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Richard Reeves: Suicide rate is four times higher in men

Reeves links male suicide, lost provider scripts, and dating-app loneliness; he proposes a service-based masculinity that does not unwind women's gains.

Richard ReevesguestSteven Bartletthost
Jul 8, 20242h 4mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:13

    Intro

    1. RR

      It is pretty clear, partnerless men, childless men, they don't do so well. In fact, they do terribly. And in modern society, that's a problem. Richard Reeves is the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. An organization dedicated to researching and tackling the challenges faced by boys and men in modern society. We're in the early stages of a cultural revolution so that women are not economically reliant on men. Which is great. But one consequence of that is that it's put a big question mark next to the role of men, which used to be filled with a whole script of ways to be a man, ways to be a head of household, et cetera. Because of that, they're struggling. They're behind in education, wages have stagnated. You're seeing a massive rise of young men who are single, and now the suicide rate is four times higher and rising. They looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives, and the two most commonly used words were "useless" and "worthless." And the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded.

    2. SB

      You said the hardest thing you've ever done as a man is couples therapy. Why?

    3. RR

      I was talking about what I'd done at home and how it's supported her career, and my wife said that, "You seem to think the problem is that you're not feminist enough. The problem is that you're not masculine enough." What I came to realize is that men feel like that in order for women to become bigger, we had to make ourselves smaller. That is not the answer.

    4. SB

      So what would you do at a social level to fix things?

    5. RR

      The most important move would be to s- (music stops)

    6. SB

      We've just hit six million subscribers on The Diary of a CEO, um, so me and my team would like to do something we've never done before as a little thank you, and we're calling it the Diary of a CEO Subscriber Raffle, and here is how it works. Every episode this month, we're going to pick three current subscribers at random and we'll send one of you a 1,000 pound voucher, one of you tickets to come and watch The Diary of a CEO behind the scenes live with our team, and one of you will have a 10-minute phone call with me to discuss whatever you want to talk about. If you're a subscriber, you're in the raffle. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to do something that me and my team love doing so much. It is the greatest honor of my lifetime and I hope it, I hope it continues, uh, off into the future. Let's get to the episode. (instrumental music plays)

  2. 2:13 – 4:43

    Why Dedicating Your Career To Men's Issues

    1. SB

      Richard, you wrote a book called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why it Matters and What to Do About It. Of all the things you could have done, why? Why did you do this?

    2. RR

      Partly because I was warned so strongly against it by my colleagues, by friends, by professionally, just saying this is such a difficult subject to write about, particularly right now in this sort of moment we're in culturally. And, and the reason I say I did it despite being warned or because I was warned isn't because I'm a, like, a sucker for punishment. I'm actually, like, very thin-skinned (laughs) interestingly. My wife's said that in some ways I was in the worst of all worlds because I'm a thin-skinned polemicist. So, i- in other words, a polem- someone who kind of goes out of their way to kind of make provocative points. Right? I'm provocative, so I provoke responses, but then I'm kind of upset (laughs) at the responses, right? And, uh, and actually, this, this work around Boys and Men is not, is not intended at all to be provocative. Ironically, I'm trying to make it less provocative. I'm trying to make it more data-based, more mainstream, like, more boring in a way. Um, but it was very interesting to me, and it was very hard to get a publisher in the US for the book. And it, so it was interesting to me that this whole debate was one that was just seen as too risky to enter. And I, and I honestly thought, "Well, hang on. If I, as a fairly boring guy with charts and research am being warned against this, who is gonna talk about it? And are we sure that it's better that those other people are talking about it and that we're not talking about it?" We're basically benching ourselves from the conversation because of our fear about what's gonna happen to us professionally or reputationally. We're basically benching ourselves, and that just leaves the ground open. And if you think there's a real issue around boys and men, real questions around boys and men, it's not like it's not going to be talked about. That's not the question. The question is, who's talking about it? (laughs) And I actually thought, "We need more people like me talking about it," i.e. boring, research-based, policy-oriented, you know, nonfiction-type people, Brookings-type people, and not just some of the people who are currently talking about it online. And that's not... There are lots of great people talking about this online, don't mistake me, but, but it's almost like it wasn't a topic that you were supposed to approach unless you were willing to risk something. And that just seems crazy to me.

  3. 4:43 – 6:55

    What's Your Background?

    1. RR

    2. SB

      When you say you come from this from a place of stats, graphs, figures, et cetera, w- what is your background? Where does that come from?

    3. RR

      I bounced around essentially between academia, think tanks, politics, journalism. So when I was over here... I was in the UK until 2012, and, uh, I'd served in the coalition government working as a director of strategy for Nick Clegg. Before that, I'd run Demos, the think tank, I'd worked, I'd written for The Guardian and The Observer, I'd worked at IPPR, I'd worked at the Institute of Psychiatry, I did a PhD in philosophy at Warwick. And so I'd basically found myself in this space where either I'm trying to make policy or I'm writing about policy or I'm trying to think about policy in that sort of semi-academic space. And so I'm a kind of social scientist by experience, I guess, rather than by training. Uh, and that led me to the Brookings Institution in DC where I was for ten years working on race inequality, class inequality, and Brookings is like a big blue chip, you know, policy think tank place. It's, you know, regularly ranked as the, the most important think tank in the world, whatever that means today, I, I don't know. Uh, and so in a way, that was a kind of natural place f- for me to end up. And so yeah, I, I come at this... And I'm very non-partisan, so I try to be as fact-based as possible. I'm not partisan, but I am very, very concerned about trying to do what we can to reduce the obstacles that people face to human flourishing. I know that sounds really, like, vague, but that's what's driven...... all of my work.

    4. SB

      And you run the Institute for Boys and Men?

    5. RR

      Yeah. The, uh, American Institute for Boys and Men. It's actually the first think-tank, like research policy shop on this issue, certainly in the US and arguably anywhere. Uh, we've had lots of institutions quite rightly created to look at issues f- for women and girls. And we need those. Arguably, we need more of them in many parts of the world. But we haven't actually thought that it was important to have any that specifically look at the issues with boys and men through a kind of research lens and a policy lens. And so, in the end, I felt like that was necessary. And then I was persuaded that I, I had to do it myself. I actually looked quite hard for other ways to get someone else to do it because it was a difficult move.

  4. 6:55 – 8:56

    The Crazy Stats That Made You Research This Topic

    1. SB

      Wh- when was the moment where you decided that this was the subject that you were going to tackle? Was there, was there a, a stat you read, a moment you had, a, a eureka moment of sorts, or was it just a combination of things?

    2. RR

      It was more of a culmination. There was just a series of statistics that I just kept running into, and not just stumbling over, but sort of just running into with my shin, bruising my shin and going, "Wait, really?" And then checking those stats with people. And, and most of them, I had a sense of the direction, but I didn't know how big some of the changes had become. So for example, discovering that there's like a bigger gender gap in higher education now than there was in the '70s, but it's the other way around. So we kind of completely flipped the gender gap in, in higher education. Or, or learning that the suicide rate is four times higher among, uh, men, uh, and boys, and, and rising. But, you know, I think I was already on this track when COVID hit. But actually COVID what probably underlined my determination to keep doing it, because in the US at least, the immediate impact of COVID was huge for boys and men. The college enrollment, uh, rate dropped seven times more for men in the US than, than for women. And then I noticed that men were dying in much bigger numbers from COVID, and no one was really researching that. So, I found myself doing research on COVID death rates, (laughs) which is not my field at all, because it wasn't being done, uh, elsewhere. And it, and those sorts of moments illustrated to me that it wasn't anybody's job to wake up each morning and think about how is this thing, in this case the pandemic, how is it affecting boys and men? It was no one's job to do that. And so those stats that I've just mentioned to you, they didn't get any attention, because no one was drawing attention to them. (laughs) Whereas the impact of C- the COVID-19 pandemic on girls and women was getting a lot of attention, because lots of people were producing, you know, good reports on that.

  5. 8:56 – 13:21

    We're Going Through A Cultural Revolution

    1. RR

    2. SB

      What is the, the sort of the macro then on the current state of boys and men? If, if I'd never, if I'd just landed on this planet and I was an alien, and I said to you, "How are men getting on comparatively versus how they used to be getting on-"

    3. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. SB

      ... what information would you supply to me to make your case? And what would you say to me?

    5. RR

      So, assume we're, we're gonna talk about advanced economies, so we're gonna talk about the UK, the US, Scandinavia, et cetera. I think a fair answer there would be to say that there are many ways in which boys and men are struggling in those societies. They're behind in education, for sure. Wages have stagnated, especially if they're working class. The mental health challenges of men are playing out differently, but in some ways more tragically because of these very high suicide rates. So, in the UK, suicide's the biggest killer of men under the age of 45. So, playing out differently for women and girls. But I think I'd probably say we're in the relatively early stages of a cultural revolution in advanced economies. And that revolution is one where the economic relation between men and women has been dramatically transformed. And so the old world, my, my, my father's world, my father just turn- turns 80 today, and, um, the world that he and my mom have occupied was one where their roles were just much more tightly defined, right? There was a kind of a, it wasn't really about much of a question about what their roles were gonna be. And women had just so little economic power that they were essentially forced into relationships, marriages, like with men, right? And so there was this economic dependency of women on men. And I would argue an emotional dependency of men on women.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. RR

      And, of course, a huge reliance on women to kind of raise the kids. But there was, there was like a script, there was a story, there was a way. The economic rise of women has achieved what Gloria Steinem set out to achieve, which is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity. That argument, which was really about changing the economic relation between men and women, so that women weren't economically reliant on men, that was the central, I think the central argument of that wave of the women's movement, and very largely achieved. And I would argue that's probably the greatest economic liberation in human history, is still playing out. We need to do more in other parts of the world. But one consequence of that is to then put a big question mark next to the role of men, right? So, I think underpinning a lot of these issues that we see kinda playing out for boys and men is really just, there's just a gap.

    8. SB

      Yeah.

    9. RR

      There's a space with a question mark in it now, whereas y- which used to be filled with a whole script of ways, you know, ways to be a man, ways to be a dad, ways to be a head of household, et cetera. And so, we've torn up those old scripts, by and large, in these advanced economies, which is great. But I would say that we've replaced the old script that women had, the one my mom had. Right, so the script my mom had was, "You're gonna be a wife and a mother-"

    10. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    11. RR

      ... primarily." She was also a nurse, but part-time, so... Skip forward one generation to my sister, my, my wife, my female friends, and it was, "You're gonna be able to stand on your own two feet." Right? So, in the blink of an eye, we changed the story for women, in a way that I think is profoundly positive. And how did we change the story for men? The old story, my father's story, "You're gonna have to do as well as you can, 'cause you're gonna have to look after a family."

    12. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    13. RR

      You know, make some money, provide-... right? That's gonna be your role. So we took away that story because we don't know if he's gonna be a provider anymore, right? I've certainly not been the main provider, f- certainly not all of the time, in, in my relationships. And we, what did we replace it with? What's the new script for masculinity? What's the new set of rules? What's the new set of dos that we've got for men? You could argue we've got quite a lot of don'ts-

    14. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    15. RR

      ... many of which we need. But not a very long list of dos. And so I think that that sense of that category, being e- o- that question mark now, being open, has just, uh, l- left a lot of men feeling adrift. Uncertain of their role, uncertain of their place, uncertain of being needed, wanted. Uh, and I think that's, that's feeding into a lot of the things that are easier to measure, like mental health, education, employment, et cetera. But underlying it, I, I, I think it's this coming to terms with this huge revolution that we've seen.

  6. 13:21 – 17:01

    We Need A New Way To Approach This

    1. SB

      I, I wanna make sure by the end of this conversation we tr- do our very best to hazard a guess at what that list of dos are for men, but also to kinda fill that question mark. I get so many women and men come up to me, often talking about their young sons-

    2. RR

      Mm.

    3. SB

      ... um, and encouraging me to have more conversations like this, because they want a good script for their young sons in a world where their s- young sons are going online and being offered maybe a not so good script-

    4. RR

      Yes.

    5. SB

      ... by certain influencers and influencers online. So that's, that's one of my objectives with having these conversations. And I, I think, uh, it's worth pausing there just to say that from looking at your work, you're not suggesting we go backwards to the old way of things.

    6. RR

      No. That's part of the challenge, is that there's, in some ways, an understandable reaction to change that is disorienting, it's destabilizing, it maybe threatens the sense of status among men. And to reach back for the world as it once was, very recently, right? This is not, we don't have to go back millennia. Probably only have to go back one generation, or two generations, to a world where the men had their roles, women had their roles, everyone knew their place. And you can see the appeal of that when there's just so much uncertainty. But emphatically not the answer, to go back. And I think in this debate, what you very often feel is if, those who are perhaps on that more conservative side of the argument, they wanna kinda turn back the clock-

    7. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    8. RR

      ... especially on women and women's roles. But I would say on the other side of the argument, maybe more on the progressive side of the argument, or liberal side of the argument, in American terms, there's a bit of a sort of turning a blind eye to the actual problems of boys and men.

    9. SB

      Yeah.

    10. RR

      And so I think for a lot of young men, and I, you know, having spoken to them and had some responses to my work from them, they feel as if there are two fairly unappetizing options on the table for them. From the right, they get the message was like, "You should be more like your father, or your grandfather. Be a real man," right, "Provide, protect," et cetera, "Have a wife that can stay at home and, you know, fill in the gap." But then they're going from the left, the message they get is, "You should be more like your sister. The problem with your masculinity is your masculinity, and we should just, basically, you should be more like a woman," right? Um, and actually, it's not surprising to me that most young men who are strongly in favor of gender equality, right, they've grown up with it, there's no evidence they're turning against it. So they want gender equality, but they also, there's something about the way they feel in the world that means that they don't want to be treated as some-... There's something wrong with them, because they're a man, right? And I think for, even, especially in schools, but maybe more broadly, there's a danger that we treat men like malfunctioning women.

    11. SB

      (laughs)

    12. RR

      So your problem is you're not feminine enough, you're not caring enough, you're not nurturing enough, you're not emotionally vulnerable enough, you don't cry enough, you don't spend enough time with your kids, you're like... Uh, and I'm not saying those aren't all valid challenges. But if that's all we've got, if, in other words, we're just defining positive masculinity in a way that is completely synonymous (laughs) with femininity, I'm not surprised we're driving, we're seeing a lot of young men in particular say, "Well, no, I'm not interested in that," and the only other thing else they can see on offer is this more reactionary alternative. And so if we give them that choice between being feminine and being reactionary, m- it's, uh, not clear to me that they're all gonna choose the former.

  7. 17:01 – 21:56

    Are Men And Women Differently?

    1. RR

    2. SB

      It's interesting because the way that the digital world, the algorithms, the social media are designed is to kind of push you towards camps.

    3. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. SB

      So this, like, space in the middle of nuance, it's just not going to get the likes, the retweets, the engagement. In fact, it's the, the ideas on the outside, the men should be more feminine, or men should be extremely masculine, that are gonna get all of the attention because of the way the algorithms are designed. So if the, if the answer is some kinda nuanced position in the middle-

    5. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. SB

      ... I just can't see, in a world, how that's ever going to form a tribe and be rewarded by the algorithm. So, you know, this is, this is part of the, the beauty, I guess, of having podcast conversations-

    7. RR

      Yes.

    8. SB

      ... 'cause you can, 'cause we're not really held hostage by an algorithm here. We can kind of, you know, speak openly. But most of the algorithms don't work in such a way. Uh, at the heart of this issue, though, I think is a very difficult question, which is, are men and women different?

    9. RR

      Okay. Well, let's, let's come to that, but can I go back to your previous point?

    10. SB

      Please, please, yeah. It's two questions at once.

    11. RR

      Because I think you're, you're underselling yourself in a way. I- I agree that the way the algorithm works drives the kind of short-term attention towards those more tribal, simplistic ideas.

    12. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    13. RR

      But the mere fact of your success, and the success of others like you, to me, is an incredibly positive sign. It suggests to me that, actually, w-... there is an appetite for more nuanced conversation, there is an appetite for recognizing that two things can be true at once, and that there are trade-offs, like A is mostly good. Like the rise of women, amazing, some- causing some issues that we should deal with. Right? And I have to tell you my own experience of this as a, you know, we've established, boring, chart-driven, policy wonk-type person, right? I did this video for Big Think, the YouTube platform, and it's had more comments than I've sold copies of- of the book.

    14. SB

      Oh, wow.

    15. RR

      Different audience, of course. My wife calls me, I'm traveling somewhere, and she says, "Have you read the comments on your video?" And I said, "Of course not." Right? I'm old school journalist, never read the comments. She said, "No, we've got to." We started reading them together. And by the end of that taxi journey, wherever I was, we're both in tears, because what the- what we found was young men, including some teenage boys, saying, "Thank you for recognizing that the problems that boys and young men are facing are real." But not saying, and therefore become a mi- reactionary misogynist. Actually saying, "Guys, this is a difficult time. There is some transitions. We've gotta think about-" You know, coming to your question about are they different, the- we are different in some ways that we have to talk about, but that in no way means we should be trying to turn back the progress of women. The solution to m- your problem as a young man is not to make your sister less powerful-

    16. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    17. RR

      ... or independent. And there's a huge appetite for that. It's just hard to articulate. It doesn't drive the algorithm. But I th- I- I- honestly, the conversations you've had around this, that other people are having around this, gives me a lot of hope that actually most young men out there want that real conversation. But it does... I agree, it has to start with a recognition of the fact that there a- there are differences on average between men and women. And I can't remember who said this, it might have been... There's a Swedish public health economist called Hans Rosling, who I absolutely love. He's passed away now, but it might have been him. It's the sort of thing he would've said. And I'm paraphrasing it, but something like, "The world would be much better if everyone could understand the idea of an overlapping distribution." Everyone, we're all try- y- you know, if you say men are taller than women, most people know what that means, right? On average. Like, no... If you say men are taller than women, no one in their right mind thinks it means every man-

    18. SB

      Yeah. (laughs)

    19. RR

      ... is taller than every woman, right?

    20. SB

      Yeah.

    21. RR

      No- no one thinks that. They know that that means mostly... So most of the men over s- most of the people over six foot are male, you know, the average, uh, man is taller than two thirds of women or, you know, whatever it is. Right? So there's two... R- and that's what most sex differences are like. They're not completely separate or completely the same, they just- they have overlapping distributions. And so on average, men might be a little bit less likely to cry. That's true. But it doesn't mean that there aren't some very weepy men, some of whom I think you've had on this podcast. (laughs)

    22. SB

      (laughs) Me too. (laughs)

    23. RR

      Right? And who knows where this conversation's going.

    24. SB

      (laughs)

    25. RR

      Right? Uh, or- or some women who are less likely to. And we could- we could take in aggression, we could take in risk-taking, we could take in sex drive, we could take in competitiveness, and- and, uh, we could take in- in more interest in things rather than people. And put all of those on this sort of distribution and just say, "Look, we can accept there are differences on average, ask if they really matter, and if we're frustrated, in what way, and then never use that as a way to discriminate against an individual."

  8. 21:56 – 27:06

    Men Take More Risks

    1. RR

    2. SB

      So are men and women different?

    3. RR

      On average, yeah.

    4. SB

      And- and in what ways are they different that are pertinent to this conversation? You know, when we talk about... It's really about societal roles and gender roles that I'm- I'm getting to here, because when we talk about the changes that have happened, and also when we get to the heart of what a man's script should be-

    5. RR

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      ... there must be clues in how we are different, if you know what I mean.

    7. RR

      Yeah. Th- the way I think about this is that if there are these differences on average in, say, risk-taking-

    8. SB

      Yeah.

    9. RR

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      'Cause men are the ones that are... I- I saw the stats. It's like 90% of men are, um, 90% of people that have, like, gambling addictions, for example, are men.

    11. RR

      Yeah. So it definitely opens up all kinds, though, that there's... Uh, let's take on average men, boys and men, somewhat more likely to take risks, right? So let's take that as an example. Like, does it matter? Um, well, it does matter in some negative ways, because, like you just identified, look, there's an addiction issue, there's also, like, teenage boys, like, twice as likely to die as teenage girls.

    12. SB

      From?

    13. RR

      From- from risk-taking activity-

    14. SB

      Wow.

    15. RR

      ... by and large. From, you know, car crashes or accidents, you know, uh, much more likely to drown, all these kinds of things, right? Because they're just taking more risks, right? And so that aspect of kind of risk-taking, and especially if the risks involve somebody else's life or wellbeing, obviously that's a problem. But if the risk-taking means that, say they're on average a little bit more likely to kinda take a risk in business, right? Or they're more likely to sign up to be a smoke jumper in the US. Do you know what a smoke jumper is?

    16. SB

      No idea.

    17. RR

      You're gonna love this.

    18. SB

      What is it?

    19. RR

      A smoke jumper is someone... You know how these wild fires out in kind of west of the US?

    20. SB

      Yeah.

    21. RR

      Right? In California and places-

    22. SB

      Yeah.

    23. RR

      ... like that, in very remote places. Sometimes the only way to fight the fire is to parachute people into the middle of the fire, or just close to the fire, in the middle of nowhere, out of a plane. So you... Basically, these are people who, for a living, parachute out of perfectly serviceable airplanes into a raging inferno, and stay there for as many days as necessary to try and fight the fire. Incredibly dangerous. Uh, and it's almost all men. Okay? It's hard for me to imagine a world where it wouldn't be mostly men ch- selecting into that occupation, 'cause it's very high risk, right? And you could think of others. Is that okay? Probably, right? You don't want to exclude anybody, but you're also not gonna freak out that that one's not kind of 50/50, and you're also gonna say, "Well, that's- that's good."

    24. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    25. RR

      And on the risk taking, actually, you, I think you'll be interested in it. I'd, I'd like to get your reaction to this, because I, I was very interested to discover that if you, this is based on, on one study, to be clear, but I liked the study, that companies that are led by women, as in CEO and CFO-

    26. SB

      Yeah.

    27. RR

      ... both women, are a bit less likely to go bankrupt-

    28. SB

      Yeah.

    29. RR

      ... than ones run by men. But-

    30. SB

      I knew what you were gonna say before you said the stats.

  9. 27:06 – 35:00

    Unconscious Behaviours Of Men

    1. RR

    2. SB

      It's so true. It's so very true. And, um, this is why it is difficult to talk about the differences between men and women at a physiological level without it appearing to be like inherently sexist, because it's not to say that either is better or worse, it's just to say that there's differences. And I think, and it goes back to what I was saying, to understand the script for male, to fill in that question mark, there must be some clues hidden in our biology. There must be. Because e- e- well I, I think there is 'cause I'm trying to, you know, it's interesting as a, I'm th- I'm 31 years old now and my, my girlfriend is 31 years old, and in the, the way that the world has changed, I'm still trying to figure out if like me holding the door open for her is me being old school and old-fashioned and a bit misogynist, or if that's bec- th- because th- that's what I wanna do and she likes it.

    3. RR

      Does she? That, well that's-

    4. SB

      Of course she lo- she loves it. Yeah. (laughs)

    5. RR

      ... that's the big question, right? (laughs)

    6. SB

      Of course. She says thank you every time.

    7. RR

      Well presumably you wouldn't still be together if you were going, "Like..."

    8. SB

      I wanna do that and she loves it.

    9. RR

      Does she? Okay.

    10. SB

      And she, she will have moments where she turns to me and tells me, she'll thank me for doing things like that and she'll thank me for the way that I am, and she'll acknowledge that my brain and her brain have two completely different perspectives on the world and it's, it's the differences that make us work. You know? Because I'm-

    11. RR

      Yeah.

    12. SB

      ... I, I come to everything super logical. "How can I fix it, babe?" It's like I show up with like a spanner to every problem in our relationship. And she has this much more holistic, she almost has like this sixth emot- emotional sense, and together we like navigate issues really well. Um, but we can't-

    13. RR

      But it does, but it does require to respect those differences and not see... See, the old problem was one was seen as better than the other.

    14. SB

      Yeah.

    15. RR

      Right? So that kind of lets the, you know, with all the caveats about averages and overlapping distribution. So let's agree now that we're, by this point in the conversation, anybody listening to this gets that when we say these things, we're not saying all men or all women, right?

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. RR

      If there are differences, the problem in the past was that, let's say men were a bit more risk-taking, a bit more competitive, a bit more inclined to kind of rational, uh, approaches to problems, that that was better.

    18. SB

      Yeah.

    19. RR

      That's the definition, in my mind, a useful definition of patriarchy. A patriarchy is one where more typically masculine virtues or attributes are seen as better.

    20. SB

      Okay.

    21. RR

      Right? And you could argue that matriarchy, were we to have one, would be the other way around. An, an equal society isn't one of androgyny. It's one where they're treated as equal value. So we don't say one is better than the other, we say they're different and try and bring them into a kind of collaborative and constructive and rather beautiful equality.

    22. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    23. RR

      But I do think a lot of people are making the mistake of thinking that equality requires androgyny. I find your door opening one really interesting. So I was, I was raised to when you're walking along a, a street to always, with a woman, always to put yourself roadside.

    24. SB

      Yes.

    25. RR

      Do you do that?

    26. SB

      Always. Yeah.

    27. RR

      Why do you do that?

    28. SB

      Um, I don't... Now, now you've said it, but I remember when I was crossing the road yesterday, um, my first instinct was to reach back and grab her hand and ba- uh, and basic- because there was like a big bus coming and then there was this black cab coming, and my instinct was to solve that problem, which was like to put myself in the front of the taxi, maybe bec- I w-

    29. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    30. SB

      ... I think in my head because I thought this was the only conscious element to it, "My body's bigger so the taxi will see me." My girlfriend's about a foot smaller than me and she's really, really small, so I thought maybe the taxi would see me...And also there's a protective element. It's two things. It's-

  10. 35:00 – 39:33

    Suicide Is The Biggest Killer Of Men

    1. RR

      rarely talk about it in an open forum, but they will very often afterwards talk about it. And I had this moment recently, someone I'm actually working with and I've been working with for some time. I did a, I did a little piece on Morning Joe, which is a daytime thing in the US, and I talked about this crisis of kind of male suicide. And she told me afterwards that they put up a, just a stat that four times higher among men, it was just a, a graphic. And she said she burst into tears and she said, "I'm so grateful you're doing this work. I lost my son to suicide when he was 16." And started telling me kind of why. And I've, I have worked with this woman for years on this issue, and she'd never raised it with me before. I had no idea. And I now understand why, particularly given her situation, she's been so supportive of my work. It wasn't just an intellectual thing. This is very rarely just an intellectual thing. It's usually visceral as well. There's usually something going on there. And I've had countless stories like that, people sharing their stories and it's heartbreaking. Uh, and you've had, you know, people on this show who've talked, uh, quite a lot about this. Jordan Peterson was asked in a, in an event once by this guy who said, "I'm thinking... I, I delayed my suicide to come and hear you talk. Why should I not take my own life?" No, I haven't had anything like that. But it's there. This crisis is there in our communities playing out.

    2. SB

      Is there a... I'm just thinking about that woman who's been working with you, supporting your work, but hadn't said anything. And, and I'm wondering why people don't say something about, about it when it happens in their family-With, with other deaths, with, with a cancer death, you'll see a Facebook post, you'll see a-

    3. RR

      Yes.

    4. SB

      ... a whatever, you'll see, you know. But it seems, I- I- I'm wondering here if there's a different level of, I don't know, public sharing as it relates to suicide, because it's a different type of death, isn't it?

    5. RR

      Yes.

    6. SB

      And that creates a lot of guilt and feelings of-

    7. RR

      Guilt and shame. And like, so your and her situation, and I have to tell you, having raised boys, one of whom in particular had really struggled with his mental health through teen years, there are days where you just hope as a parent that they're still around. And you think, "What a loss." And actually 16, and we've seen a huge rise in, in young, young men suicides in the US especially. And just think, if you're a parent and you lose a child to suicide, the idea that you can- cannot free yourself of the burden of, "What could I have done? What did I miss? Was it me?" Right? Being a parent is already a lifelong trip in rethinking your decisions, right? (laughs) And you add that to the mix, I- I- I can't imagine. I mean, my- my parents lost their daughter very young to a heart defect, and they have an amazing marriage, and they've been amazing parents. But I do think that the loss to this illness, this terrible tragedy thing, it's just different cycle. Not, it's hugely grief, but- but you're n- but it doesn't turn the, like it turns the mirror on you. It's like, "Was this you? Was this your fault? Are you the reason your son is dead?" Just think about that for a moment and what that kind of does to people. Um, and so because of that, people don't talk about it. So you'll get, "Died unexpectedly."

    8. SB

      Yeah.

    9. RR

      We're not willing to talk about it i- in the same way as we are others, because we think it might reflect on us in some way perhaps or on the memory of that person.

    10. SB

      Or them, yeah.

    11. RR

      I mean, it is still a crime, technically.

    12. SB

      Oh, is it?

    13. RR

      Now, people say, it's a really interesting thing, I've really learned not to say commit suicide.

    14. SB

      Yeah. Died by suicide.

    15. RR

      Died by suicide.

    16. SB

      I just wanted to-

    17. RR

      Sure.

    18. SB

      ... 'cause I've got some crazy unthinkable stats here...

    19. RR

      Yeah.

    20. SB

      ... that I wanted to just add on top of what you were saying-

    21. RR

      Yeah.

    22. SB

      ... which come from the Institute of Boys and Men report that really was staggering to me, is that, um, a man dies by suicide approximately every 13 minutes.

    23. RR

      In the US, yes.

    24. SB

      In the United States alone.

    25. RR

      Yep.

    26. SB

      So that's not including other countries and the UK.

    27. RR

      No, just the US.

    28. SB

      Okay. If men's suicide rates had matched those of women's, approximately 545,000 fewer men would've died since 1999. And that's again, just in the US.

    29. RR

      Just US. Half a million men, yeah.

    30. SB

      Suicide

  11. 39:33 – 43:36

    Why Is This Suicide Increasing?

    1. SB

      rates amongst younger men have grown the fastest. The growth of male suicides has occurred almost entirely since the beginning of 2010s.

    2. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. SB

      And interestingly as well, rural countries in the USA have higher rates of suicide than those in urban metro. So it highlights again that suicidality is geographically distributed in, in certain ways. Why? What's going on here? What's going on with this full picture? Why, why, why is this the state of suicide amongst men?

    4. RR

      In some ways, the decision to end your own life, obviously it's complex and it varies, but in some ways it's like the ultimate signal that you've don't feel as if the world is better off with you than without you. Like, so many people who take their own lives, lose their lives to suicide, will say something like, "You'll be better off without me. I've been a burden to you. I know I've been difficult." They convince themselves that they're not wanted, they're not, not, not needed. In some ways that goes back to like Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman takes his own life 'cause he thinks that the life insurance his family will get, will be, will be a better breadwinner than he can be, 'cause he's so badly failed in his primary responsibility as a, as a breadwinner. So it's not a new idea. But there's a really nice piece of work by Fiona Shand, she's an Australian researcher, and the, the work was done primarily in Australia, where they looked at the words that men who did take their own lives used to describe themselves before doing so, or in some cases attempting to. But u- usually when men attempt suicide, they do lose their lives. And the two most commonly used words by those men who took their own lives were, about themselves, were useless and worthless. Now, of course, this is a sample of people who then went on to take their own lives. But it's nonetheless, I think very powerful statement that to get to that stage you, you, you don't think you have worth, you don't think you have use, you don't think you're needed. And I believe that the most fatal place to end up in as a human being is to feel unneeded. I think to be needed is arguably the most important and constant human requirement. And so if you end up feeling like I'm not need- I m- my family don't need me, my employer doesn't need me, my community doesn't need me, I am surplus to requirements, if anything, I'm a drag on my parents or on my community, I'm not adding value, however you define value, to the people around me, I'm taking away from it, that's, uh, that's the psychological trajectory that seems to put a lot of men towards this path. And well short of suicide, I think many of the other mental health problems we see among men, addiction, checking out in one way or another, f- coming out of the labor market, et cetera, they're not the most extreme form, of course, of, of checking out by literally-... taking your own life, but they are a different form of that. They are a different way of kind of benching yourself, taking yourself out of the equation, because of a sense of like, "Well, who needs me anyway?" Right? And so I just think in a way that the suicide statistics are, in some ways, the kind of tip of the iceberg of this sense that many men have of feeling unneeded, unwanted.

    5. SB

      Is there an evolutionary basis for why men, or humans I guess, need to be needed amongst their community, do you think? Have you h- thought about that at all?

    6. RR

      Yeah. (sighs) Well, when we started operating in tribes, of course, like they, we, we realized we were gonna sink or swim together, right?

    7. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    8. RR

      Or hunt, hunt or die together maybe is a better way to put it. And so what that meant was, being needed by your community or your, and/or your family, was kind of central to the human experience. So the kind of invention of tho- those

  12. 43:36 – 47:48

    Why Do Humans Feel Like They Need To Be Needed?

    1. RR

      bonds. And the difference is that for women, particularly once they become mothers or if they're intending to become mothers, the question of like whether I'll be needed is n- never asked in quite the same way. Because you, you're literally needed to grow children and give birth to them and feed them (laughs) , right?

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RR

      And so that kind of very rooted sense of being needed for the, for the species, I think it's just c- it's just more obvious with women. But why do we need men? Why do we need dads? And that's a much more kind of recent phenomenon, in the sense of being dads. And the answer is because actually there's this amazing work by An- Anna Machin. She's a, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, o- about fatherhood. And she j- she's ... So I'm just paraphrasing her now. But she has this wonderful description of how we invented fatherhood because we went bipedal. Do you know all this?

    4. SB

      No.

    5. RR

      And the baby's head thing? It's amazing. So we h- we had this bit of a crisis, X hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm terrible at remembering whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands. So ho-

    6. SB

      Long time ago.

    7. RR

      G- g- google it, right? (laughs)

    8. SB

      Yeah. (laughs)

    9. RR

      Back, back in the ancestral times is what people say, right?

    10. SB

      Yeah.

    11. RR

      Right, so what happened was we had this massive s- growth spurt in our brains, in our heads, right? So we got massive heads. But we also went bipedal. And if you're bipedal, your hips can't be that big. And so we c- women couldn't get the heads of the babies out of their smaller hips, right? So we're actually facing a bit of a crisis. The way we solved that crisis was by giving birth to babies way earlier than we should. Way, way earlier. In fact, if we were like other mammals, uh, pregnancies would last about two years. So I don't know how women watching all feel about that. Can't speak to that. But two years would be about the average, right? We don't, we do obviously do it at nine months. So they y- they're incredibly vulnerable. And mom has to literally keep feeding them, right? S- and the calorific requirements, just the amount of food that they need, mom and baby, was huge. And so dad, go get food, right? This is only gonna work, the, the, the ... We're only gonna survive a- as humans if this stuff comes. And so in a way that was the invention of fatherhood. And you see the brains of fathers ac- you know, getting activated by all this stuff. So being needed (papers rustling) by the community, family, et cetera, to produce something, to provide something, is ... I, I, I think it's just deeply encoded. It's b- it's encoded in our DNA. It's like part of ... Like if we're not needed, then we're dead 'cause we're gonna be on, on our own, right? So these, these ties, familial ties, tribal ties, are, are actually central to our identity. And so the danger now is that if people, particularly men, start to feel like, am I needed? Does the community need me? Do my kids need me? Does the woman I've had my children with need me? Am I needed? If the answer to that is not clear, I think that has all kinds of downstream consequences. And we've just done a really poor job of making sure that even in this time of great transition, we still need you. We need every man, every boy, every everybody. We need you. We don't yet know exactly what we need (laughs) you for, but by God we need you. We cannot afford to lose you. You are precious and we need you. You know, y- you ... I don't know what you're gonna go on to be yet, but by God our community cannot afford to lose you. And so that message of just like how much we need you, I just think we've lost a little bit of that in recent debates. And too many men have drawn the conclusion that maybe they aren't needed, with tragic consequences.

    12. SB

      A few questions there, just because I wanna m- make sure I'm clear.

    13. RR

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      Fiona's work in Australia around these letters that men had left before they had died by suicide, did she also look at the letters that women had left?

    15. RR

      No. She only looked at men in that case.

    16. SB

      Okay. Fine, that's my first question.

    17. RR

      Yeah.

    18. SB

      And for me, the, the key thing in, in the suicide stats is that it's increasing.

    19. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    20. SB

      It's increasing.

    21. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    22. SB

      So if we're saying that it's a case of men not feeling needed, then why is that sense that men aren't needed

  13. 47:48 – 50:32

    Why Men Feel Less Needed

    1. SB

      increasing? If, if we're saying there's some kind of link between those two ideas?

    2. RR

      Yes, yes. Because the extent to which they're needed is less clear now than it was (laughs) . Right? So it was very clear before that you're needed because you're the breadwinner.

    3. SB

      Okay.

    4. RR

      You're the provider, right? So go back ... And, and I don't ne- uh, I think part of the point here is that this idea of being kind of ma- this gets us into discussions about masculinity, but bang- being generative, like p- producing, providing. It gets narrowed down to like the breadwinner model of like post-war Western societies, right? It's like a wage earner. But that's not all it means, y- you know, it used to mean going and getting meat. It used to mean helping p- farm together. There's al- there's all kinds of ways you can be a, a provider.

    5. SB

      Service I guess as well, just like ...

    6. RR

      Yeah. It's about being more ... There's this great line from C.S. Lewis, the, um, he's a very good theologian, but obviously much better known for his work on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Chronicles of Narnia. But he had this lovely line, uh, he was talking here about what it meant to be a Christian-But I think it applies to what it means to be a mature man as well. He said, "You shouldn't think less of yourself. You should just think of yourself less."

    7. SB

      Hmm.

    8. RR

      And there's something about service and pro- like just doing for others, your family, your community, et cetera, that I think is quite intrinsic to these ideas of, of mature masculinity. And if, if men don't feel as if they are necessary or encouraged to have a kind of distinct and important role in the family, in the community, then I think that kind of question mark over, "Well, am I needed anymore?" is, is a real one. And lots of people like Margaret Mead, anthropologist in the '70s, and a lot of conservatives were saying, "Look, if women do achieve a significant degree of economic independence..." She thought that was a wonderful thing, the conservatives didn't, right? But they all agreed that we will have to think really hard about men. How do we make sure that men still feel connected and needed in our society if we have very quickly changed the central way in which they express that?

    9. SB

      A few things came to mind. So, it's, it's interesting. Before I move forward on this point, um, when you're talking about this idea of humans needing to be needed-

    10. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. SB

      ... it made me reflect on some of the stats that ca- came out around how quickly someone dies after they retire.

    12. RR

      Yeah.

    13. SB

      And th- that kind of general narrative that if you retire, you don't have long left. Which is kind of, you know, this idea of a social tribe and feeling like you need to be serving the tribe in some way. I've always wondered if there was any truth to that, this idea that, you know, retirement can speed

  14. 50:32 – 55:32

    Does Retirement Kill You?

    1. SB

      up your mortality. Because you're-

    2. RR

      Yes.

    3. SB

      So it's almost like there's something in your body... Either one of two things could be happening. Number one, you just sit around more, which means, you know-

    4. RR

      You're more sedentary.

    5. SB

      Yeah, exactly.

    6. RR

      Right. Yeah.

    7. SB

      Which is gonna kill you, kill you anyway. But, um-

    8. RR

      Yeah.

    9. SB

      ... number two is that there's almost... I don't know, I've, I've pondered this idea that there's this almost device in our brains that makes us the tribe. And when, when it knows that w- we might have switched from bec- becoming useful to the tribe to becoming burdensome to the tribe in some way, now that we're consuming resources but providing none-

    10. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. SB

      ... this device in our brain (laughs) like turns us off or something.

    12. RR

      Yeah, that's it. We're done. We are surplus to requirements.

    13. SB

      Yeah, we're surplus to... Yeah.

    14. RR

      And so, and so the decent thing to do is just, you know, die.

    15. SB

      For the tribe. It's, yeah.

    16. RR

      Yeah, for the tribe.

    17. SB

      And that, we, theo- theoretically, from an evolutionary standpoint, we, we, we evolved as tribes. So it's not impossible that there's some... You know? (laughs)

    18. RR

      Well, I do think that we... I mean, of course, w- we didn't use to live anything like as long.

    19. SB

      Yeah.

    20. RR

      There's a stat that I came across today (laughs) that, s- with this new book that's just come out, which is in the, in 1963, the most common age of death was one, and now it's 83.

    21. SB

      Wow.

    22. RR

      What- whatever, right? Do you know what I mean? It's like, so the progress we've made towards greater life expectancy generally has been huge. But it has then asked these questions about kinda being needed later on in life. So there's a couple of things I would say. One is that, like having a job is just a massively powerful way of feeling needed.

    23. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    24. RR

      Right? Just showing up. Like, "We, we, we need you to start to open up at 6:00." You know, "We need you to..." Like, and in fact, Arthur Brooks, who used to run the American Enterprise Institute, uh, he tells this wonderful story. He was interviewing this guy, uh, who'd come out of prison, was in this new program, rehabilitation, et cetera. And he's just chatting to him, and the guy gets a text while he's chatting to him, and he bursts into tears, right? Gets really tearful. And Arthur says, "I- is everything all right? Did you get like some bad n- you know, what's happening? Is this bad news?" And he said, "No, it's the opposite." And he showed the text to Arthur. And the text just said, "Fred, can you get over here as soon as possible? I really need you." And the guy said to Arthur, "I've never heard anyone say that sentence to me before. I've never had anyone say to me, 'I need you.'" And in this case, it was, "I need you to come and..." I don't even know what it was, right? "Fix this floor tile, d- deal with this customer." I don't know, but, "I need you." And it brought this guy to tears because he hadn't kind of felt that sense of neededness before. And at, at its best, the workplace signals to us on a daily basis (laughs) or however often we... Like, yeah, you're needed, right? Y- your colleagues n- need you. They need each other. That, that, that's huge. And so if you then don't have that in the labor market, maybe 'cause you've retired, the question is, are you still needed? And then I just think we have to reinvent the ways in which we can make use of the skills and wisdom of the people who've suddenly got time. You know, so my mom, she volunteers r- as a reader in a primary school, 'cause she has time. Right? And it's amazing, she gets to know the kids really well, and she loves it and so on. You know, my father, he's on the board of a technical thing, and he runs chari- they do stuff, right? They raise money for all this, because they've got time. And so they're just, they're contributing to the community in a new way. And actually, as more and more women work, those community roles that were previously very often filled by moms at home, like school volunteering, for example, right? Now they can be done by, perhaps by more, or by older people. And so part of this story here, I think, is also making sure that older people don't lose that sense too. Because although we focus quite rightly on, on what's happening to young men, the suicide rates among older men are also very high, uh, especially if they end up on their own. So kind of men on their own later in life are at massive risk. Because if you take my theory about being needed quite seriously, they're just looking around and saying, "Will anyone even notice if I'm gone? Maybe they'll be better off." And so even for those older men, we have a, a job of work to do to make them feel really like, "Yeah, we need you. Your church needs you. Your scout group needs you. Your local charity needs you. Your neighbors need you. The kid across the street who needs help with his university applications needs you. The boy down the road who's like struggling a bit 'cause, you know, his parents have split up and just wants someone to give him a cup of tea every now and again, talk to him, they need you."

    25. SB

      We don't know the boy down the road anymore, or the family next door anymore. And I think... So when you, you described that, that was, you were describing like an old-fashioned way of the world, in my mind. Because even, you even said the word Church, and I was like, "Well..." You know, where there's been a rise in atheism and a, and a fall in religiosity, so.

    26. RR

      Yeah, that's part of the problem though, and, and from this point of view, is that (sighs) we used to have more institutional structures through which our connection to the broader community could be, you know, captured. A- and organized, honestly,

  15. 55:32 – 58:31

    We're Losing Connection In Our Modern Society

    1. RR

      right? So, you didn't have to sort of sit there on your own somewhere saying, "How can I contribute to the community?" You just volunteered as an usher, or for Bible cl- or f- to do the soup kitchen at your church.

    2. SB

      Life came sort of inherent with responsibility, like 'cause, even with church, I just grew up in there-

    3. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. SB

      ... in my family. I, I wasn't religious after the age of 18 but, as early as I knew, I was in the church and I was in Sunday school and I was in St. Luke's Hospice on the, on the weekends with my mom. And I didn't choose that, it was just, came with life.

    5. RR

      Yeah. Yeah, and actually, so the, the de-institutionalization of those community relationships, as we've seen these institutions weaken, has created a real problem because the needs are still there, but it's like we didn't have the organizing framework, right? So whether it's churches or community groups or whatever, and, and mums. Like one of the things that would happen, like my mom was at home kind of most of the time, and back in the Dark Ages when I was b- being raised in the '70s and the '80s, um, there were a lot of mums around, right? And so they organized a bunch of stuff and they kind of took care of the community and they volunteered for stuff, and it's amazing now that women are in the workplace, of course. But that sense of like there were soft institutions like those networks, but also just churches, community groups, et cetera. They basically provided a way to kind of plug in my time and energy to an institution that then did stuff for other people.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. RR

      It's really hard to do that on your own, right? It's really hard to recreate those institutions online or just on your own. And so I actually think that that's had a bigger effect on men as well because historically, and even today, women are a little bit better at kind of maintaining those community and social networks than men are. So absent those institutional roles, you're gonna be a scout leader, you're gonna be a, an usher at church, you're gonna volunteer for the school PTA, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna do, d- uh, "We need men to do this, this, this, and this," right? "You're gonna do that." And s- you're right, some of it wasn't even questioned, it was just what you did. Of course we want more choice, but I do worry about the loss of those institutional frameworks if we don't find ways to replace them. And you're starting to see that now, men's sheds movements and men's groups and, and so on, but it's really hard to find secular online alternatives to those traditional institutions.

    8. SB

      You mentioned, uh, a- an elderly man who's now alone, you know, maybe lost his partner, maybe, um... What do they call it? Widowed? No. Widower? What's the male equ-

    9. RR

      Wid- I think widowed is both, isn't it?

    10. SB

      Oh, is it? Okay.

    11. RR

      I think so.

    12. SB

      So a widowed man. Um, but as we think about younger men, and the environment in which, the sort of dating, love environment that they're in, what's changed there? Because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if at, you know, 18 years old, we find a partner and, you know, she makes me feel needed. My, in my life, my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed-

    13. RR

      Yes.

    14. SB

      ... and most important. She's constantly asking when I'm coming back from Dragons' Den filming or when I'm gonna be here and she's, you know, she makes me feel like I've, I'm service to her in the same

  16. 58:31 – 1:06:12

    The Dating Environment Has Changed

    1. SB

      way that she's service to me. So... But, but that landscape-

    2. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. SB

      ... seems to have changed as well.

    4. RR

      Yeah.

    5. SB

      The dating environment, the romantic environment.

    6. RR

      Yeah, it's interesting, again, I'm just ref- reflecting on my own personal experience too just through the, the lives of my sons and one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car.

    7. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    8. RR

      And he's really into cars and all that stuff and, and he's into finance so the, the loans and all, he's just basically done like, basically done the, the, the work for her around it 'cause she's working full time and he's got a bit of time and so, that is a really good example. He, he said to me the other day, he said... I said, "God, you put a load of time into this," he's like test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff, "Loads of this for, for your girlfriend." He's like, "Well right now I don't have that much, uh, of my own stuff to do, so it's really nice to be able to do stuff for her."

    9. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. RR

      Uh, and so you're right, I think those relationships, they can be in like traditional families but also, and of course friends, but particularly romantic relationships, they can do that for you. So it's not for nothing that we're dating less, dating later. Um, you're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single by comparison both to young women and in the past. And, and so that's another change which you could argue is good or bad, right?

    11. SB

      Yeah.

    12. RR

      Is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on? Again, I think you can argue for sure there's lots of good stuff there but one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those r- romantic relationships were also pulling on them, calling, calling on them to say, "I need you to do this. I need you to drive me to work. Can you pick me up from this? Can you do th- do this?" Right? And that used to happen much, much earlier, uh, than it's happening now and so there's now perfectly possibly 25, 26, 27 years of age and your parents don't need you 'cause then, you know, you maybe even left home and they don't need you, maybe you don't have a girlfriend so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you, maybe you're not working or you're working in a place that you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not, so. So it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid and late 20s as a man and honestly feel like it's not quite clear who needs you.

    13. SB

      It's interesting c- because also when you layer on top of that the dating app environment, um, I had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about f- I mean, I've had a couple of founders of the big dating apps but I've also had-

    14. RR

      Have you had the Tinder founder on?

    15. SB

      No.

    16. RR

      Okay.

    17. SB

      (laughs) I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps-

    18. RR

      Okay.

    19. SB

      ... like Bumble. Uh, and-

    20. RR

      Oh, okay.

    21. SB

      But one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50% of men-... are basically getting not much action at all.

    22. RR

      Almost none, yeah.

    23. SB

      Almost none. And then the, like, top 10%-

    24. RR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. SB

      ... of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent, most attractive, top 10% of men that are most desirable. But I imagine if you'd gone back a hundred years, it was really like, who's in your village versus, you know-

    26. RR

      Yeah. Yeah.

    27. SB

      ... versus an algorithm sorting millions of people.

    28. RR

      Yes. But that's, it's s- so interesting that pattern that you describe of like the bottom 50% of men basically not getting much action, if any. And the top 10% are getting almost all of it. Because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said, "That looks like human history to me." So, if we go back further, actually 95% of known human societies were polygamists. Right? Monogamy is very weird and very recent. And here's one that always blows my mind, even though I've said it so many times now, is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. We have twice as many women in our ancestral past as men.

    29. SB

      Why is that? How does that make sense?

    30. RR

      Because... And the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get her around that is because you're thinking, well, you need a man and a woman to have a kid, right?

  17. 1:06:12 – 1:10:30

    Are Dating Apps Being Unfavourable To Men?

    1. SB

      got the perfect hair and he looks like something out of like a magazine, I would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter. So my whole strategy was I would just do much better in person when I met people.

    2. RR

      Yep. Yeah.

    3. SB

      But obviously it's much more difficult to meet people. If you look at the stats around wh- how people meet-

    4. RR

      Yeah.

    5. SB

      ... it's crazy. It's like a, a vertical line upwards, um, when you look at the, the line that's showing people meeting online just outta nowhere.

    6. RR

      Yeah.

    7. SB

      And it went... School's gone down and church has gone down and through a friend has gone down, and it's pretty much all online. So if you're, if you're not, I think, aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word-

    8. RR

      Yeah.

    9. SB

      ... and, you know, have signals of, uh, wealth and status, you really are gonna struggle. And I actually kn- came to learn this a lot, not just from my own experience in dating apps once upon a time, but also from doing this podcast, and I remember the first time we had on a, a founder of a dating app and put the episode out assuming everyone would love it.... and just the anger in the comments section from pretty much all men-

    10. RR

      Mmm.

    11. SB

      ... who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives, or are just an, are just an evil thing in the world. And it really caught me off guard. In fact, reading those comments on that particular episode is when I went, "Oh my God, p-p-people hate dating apps." There's like this group of people that just think it's e- like the cause of all pain. Um-

    12. RR

      This is really difficult stuff to talk about, I think, because it's so, it's so visceral, it's primal. Right? We're talking about sex, we're talking about procreation, we're talking about our DNA being passed on-

    13. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    14. RR

      ... and who with. And so, it's not for nothing if we- if something's happening in that ma- in that market. And it's not for nothing we see a huge rise in the share of childless men. Like especially, you know, getting to 40. And, and of women, but more, even more so for men. And more men are saying having children is important to them, more men are starting to say actually forming a family is kind of important to them. And so there's a, there's a weird paradox here, which is that, you know the old idea of like marriage and kids is that like women have to kind of trap men into it, right?

    15. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    16. RR

      You know, as men, we just wanna go our own way, right? We wanna be cowboys around the desert or the forest or something. But the ball and chain, the woman, she traps you, right? And, and she domesticates you, and you kind of go along with it 'cause you wanna have kids, right? But, but in your heart, in your heart, you're still out there on the frontier, right, and she's the one at the hearth. Th- that is complete bullshit-

    17. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    18. RR

      ... on every single level. Actually, historically, back to where we were before, ma- being masculine meant being in the tribe. It meant generating more than you need for yourself. I love this idea of a surplus that comes from this guy David Gilmour, that mature men generate more of whatever it is than they need. They're surplus generators. So rather than being surplus to requirements, which is what I think a lot of men feel now, they actually generate a surplus for others to use. And so the idea of, like, you've heard this men going their own way movement? It's like a male separatist thing online? We're gonna go our own way, we don't need... You know, turning away from women. Is the opposite of masculinity, right? Masculinity defined as like a, a lone ranger or a, "I'm my own man," is the least masculine sentence I think you could ever utter. "I'm just my own man. I do my own thing." Right? If you're not a man for others, then y- in my view, you're not-

    19. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    20. RR

      ... you're not a man. And so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on, if it does leave many men feeling like they're not gonna have those connections, they're not gonna have a sense of being for others, and not just pr- not providing just in the economic sense but being needed, then it does leave a lot of them benched and they either go their own way or they get mad as hell, so you see the rise of the incel movement, et cetera. Um, and so again, you're just seeing these extreme, the extreme examples are the ones that get the headlines. But behind that, behind the kind of men who are acting out, there's a lot more men who are checking out, and they're just saying, "Oh, I think I'm done with this." And that's very dangerous.

    21. SB

      Marriage has also had a, a knock-on effect to this, hasn't it? Because this, the sort of the role of marriage in society has changed, but also the stats around marriage seem to be changing. What, what information do you have on that? E- am I right in thinking that marriage is in decline?

    22. RR

      A little bit. Yeah.

    23. SB

      A little bit.

    24. RR

      Yeah. Marriage has gone down. Eh, this is one area where it's very different in different countries, so I have to be careful about this. Like in the US, there's a big class gap in marriage. Like college-educated Americans are still getting married. Non-college-educated Americans are not. But in most of Western Europe, you've

  18. 1:10:30 – 1:13:40

    Is Marriage In Decline?

    1. RR

      seen a big rise in the share of kids being born outside marriage. Now, the question then was like, what job, if anything, was being done by marriage? And if marriage was a way to sort of signal and enshrine a commitment to having kids together, raising those kids together, then in a sense, like there are all kinds of, oh, and you have a civil partnership now, or there are legal documents you can have that kind of do that. And so, if it gets r- i- if the dec- if the decline of marriage is related to a decline in fathering, that's a problem. It doesn't have to mean that, because A, you can be a perfectly good father if you're living with your partner and you're not married, but also, you can be a good father if, for whatever reason, the relationship with the mother doesn't work out. It's harder, uh, you're gonna have to kind of work at it a bit more, but you can still do it. But because of this old idea of m- of like fathering being bundled together with marriage, right?

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RR

      I think that's my big problem is it was like, it was like a one-stop thing, right? It's like husband and father-

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. RR

      ... was kind of like one thing. But that's not true anymore. So it's okay if that's not true, so long as we don't lose the fathering bit, because dads matter for their kids as much as their mums, in different ways and at different times, on average. But so I o- my worry about the changes in family are not about marriage per se, they're about what that might mean for fatherhood. And what, and what a lot of, a lot of conservative critics will say is, "Well, I- the evidence is that actually the men who marry are more engaged fathers, and do stick around for longer." But of course the problem with that, that's one of the reasons they got married.

    6. SB

      Yeah. Of course, yeah.

    7. RR

      Right? So it's very hard to tease out cause and effect there. And in the end, I'm sort of agnostic about the marriage question, but I'm not agnostic about the fathering question. Like I don't think you have a moral responsibility to get married before you have kids, at all. I do think that if you have kids, you have a moral responsibility to be a father to those kids. That is a, a, that is just a, that's an inextinguishable moral responsibility. And that gets a little bit lost, because sometimes on the fe- the femi- the feminist left, to just characterize horribly, say, "Do we need, do we need dads anymore? Isn't that a bit heteronormative?" I've sometimes been accused of being heteronormative, for being pro-dad. You know, "What about same-sex couples? What about single parents? Are we saying that they need their dads?" Right? Isn't that... That feels a bit old-fashioned, a bit conservative, so we get that on the other side. And then on the other side you say, "Yeah, of course dads matter. It's why they all have to get... That's why they should be married." And of course, the truth is between the two. The truth is that dads matter, full stop, whether they're married to the mother or not. Um, and both the people who insist that the only way to do that is through marriage are wrong, and the people who insist that dads don't matter are equally wrong.

    8. SB

      And about 40% of births in the US now take place outside of marriage, which is up from about 10% in 1970.

    9. RR

      Yeah, it's quadrupled in the US.

    10. SB

      That's crazy. That's, that's... But I beg your... That's, that's just... Why is that? Is that-

    11. RR

      It's the high... US is really weird 'cause it has really high rates of, like, unmarried, um, pregnancies and births, but then, like, really high rates of marriage among the kind of college-educated at the top. So as I said, there's a huge class gap. There's a race element here. So 70% of Black kids in the US are born outside marriage. There's also a huge education

  19. 1:13:40 – 1:14:45

    Births Are Increasing Outside Of Marriage

    1. RR

      gap here, as I just alluded to. There's a big, big class gap. So most kids to non-college-educated parents are born outside marriage in the US now. And so it's weird. What's happened is that the average marriage rate in the US is really disguising these huge differences by race and class-

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RR

      ... whereas in most Western European countries, there aren't such big differences by race or class. It's sort of more of a dis- more of a general decline. It hasn't declined particularly more for one class than another in, in the UK. So quite common in the UK for couples to decide to have kids together, have kids together and not get married. And that's definitely true in Scandinavia and Northern Europe as well.

    4. SB

      And who is marriage good for? Who's it serving more, men or women?

    5. RR

      Now, men.

    6. SB

      'Cause I was, I was thinking, if we pressed the button and the marriage stats went backwards in time, i.e. more people got married and they got married within, um, when they, they gave birth within marriages, would that be better for men or women?

Episode duration: 2:04:17

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