Why Are Young Men Struggling So Much? - Connor Beaton - #692

what is the one rule of men the one rule of men is very similar to the one rule of fight club right you know everybody's kind of seen fight club it's like a tour de force on masculinity in many ways but the first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club and the first rule of men one rule of men is that you don't talk about what it's like to be a man specifically a man who is suffering or struggling so if you're having a hard time the rule is don't talk about it if you're going through you know the ringer wife's left you you know your pickup truck's broke down your kids are having a hard time you're having a hard time at work you hate your job generally the rule is don't talk about it and so i think that that's one of the main things that we see a lot of i see a lot of men battling against you know they've sort of been compressed underneath this rule for a long time i know this was what i went through for a very long time i grew up in what i call the texas of canada you know we have big trucks we got oil we got guns and cowboys but it's minus 36 months out of the year right so um a little bit different than that front but i think that one rule is the thing that a lot of men really struggle to get out from underneath and what it leads to is some type of rock bottom i think a lot of men are convinced again at least this is this is my experience this is the path that i sort of fell down i'm convinced that things aren't actually going to change until they bottom out because there's nowhere else to go when your version of strength is i have to suppress i have to push things down my anger my anxiety my sadness my grief you know from having the woman that i love leave me or whatever it is when you have to suppress and you've been told that if you can push things down long enough if you can avoid things for long enough that you will somehow be stronger for it it it creates a very strong part of you that is actively working against you so we can talk about that in a sec but that's the one rule of men and men i love like i just got to say it's it's such a good movie in so so many ways seeking strength through suppression is such a lovely frame i think and it so nicely encapsulates what men are doing and it's the seeking part as well you know it's grasping for it it's almost like a wistfully hoping that it's going to appear like if i just push my emotions down enough and the other thing as well is it's not all untruth right there is a part of male mastery which includes standing up under pressure which includes being able to be a bulwark against difficult things the vicissitudes of life you are the one you know what's peterson's piece of advice uh be the strongest man at your father's funeral right like that you know there are times for this where it is your job to be emotionally stoic and to do this stuff but as with almost everything taken to an extreme it ends up becoming a toxin instead of a tonic yeah when when that modality becomes our way of living right this modality of i'll gain strength through suppression i'll gain strength by ignoring the things that i'm you know the areas of my life where i'm hurting right the fact that i hate my job or you know my relationship is really challenging or going through a hard passion i can't talk about it whatever it is when we buy into that method of trying to develop psychological strength we are actually weakening ourselves in a very real way and and again like you're saying that's incredibly true right men have this wonderful blessing and curse we are blessed with the capacity and the ability to to sort of muster up the courage and strength to push through some of life's greatest challenges and i think that's you know society in many ways in the world that we see today in many ways has been built on the backs and on the shoulders of men who have gone through some really hard times some really brutally hard times um but again when that becomes your way of living all of these other frameworks start to get built to help you cope with the fact that you have no outlet for your pain for your grief for your sadness for your anxieties for your anger for your loneliness and i remember in my in my 20s my early 20s i really you know i came out of high school um i barely graduated high school i failed to grade so i have english i failed biology i was more interested in you know sneaking out at night and going to parties and hanging out with my girlfriend and like that's all that i really cared about right and so i had to go back and do it over again but anyway in my early 20s i remember working construction i was working in a gravel pit in northern alberta it's like minus 40 i'm doing a night shift from 6 p.m to 6 a.m i hated it but i needed the money but at the same time there was this part of me that was like what am i going to do with the rest of my life like is this it you know am i destined to drive a bobcat and shovel gravel you know until i die and there was this sort of internal sense of anger and frustration and bitterness towards the world and towards myself and towards my life you know my life in some ways this kind of victim mentality that we can all get sort of gripped by and i think that if i had sort of bit down and just stuffed that down you know i could have gotten through it but i probably would have had to drink more than i was comfortable with and smoke more weed than i actually needed and watch more porn and that was my life at that time you know so i think that a lot of guys today are doing relatively the same thing you know there's actually just a stat a piece of research that was uh that came out i think professor galloway posted it i think you've had him on your show before and uh it was talking about how comfortable our people are with crying would you feel uncomfortable crying in front of someone of the same sex and men between the ages of 18 and 24 said you know 60 of them said no you know i wouldn't feel comfortable i would feel very uncomfortable crying in front of another man and so you know it's a bit of a double-edged sword i think a lot of men live under this pressure of is it okay for me to talk about my hardship is it okay for me to talk about where i'm struggling truthfully and i'll wrap this up with one one story after i bottomed out and one of the things that i've written about is this period of time where i lived at chateau walmart that's what i called it i lived out in the back of my 2007 ponny h5 with wonderful racing stripes and this beautiful fin on the back and chrome wheels it was really now i'm like sometime there after bottoming out i decided to have some conversations with people in my life and tell them what's been going on i've been struggling i've been unfaithful i got caught cheating you know all this stuff that sort of happened in my life i didn't know what i wanted to do with my career it all collapsed and i had a conversation with a buddy of mine who i'd gone university with and i sort of laid all the cards out on the table and just told him everything that's been happening and after telling him what had gone on there was this awkward pause because of course i just sort of like emotionally vomited onto this guy this poor guy and you know after after telling everything there was this pause and he looked at me and he said thank you and then he proceeded to tell me that he had tried to take his own life six weeks before this very conversation and it was a very stark moment because i kind of knew everything about him i knew the scotch he liked to drink and the you know the women he liked to date and all the stuff and it was just this indicator that there was parts of us there was parts of me as a man that i didn't feel like i could talk about because i had to create this appearance of strength but i didn't actually feel strong right i felt an imposter and he felt like he had to do the same thing right that he had to create this appearance that he had all this shit together he had all his ducks in a row he was totally fine when in reality there was parts of both of us that we were incredibly challenged by parts of our life parts of our childhood parts of our you know current existence that we struggle to just talk about and i think that that's the case for a lot of men that they are living alone with things in their life with aspects of their life that they have no idea how to grapple with and it's a kind of existential aloneness that i think is crippling in a lot of ways and it doesn't produce the strength that we want right when you hear people like jocko willings and david goggins like they are facing the hardship they're not saying sequester it away in your life they're saying confront it right so there's no growth there's no change without confrontation where do you think this expectation for men is coming from i think it's coming from a number of places i think i think historically from an evolutionary standpoint life has been very hard and we've had to do some incredibly hard things to you know to just survive i think that that's that's the nature of our existence i think to ignore that is you know infantile um i think that's part of it i think socially we sometimes buy into a narrative that we have to be more together um more sort of put together than is necessary in order to get women's attention right there's this notion that if you're a man who is just you know supremely put together that that's the ultimate sort of attraction point for a woman um and so i think that's another part of it and then i think that there's a i think that a lot of us as men have competition-based relationships where we're subtly competing with one another in the background of the relationship and it doesn't leave a lot of room right if you're in competition with somebody the one thing you don't want them to know about are your weaknesses right so if i'm competing with you even though we might be best friends we might have known each other for a decade the last thing i want you to know if i'm unconsciously competing with you is where i feel weak is where i'm really struggling so men are more likely to withhold whether it's really financially or sexually in the relationship whatever and then i think the last piece is we're living out the generational i you know almost we're living a generational trauma of the world wars that sort of rocked men globally you know who were told to man up who were told to suck it up and get into the tanks and go and die and get into the planes and go and die and then came home and you know had to switch from killing mode from this hyper suppression of i need to survive i need to do whatever the hell it takes to survive and then you know went home and walked in the front door to their wife and their children they hadn't seen in a number of years and then we're just expected to go back and mow the lawn and you know go sell a dishwasher and a dryer and shit like that i mean i probably can tell decades later but you get the point right so i think i think that that's a big part of it you know when i look at my grandfather who was a pilot in world war ii i remember him telling a lot of stories to me as a child he was a he was a pilot you know what he saw what he went through what he experienced and he had to live that you know he had to live that modality of just do whatever it takes to survive and it creates a kind of hardness i think where vulnerability and weakness are the enemy you know so you don't talk about it you don't show it you don't do any of that but the reality is that in any um in any strategy the best whether it's war strategy or military strategy the one thing you look at is where are weaknesses where are they objectively you know you really want to know what your weaknesses are and where the where the enemy might actually come through but we've created this kind of narrative i think within our culture where that is not so much the case i think those are some of the contributing factors for sure um what are your thoughts dude that's a gorgeous conception it's a fantastic framework to break those things down that's really really really impressive the competition point i think is completely overlooked by men because there is camaraderie in competition you know um all of the guys that work for me chase my youtube strategist dean my editor that's been with me for six years um like we're on the same team we're completely on the same team our values are aligned our goals are aligned if they win i win if i win they win and there's still probably lurking in there somewhere just men are so status is the currency of men right fundamentally it is what we are transacting with and yeah i think it's probably there as much as as much self-work as we try and do to deprogram i think i think it just remains i had this conversation with a friend um who does a good bit of men's work here in austin and it was the first time i actually heard about the name of your book men's work the first time i heard that was from this guy and uh he'd done i think he was about to go and do ayahuasca and he done a ton of psychotherapy in advance which i respected as opposed to just being a spiritual tourist and jumping at the deep end he tried to do some of the work at ground zero first and he had this conversation with this therapist and he sort of kept going and kept going maybe it was an mdma assisted thing before he went away to the the ayahuasca and he found that he'd been constantly comparing other men to him mostly in a derogatory fashion mostly inside his own head so he would see another man out at dinner that's his wife's friend or is somebody that he's over ages and catching up with or somebody new or whatever and he would just have this very like vitriolic comparison going on inside of his mind and he it took him a long time to kind of open up about this even to his therapist and his therapist said something along the lines of yeah that's what being a man is you're permanently comparing yourself to where am i in the status hierarchy how's he doing is he ascending oh do i need to do i need to watch out for him he might be he could be a threat is he an ally but even if he is an ally he's still kind of a threat because like you know ascension is good but it's also kind of not good so that and then dude this uh emotional inheritance that we've got from a post-war you know what three post-war generations like 1910 1940 1960 three post-war generations and then you know i don't know what the kids of the desert storm guys will be like but you know fucking hell like they seem even more shit in some regards right well it's become more lethal um more support but maybe in some ways more trauma too so yeah this this emotional inheritance it's malignant emotional inheritance in some regards you do wonder that's the first time anyone's ever said it's the first time anyone's ever brought up the fact that we did pretty much you know a huge chunk of men for the best part of a century got sent off to war right and what does that teach them about how to deal with their emotions and then they come back and they pass that down to their kids and they pass that down to their kids and they pass that down i've been thinking for a little while you know there's a real inflection point i'm seeing with the advent of introspective mindful content on youtube and podcasts and books and stuff um there seems to be a real set change between our generation's parents and our generation right my dad didn't have the tools to be able to understand whether he was enacting his logos forward you know like his dad smoked and his dad was an engineer and my dad became an engineer and blah blah blah like you know the coping strategies were just like inherited down and there was no orthogonal elders we could call them right there was no one outside of the existing frame that says this is something this is a pattern interruption that you're not familiar with and this might be precisely the thing that you need to hear and i wonder whether i've been thinking about it for a while if this is an inflection point if we're going to see gen a kids be more emotionally in tune be able to deal with their emotions more now they have other things to deal with like fucking tiktok and social media and comparison and too much time inside and not enough time touching grass and not enough exercise and everyone's fat and full of seed oils and all the rest of it like i get that but like from an emotional education perspective the tools that at least me and my friends have are a million miles away from what our parents did but this uh aftershock this sort of recurrent tremor that's been inherited through the generations um it's almost it's almost narcissistic to believe that so much war for so long to so many men would not have oh it's over now grow up you go what do you mean grow up like fucking half of my friends died in a five-year period or i did this i saw war and destruction i was a fucking medic and i tried to fix people i couldn't help so yeah i think i think the competition point is massive and if guys were to assess themselves that degree of comparison that they have which is different to women women fucking hell like if you want to like girls you've got it where it was um but guys have it worse in a much more i think like a visceral way it's just like like where am i and what's that and we can be more positive some than women can like women's relationships are brutal i'm so so glad that i'm not one um but yeah competition are more i think uh fascinating insights well that i think that the competition piece is insidious in the sense that it's largely unconscious for men like women women when you talk to women and you hear how they interact with other women or see them they're largely they're very aware of oh yeah when i walk into a bar or restaurant or a party they are scoping out the other women to see you know what are they wearing how they look what's the men that they're with you know like there's there's this sort of sizing up that happens whereas men it's this kind of thing that they're going to be wearing books maybe i think that's the reason that's the kind of thing that that's what i think it's the whole thing i want to make these videos for the it's very much in the background. You know, it's in the background of the conversation. It's in the background of the walking in and sizing yourself up. Maybe sometimes it's more direct.

Like, could I take that guy? You know, like, or, you know, how does his physique compare to mine? Or what's the watch that he's wearing? Or, you know, those types of materialistic things.

But I think that we forget that. And, you know, if you look at an evolutionary standpoint, that that's baked into us. You know, that sort of sizing one another up. Where do I fit within the hierarchy?

Well, the other thing is that status is a game that you lose the second you talk about it, right? And that means that this competition thing is also something that's very difficult to think about or to open up about. Because as soon as you admit that you think about the fact that another man might be competing with you or that you feel like there's a status rivalry between you and him, you lose the game, right? It's low value.

It's low status to talk about status. Ah, interesting. So I had friends of all on my podcast. He was an alpha male.

Yeah, one of the world's leading primatologists. And he was fascinating because he was talking about how his whole take on alphas was wildly misconstrued when it first came out, like when it initially came out. And how really in nature within primates and chimpanzees specifically who he was studying. Yes, you do have this hierarchy where there's an alpha that is sort of ruling by dominance and aggression, right?

That does exist. But one, they generally speaking have a shorter lifespan period and they generally speaking have a shorter leadership span. So they actually lead for less time because there's so much controversy. And then the alphas that tend to lead longer are actually not ruling through dominance.

They're actually ruling through coherence and prestige. And so can you create coherence within the tribe? And so it's kind of interesting, right? Because I think what you're saying is accurate in the sense that when you talk about status, that's low status, right?

Like how do I compare against other men? But I think when you are talking about a sense of coherence amongst the group, that's a bit of a different conversation. But the competition piece is interesting. I think that the war piece, you know, coming back from war and how that's, I think one of the biggest challenges that I've seen time and time again is how it affects a man's ability to relate to other men and to feel safe and to trust them.

You know, I've worked with a lot of veterans. I've worked with Navy SEALs over the years and they come back and to interact with civilians and to trust civilian men in the way that they've trusted men that they've gone to war with is like almost impossible. And so there's this isolation that starts to emerge within a lot of those men. And so that's one part of it.

I can't trust these other men the same way I could. Go ahead. Yeah, I was thinking about the impact of some emotionally damaged men in a barrel of other emotionally okay men. And I remember reading a study about how if they wanted to work out whether poor performers bring down a team or whether great performers raise up poor performers.

And they tried putting different combinations of high performers and low performers in a team together. And they presumed, you know, we've got a team of six, five of them are amazing and one of them is lazy and we're going to test and see what goes on. Surely the five people are going to bring up the one and they didn't. The way that it seems like sort of human team working and human emotions work is that it kind of meets at the lowest common denominator.

And I wonder whether, you know, in a group of guys, if one of the dudes, not everyone's father has a military history, mind you, but like not everyone's do. But, you know, how many military emotional inheritance men do you need in order to be able to like spoil the barrel, so to speak? One of my favorite quotes I've learned from you as well is men face a conundrum, have your shit together and also be able to talk about it when you're struggling. I love that conception.

I think it's really right. Yeah, there's this double standard that shows up with men's vulnerability and men's aggression in the sense that you should be able to be vulnerable or be aggressive, but you should also be able to temper it at your whim, right? Like you should have complete control over your vulnerability. You should have, you know, you should be able to talk about it when necessary because that's the big push that we sort of hear socially, right?

Like men just need to be more vulnerable. If men were just more vulnerable, you know, society's problems would change, men's problems would change. And, you know, I've kind of railed against this. I love what George brought up from the Tin Man on your conversation about that study in the UK with men who were suicidal or men who have taken their own lives that 92% of them, 92% of men in the UK that had taken their lives were in therapy, right?

They were talking about their issues. And then 80% of those men that were in therapy that had taken their life were labeled as no risk or low risk, right? And so we're so culturally and socially almost inept at being able to identify a man who's really struggling. Like we are, we're inept, you know, it's pretty bad.

And I see a lot of men who come in, who come to our weekends, who come to work with me. You know, some of these guys are incredibly high performers, you know, mainstream rappers, Navy SEALs, entrepreneurs, et cetera, et cetera. And then just everyday guys are just, you know, trying to make a living, you know, feed their kids. And across the board, it's shocking how many of them on the outside look like they have their stuff together, but internally are really struggling.

And one of the main pieces that they talk about is that they know that there's a risk for being vulnerable, right? You've got your idea of the myth of male vulnerability. Yeah, the myth of male vulnerability is pretty simple, right? It's just the myth is that all of men's problems will just disappear if men are just more vulnerable.

That's the societal narrative right now that men are being told ad hoc, right? If you just open up and talk about it, then you'll feel better. Women will feel better. Relationships will be better and men will be better.

And it's a very female oriented approach to male problems. And it misses much like I think a lot of the therapeutic industry is missing. It misses the actual challenges that men are experiencing. And so the myth of male vulnerability says you'll be okay if you open up.

And it also misses on the consequences of opening up, right? That you might open up to the wrong people and they'll be like, oh, dude, you're such a pussy and what the hell is wrong with you? Just shut up. And she might open up to the wrong people and it might not go well.

You might also miss out on the consequences of if you open up to your girlfriend or your wife and that might not go well, right? She might not know how to handle it or receive it. One of the things that we don't talk about culturally is that a lot of women do not know how to be with or receive or see a man's vulnerabilities. For a lot of women, it's very frightening.

It's foreign, right? Imagine being a woman who grew up around a grandfather and a father who never cried, who never opened up, who never talked about their feelings. to their girlfriends and all of a sudden, two months later, their relationship's over, right? Or the sexual attraction's gone or the conversations suddenly get stilted and they're like, wait, what's happening?

I thought this is exactly what you wanted. I thought you wanted me to open up. But the reality is, and this is a funny one. I posted this the other day.

I said, women don't necessarily want you to be vulnerable emotionally. Women want to know that you know what's happening inside of you, that you can communicate what's happening inside of you and that you have the resources around you to support you. So that's the real crux of it. That's when women say, I want you to be more vulnerable.

That's generally what they're saying. They're like, that's generally what I've seen a lot of people saying. So yeah, there's consequences. There's parts of it where guys, you know, I think are sort of battling against some of the things that we've been talking about, right?

The notion that if you do open up your week, if you do share your week, you know, you're gonna be ostracized, you're gonna be isolated even more than you already are. And then there's the resource problem, you know, where a lot of men enter into therapeutic conversations or environments and are not actually given the tools to solution their problems, right? They're treated in a very sort of feminine oriented way where it's like, well, let's just talk about what you're going through. Yeah, the Christine Ember article from the Washington Post, which was just so great.

And I brought her on and she was fantastic. She has this wonderful line where she says, to the extent that any acceptable version of masculinity is ever put forward, it sounds an awful lot like stereotypical femininity to me. Yeah. And, you know, the sanitization narrative around men is that they are defective women.

If you just stopped being so masculine, if you just stopped being so non-feminine, all of your problems would go away. And we know that this isn't the case, right? Like there's a trend on TikTok that I'm sure you've seen at the moment of liberal women saying, why are the only men that I can find who want to open a door for me and pay for the first day conservatives? And, you know, a partnership that is somewhat more traditional, struggling to find that from liberal men.

And I'm sure you've seen all the stats around school kids now that girls are diverging massively toward being liberal and guys are diverging massively toward being conservative. So yeah, there's going to be some awkward Thanksgiving dinners in a couple of decades time, perhaps when all of these people sit down. Like one third of Republicans and a half of Democrats fear that their child will marry a person from the opposite political party. And that's another Scott Galloway one.

But yeah, I think this mythic male vulnerability thing is super interesting to me. And I like challenging, especially manosphere and red pill notions that are wrong. And as with many things, there are some kernels of truth in it. Streaks of piss in a pile of shit, as my dad would say.

That's good. I like that. And I agree. Opening up to the wrong woman at the wrong time about the wrong thing, bad idea.

Could it kill, could it be the one inflection point that muters attraction for the rest of time? Could this be the end of your relationship because of a single moment of opening up vulnerability? Perhaps, frankly, if that's the way that your female partner behaves, presuming that this isn't the third date, like if that's the way that your female partner behaves as soon as you show any emotion that isn't just like stoicism and directions, I think that it's genuinely a good thing that you found out now because that person isn't ready to have a real relationship. So first off, if that does happen, see it as a good thing.

But to sort of do a callback to what we spoke about at the very beginning, was it 64% of men aged 18 to 24 would feel uncomfortable crying in front of someone of their own sex, right? So the common internet advice is don't open up to your girl, that's what your boys are for. Hang on a second, two fucking thirds of men aren't prepared to even do that. Okay, so tell me at what point people, and this is the best use of the word man up, like tell me at which point these guys are actually going to man up and integrate and transcend and include all of these emotions that they're facing, right?

Like when are you actually going to let the rubber meet the road with this? Yeah, I mean, I think that's why, you know, when I look out at the internet today and you see this huge swell within men's work, within the manosphere, within Red Pill, you know, certain figures that are online that have just had a meteoric rise. In many ways, it's because they're speaking to the sort of cultural underpinnings of what men are experiencing. You know, we're living through one of the first times, in my opinion, in almost all of history, all known history, where masculinity isn't getting defined by men, right?

Culturally, if you look at what makes a good man and what makes a man masculine, there's sort of this battle for being able to define it. And I think it was Yuval Harari in Sapiens, or maybe it was Homo Deus, where he talks about how in the future, the wars will be fought within intersubjective reality, within the reality of story, within the reality of narrative. And I think that that's where a lot of the quote-unquote gender wars are happening right now. It's within the realm of story and within the realm of narrative.

So anyway, that's a little existential, but to pull it back down to reality, I think you're right. There's this very big challenge that a lot of men feel, which is they're being told specifically by a lot of women to open up by society, by Instagram, by Facebook, it's like open up, be more vulnerable. And then there's a bit of a mixed bag when they do it, or they don't feel like they have the proper resources to go and do it, right? They're not sure what's going to happen if they open up and say, hey man, listen, I'm really struggling.

I'm struggling to get out of bed. I freaking hate my job. I'm barely getting by. I don't know how to support myself.

I'm really struggling. What should I do? Or what have you done? And so I think that that's the inflection point that a lot of men find themselves at.

And the challenge is that when we talk about some of the issues that men are going through, because statistically speaking, in a lot of ways, men are in decline, right? In decline in the workforce. They're not going to college as much. It's all stuff you've talked about on your show before.

Lifespan, healthspan. Lifespan, healthspan. They're living at home longer. They don't have as much money.

They're not buying properties as much. They're not graduating from college. I mean, it's just like across the board. Testosterone's down.

It's like, you know, there's some big things that we as a culture, as a society should be talking about. But what I've noticed is that when we want to talk about men's problems, if we want to talk about men improving themselves, everybody's for that. Thumbs up green light across the board. If we want to talk about the issues that men are having, that's a very different challenge.

And what men are usually met with is the solution of be more vulnerable. It's like, oh, you hate your life because your wife just divorced you and left you and took the kids and half of your net worth. Just be more vulnerable. Just open up and talk about it and that'll solve it.

It's like, well, but what about the judicial system? You know, what about talking about some of the things that are actually, you know, sort of infringing and impinging on men's lives? So I think some of these things are, you know, I think they're coming to a head in a lot of ways. I had a post that I put on Twitter that I got a lot of shit for, so I'm going to say it again.

Publicly trying to work out why men are struggling is largely a thankless task. This is the zero-sum view of empathy. There is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some of the minority group who is more deserving. After all, haven't men had it good enough for long enough?

Maybe they should just suck it up for a while. But empathy does not work this way. It's not a limited resource. Recognizing the plights of men does not ignore the plights of women.

And ultimately, women end up suffering in any case, as it's this increasing cohort of apathetic, checked out, and resentful men who contribute to the exact lack of eligible partners that women say they're struggling with. Women who post boo-hoo, poor patriarchy, sad, whilst also complaining about where all the good men at are committing mating logic seppuku. If one sex loses, both sexes lose. Male blame is something else that I see a lot and this is what triggered what you just said.

A common question is why don't men just do better? Surely they can work harder in school, employment, and health. Chop, chop, men, hurry up and stop being so useless. Well, no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead, we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns, and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask, what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we ask, what can men do to fix themselves?

You know that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that summarizes it in a nutshell, right? The myth of male vulnerability is that it's wanted and the reality is that society and people generally don't know what to do with it when it arises because when it comes forward, there are very real things that we have to look at socially in terms of altering. I mean, Richard Reeves, who I think we both interviewed and talked to, talks about red-striving boys, you know, and it's like that creates so much controversy, just that one thing.

You know, a lot of people were against it and, you know, we shouldn't be treating boys and girls differently and, you know, some people are on board with it, which is great, but I think that in large part, that's the attitude that society and culture sort of pushes back on men is, well, you guys just need to go and figure it out and I think that a lot of young men hear that in today's world and are just checking out. Like I see in my YouTube comments, you probably do too, where it's just like, you know, I did a video on, I did two videos, one on, you know, should you bother getting married or is marriage dying and then, you know, should you bother having kids and it's very interesting to hear and see people's responses and to get the DMs back from it and, you know, I think in large part, part there's a huge cohort of men who are just like checking out from marriage from having kids from society in a very real way and that should be cause for concern that shouldn't be like we should not be approaching that problem if women were just checking out from culture and society like in large numbers i do not think that we would be approaching that problem with a sense of well you either just need to get your shit together or you just need to sit down and talk about it we would be looking at what systemically are causing some of these issues and how can we actually go about creating a robust plan and structure to actually do something about those challenges that they're facing so i think we need to bring that into i think it's an important part of any man's work you know to really be um in the conversation of where do i feel stuck you know who can i talk to who can i open up to are there challenges that i feel bought down by my life that aren't just psychological or emotional you know that are maybe financial that are maybe structural within my life that that i'm frustrated by and to be able to have some conversation to work on those things i think is incredibly important yeah i am i got in trouble from a different group for saying uh limits on speech limits on sincerity that if it doesn't make you any less vulnerable to not talk about your vulnerability like if you're if you're so much of a pussy that you're struggling with the things you're struggling with and then you layer on top the amount of pussiness that you need to not be able to talk about it how does that make you any stronger and a lot of people brought up the bring it up to your goal and these things can go wrong and then she's gonna leave you with the postman or whatever and it's coming back to that stat at the start about men not even being able to open up to other men and like i'm speaking to myself right i'm speaking this isn't me from a fucking high horse with like masculine virtues and i got it all figured out um but i do think that reassessing what we mean by vulnerability and the frame that is placed around these sorts of conversations and again for the women that are listening like these are the guys that you're going to get into a relationship with these are the guys that are going to have to be up five times a night when the baby's got a stomach bug at six months old or whatever right like this is the degree of resilience that you require from your partner is not just in terms of their resources it's emotionally as well and the i fucking hate hate it when people go this is gynocentrism at work i'm like dude like fucking hell you really think that like women could coordinate anybody could coordinate like some mass move toward one thing it's the popular view at the moment because it makes you seem empathetic if you support women it makes you seem like you're standing up for the little person right it's the same tyranny of the minority rule that we see in everything it's why trans athletes in sport is such a big deal it's why kids getting hormones is such a big deal it's why ensuring that you know we can move gay rights in the middle east is such a big deal blah blah blah fine totally fine like you know well not fine but you know i mean like it finds you to talk about you can fucking open it up it's a big deal but it's not the same case when you're talking about male problems through a female frame like the presumption is the term from evolutionary psychology is a failure of cross-sex mind reading and i don't know why it's the case i understand why publicly this tyranny of the minority or like the upheld the upholding of the only class thing like i understand why that has um why that makes sense like it's got some states associated with it what i don't understand is how it actually gets pushed into capturing the frame of a conversation around like what men should do why is it that you simply this insight from the american psychological association uh traditional masculinity is defined as harmful and damaging to boys and men's mental health uh modern therapy basically treats men like defective women um yeah i that's the bit where i actually think well fucking hell like that is gynocentrism at work even if it's not coordinated by some cabal of fucking hooded women like big titty hooded women like all drinking male adrenochrome or something and eating fried foreskins like that's not necessarily what's happening but in terms of cash value of what's occurring i do think that's what we're ending up with i'm just waiting for the animated videos of your commentary and then animation in the front like big titted hooded women frying up foreskin is you ever seen the midnight gospel uh yeah i'll spin it on all day well i think part of part of this is that you mentioned mentors before and and part of this is that there is a vacancy in a lot of young men's lives you know if you're a one in four kids and grow up without a father in the household right everybody hears that stat but when you when you kind of follow it through imagine you're a young boy you're growing up in a single mother household your dad's not in the picture you go into the education system it's predominantly female teachers right dominated by female teachers you exit the education system maybe you go into college or not going to college and then you're struggling and you're told go get help right go talk to a therapist you start to look into therapy and it's 75 percent of therapists are women and so you can literally go through childhood education mental health support and not be influenced by any men you know or so few men or you know the men that you're in contact with haven't done much with their life or they're not you know they're not role models to begin with and so i think that one of the challenges that a lot of young men specifically are facing a lot of men in our generations as well is that there's a serious lack of role models and there's something about being a man and masculinity that is modeled you know if i wrote about this in the book that like part of how we as men learn how to deal with our power our aggression our anger is through the modeling of other men specifically older men so if you're not surrounded by any men that are older than you um you're probably going to struggle to learn how to deal with those things because mentorship and initiation specifically has been an incredibly integral part of young boys lives throughout history cross-culturally right it's just such an it's such an important piece but we strip mind initiation out of our culture we sort of strip mind boys spaces specifically where a lot of young boys would have those male role models those are collapsing rapidly and so a lot of young boys just do not have the the opportunity even to be around older men that are going to show them hey when i'm struggling here's how i deal with it when i'm flawed here's how i deal with it here's how i treat women here's how i deal with my anger here's how i deal with my sadness my grief or my aggression here's how i deal with you know a job that maybe i don't like like there's there's certain masculine qualities and traits that i think that we as young boys are are trying to emulate but if there's no one there to emulate then what are you doing right you're learning from homer simpson and you know freaking peter griffin and i mean it's it's like it's terrible so i think that there's a i think that there's a vacancy of mentorship that's why i mean i've been very fortunate to have phenomenal mentors i've been very lucky to stumble across some incredible people in my life why did you find them honestly just happenstance you know my first mentor um i was a classical singer oddly enough in my first career that's i went from stunting and street racing motorcycles and doing construction to traveling the world singing natural yes natural uh and and he was a part of that um cohort but he had in his past life uh studied psychology and so i spent two years apprenticing with him learning union psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy and in return i would chop wood and help him with his asparagus farm because he was you know in his 70s and you know so i just sort of stumbled across them um but they played an integral role in filling in the gaps that the men in our lives you know fathers whether they're there or not you aren't really meant to do all of it like the burden of responsibility of you becoming an integral a man that's integrated into society and culture in a very effective way was never the sole responsibility of the father even if you study initiation processes around the world right in africa and you know in eastern europe and in asia and whatnot and even here in america traditionally those initiations the men of the tribe would come and take you as a boy and take you out and process your initiation start your initiation sometimes the father wasn't even a part of it but in our culture today a lot of fathers just don't even have that community of men around them where the young boy is getting supported uh nurtured you know challenged by the other men that are surrounding the father so i think that there's i think part of it is that we need to re-establish masculine friendships you know masculine groups um where men can actually come together and not return to some ideal things i don't think that's it but to at least re-establish what it's like to be a man amongst other men having real conversations being transparent challenging one another supporting one another through hardship that's the foundation um that i think needs to be present as we said before you can be in a group of people and if there's some that are mocking or scathing or make it feel unsafe to be able to open up in the way you want to it can actually end up maybe even doing more harm than good to be able to do to be in a group of men that make you feel silly or deficient or weak for the things that you're feeling you know i certainly know growing up in the uk that i had older men around me uh you know i played cricket for a long time at an adult level from the age of 13 probably so from you know 13 to 15 half a decade i was two or three days a week in the pavilion or in the clubhouse or out on the field to play with 10 other guys and at least like seven or eight of them would have been you know 25 plus probably something like that so i was around a lot of these guys and i found um good lessons here and there and there were some people that were really fantastic role models to me but there were also ones that if i wasn't more socially introverted would have been atrocious influences on me i came up with this idea called the negative role model or the reverse role model which is as opposed to seeing people like the person you want to be like you see people like the person you don't want to be like i don't want his relationship with gambling i don't know the way he treats his wife and i don't want the way he shows up his friends or not and that is actually super valuable uh it's unbelievably valuable to like i've never gambled never ever gambled once i saw a bunch of guys in my youth that had problems with gambling and maybe i just not be a gambler probably like i don't find it that fun but also i always had this super fucking visceral experience right this like real front and center like guys like infidelity really early on like weird stuff with like she wants more kids and i don't want to have kids and she's trying to get me to come inside of her and i'm fucking trying to pull out i was like well i'm 15 years old hearing like you know in a turmoil but it was said it was said in such a this wasn't men's work opening up this was like blase and and sort of casting it off as you know like and what's in the newspapers this morning type type of a story and um yeah i understand that it's a heavy lift to be able to see that for what it is which is a reverse role model rather than an actual role model and you know a slightly different genetic work a slightly different upbringing for me and you know that could have been the role model rather than the inverse yeah i mean i i can't help but hear your story and hear those guys and think about you know the men that i grew up with and the amount of men who casually throw their problems out into the locker room or into the friend group at the bar and talk about it in such a nonchalant way uh you know as if it's not that big of a deal and to be met with crickets you know like i think like did any of those guys get any solutions did any of those guys get any support or did they're using it they're using the humor and the um casual nature of the way they're putting it across largely to not actually have to accept the fact that it could be a big problem uh you know fundamentally the guy that's in the marriage with the partner who wants to have a kid and he doesn't have a kid because he wants to leave so he doesn't want to be in that relationship so by making the joke all about like oh and she's like holding on my hips and i'm like no by doing that it makes the situation about something else and it allows you to deal with the surface level joke that everybody can laugh at whilst not actually dealing with this iceberg that's kind of lurking underneath but i think you know the story that you're telling i really just want to drive home that i think for the majority of men that is the state of their male friendships that's it like you just nailed it it's a very it's like a mile wide and an inch deep and i think what many men are craving are more depth oriented relationships where where because it's confronting it's hard you know it's very hard to be in relationship with other men and have real substantial relationships about your life about the challenges that you're facing about what you want your dreams you know what you want to build and create they're they're hard to build those types of relationships and we see that right i think again there's lots of research that's come out on men being more isolated than ever before and having less friends than ever before and so you know prioritizing those types of things prioritizing those types of relationships i think for a lot of men is one of the most substantial things that they can do because in many ways a lot of the issues that we've been talking about is this sort of breakdown and framing of masculine relationships and keeping it in this very safe sort of surface zone where we don't go deep into the muck and the reason why when you talk to people like navy seals and marines that go into battle together the reason why they are so close to the to the men and women that they serve with is that they go through hell but they go through it together shoulder shoulder and in in my current mentor's framework he's been doing gestalt therapy and developmental psychology for 40 plus years he's trained on 5 000 therapists and has 90 000 clinical hours he has a framework around attachment it's super simple but very powerful and he says the foundation of attachment is to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay that's the foundation when you're a baby when you're a child when you're an adult it's just can i in relationship with you go through a hard time and come out the other side okay and that's what actually builds the blocks of relationship but we as men are often feeling like we're on these little islands i'm going through a hard time maybe you're going through a hard time but neither of us fucking know and so how does it build the foundation underneath i really feel and know unquestioningly that i have a solid relationship with you as a man and if we can't get that if we can't piece that together then it's going to be exponentially harder to do that with women to do that with our children to do that with the people at work because there's something i believe and this is just in my framework that there's a kind of sustenance that comes out of our masculine relationships and when we can go through those hard times with other men and come out the other side okay and you know that we're good we've had the conversations we went through the hard time you know we got feedback we got support then on the other side of that we have a more robust sense of i belong i belong with these men i have friends i have people have my back and then i can face the challenges in my marriage at work in my business you know with my kid he's got that something virus at three o'clock in the morning i just want to like lose my mind what have you found it was talking about fatherlessness a good bit over the last few weeks on the show actually and then plus today what have you been sort of learning about the impact of fatherlessness and how do boys model men when dad isn't around what happens i think i used the word vacancy before and i used that specifically because you know over the last decade i've sat with tens of thousands of men like it's just it's a lot of men virtually and in person and there for a lot of guys a vacancy forms within an actual sort of emotional or psychological void where when dad isn't around it creates this big question mark like the unknown becomes somewhat terrifying you know they don't know how to take risks properly or they try and compensate um for that by taking really stupid risks you know risks that will get them killed um they're not really too sure if it's okay to say no and to have really assertive direct boundaries and so what ends up happening is that for a lot of guys that have no father around they become your classic nice guy right they they start to orient themselves their whole orientation of how do i be a man in the world there's no model for me to orient myself towards or away from because a lot of men will create a life in opposition of their father i don't want to be like that guy don't be that drunk i don't be that fucking asshole that yells at you know mom and you know beats his kids and drinks too much they either orient in opposition of their father or in repetition of their father right so they either say okay i don't want to be like him or he's incredible and i want to orient myself towards how do i be like him you know how do i build my body in the way he built it etc so when that's not present young boys it's not that they don't want to orient themselves towards being a man they just don't have any symbol for it and so they start to orient themselves towards well how do i get affirmation from women that i'm a good man that i'm a good boy and so the over validation from women starts to become very prominent within young boys lives and again like i said it'll show up at home it'll show up at school it'll show up if you see a therapist or whatnot and it'll create a framework psychologically within young men where they will try and live in repetition of what women say is good for them uh in order to reinforce if they're being a good man you know if they're dealing with their anger properly or proportionately if they are treating the women you know how they should or they will live in opposition to what women say so they'll actually start to instead of push against dads to push against other men they'll start to push against women and you see this big movement online that has i think in some ways been birthed out of that that there's this void and this vacancy of mature men that younger men are growing up around and so they have nothing to push against you know i have a two and a half year old son he wants to push against me he wants to jump off you know like hulk hogan off the top ropes of my couch onto me he wants to push against me he wants to test boundaries you know he drives his truck into the wall he wants to challenge me and he wants to see where are the edges where are the limitations where's the structure and what are you going to do if i don't listen and that's that's every young boy and so when we don't have that structure and i'm talking about psychologically here and emotionally what we start to do is we start to look at women as an object that we should push against to see and verify whether or not we are operating as a man as a good man as a healthy man as a man who is accepted so that's what i've seen why do you think this people pleasing element comes in this sort of fear of being assertive if the boundaries haven't been placed there by dad because that's been absent whether it's this not necessarily just a single parent household i imagine workaholic father is probably giving you a single a similar kind of outcome um if boundaries haven't been placed have you got any idea about why it is that men refuse to assert them themselves that's almost seems very circular so generally speaking young boys are going to look for different things from fathers than from mothers right so and peterson's talked about this quite a bit there's a good amount of research that shows that young kids boys or girls need rough and tumble play from fathers they need that risk-taking those types of pieces so fathers generally speaking play the role of structure and orientation towards order which also means an orientation towards limitations whereas with mothers generally it's not about structure order and limitations it's about nurturing care and acceptance and so it's about are you good are you listening to what mom wants are you acting in a way where she's giving you approval so it's about verification it's about appreciation it's about nurturing so the orientation is just very very different so when a young boy is missing those those behaviors and the the opportunities to push against the boundaries and the limitations to actually say no i don't want to do this or no i'm not interested in that what he what he'll do around a mom oftentimes is just acquiesce it's like oh okay i'll go along with that oh that'll keep me safe it'll keep me here you know that'll keep you around they'll keep you happy with me uh and so they they it's not that they don't push back as much there's definitely a lot of young boys who grew up in single mother households who give their moms hell um but generally speaking they'll have an orientation towards needing to get everything from that primary caregiver and so they'll they'll try and get that structure that order for mom and if they can't get it they'll try and provide that order structure for themselves by just acquiescing to everything by just saying okay i'll just go along with it i won't tell you no because if i tell you no you're also my only lifeline you're my only caregiver right now and so i kind of have to acquiesce otherwise that might feel dangerous or unsafe especially for young kids you know like three to five and then presumably this probably shows up echoed in relationships later in life 100 yeah 100 and a lot of what happens what happens for a lot of parents especially if you're a boy that grows up with a mom who's a primary caretaker she might do a phenomenal job this isn't to knock on you know single moms there's a ton of moms out there that do phenomenal um but what will happen often is that that mother will try and discipline or create discipline for her son by reinforcing and over reinforcing where he's good right where he's being a good boy where he's acquiescing to what she's asked him for and she'll do that by nurturing him constantly and so he will learn very quickly that how he gets feminine attention how he gets female validation and affection is by acquiescing to her needs and her wants and so he'll orient himself in a very sort of hyper fixated way towards what do what do women need what do women want and my needs and my wants are on the back burner and maybe once i've you know ensured that her needs and wants are met then i can bring mine in yeah adam lane smith talks about uh the good boy paradox like i just i just want to be told i'm a good boy i want to make sure like you basically find sorry that mothers in each partner subsequently as you grow up one other thing a conversation i haven't really had much recently but i was talking about a couple of years ago was the pressures around men and sex this is a real double standard i think in the way that we see men women um you know female body dysmorphia uh concerns about how they perform during sex uh can i orgasm through having sex can i take my top off like you know do i need to keep my bra on because i'm embarrassed about my body in all of these sorts of conversations like i'm not saying that they've been fixed and i'm sure that there's a lot of work that needs to be done for girls to feel better about this stuff but the conversation is largely being normalized you know like when you've got feral girl summer being like a meta meme for an entire year you know that this kind of conversation around not shaving your legs or about what your body looks like when you're on your period all that sort of stuff like it's kind of being had is that the equivalent of like fuck boy summer like is that a it was hot girl summer right then because every culture the requisite of any cultural movement is a countercultural movement to the same thing right so like for every uh dan bilzerian there's a mig tau and for every hot girl summer there's a feral girl summer and feral girl summer was advising girls to like not wash not shave like just completely just descend into slobbery as much as you can because they needed every culture needs a counterculture um but yeah one of the one of the conversations that's really particularly uncomfortable for guys to talk about is like communicating with their partner about what they want in the bedroom and opening up about whether they are or are not hot to trot all the time um you know there's an expectation that men are these sexual protagonists and women are sexual gatekeepers even within relationship how many people listening to this conversation right now have guys or girls have had some thought that they haven't ever brought up about who initiates sex like it is so so common right for that to be a point of contention that the guy always feels maybe more often than not perhaps the guy always feels like it's him that has to do it and the girl's nervous about it because she's it's the way there's never been a requirement to train it otherwise and male and female sex works in different ways um but talking about like with guys guys not being in the mood like for a girl if a girl does decide that in a relationship that she's going to make the like let's initiate some sex this evening but like there's an expectation that guys are hot to trot all the time and if you've had a rough day you're like darling i know that i'm supposed to just be like stand to attention upon command in many ways um but i'm like i just not not tonight and then that that's taken in a very different sort of way i think that's interpreted in a very different sort of way by women because there is this presumption again that oh that must be because there's something wrong with me whereas we've seen memes you know the family guy the homer simpson you know like johnny bravo like trying to get physical female attention from a woman and being rebuffed is just like sort of built into the cultural meanplex i don't think it is in the same way in reverse and i think that that you know also talking about what it is that you want in bed what level of sexual frequency fancies all that sort of stuff is such a tough conversation for men to have again it's even more of a different kind of vulnerability yeah there's just this notion that a lot of men hold within themselves that they should have a certain level of proficiency sexually they you know i think for a lot of men our sense of identity our sense of value our sense of worth um specifically with women rests on how well we can perform you know a lot of men's stuff comes back to how well can i perform at work financially physically sexually it's how well can i perform how long can i perform for you know am i in the top one percent of you know dudes that she's been with can i rock her world for however many hours and i think that that's you know that's definitely a part of it i think one of the hard things i'll give you an example so i host these live weekends and one of the questions or one of the things that we'll do is partner guys up and say tell your first sexual experience and tell your worst sexual experience and it's usually a story that most men have never told or they've told in a way that is very illustrious right it's there it's more like yeah this is incredible my first time was amazing it was so good my first time was in an industrial estate car park in the northeast of england in the front passenger seat laid flat of a vw lupo so if you thought that if you thought that if you thought doing it normally for the first time was difficult i was like fucking give me 10 out of 10 difficulty let's try and do some feng shui like yin yoga at the same time mine was uh on my girlfriend's in high school my girlfriend's father's pool table and it was brutally uncomfortable and it didn't last a hell you know a lot longer it didn't last as long as i wanted to that's that's for sure uh and mostly because it was just the most awkward situation because i could hear him upstairs and i was like this is bad news uh but yeah is there a meme in america of a danger wank do you know what that is i do know what that is yeah so you call your mom's name and see if you could finish before she came upstairs i'm like descending back into your seven year eight year nine school like jokes uh but yeah that was the that's dangerous sex is the equivalent yeah like that's absurd i'm on the pool table let's see if we can get this done before he comes down yeah there's there's a lot of that but you know i think for a lot of guys when we talk about sex generally we're talking about our accolades right we'll talk about you know when things are going well or a lot of guys that are married or in a relationship and you know maybe sex isn't going well it's a lot of complaints about not getting enough sex but i do think that there is this pressure and this expectation on men that you know the expectation that guys are just ready to go all the time you know and there's a lot of performance anxiety and i think for a lot of men i don't think that we talk enough socially about what performance anxiety is for most men you know because if you're stressed out all the time right if you're stressed about work and finances and your relationship the chances are is that your nervous system in your body are in a more sympathetic dominant state which means that you're in more stressed out state all the time and that's actually a testosterone is probably in the absolute toilet right so your t levels are down you're not sleeping well you're stressed out you know you've got all the stress chemicals ripping through your body cortisol and adrenaline those things by the way are not conducive for a hard-on right if you're stressed you getting hard is it can be a challenge if you're stressed you staying hard it's gonna be a challenge if you're stressed you're not coming too fast it's gonna be a challenge right so we live in this very distracted overstressed always on always hyper caffeinated state as modern men and then expect ourselves to perform like peter north or ron jerry which i'm dating myself right i'm like i'm almost 40 so i'm naming male porn stars that uh we're famous a long time ago i don't know who they are today um but it's probably someone on tiktok yeah it's a it's so funny man like thinking about this convergence of difficulties that guys are facing in the bedroom so i am i started working with a blood testing company about six months ago in america trt and hrt and hormone optimization so just not a conversation really in the uk um and i knew i wanted to do more preventative medicine all the rest of it anyway get my blood done never had my t levels done i don't think i had them done properly before anyway uh 495 came back at 495 so i'm in the normal range but fuck i'm at the low end of normal definitely not for me as someone who trains a lot and wants mental clarity and energy and stuff to do so anyway they put me on a protocol which didn't include trt so nothing like super nuclear but like i need to take boron to free up my free tea and i needed to do like a pharmaceutical grade magnesium glycinate because the version i was using wasn't converted into some amiga sls there and more organ meats and more blah blah all this stuff right like a ton of different things and i got my results back about two weeks ago and it was at 1006 so it came from 495 to 1006 and the felt difference in my mood in my energy uh libido everything is fucking palpable and i mean i've doubled i've like more than doubled my testosterone so like shock horror um but um realizing that oh i thought that that was life i thought that was normal and it's like um it's almost like changing the laws of thermodynamics or whatever of your existence it's so fundamental to the texture of your own experience right it really is like the parameters within which you exist this is the way that i am right um and uh yeah you know to fold in the what is turning the frogs gay the like that was great just everything everything at the moment seems to be very well very conducive toward men uh not being able to psychologically physically hormonally socially archetypally embody anything that is traditionally masculine and ultimately it's not just guys that will struggle because the women out there who want to find a partner or who have a partner that they don't feel is showing up for them in a way that they could you know like having that belief in your partner that i know that you could be a really resilient man a strong man emotionally as well as physically i know that you could be fitter i know that you could be more disciplined i know you could be more stylish i could you know you could have more self-esteem more confidence more self-belief a lot of these things are challenges that both men and women are facing right like if one sex loses both sexes lose yeah yes i always appreciate the picture that you paint for what men are up against in our culture you know in our current times i think it's it's challenging you know there's a lot of adversity in a lot of different ways but getting your health together you know making sure your t levels are in good places incredibly important i'm gonna take a little bit of a side tension on this one um i listened to this interview i think her name is ayala and she was on she had done this study this piece of research i think it was just through her twitter uh that showed that on average women want men to be more sexually dominant in the bedroom than men want to be sexually dominant in the bedroom and so i repeated the same polling on my instagram to kind of see you know what would happen to sort of gain uh some insight into that and turn out the exact same thing came back where on average women wanted men who were more sexually dominant in the bedroom than men were wanting to be sexually dominant in the bedroom and i think that that's telling in the sense that a few things are playing into that one certainly testosterone levels right if your t levels are down you don't have the drive you don't have the motivation you don't have the energy you know that's that's going to impact you in a very very real way and it's going to impact you on on all fronts but especially you know in the bedroom sexually um and secondly i think there's a bit of a conundrum for a lot of men because when they hear the word dominance when it's like oh you want me to be sexually dominant well that's not the narrative that i'm hearing socially right that's not the narrative that i'm hearing online so again i think this is the conundrum that a lot of men find themselves in which is you need to be able to temper your aggression or your sense of dominant depending on the circumstance in the situation and you need to know unequivocally that you are asserting the right amount of dominance for the situation and i mean there's just so many parameters that you as a man have taken into account this fucking needle through a minefield filled with me too headlines right right it's like i mean in some ways i'm very thankful that i'm not out on the market today because that would be that would be brutal i think that'd be a very brutal thing to to traverse for a lot of men here's the other thing to fall into that as well which is every time that you make a a point like this there is and a lot of the time it's actually male feminists that bring this point up or male leftists that bring this point up um well sometimes like quite sort of forthcoming gay guys too uh well in a choice between that and the fear of being raped like what do you wish that you'd rather have and it's like hang on this is just a zero sum view of empathy again like we can't afford any empathy toward men because women out there are being sexually assaulted like i don't want that to happen like show me show me where the thing is and i'll sign it right like i don't want that to happen um i'm writing a book with a fucking guy that did an entire book a bestseller on male violence so like okay preaching to the choir but there is something about the vestigial benefits of patriarchy meaning that men who today don't feel like they have any of those benefits anymore still not being allowed to be afforded any sympathy because of the sins and benefits that their fathers and grandfathers were afforded is just like i i don't know and when it comes to that dominant thing dude it is it's like a spiral or maybe like an ever-intensifying or shortened game of tennis where the ping-pong ball bounces more quickly between each of them you know what i mean when you think about it in your mind you start off with quite a broad conception which is like men and women have sex women want some things men want some things women want men to be more dominant than men want to be okay but then there's this fear that men don't want to be overly dominant but then you fold me too in but then you fold sexual assaulting but then you fold the fear of the ping-pong all the way up and it's like holy fuck like of course of course of course everybody is anxious and scared and uncertain and despondent and checking out uh because when the goal of a lot of this stuff if it was i'm not conspiratorial but if it was a conspiracy the goal of this isn't to convince anybody of any one particular narrative it's to fire hose you with so many narratives that the truth can no longer be ascertained yes yeah and whether that's by coordination or um like just a chance then the cash value the net effect of what's happening is that that is what's occurring people don't know what the truth is they don't know like how many girls that want a man to be more dominant in bed are ashamed of having to admit that because there is more ashamed than like just normal sex is a private thing and opening up about it stuff like hang on maybe this means that i've got you know that i'm at a greater risk of being sexually assaulted i heard about the sarah everard case i hear about these girls that are like i saw the sound of freedom like you know maybe i'm contributing to that in some way uh maybe i'm not standing up for my feminist sisters in the manner that i should or whatever right like it's just it's rough man it's a really difficult uh communication landscape at the moment and i think i said to you before we started the work that you do the work that guys like george tinman does are like literally invaluable and especially to be able to make it exposed to the masses the men's work side of stuff that a lot of my boys do the sex men's groups that i've dipped in and out of in austin um everyone's always on fucking lse or something so it's like that's like common commonplace but it's so progressive and forward thinking when it comes to like well-being and mental care like it's real tip of the spear shit even if in austin you can like find any wednesday night like a ton of different houses that have got this stuff going on for most men all right where do i go like is there a men's shed in australia that's within a hundred miles of me so i can go fix some guy's fucking lawnmower while i talk about the fact that like i'm struggling in my relationship um so yeah i think it's very very important one thing i'd love to get out of you before uh we finish up what would you say to a guy that's been listening to this or a girl that's been listening to this and wants advice on how to begin like embodying that vulnerable emotionally open side is there anything tactically strategically that you think are good steps in order for somebody to go through either before they do it or how to do it or who to do it with or when to do it yeah i just i wanted to make one comment on something you said before you were talking about the like mass confusion and i couldn't agree with you more and if the people that are listening just envision masculinity as a physical body for a moment then confusion is one of the most toxic things for that masculine body and so one of the surest ways to dilute masculinity and to dilute men and their potency is to just confuse the shit out of them and when you can do that then you've eroded a sense of masculinity because masculinity there's an assuredness there's a clarity that feels safe there's a sense of direction and an assertiveness about that direction that that's that's the way that we're moving that's the direction that we're moving that those are some of the core tenets of masculinity and we have eroded that um and we've allowed that to be eroded and so if we can return to this no i'm not confused about x y and z i'm very sure right if we can just return to that place i think it's very very important i just want to touch on that one of the things that i think is incredibly important for all men and one of the things i talk a lot about is just the notion of confronting your own shadow your own darkness the parts of you that you don't like that you don't want other people to know about that you know you are insecure about those parts of you as a man are the elements of you that need confrontation you know carl jung had this great sort of quote where he said that um the first step in any therapeutic or psychological modality is confession and it's the same with it's the same with any religious process any spiritual process any kind of healing or change of transformation whatever label you want to put on it uh confession and admission is the first step and what you're talking about what you're confessing admitting to are the things that you ultimately don't want to talk about so i would say for the guys that are out there or women that are out there find a place you know you might need to try a few you might need to whether it's a therapist or a psychologist or a men's group or whatever it is find a place where you can start to break that first rule of men to bring this full circle right to break that first rule of don't talk about what it's like to be struggling to be you know to have some challenge in your life where you just don't know how to deal with it and when you can do that your your psychological resiliency will start to develop right your confidence will start to develop so if you can confront um these parts of you you know your insecurities your fears the decisions that you've made that you don't like the choices that you've made the fact that like maybe you're working a job you absolutely freaking hate but you don't know what to do about it when you can begin to confront those things and and bring your sort of internal truth out onto the table for other people to see you can begin to work with it and you can begin to get feedback on how you can shape it and how you can hold it so i say the first step go and find a group we are not meant to deal with grief in isolation we're not meant to deal with our anger in isolation we are not meant to deal with our own psychological hardship in isolation we are meant to do that with others and we're meant to do that with others who have run the gamut before so that's my second part is find some mentors in some capacity that you respect and that you admire you probably listen to this podcast because chris is somebody that you respect and admire and he brings on a ton of incredible people but find people that you can be influenced by more directly we have we have devalued the uh the actual inherent necessity to be influenced by other people you know and we think that we live in this sort of narcissistic state this very arrogant state of belief that we shouldn't allow ourselves to be influenced by other people when it's almost a necessity for a human being right for especially for men to be influenced by other men to be that's why the saying iron sharpens iron right other men are influencing you so find a mentor find a group right find some resources that you can dig into and then you know i think the last piece is start to replace some of your coping mechanisms and maladaptive behaviors um that are keeping you in place we all have these terrible mechanisms that we use to keep us stuck maybe it's smoking weed or playing video games or eating shitty food late at night just systematically start to replace one at a time i'm trying to do all of them at once but replace one at a time right so choose one okay stop smoking weed and replace that with a generative habit that you can feel good about because the reality is that for what a lot of men are missing is a deeper knowing and understanding of competency and capability and so these are some of the pieces that will start to move you in the right direction i love the touch on competence and trust in your own word because you know seeking validation from other people involves you often trading what you want to do for what they want to do and building self-esteem a lot of the time involves trading what other people want you to do for what you want you to do and we end up defaulting to the former rather than the latter and over time have we then begin to ask why is it my self-esteem is in the fucking toilet so well because you have done what other people wanted you to do and you haven't stood up for yourself and you haven't told the truth for two decades why would you trust you if you had a friend that was you you wouldn't invite them to dinner you wouldn't expect them to turn up to parties they don't keep their word so yeah building up bit by bit kind of beaten ladies and gentlemen i fucking adore your work i think your book's great i think instagram's great i think all of this stuff you're doing is fantastic so if people want to join this ethical cult where should they go i love that voted voted highest in class first in class to start uh you can go to mantalks.com and all my stuff's there or you can go to instagram and it's just mantalks on instagram and the book is just called men's work and there's a ton i wrote it in a way where i wanted guys to have real work to do as they read through the book so you're not going to read the book you're going to do a shit ton of work there's questions there's integration exercises so enjoy oh yeah i appreciate you thank you mate thank you