What's up guys? I'm really excited to talk to you about a very important topic. Why the modern man is struggling and falling behind at an alarming rate. My guest today, Richard Reeves, is the author of an extraordinary book called Of Boys and Men.
He was named one of the top 50 thinkers in the US and his latest book is exposing the fact that boys and men are declining rapidly in society as more and more opportunities open up for women. Something, however, is causing men to falter. And in this episode we discuss who has it worse and whether or not the beautiful rise of women has anything to do with the terrifying decline of men. We discussed the biological and societal differences between the sexes that play a major role in this issue and the unexpected consequences of the declining rates of marriage and why marriage may be even more important for men's well being than women in our modern culture.
I think you guys are going to love this conversation and if you do, please dance on that subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. Also, subbing really helps the channel reach even more people and I thank you guys in advance for your support. I'm Tom Dilue and wel welcome to Impact Theory. Who has it worse right now, boys or girls?
Depends which domain you're looking at. If you look at how boys are doing school and college, clearly they're doing worse. And some aspects of mental health, I think it's pretty clear that girls are doing worse. You've seen a recent spike in depression and anxiety among teenage girls along with a big rise in male suicide.
So that's again another difference. And then when you get into the labour market, there's all kinds of issues that face young men and young women differently. So right now I think the most honest thing to do is to just say that girls and boys, young men and young women are struggling in different ways in different domains of life. I just can't call it right now.
I don't think it's obvious. Some people think it's obvious one way or the other. I don't think it's obvious that one is suffering more than the other. I think it's more honest to say that boys and girls are struggling in different ways and perhaps at different points in their life.
One thing I really want to understand about this so for a long time is just everybody took a self evident that women were where we needed to target. There were structural issues that were creating major problems that were. I think the way that most people talk about it is there were breaks put on women and that we now live in the era where brakes have been taken off. And I think a pretty typical narrative is that as we took the breaks off women, we have done something bad to men and boys.
I will be honest that I'm just beginning to really explore this as somebody that doesn't have kids. So a lot of the ideas that I will put forth today to get your sort of sanity check against are me at the initial point of my thinking. But it does not feel like this is a you take the brakes off women and then suddenly fall apart scenario. But it does seem to be tied to what the evolutionary reason for what have become gender stereotypes.
Like, is this a societal structure issue or is it a biology issue? I love your analogy about taking breaks off. Right. Because those breaks were put on in some deliberately.
Right. There was injustice in what was happening to girls and women. So that to me is a societal statement, because I have a hypothesis that this did not begin as a societal problem, but this began as a biological problem. And when you're in the red and tooth and claw issue, that those things are going to spring up in that way.
Well, I think what happened in some ways, you've got it with the roles thing. So if we just go back 50 years, right, when 50, 60 years, when not many women went to college, Right. Was that because they weren't as good at high school? No, they were doing as well at high school.
Was it because women couldn't succeed at college? No. So why weren't women going to college? Well, because that wasn't seen as appropriate or necessary or useful for them.
Because after all, their main role was going to be as wives, as mothers. So to some extent, going to college was, you know, if anything, just a luxury. And in fact, all the women who did go to college back in the 70s, most of them were married within a year of graduating. Right.
Imagine that. That's a completely different world. And so we are, by ascribing very tight roles that were based on biology to men and women, we actually put the brakes on. And we basically said female education is kind of wasted time in 19 because it's going to be wives and others.
Once we took those breaks off in a way that I think was both necessary and justified, that allowed the kind of natural advantages of women because to show up in the education system. And so in a sense, to use your analogy, again, you took the brakes off women, what happened was it turned out that they can drive the car faster once you take the brakes off. And so they went past men. So there's actually a bigger gap in American higher education today than there was 50 years ago in 1972, when Title 9 as Masters just flipped.
So women are further ahead of men today on college campuses than men were ahead of Women in 1972. So there's been an extraordinary reversal in education. And this biology culture question is really, I think you're right at the heart of a lot of this. And so maybe a bit unfair to both sides.
One side says, well, we're biologically different, we have different roles and so we're never going to be equal. And this is how we're supposed to be. This is how men are supposed to be on the other side. No, no, biology has no influence at all.
Everything's socialized. Gender's a construct which underpins the patriarchy. So let's just kind of all enter the androgynous future. And the reality, of course, is somewhere in the middle, biology does matter.
And it matters in all kinds of ways that affect men and boys differently to women and girls. But culture is the way that our biology or biological differences is expressed. Right. So I don't know, just to choose one example, Aggression.
Right. Are boys and men more aggressive than women? Yes. And is that biological?
Yes. There's this huge gap in violence at 17 months, 18 months. Now, it's possible that one and a half year olds have picked up the cues from a society that says it's okay for boys to hit each other in the face, but not okay for girls to hit each other in the face. But I'm skeptical that we socialise them that strongly by 18 months, which explains massive differences.
What is that study done? I don't know. It's a good question. I would say that the tenor on that societal has shifted so far that if that were anywhere in the last 10 or 15 years, there's no way that's coming from culture in my estimation.
Like the way that people look at me when I say that my mom's make me and thank God is like, I said that, you know, she put me in the icu. So there's been a real cultural shift in that. And there's most of us fighting in schools now as well. Actually, interestingly, most American parents even today engage in some kind of physical punishment for their children.
I looked at this Brookings like 10 years, 8 years ago because I mentioned I was astonished by how common it is because if you live in a bubble of upper class, upper middle class people, it's like absolutely verboten. There was this, there was this book a year ago, it was called the Slap or something like that. Basically the whole premise of the book was what happened when one parent hit their kid in front of other parents. And all the ripples from that.
Right. Can you imagine that? That would make a kind of flip. And so, sure, cultures change in ways that we can argue about whether they're positive or negative, but the underlying point is that there are these biological differences.
So let's say aggression. And the question is, do you live in a society where being aggressive, expressing that aggression is good or bad? In some societies through human history, you bet. Absolutely.
Today, not so much. Right. It's probably, you know, if you get up now, if I say something that offends you and you come over here and punch me in the face, even I would be very surprised if I did that. I don't think the people watching this will be like, yeah, absolutely fantastic.
Great case fighter. What's wrong with him? Will Smith, Pretty, pretty dark. Different people responded differently.
I thought everyone was going to roundly contemplate. And while largely, yes, I was startled that there was. There were people that were like, yeah. The point I'm trying to make here is that how a culture encourages this character incentivizes, disincentivizes, rewards or doesn't reward certain biological traits, it's hugely important.
And a good feminist argument would be that let's say that women do more care work than men raising children, another kind of care work. And let's say that's partly because of differences in biology. Let's just say that's true. Does that mean that work is less valuable, should be lower status, should be worse paid?
Well, yes, if you think women's work is worth less, but no, if you think that just because women's work doesn't make work any less. And so there is a feminist argument that care work is predominantly female work and that it should be paid much better and rewarded, much like how wages for housework movement came from. So we have to think about biology, cultures co evolving. And most importantly, recognising biological differences doesn't make culture less important, it makes it more important because culture is how we learn how to express or not express these tendencies or when it's appropriate to express them, when it's not appropriate to express them.
Yeah, very well said. So there were a lot of things that you said in there that I want to go back and address. So the first is this idea of wives and mothers as a throwaway comment, so. Or a throwaway category.
So my wife, who and I should set the stage for people that are Seeing me for the first time because they're attracted to you in your work. So my wife and I have no kids. My wife is the quote, unquote, boss bitch, like, super hardcore, very talented entrepreneur, been very successful. And she was one standing in line at a restaurant with another woman, and they just started talking.
And when I asked my wife what she did, she was explaining, you know, run companies, blah, blah, blah. No one was like, oh, wow. My wife was like, what do you do? And she said, oh, I'm just the mother.
And my wife was like, yo, hold the phone. Now, my wife has decided not to have kids, but she has just crazy amounts of respect and, quite frankly, gratitude. Gratitude to other women that do. And so I.
I will. My wife doesn't say these words, but she shares a sentence. But many parents always thank them for their service, which, by the way, thank you for your sound. I mean that completely unironically.
Like, I'm very grateful that very thoughtful, caring, loving people have kids and raise them well. We just need that as a society. And I couldn't do what I did if other people weren't out there having children. So the idea of, like, oh, wives and mothers, as if that weren't something that should be venerated.
And so I think the central thing that you and I are gonna. You will hopefully help me shape my thinking on this, because you thought much more deeply about it. But I come at it, I'm like, oh, there's a nuclear bomb in the center of this discussion, and very few people are talking about it, which is birth control. And so my hypothesis goes something like this.
We have. We have reached a moment of crisis, which I know you. You don't love when people use the hyperbolic. But I would say something pretty dramatic is happening right now that I think warrants that language, if for no other reason than to get people to pay attention.
But I think this is all an echo. This is largely an echo. I'm gonna be somewhat careful in my speech here. This is largely an echo of birth control.
So you get this idea of you said, okay, if we value parenting and raising children and women are doing that, then they should be effectively compensated. It's not the exact words that you use, but my initial reaction that is not all value can or should be captured financially. So just because it's this insanely important thing does not mean that we should be pay. And the re.
And you can even think that the family unit effectively is paying the person to do that if they are truly within the home being equal and so this is something. I've earned my strides on this with my wife. For eight years of our marriage, my wife didn't work, but I was like, you are my equal in every way. But we have very different roles now.
Ended up changing over time, but same idea. We've just. Everything for us has always been equal. So in some ways they are being paid, but at a governmental level, which is what I think people mean.
They want the government effectively to come in and pay. And this is where this shit starts to nest inside of, like, these crazy ideas. But just to get at the complexity of why I think this is falling apart in this moment. So birth control changes the dynamic.
Women start fighting into the workforce. They're now in control of whether they need to be at home with kids or not. And then we have this other idea, which is that basically, um, the miracle of the way that the modern world works is not in production, to use a, you know, a Marxist term, but instead is in the redistribution. And once you, my hypothesis goes, once you start thinking that the miracle is the redistribution, then you forget that as you start to redistribute, then all the people that would rise up that are entrepreneurial minded, they stop doing that.
And all of a sudden there is nothing left to redistribute. And so getting this moment right and understanding the. The really foundational dynamic between men and women, I think becomes incredibly important. So if we were to try to recognize the contributions of women by, through a financial instrument, I think we are just absolutely headed for disaster.
So how do we recognize the contributions of something that is incredibly important? Okay, so I agree with you that control of fertility was a cultural game changer, especially for women. There's no question that effective birth control has been one of the most significant changes in the culture of human societies. And most importantly, because by allowing women to control their fertility, it allowed them to become more full economic participants in the labour market.
I'm thinking about a more recent capitalist labour market economy. And the central goal of the postwar women's movement was to secure economic independence for women. So if you read Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, et cetera, they will say, and they said things like, the purpose is to make marriage a choice, not a necessity, so that women could stand up in marriage on their own two feet. And of course, the fact of birth control was an important way in which we could do it, as well as educational successes.
Do your alarm bells go off, though, when you hear that? Because mine do. Which bit of it that you're already creating a problem for Yourself the second you, if you find the fence in the middle of the woods, do not tear that fence down until you understand why that fence was. J.K.
chesterton. Yeah. Who's certificate's name? Yes.
Thank you. So my, the underlying thing that you're being very gracious to, let me think through out loud, is that evolution has created something, a dynamic between men and women that can become pathological and become tyrannical for sure, but there's an underlying something there. And so I'll use. This is maybe dangerous oversimplifying, but I will use my own relationship to my wife as an example of why that moment, to me, is something that people need to stop before we just throw out the, oh, maybe marriage should be the same.
Nobody needs to do. And it's like, I want people to do it by choice, 100%. I don't want anybody to be forced in their marriage. I can give nothing worse because of a recurring nightmare about ending up in a loveless marriage.
But when I think I once, and I'm not a prior man, but I once wept in front of my wife because I was like, this was before we started this company and she stepped up front, became an entrepreneur. And I was like, the world is never going to understand that I would not be able to do what I do without you. But you have made me a better person. And that makes me ask the question.
It feels to me like men, women, need to come together. So I agree that we're in a moment now of massive flux and uncertainty. And one result of that is to leave men in particular very uncertain of their role in this new society. So the securing of greater economic independence for women, I think has been the greatest economic liberation in global human history.
So in the US today, 40% of women now earn more than the average men. In 1979, it's 13% of women. So it's not as we don't have absolute gender equals in the labor market yet, but my God, in the last 50 years have we seen this extraordinary change. And so Steinem and me and others have to some extent achieved their goal, which is women will not need to be with a man in order to feed their kids, have a home, et cetera.
And of course, the welfare state has stepped in as well. So that's securing that separation that's like, I don't need a man anymore. Materially has been very significant achieved. And your right, birth control as part of the story, that is where we are now.
And I'm glad that's where we are. And When I use my ugly male marriage as an example of this, which is my wife and I have actually taken in turns essentially to be more of a kind of breadwinner and more of a carer. When we've been raising our children, we're absolutely determined we'd raise our kids ourselves. It's not, we never had any help.
We're not going to be this kind of too professional career, full time nanny, you know, see the kids at weekend couple. We're not going to do that. And actually there have been periods where my wife has been full on and I've been at home raising the kids and vice versa. What a wonderful world where we had that choice.
My parents didn't have a choice. When my dad lost his job, there was no possibility that my mom is going to be able to say I'll do Redburn for she didn't have the economic power to do that. It was all him. That's not true for our generation and that's a huge gain not only for women, but also for men.
However, does that come with consequences of how we think about male and female roles, about marriage, about mating, about child rearing, about fertility? Oh yes, it's a massive change. And I think there's a tendency sometimes to just to not recognize that fundamentally altering the economic relation between men and women is huge. Culturally, sociologically, in almost every way imaginable.
You can do that and not have massive consequences. The people who win, they're not smarter, they just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now in business, psychology, leadership books that have already changed how the best operators think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have.
This is a bandwidth problem, not a discipline problem. And that's exactly what Blinkist was built to solve. It takes the world's best nonfiction books and distills them into 15 minute summaries. You can read or listen to scattered 9,000 titles.
We're talking atomic habits, thinking fast and slow. The hard thing about hard things, books you know you should have read by now, done in the time it takes to drink your coffee. And because it's built for mobile, your commute becomes a classroom. Blinkist also sends you personalized recommendations so you actually build a daily learning practice instead of just planning to do one.
Start your free trial and save an extra 30%. Go to blinkist.comimpact Again, that's blinkist.com impact. Start learning aggressively today. It will change your life.
Let's talk about what is going on in your closet. This time of year, most people realize half of what they own isn't even worth keeping. Things that look fine in the store, but they don't hold up. Pieces you keep but never reach for.
I know that one all too well. Spring is when you see it all clearly. You don't need more, you need better. That's where Quince comes in.
I picked up one of their cashmere sweaters and the quality genuinely shocked me. It's incredible. It's incredibly soft, well made. You can feel the difference immediately.
That's 100% Mongolian cashmere for you. And that is the same material luxury brands charge a fortune for. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.comimpactpod for free shipping and 365 day returns.
Now available in Canada as well. Go to Q U I n c e.com impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com impact pod let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building. Compounding.
There's a reason that people talked about this forever. You put an asset to work, it generates more of itself. Over time, the curve bends way in your favor. Every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works.
Most gold owners, though, have completely opted out of it. Monetary Metals changes that equation. They've built a way for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars, but in more physical gold, up to 4% per year, more ounces stacking every single month, compounding in one of the only assets that can't be printed, inflated or debased. And storage and insurance are included by the way.
So hidden fees don't eat your yield. The average person is passively absorbing inflation. This is how you can pound your way out of it. Click the link in the show notes or visit monetary-metals.comimpact to learn more.
This is a paid advertisement. I want to hear about those consequences which you go through in the book in an amazing way. So what are the consequences? Well, the first one is of course that women don't have to have a man in order to survive.
And so one result of that is that 40% of kids in the US are now born outside marriage and most kids born to non college educated Americans are born outside marriage. And so the and one reason that we've seen this really big increase in the share of kids being born outside marriage and this is worse than the Joint Economic Committee was led by my friend Scott Winship at the AEI is the decline in shotgun marriages. So actually if you look back around the 60s and 70s, there was a very high percentage of births took place less than nine months after the wedding. It was a real thing.
Well, June Carbon has this number, which is like 30% of first births around 1960, within nine, something like that. So it was non trivial. Right. So the point is it was a lot.
It wasn't that people weren't necessarily having sex before marriage and getting pregnant before marriage. It was that if you had sex and you got pregnant, the next step was get married. That's almost fallen away now. There is this sense of like, well, how many kid Diego have to get married?
And here I want to actually be really fair to the conservative critics from the 1970s. So I went back and you read these folks, including like George Gilder, who was the misogynist of the year, I think two years running, I mean, incredibly ended up being one of Reagan's advisors and he and others, Jeff dentioners, they argued that if women secured economic independence in the way that the women's movement wanted, that actually that would basically make men redundant. But if men didn't have that role of kind of provider, then they would effectively become surplus to requirements. And men who are surplus to requirements are very dangerous in human history.
This is what Joe Henrich calls the math problem of surplus men. Surplus men are bad news for society. They maraud around, they're very violent, they're very risk taking. And so the conservatives were saying, if the winner Zoom gets this way, we're going to have Mad Max style bands of marauding violent men saying fire to everything, etc.
In fact, the opposite has happened. We've seen a drop over the last few decades in violent crime, drop in express aggression, etc. I think largely because of the Internet. I think actually what happened is the fox kind of running out and sending fire to things.
A lot of these men are retreating stereotypically to the basement, maybe to video games and pornography. So this is kind of very weird and provocative thought I sometimes have that maybe the screens are kind of saving us from the worst consequences of this tantal surplus requirement staying around men. So that worst fear hasn't been realised. But the conservatives were right to say that if we get to this world where there's much greater economic inequality between men and women, which is that means that men don't have this specific, very dedicated role anymore, a breadwinner, we're going to have trouble with these guys.
These guys are going to be either in trouble or trouble. And although their natural trouble is different to what was predicted, nonetheless I think that was right. So if you look at the men who opioid overdose, mostly men. Suicide rates are four times higher among men and boys, young men, than among women, and any number of other pathologies that are affecting a lot of men.
And I looked at the work on suicide and one of the studies that really stopped me in my tracks, honestly. And it's a moment where you stop being a. A scholar, only just become a human being. This work by Fiona Shand looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before suicide.
And the two most commonly used words by those men were useless to describe themselves, useless and worthless. There's something going on there which is we cannot create a society which is more gender equal, which I fully support, if, in case it's not clear by now, but which also makes so many men feel like they're of no use anymore. They're worthless now. Thanks, guys.
We got it from here is not a great message. And so we've got to find a way to get through this messy situation we're in now so that there's a positive script for men, a positive description of masculinity and what we need fathers and men and boys to be like that is compatible with this new world of economic politics. It's not going away, right? Not going back to.
To a world where women are economically dependent on men, except within families by choice, as my wife was on me for periods and as I was on her for periods. And interestingly, the couples who do have the most economic power and the most resources are the ones where women stay home to look after the kids more easily because they can afford to do so. That's great. And I think that the women's movement have dodged a very, very big bullet by not, I think, apologizing the women who chose to become parents.
Who said that to your wife adjuster mom thing? That's much less common now. I think there was a moment where the women's movement started to look like it might look down on women who were sort of in the lab market full time, etc. I think that was largely avoided.
And now I see women's movement is actually desire to support Monsieur. They want to. I respect for women's choice. So I think Elijah avoided that trap.
And that's a great thing. Yeah, agreed. So now I want to talk about this idea of surplus men and what happens when they no longer really have a need to be the breadwinner, especially if they're being outperformed by women. So I'm going to keep anchoring this in my logic around.
Okay, you're having a biological experience. This is like my obsession is to get people to understand that you are living life through your brain and your brain works in a certain kind of way and male brains work a little differently than women. There's way more overlap than our differences, but the differences end up mattering. And so.
Well, it depends on the issue is more overlap on some things than others. That's very. I mean there's 95% of violent crimes committed by men. So do you think that's a distribution problem?
Meaning that. So you have a tremendous amount of overlap in these things, but the most violent things are going to happen at the tail. At the tail, yeah. But there are some things like aggression, sex drive, risk taking, people things.
There's a whole series of dimensions, agreeable, disagreeable, where the distributions overlap different amounts. So the agreeable disagree. Are you agreeable? Personality trait thing agree that overlapsable.
In fact, I'm more agreeable than my wife. Right, There you go. Set it now. Yes, right, so and that does it.
But aggression, potential for physical aggression, that doesn't apply very much. And so yes, you're right, it's at the tail just in everyday life just like this is much less so I really like the fact you said they overlap, but so the question is not does this distribution overlap on because it's almost always do overlap. The question is how much do they overlap and how much does it matter. I am going to continue to anchor around the idea of biology just to give myself a thread to pull through all of this.
And I do understand that I am taking an extreme, extraordinarily complicated topic and simplifying it. I think it will help people think through certainly it will help me as you check me in different areas. So surplus men could end up being Mad Max style has not been Mad Max style, but probably we have a new opiate for the male masses anyway in pornography and video games, which hey give you a sense of like I did get laid. See, I'm okay and I did win that competition.
Right, exactly. So very interesting. I don't yet know as somebody who plays video games and when my wife does not match, like my libido is more than happy to dip in pornography. It's like I hesitate to say it's bad, but at the same time I'm very good at self regulation so I don't end up having a problem and a lot of people do.
Okay, so we've got this moment where you've got over how many hundreds of thousands of millions of years you want to Clock it of evolution that's driving a slight differentiation between men and women. You get men needing to be, not needing to be. But men are shaped because they can't breastfeed, which is a choice that evolution makes. Men can't breastfeed, nor can they carry a baby to term.
But you need them for the genetic mixing that you get from sexual reproduction. Okay, cool. So what is going to be their role? And it becomes, okay, you're going to be optimized women.
You're going to be optimized for caring for infants. So one of the things I found utterly fascinating, it's 15% of women have a fourth photoreceptor. So they can literally see colors that guys can't see. That one struck me because it is so obviously physiological that they just have an extra thing that guys don't have.
Why might that be? To be able to perceive changes in the skin color of their child, to detect sickness or whatever. I don't know. But that's one hypothesis that's interesting.
Obviously, having mammary glands and being able to produce milk, like women are just optimized to have and care for children. So now you've got guys that are. Oh, God, I don't know how much time to spend this. I will say things quickly.
If there's anything you disagree with or think I'm crazy about, just let me know. But men are basically the answer to the question of what do women want? Women are the sexual gatekeepers. And so the vast majority of reproduction comes from what women are willing to grant their sexual access to.
And so men are stronger in upper body. Men have the aggression, all the things that you talked about. Okay. So basically, women are saying, I need a partner, which is my whole thing, if I were to sum my thesis up, is men and women need each other.
They need to shape each other. Okay. So if at a societal level, that shaping happens in evolutionary time frames, being out in the savannah, having to fight lines and stuff like that, it's like, okay, I need to be stronger, more aggressive, more willing to take risks, all of that, so that I can take care of the child, you out and do more dangerous shit. Whether that's hunting, protecting from other males in their tribe.
Cool. But that's what you're gonna do now. As we evolve, we build these very stable societies, we are able to do all the things we do in a lot of contexts, include separate sex from reproduction. Yeah.
Now women go to the labor force, but now, like, they're still gonna be able to have babies, which is Absolutely necessary. And biology's gonna be like, oh my God, you can breastfeed. Like, this is amazing. They're get all this biological reinforcement, including neurochemical flood.
But guys, you can't breadwin anymore. Or you don't necessarily need to. And by the way, if you're going after it, you're a bad person. Well, you don't need to.
I think you've said that final point you made, which is that we don't necessarily need you to do that anymore. So are men necessary? Who wrote that book down? I think read the book by all men necessarily.
That's a terrifying question. Great question. And of course there are these kind of women on utopias, right? Which you see all the way through from kind of Perkins through to Rick.
And there's a Rick and Morty episode, right, Raising Gazathorpe or something where it's an old trope, which is there's this kind of utopian female society and then kind of savage men down there and they can get the sperm, they solve the reduction from the normal male or the other and just get rid of all those men. So I think there's a few things going on here. One is that the shaping. You talk about shaping of men and women, of each other.
I look at it slightly more through the lens of parenting and so how the raising of having a successful raising of kids shapes us. So I'm very interested by the work of Anna Machin, who's an anthropologist at Oxford. She wrote a book called the Life of Dad. And what she shows, and there are other people have shown this too, is that fatherhood really was created when our brains went through that huge expansion and the years it took to get our kids to nutritional independence, which is huge.
And the calorie requirements to get a newborn. Nutritional independence, something chemist. There's no way we can do it on her own. And so if you wanted your kid to survive, you kind of need to be a dad.
So I see this as kind of much more around reproduction and what happens to our offspring. And that's kind of at an evolutionary level that's affecting a lot of our behavior. And so then the question becomes like, what if you don't need it anymore? Like what?
Like, why do you need dad when you have food stamps and women only 40% women more than men. And so we have to come up with a different answer to that same question. And we have to find ways in which the natural tendencies of men say to be more risk taken because people write men are more risking than women. Where does that Go now.
We can't just suppress it, we can't somehow expunge it. Right. We can't take that out of men like an appendix. Right.
It's not some obsolete thing we can just sort of remove only if it comes inflamed. Otherwise it's just this kind of obsolete part of our revolution. You can channel it. Right.
So do we want men to be risk picking? Yes and no. Depends on circumstances. Right.
So when I was running across in front of trucks or flipping, doing somersaults over the side of the ski resort to see them hitting farm machinery like. No. Do you want people to kind of take risks and sometimes starting businesses, do you want people to be more adventurous, et cetera? Yes.
So that risk taking appetite among men, is it good or bad? Is the wrong question. It's when is it good and when is it bad? And how can we find ways to channel in ways that are more appropriate than others?
That's not a new problem. We have a new set of challenges around it. But there's this line from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, which I now use so much and I've got committed basically to memory, which is every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men. This behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively.
I think that's exactly right. So male nurturing, and it doesn't mean necessary one, one nurturing. Male nurturing can be a little bit more tribal, it can be a little bit more of a bigger group. But male nurturing matters, right?
It has. Ancestry has mattered because it's different in tonality than female nurturing. You make the point that kind of like women breastfeed, there's the octopus and thing. There's a kind of.
For very young children especially, there is a difference between the biological relationship between fathers and mothers. And very young children. Where I disagree with some conservatives on this is like that's not less true for 12 year olds. In fact, I'm reasonably convinced by the evidence that dads, if anything, have a bit competitive advantage when it comes to adolescence.
So just because women like breastfeed for the first few months doesn't mean that they. That's them for like 25 years. Right? Yeah, you're a mum, that's a problem.
You overdetermined biological difference turn into roles and trap people with them. And the other side say, oh, there aren't biological differences. So you just end up with an absurd situation where neither side makes any sense. And so the question is like, well, okay, what about the guys then?
Well, fatherhood still really matters, just in a slightly different way. So you're still needed by your kids, you still have to provide for your kids. And by the way, that could include materially. Right.
There are probably very many women out there that love the idea that men aren't going to do any more earning anymore. Right. And in fact, there's this very interesting new recent evidence that shows that a big reason for the gender pay gap is parenting. We know that already there's a difference between men and women's parenting, but it's not just that mothers earn and work less, it's that fathers earn and work more and that drives the gender payout very significantly.
Right? So actually fatherhood triggers more work, my earnings among men, right. So the idea that the providing role of men is kind of somehow kind of behind us, that's wrong. It's just that they don't have exclusive access to it anymore.
But they also matter as dads. They're a bit better at helping the kids take risks, maybe a little bit better around some of the physical stuff. With sons, I only have boys. I can only speak to three boys.
And a friend of ours said, like, well, you've got boys and they like dogs, just run them out twice a day and you'll be fine. It is a bit more complicated than that, but there's some truth in that. It's just the physical needs of boys and girls are a little bit different and dads actually are pretty good at all that. So I guess my big point here is that we are where we are in terms of the relationship between men and women.
We also are who we are in terms of our biology. So the question is, what kind of culture do we need to create that recognizes biological differences without in any way making them determinative, but without imagining they're not there. Which celebrates economic, greater economic equality between men and women, but which nonetheless gives men a specific role to play in society and their kids lives. We are just beginning to answer that question.
In fact, I honestly think through my own work, I haven't persuaded some people that even question a question that he's answering, right? Which is there is a problem right now with boys and men. And one of the sources of that problem is we don't have a new script for masculinity. We've torn up the old one, the breadwinning one.
We haven't replaced it. But actually masculinity doesn't invent itself. Let's talk about who's profiting from your personal information. Someone is making money from your data every single day.
You just don't see the transaction. Data brokers collect your personal information and sell it for profit. Your address, your phone number, your email, your Social Security number. Yikes.
It's bought and sold constantly without your knowledge or consent. Scammers buy it for identity theft. Spammers buy it for targeted harassment. Criminals buy it to find you.
And the crazy part is, it's completely legal. The solution is Incogni. Incogni tracks down your data across hundreds of data broker sites and removes it automatically. You authorize them.
Once they handle everything else, they remove your data and keep it removed with repeated requests. Plus with custom removals, you send them any link where your data appears and their team will remove it. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Go to incogni.com impact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan.
Try it risk free for 30 days. That's I N C-O-G-N-I.com impact and use code impact. And back to this point about the frigate the Learn thing from me I think it's basically true that becoming a man, mature masculinity, positive masculinity, is more learned, more socialized than femininity. Women have a much clearer sequence of biological milestones, etc.
If you look at the history of human cultures, they work really hard around rites of passage for men. Is that because they were patriarchies? Not mostly, I don't think. I think it's because humans have known forever that the challenge of turning boys into good men is a bigger cultural challenge than turning girls into women, because we don't have quite the same biological markers.
And that is a task that every culture has taken very long, very seriously. And I think it would be incredibly arrogant of us to think that we can be the first to science society in human history that doesn't have to pay attention to the way we turn boys into men. I agree with that. Really aggressively.
So one of the. I should say aggressively because that's right. I know. Which I love.
So the funny thing is I am. I'm more. I am. I don't know what the right way to say this is, so I'll say it overly simplistic.
I'm more traditionally feminine than my wife. My wife is more traditionally masculine than I am. And so us coming together has been really interesting in that we have a very easy time understanding each other. So there's not this catastrophic difference.
Like when I think of like an MMA fighter getting with somebody that, you know, all they want to do is play with dolls and have kids. It's like. Like that. That could be a much tougher bridge to cross.
But when I was, I guess, right before I met my wife, I read the book the Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. And I sometimes get made fun of it for this, but I actually think it's one of the most important things I did in my life, which I read the book. And he has a hypothesis in that that a big problem that we face is the breakdown of coming of age rituals. And there aren't a coming of age rituals.
And my own journey into entrepreneurship was one of toughing up, of becoming more traditionally masculine, of learning to be aggressive, of learning to be disagreeable. And it really, really served me. Now, the fact that I'd learned it means that I had skills on the other side of empathy, connection, all that which has served me incredibly well as well. But I realized I would not have gotten where I've gotten had I not developed those skills.
And so it got me thinking a lot about I didn't end up coming of age ritual. My dad wasn't hyper involved. He was married to my mom the whole time. I was running out.
Left three weeks after I went to college. That tells you a little something. Great divorce. Yeah.
So it was. He was absent despite being physically there. He worked in the garage. I didn't have a super strong male role model of what being men looked like.
And he grew up without a father, so it was like he didn't even. He probably didn't know what to pass on or how to pass on. Anyway, so when I read this book, the Power of Myth, hey, these coming of age rituals are missing. That really echoed true for me because of how I came up.
And so I'm thinking, oh, I am about to, you know, at some point in the near future, hopefully we'll find somebody that I want to get married to. And he also mentions in the book that he thinks part of the reason that 50% of marriages end in divorce is because there's similarly no really hardcore ritual of you were single and now you were married, and you were different now forever. And so as a part of getting married, I got myself ritualistically scarred. Now, the reason that people make fun of me is what it was was a tattoo.
Now, most people think of it as a tattoo, but I did not. I only have one tattoo. I absolutely, at the time, really had a hard time with needles. And so for me, it was facing a gigantic Fear that I had, I wanted it to be painful, and I wanted it to be permanent.
And so was it something of your watch? Was it? Of course. Of course.
So I end up getting a tattoo design, which is. She's Greek, so it was her name in Greek, and then in Greek, the four words that were my basically promise to her. And when I did it, I said, I want to lean into the fact that this is painful. I want to be completely present with what I'm going through and as it's happening.
So I made her come with me, but I did not want her to give me comfort or solace or anything like that. I was like, don't distract me. I want this to be painful. And so going through that was, between her and I, a pact.
We will never joke about divorce or anything like that. That's completely off the table, barring this becoming loveless or abuse on either side. This is forever. And not because we say words in front of friends, because we believe that's the most logical thing to living a fulfilling, amazing life, but that it's necessary to walk through some kind of threshold for me.
And it's interesting because I didn't feel she needed to go through something like that as well, because she was like, you know, should I get a tattoo? No, actually, I don't. Doesn't feel intuitively like where I was like, if you want one, obviously get one, but it is not what I would want. And so we did this whole thing and talked about it, and that really laid a foundation for us where, for me, I knew there is no going backwards, and there is no unwinding this.
There is only what is the path through, what is the path to a loving, long lasting, healthy relationship. And so by conceptualizing it as a ritualistic scarification to remind myself that I'm different tomorrow than I was today, that we are married, and it is a line in the sand that I'm never going to retrograde back across. But I had to think of it like that. And I needed something to.
I needed to make a big deal out of something. I needed to. First of all, I think that there are lots of different rites of passage that we kind of. We all need.
And just an anecdotal level, I think things like. So I've been a Scout leader in the past. Things like moving up from different Scout groups to another. I remember one used to do where they would be a Cub Scout to a Scout, and they would literally have their Scout uniform on underneath their Cub uniform, and they'd go on this Kind of parachute thing.
And all of them would line up and go in a parachute and they go in a parachute thing and then came out of nowhere, Scout. And they came out, right? They went in this Cub Scout, came out as a scout. Sounds silly, etc.
I remember doing that. Big deal, right? And so there's kind of all of these rituals. What's interesting is the role of marriage.
I've been really struck by the fact that more American men say that marriage is important to them than American women do. Women are twice as likely to initiate divorce as men. Post divorce, men do much worse than women. And so I think that as variation in your story, that marriage as an institution is more important for men than for women.
That's really shocking. It's so counterintuitive, right? It goes against the narrative. The narrative is, well, you know, she dragged me into it.
You know, the guy's just stagnant. He rolls his eyes. And like, the narrative is that women are kind of trying to trap men into marriage, right? They find someone to marry, they obsess about their wedding, dating, all that.
Men are like they're being dragged in because we'd much rather be out on the range being a cowboy or shoot whatever bullshit. It actually turns out, especially now that women are a bit more like, yeah, the marriage might not marry, et cetera, and if he's not working out. Whereas for men, actually that institutional anchor, I think is becoming more important. And super interesting to me that one of the results of the women's movement has been to make marriage more important for men.
But I also think it's because men don't have these alternative rites of passage. So becoming a mother still has a different impact for women than does other men. I think that's going to remain true for some time. I would love fatherhood to have much more salience than it does.
And that's why I want more paid leave for dads and all that stuff I get into in the book. But I am super interested in, like, the deinstitutionalization of masculinity. There's a sound point for you that no one's ever going to use again. Put on the bumper sticker.
What do we want? The reinstitutionalization of masculinity. What do we want in it? This catch, isn't it?
You heard it here first. And so what I mean by that is actually many of the institutions through which actually men's roles were formed, that could be a labour market, could be church, it could be marriage, are actually kind of falling away. And those are affecting men much more than women, including marriage. And so it's interesting to me, like the tattoo example is, I think that some deep level what's happening there is you wanted to connect yourself to the institution in a way that felt just.
You wanted to embrace the institution, you wanted to become part of the institution, you wanted to step into the institution. And that took more than just the same, a few vows. You needed something more than that to mark the institutional marker. And I think that just generally there are fewer heroes than men in our society now.
And that's the problem. Campbell was right to that extent. Yeah, I am. I'm in a really weird intersection of as an entrepreneur, governmental tinkering bothers you as a podcaster who's trying to think well through these things, and you get confronted with, oh, God, this tinkering work.
But then at the same time, as a person in the world with people that you love and care about, you like, thank God the government exists and that they, you know, do their best to come up with policies to help people and thank God there's a safety net and that people aren't, you know, just like, well, you have blindsided. Sorry. Yeah, so. But I.
While I think it is important and I'm very much not the tear it all down and let's hope the thing that we build back is better. I do worry that people aren't being thoughtful enough, that tinkering in and of itself is the finding the fence in the middle of the field going, I can be a bit better like this. And then you realize, oh, we just made it so things could crawl underneath it, or we made it shorter and now things can leave over it. And we didn't realize what the second and third and third order consequences.
We didn't think through what the role of that institution was before we tore it down. Exactly the difference between a revolutionary and reformer, I think. Yes. And so when I think about where these.
To call it an institution makes me uneasy because going back to biology, this stuff was born very naturally over very long periods of time. From when you say any situation about a marriage specifically or anything, or monogamous marriage is a very recent invention. Interesting. So 95% of human society has been polygamous, and only 50% of men historically have reproduced.
So twice as many of our ancestors are female as well. So sorry, walk me through 95%. So when you say polygamy is the norm, as in this is the actual structure of our society is like, yeah, guys have more than one wife yeah, it's almost always been polygyny, which is men having multiple wives, not the other way around. That's what we mean by that.
But yeah, it's important I think when we have these discussions about what traditional marriage, what traditional societies, to recognise that across the arc of evolutionary history, which is I think the ban that you're interested in, monogamous marriage just. Yes, it was invented yesterday largely by the Christian church and then kind of spread across the world from there. And that's been huge in terms of its cultural impact. One of the reasons why the men probably have an evolutionary higher up life of risk is because actually if you only had a 50% chance of reproducing ancestrally, it was worth taking risks trying to get the 50% who were going to reproduce.
I don't know these stats well enough, but I'm going to push on some what my intuition is telling me. So the only way for men to be polygamous is that if they're able to acquire resources in such disproportion that you're as a woman, rather than going to a relationship where you can have all of that one man and the things that he drives, that you would rather have a smaller percentage. How on earth is that possible? Pre agriculture chiefs, tribal chiefs, I mean Genghis Khan for example, this is a very famous example.
But even that those really spring up non God, I want to fully acknowledge them outside of what I understand. So the status hierarchy of men was what led them to have like multiple wives at the top of the hierarchy and none hundred thousand years ago. Absolutely, yeah. So there's a debate as whether human societies are more than technological societies, more than 10 or 20%.
Sure. So there's going to be a bit of discussion here as to what counts as quotes a society in order for us to know the status gave you about Polymeru from Joe Henrick there again we have to know about our society, so we have to have evidence for him. So that's by definition a more recent one. So you're right, I don't want to be.
I don't want to get a kind of starting date wrong for this. But to the extent that we know about human society, so the societies we know about 95% of them have been polygamous now to very different degrees of course. Right. So there's a world where like one guy gets all of the women and then there's a world where women, men get one of each and everything in between.
But it does generate this issue of the kind of the Historic problem, the math problem, surplus men was actually one that every society had under condition of polygamy. Because if one guy has multiple wives, by definition, that means there's a bunch of guys who don't know why. And it was a monogamy that came along and quite solved that problem. And so actually Henrik and others are very good about saying, everyone says, of course men will love this.
Right? They roll their eyes and say, of course men will like that. Of course men are favour of eventually. Don't be too careful to assume that there are not some advantages to those societies, including for women.
And so to put it very bluntly, in the modern context, if you went to the average woman and said, okay, you can be the third wife of Jeff Bezos, or the only wife of an unemployed steel worker, damn, what are you going to choose? And it might depend on who you have, marriage, etc. But I've tried that question on a lot of women. Like, yeah, interesting.
That is terrifying. It's terrifying because of my worldview. Being Jack's third wife is terrifying when I look at it. When I look at it, I am, I'm really unnerved by that.
It isn't easy to dismiss and go, oh, I want to say you're better off as the wife of an unplayed steelworker, but I would actually, if it were my sister, I would hesitate. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, obviously not third kind of consecutively. I find this very interesting in light of the rise in polyamory and what's happening to relationships now and sort of seeing where it ending up.
Plus there is all this discussion what happens on dating apps, for example. So dating apps have been, and you probably know this, but they've been kind of quite well studied. And there is something kind of winner takes all dynamic that happens on those dating apps. And so you do see a small percentage of the guys getting a disproportionate share of the dates.
And so it's not. That's kind of like a microcosm, if you like, of that kind of society where actually very high status male can end up with many more women, in this case just dates and so on too, leaving lots of other men without any women. And that's the kind of debate that's happening in the manosphere. There's a lot of discussion about incels, et cetera.
And there's a lot of grievance, honestly, around what's happening, most of which I don't think is justified. But nonetheless, it's interesting in the context of this kind of biological history. Yeah. To say this is interesting, that is an understatement.
I want to go back to this because you've really, you're. You're helping me identify base assumptions that I have. So everybody is a slave to their frame of reference. My phrase, your frame of reference is your values, beliefs, based assumptions.
So this is how I am. This is how the world works. Often those beliefs are invisible people. They don't even realize that.
Yeah. So they're. Exactly. And when you said that about being the third wife of Jeff Bezos, man, that's really.
So it's made me confront something. So I'm realizing now that my base assumption is that a thriving relationship between two people that love Jeff doesn't even need it to be men and women. That just happens to be, from an evolutionary standpoint, the default. The vast majority of people end up there.
So. But that, that relationship with my wife has been the most unbelievably nurturing and soul affirming thing in the world. So I have a subroutine that runs in my brain that as long as I have my wife, everything's gonna be okay. And that's allowed me to take tremendous risks and try things from a place of security rather than from a place of like.
Because a lot of the risk taking behavior, I think you'll agree with this, a lot of the risk taking behavior that men display are because they're from an evolutionary standpoint, trying to win access to females. Yes, I already have that. And I. It's possible I get blindsided one day, realized my wife's been faithful this whole time, but I really, really doubt it.
And so I'm not trying to win over access to a woman. I have a woman. It's a very emotionally nourishing experience. And yet it also manifests in a way that has me taking bigger risks and trying different things.
And so when we talk about what is the moving forward script for men in a way that does not replace brakes on women, which I will just say emphatically, I'm on that team, I want to see women thrive. I want to see men thrive as well. And I think that one thing, I'm always trying to get guys. And I'm so curious to see how you respond to this.
I'm trying to get guys to be more aggressive and that I don't want women. I absolutely despise any human being. This is all slow down so you can lead. I want people to go as hard as they possibly can, but with love in your heart.
When you say that you want. I guess I largely agree with all that. I'd love to hear more. When you say that you're encouraging guys to be more aggressive, what do you mean by that?