Does Anyone Care About Male Loneliness? - Max Dickins

1. 0:00 – 2:43

   Intro

   1. MDMax Dickins0:00

      She said to me in the pub, "So, who are you gonna have as best man?" And I sort of palmed her off and thought, "Oh, my mind's gone blank. I just, I'll be fine. It will come to me in a moment." And I went back that night and I made a list of my male friends and I looked down the list and I realized I worked with most of them, and they'd find it really weird if I asked them to be best man. And the rest of them, I maybe hadn't had any meaningful contact with them for two, three years, and I just thought, "Oh my God. Where have all my friends gone?"

   2. CWChris Williamson0:26

      Did you watch Paddy Pimblett's Octagon interview this weekend?

   3. MDMax Dickins0:31

      I did. Uh, funnily enough, I, I tweeted something about that today. I thought he was brilliant, and I thought it was brilliant for two reasons. Number one, the message, which was about friendship and about guys having to talk about real stuff to, to kind of, uh, intervene in these mental health challenges that men are having. But also, I think the messenger with men is really important. So there's a lot of messages that I think men just tune out. But an absolute animal (laughs) like Paddy the Baddie saying this stuff, I think a lot of men are gonna buy into it. So I was delighted and I thought it was brilliant.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:04

      Yeah. It's, uh, for the people that didn't see it, Paddy is a UFC fighter, currently up and coming, people drawing some, uh, similarities between him and Conor McGregor. Quite outspoken. He's Scouse, which means f-

   5. MDMax Dickins1:17

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:17

      ... that he's from Liverpool, if you don't know where that is. Uh, very, very strong accent. S- swears a lot. Very much a laddy lad. Gets very fat in between fights. And at the end of this victory that he had, uh, he said that his friend had taken his own life on f- what must've been Thursday night, and I think he weighed in on Friday morning. So he woke up at 4:00 AM on the morning of his weigh-in, so this is 36 hours before he's about to fight, to find out that one of his own friends has taken his life. And he got the, the text or whatever, the alert somehow, from one of the family members, uh, and then used this opportunity to speak in the Octagon about how men need to speak up, how, you know, I would much sooner take a phone call from a friend that was crying than attend his funeral.

   7. MDMax Dickins1:59

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:59

      It was beautifully done, man. So spectacularly done.

   9. MDMax Dickins2:02

      Yeah. Yeah, and then the, he did, I watched the post-match he did on ESPN as well, and he went into a bit more detail. And he was talking about how, I think this is a Scouse word, but he said, "The thing about women is they can have a gab," he said.

   10. CWChris Williamson2:14

       (laughs)

   11. MDMax Dickins2:14

       They can have a gab with their mates over a cup of tea. And they, he said, "They don't stop talking." But he said, "We're blokes. If you try to talk about certain stuff..." I think the line he, he said is like, "What you doing, lad? Grow up." And I thought that was, you, we've all been in conversations maybe when we were a bit younger where similar sort of phrase has been used. And yeah, I mean, uh, I, it's great that someone of such profile is talking about it, but in, in, in language that normal people use. Do you know what I mean?

2. 2:43 – 8:48

   Difference Between Man Up & Open Up

   1. MDMax Dickins2:43

   2. CWChris Williamson2:43

      I find it interesting at the moment, because there's sort of two worlds that are colliding at the same time when it comes to talking about men and mental health.

   3. MDMax Dickins2:51

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CWChris Williamson2:51

      One of them is stop being such a victim. You know, get hold of your bootstraps, pick yourself up, carry the weight. You know, uh, re-embrace traditional masculine roles and archetypes, the Jocko, Goggins, Jordan Peterson style of things. But also the kind of reassuring, "Men, you just need to do some stuff that's going to make you feel good and reconnect with your masculine purpose." That is so close to the line of just man up, stop being such a pussy-

   5. MDMax Dickins3:19

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson3:19

      ... that the next conversation, which is men need to open up about their emotions, men can be sad too, it's important that if you're feeling down as a guy that you open up to people, and it's not just enough to treat male depression or sadness in the same way that female depression gets treated-

   7. MDMax Dickins3:34

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson3:34

      ... by making them feel like they belong. They need to feel like they're worth something. They need to feel like they have purpose and meaning and capability. And those two worlds of men being told to man up, which, uh, it has its uses, and men also being told to open up-

   9. MDMax Dickins3:49

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson3:49

       ... that is a really difficult, uh, line to pass.

   11. MDMax Dickins3:53

       I think it is. I spoke to a psychologist called Fred Rabinowitz at the U- University of Redlands in California, and he's a poker player, semi-pro, plays golf, as well as running men's groups, being a therapist. So he's got both sides to it, right? Almost like what you, kind of what you're explaining. And he put it to me in a way that seemed just really sort of simple, which is you need to have a, expand your toolbox. So that as long as you've got tools for different conversations, that's fine. You don't only have to be one way. You don't have to be new age mush all the time, 'cause I think a lot of men switch off to that. I don't know, I certainly did. But also, um, there are some times where if you wanna go through the gears in a conversation, to mix my metaphors, you do have to have other tools. You know, sometimes in life you gotta have a conversation about something big, and you've gotta show up a bit different to that than if you're in the pub and you're having, having some fun with your mates. I th- I think it doesn't have to be as complex as maybe we think it is, but I completely agree with you. Those two world views that are kind of rubbing up against each other, but maybe they're more complementary than both sides reckon.

   12. CWChris Williamson4:58

       I think a lot of it is to do with expectation, because manning up and opening up, it takes a lot of courage and bravery, which are typically masculine traits, in order to open up in any case. But it's more about sort of like cultural stereotypes, what is it s- what does it mean to be a man, S- things like that. Th- w- going back, h- what got you starting to think about men's friendships in the first place?

   13. MDMax Dickins5:22

       So, um, just pure necessity. I didn't really realize I had a problem with my friendships until I was, I was l- I was planning on proposing to my girlfriend, and I literally went as far as being in a shop in Hatton Garden, which is a jeweling, jewelers district in London. I went with a, a female pal for sort of moral and aesthetic support, 'cause I don't know what I'm doing obviously. (laughs) And afterwards, having shopped, she said to me in the pub, "So, who are you gonna have as best man?" And I sort of palmed her off and thought, "Oh, my mind's gone blank. I just, I'll be fine. I'll just, it will come to me in a moment." And I went back that night and I made a list of my male friends, and I looked down the list and I realized I worked with most of them, and they'd find it really weird if I asked them to be best man. And that the rest of them, I maybe hadn't-... had any meaningful contact with them for two, three years, and I just thought, "Oh my God, where have all my friends gone?" And then I Googled the phrase, "Getting married, no best man." And there was something like 950 million results. And if you click on them, a lot of them are wedding website forums and blokes saying, "I'm really worried. I'm get- I'm ge- I'm tying the knot. I've got no one." People giving them terrible advice like, "Why don't you use your dog?" (laughs) Awful, awful tips. And I realized that a lot of other guys were in this position, and when I looked into the research, I discovered that men, since the 1970s, I mean, social scientists have looked at the data and when they're measuring this stuff, men have had less friends than women, and especially less close friends. And I'm sure we'll get into what that means to have a close friend. And also what was interesting, the second problem men seem to have is that this gets worse as they get older. So men have bigger social groups than women in their mid-20s. Get to your mid-40s, that's flipped on its head. So so- sociologists call it network shrinkage, a very boring term for something pretty simple. Our mates seem to disappear, whereas women are better at maintaining and probably developing new friendships. So I thought that was interesting. So why is that? And I tried to work out the reasons so I could solve my friendship problem, get a best man, but also kind of go, this is a question that's curious, right? 'Cause we're always told that men have it best, but in this case, they don't. So what's the reason why?

   14. CWChris Williamson7:28

       Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, talking about different inequalities that you've got in the world, there seems to be a, a friendship inequality that's going on here that's pretty stark, and that is upstream from the suicide inequality that you see as well.

   15. MDMax Dickins7:41

       Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, they're connected. So, uh, if you look at male mental health, we, we, as you say, Paddy the Baddie's talking about it, biggest killer of men under the age of 45, uh, certainly in the UK. And the Samaritans who look into this stuff, do studies, they say one of the biggest causes of male suicide is a lack of social support, the, the fact that men are isolated, don't have people to talk to. There's what's called a big build effect, you know, you don't tell anyone about what you're going through and then, then you maybe take an action which is obviously seriously lethal or, or dangerous rather than talk about it. But also physical problems. Loneliness is worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, a big meta study revealed recently, which was, uh, loneliness is worse for you than being obese or drinking a lot. So that's... I never thought that would be true, but it shows you, if you get ma- if you get some mates, you can also (laughs) abuse your body. So there is an upside.

   16. CWChris Williamson8:35

       (laughs)

   17. MDMax Dickins8:35

       You can sort of buy yourself some beers and some burgers if you have some mates. That, there, that's the positive. But, um, that's... I read that and I was like, "That's mad." That's 'cause you wouldn't think it would have anything to do with your physical body, but it does.

3. 8:48 – 19:49

   Why is Male Loneliness Unique?

   1. CWChris Williamson8:48

      Why is male loneliness unique then? How, how come it's gendered, in a way?

   2. MDMax Dickins8:54

      So it's... The way male loneliness is gendered is, is I suppose two things. One is that, kind of like I said, they lack intimacy in their friendships, so the people that they can go to and talk about a meaningful thing. So for example, the Movember Foundation, a male mental health charity, recent survey or recent study said one in three men have no close friends, and then part of that same study was to ask that group of men, "How many people in your life could you talk to about something serious, like a health problem, work problem, relationship problem?" 50% said no one at all. So those sort of conversations, that sort of sense of someone really knowing you and you really knowing them, men don't seem to have often that many of those friendships, relationships. But also, this was the other gender thing which I found most shocking, I think, is that when you get to the pinch points in life, so when men get bereaved, so say their partner dies, they get divorced, or they retire, that's when they have a lot worse mental and physical health outcomes than women because they are isolated. And the grimmest thing I looked at with this was something known as public health funerals. So public health funerals are basically when the, the council or the government, uh, bury you because no one's there to do it for you. So maybe you've not got any money, but no one will kind of take on your estate and bury you. No one shows up. Really sad. And this happens all the time in communities all over the world, America, UK. And men were three times more likely to have those funerals than women, even though women, if you look at the stats, are way more likely to live alone. So that's bonkers. That's a complete paradox. And I think that shows the level of isolation a lot of men get to when they do get a bit older. So that's probably the gender... That, those are the two things that summarize it.

   3. CWChris Williamson10:46

      Dude, that's wild.

   4. MDMax Dickins10:47

      Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

   5. CWChris Williamson10:50

      You said, uh, the important question is not whether men are lonelier than women, it's how are men lonely? And I think that that kind of reflects what you're talking about there, that it's not just the breadth of your connections, it's not how many people can you say all right to in the pub or at the...

   6. MDMax Dickins11:05

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson11:05

      ... season ticket seat that you've got at whatever football team that you support. It's to do with the actual function of friendships, like why, why we have them, what they're useful for, and a million shallow ones, does that compensate for one really good and deep one?

   8. MDMax Dickins11:25

      Well, I mean, that's interesting. So I mean, I'm sure we'll get on to the work of a guy called Dr. Robin Dunbar later who's kind of, like, known as the godfather of friendship resear- research, evolutionary anthropologist, but one of the things that he looks at is introverts versus extroverts. So extroverts have lot, a lot more friendships than introverts, but they tend to be a lot shallower. Introverts have less friends, but they tend to be closer. So personality type comes into it, and I suppose there's no right answer to this. Like, loneliness is not an objective measure. It's subjective. It's about do you feel your friendships are sufficient for you? And if you're really happy with your social life and you've got one friend, good luck to you, right? It doesn't really matter, but I suppose it's where... Are you happy with it? And I think...... blokes, if they're honest, a lot of the time, it's certainly true for me, we don't like to talk about it. I was really embarrassed, to be honest, to not have a best man. And it took me a long time to talk about it. And even now, it's kind of, like, a bit of a double-edged sword, I feel, being the face of Billy No Mates, right? (laughs) Like, I get introduced on things, it's like, "He's the guy with no mates." And I've done a lot of work on it, but there's a lot of stigma to it, so I think a lot of men won't confess to it.

   9. CWChris Williamson12:36

      Was it always like this? You said since the 1970s. What happened in 1970?

   10. MDMax Dickins12:41

       I mean, it's a g- I mean, this is a really good question. So, I mean, they- there's, the honest answer is they started measuring it, so we don't know what happened pre-1970s. But ... So, the k- we can maybe get into maybe why this happens now. So, there's, there's e- there's essentially three broad theories. Maybe the third one, you could argue interacts with the other two. The first one ... And so when I got into this, I thought, "I'll go and talk to a load of psychologists, therapists, gender people, and go, 'Right, what's, why is it going wrong for me? Why is it going wrong for men?'" And they would say the kind of ... You've, you've, you've, we'll have guests on this podcast before who've, who've said the same thing, right? The man box idea, that we have restrictive gender norms that stop us having intimacy in our relationships, whether it be ... Like, I look a lot at banter in the groups, so like, you know, taking the piss out of each other, that jazz of casual brutality that men have, right? Which is great fun, but maybe, um, maybe it stops ... I- i- it's a moat around us. I remember I went ... I, I forced myself to go to therapy doing this book, and after four months the therapist stopped and said, "The thing is with you, Max, is you can talk about anything in a funny way or an intellectual way, but I think your friends get a feeling that if they go somewhere vulnerable, you won't be able to reciprocate. They get an aura that you're closed, that you're not open. Maybe that's why you've got no friends." And after, like, four months of being with someone, that was like a haymaker. That was like a Paddy the Baddie (laughs) hook to the chin. I'm on the canvas going like, "Okay, I can't really deny that." So there's something to it. But then on the flip side, we'll get to that later maybe as well, is that, you know, the banter is a form of intimacy. But it's this idea that we have these rules. Another one is affection. Like, wha- ... I'd, I'd thought there's n- ... When have I ever told a male friend I like them, let alone I love them? I mean, maybe after seven or eight beers? And we, we maybe won't talk about that. So, like, I well often feel like male friendships are like a probationary period where you're not sure you really like each other, is there gonna be a job at the end of it? So we kind of keep it at the same level. Um, so these sort of basic rules to do with masculinity, you'd say, they're getting in the way, the psychologists would argue. But then to go back to your point, Chris, about you said about, "Well, what, what happened in the '70s?" Well, one thing that happened in the '70s is we started talking about gender. And now you cannot argue that it's not easier to be a man than it was in the '70s in terms of masculine roles. It's a lot looser. We can do w- ... There's much more ways of being a bloke than my dad has, right, who's turning 70 in October. But male friendships, the stats show, haven't got better, so it can't only be the gender stuff, which is when you get into kind of the second theory.

   11. CWChris Williamson15:25

       Which is?

   12. MDMax Dickins15:26

       Which is (laughs) that ... So that, it's, it ... We're com- we're now coming to Dr Robin Dunbar. So Dr Robin Dunbar, who's an amazing guy, he's got a book about friends. He's basically ... He came up with what's known as the Social Brain Hypothesis, which is essentially this idea, um ... Or he proved it. I think someone else came up with it, but he proved it, which is that there's a cognitive limit to the number of friends we can have as a human being. So this is 150. So this is what's become known as Dunbar's number. We can only have 150 friends. And within that number, there are different circles of friendship, so they go 5, 15, 50, 150. So, you have five really close mates, maybe your parents are in there, girlfriend or, or a mate, and, and et cetera, et cetera. But he said to me the, the social world of men and women is really different. And it's not trendy to talk about it, but actually if you look at it, it's really different. And to summarize it quickly, it can be represented like this. Female friendships tend to be face-to-face, based around talk, there's a lot of emotional disclosure. Male friendships tend to be side-by-side, based around sharing space, sharing activities, often in groups. That's about style and it's about preference. And so fundamentally, uh, there's differences there, and that might be why male friendships are less close and why they may look different in terms of closeness compared to the female ones. And he also said that when it comes to our software, so the stuff in our brain, he talked about something called mentalising. So mentalising is essentially the ability to understand other people's mind states. So with you, Chris, I'm looking at you now, I'm hearing the tone of your voice, I'm reading your body language, I'm taking some contextual clues, I'm trying to read the room and work out what's an appropriate response here to stay in rapport, to build a relationship. That's all known as mentalising. And if you ... They measure that in tasks known as Jack and Jill tests. I won't go into it too much, but women outperform me- men-

   13. CWChris Williamson17:28

       No, what is it? Tell us. I wanna know.

   14. MDMax Dickins17:30

       So Jack and Jill tests are essentially, um, they, they ... This is how they test, I think, o- o- often autism with children where they've got Jack and Jill, imagine there's two dolls. It's about orders of intentionality, so it's about working out ... So Jack think this, thinks this about Jill, but Jill's thinking this about so-and-so, who's thinking this about so-and-so. Can you follow those lines of intentionality? So for example, in a conversation, what would that look like? I say something to you which is a bit tattless. Your girlfriend's stood next to you going, "Bloody hell, that's a bit much," and her mum's there going, "God, I hate Chris's mates," right? (laughs) ... okay? So, uh, they're, reading those kind of relationships all at once, which, when, we, we see examples like that all the time. It's what social, socializing is, reading the room, reading each other. Women are much better at it than men. And he said they're good, they're better at it than men to the factor of they can handle two more close friends than women can. Or w- the men can, I should say. So women can have two more close friends than women in that inner circle of five. Now, that's, there's not much you can do about that. Change your gender, you can't change the software.

   15. CWChris Williamson18:41

       And that's biologically hardwired in, that's some sort of predisposition that men have and women have?

   16. MDMax Dickins18:47

       Yeah. I mean, we both have the mentalizing software in there, we do it all the time, it's just men are not as good at, as good at it. I mean, the classic example is, you know, you go and have a, uh, you go out for pizza with your mate, and then you come back home and your girlfriend says, "Oh, how's so-and-so? How's his baby?" And you go, "Well, I don't know. We talked about, you know, we talked about what's, how much broccoli is there in the world to the nearest square foot. We talked about that for an hour." Right? (laughs) "I didn't talk about his baby." Right? (laughs) It's about they, but that's kind of like a microcosm. We see these things all the time, but then when you kind of understand the mechanism behind it, you're like, "Oh, right, that explains it." Dunbar did say, so I asked him, "What's the balance between, you know, nature and nurture here?" And he said, "That's the $64,000 question. We don't know the exact balance." But to say that it is all gender norms and it is all about psychology is just not true.

   17. CWChris Williamson19:40

       Did he have a potential explanation for how this would be adaptive?

   18. MDMax Dickins19:46

       Yeah. So, I,

4. 19:49 – 25:56

   Fundamentals of Friendship

   1. MDMax Dickins19:49

      I spoke to him and I spoke to another evolutionary anthropologist called Anna Machan, or an evolutionary psychologist, I believe she is. She's quite famous, she's got her own stuff out there, done a lot of research with Dunbar. And it goes back to what our friendsh- our friendships used to be for. So if you can go back to, you know, thousands, thousands, thousands of years ago, w- women needed their friends to help them bring up children. So you can imagine, if you've got a baby, you'd want to really trust the person you left the baby with to go to the toilet or to go up the w- w- road to fetch a pail of water, whatever it is. You have to really... I don't understand a lot about (laughs) primordial man and woman. But, um, you'd do, you'd want to really know them deeply and vice versa, and you'd want to feel it was reciprocal. Whereas the, the men would, would have to form, uh, groups to go and fight, to go and hunt. They'd have to have friendships that were maybe a bit shallower because you'd be working with new people all the time. You couldn't get too emotionally attached 'cause they might die. I mean, th- that was the adaptive argument, right?

   2. CWChris Williamson20:49

      Mm-hmm.

   3. MDMax Dickins20:50

      Um, and different evolutionary anthropologists have different kind of versions of that same thing. Essentially, men have evolved to work incredibly well in groups and to have those build, build, uh, support within those groups, so status hierarchies, handling that. Which is one reason where they argue men are more aggressive. Whereas women have evolved to be, they call them dyads, basically pairs of really close bonds there. So that's kind of, that's the argument about where it's come from and why it's adaptive.

   4. CWChris Williamson21:19

      Would also potentially explain why women use emotional and social punishment and sort of back-stabby gossip talk as their form of enforcement within the group as well.

   5. MDMax Dickins21:33

      Yeah, exactly. So, I, I, I've read s- uh, like a meta study about aggressiveness, and male aggressiveness is very out there. You know, you punch people, you... But it's much more passive, like you say, with women, much more around r- um, sort of relational aggression. Um, I read a really interesting study by someone called Joyce Benenson, who's an evolutionary psychologist from Harvard. She's great. She's done all sorts of interesting stuff. But she did something about roommates. So, at US colleges, male and female roommates, so w- women share with women, men share with men. But how many of those in second year chose to live with each other? Uh, almost none of the women would live with each other. They'd all go, "I can't stand this person." And then the men, even though they do s- study, you know, questionnaires going, "What don't you, or d- do you or don't you like about this person?" The men would go like, "He stinks. He's always coming in drunk. His clothes are everywhere. He's a real pain in the ass." "Do you want to live with him next year?" "Yeah. Why not?" (laughs) Right? That's... So that shows you have, like, there's kind of the tolerance there. And I've read a Dutch study that, that was kind of about the same thing, and the title of it was, I Don't Like You, But Who Cares? (laughs) I just thought that's quite an interesting, like, study of the male dynamic in groups.

   6. CWChris Williamson22:43

      Did you s- did you see, I think it was Dunbar that did this. I g- I stole this from Rob Henderson, uh-

   7. MDMax Dickins22:48

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson22:49

      ... that women, when they're standing talking to each other, will stand straight on at, whethe- whatever you want to call it, like 180 degrees or zero degrees or whatever.

   9. MDMax Dickins22:59

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson22:59

       They're gonna be completely opposite. Whereas men usually stand at about 120 degrees.

   11. MDMax Dickins23:04

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson23:04

       And you can do this the next time that you're looking at a party or a group of people, or even yourself as a guy-

   13. MDMax Dickins23:08

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson23:08

       ... or as a girl, you can look at the guys, and you'll find that they sort of just angle themselves ever so slightly. And I, I remembered that study as I was stood talking to a friend and looked down at our feet, and I swear to God, if I'd drawn a line between them, if I'd got my protractor out, I'd have been like-

   15. MDMax Dickins23:24

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson23:24

       ... "That's a hundred, that's pretty much bang on 120 degrees." And the argument there was that men, when they are face to face with each other, that's typically because they're ready to fight.

   17. MDMax Dickins23:34

       Right.

   18. CWChris Williamson23:34

       There's a, an increased level of, um, intimacy and aggression there. Uh, whereas with women, the, that, th- there's no, uh, concern.

   19. MDMax Dickins23:45

       Yeah. I mean, that's, I completely buy that. And also, I mean, when I said face to face and side by side, I mean, that's b- I mean, basically talking about the same thing there. I mean, very similar dynamic. I think a lot of people go like, might say, "Well, so what," with this stuff. And I think it's really important for two reasons. Maybe get to the second one in a sec. The first one is that if you don't accept that men are diff- have a different social style or have different social preferences, you can't do too much about...... male loneliness and male mental health. Here's two examples. Men's groups are really effective for men, maybe more than therapists, because therapists you're face-to-face, a lot of eye contact, really intense chat. Some people can do this, some people can't. Men's groups are in circles. You're shoulder to shoulder, and it's a lot more indirect and I think men prefer that. They, they, they... I mean, like you say, I mean, it might be the angle of the body, the lack of eye contact, the lack of intensity. And one of the most successful interventions in male loneliness in the whole world is a thing known as Men's Sheds. It came out of Australia. And essentially what was happening in Australia is the local government were putting on all these things like, for, for lonely old people, like coffee mornings and stuff, and men would never show up. And then eventually some bored Aussie guy went, "No wonder no one's coming." You know, no, men don't wanna go to a coffee morning, right? So he said, "Build a shed." So they put a shed up so men would show up and build stuff, fix stuff together. Man, it was rammed every week. And they'd come out with friends, they would... They... And they called it health by stealth because it would, the conversation would come up, you talk about your prostate while you were fixing a pepper grinder, right? And it works. And I, I... (laughs) Maybe it's too phallic, the pe- the pepper grinder and prostate. I just, I just realize really-

   20. CWChris Williamson25:24

       Depends if you do, it depends if you do that weird double twisty thing.

   21. MDMax Dickins25:28

       (laughs) Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson25:29

       The girl, the girls with experience know what I'm talking about.

   23. MDMax Dickins25:32

       (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson25:33

       (laughs)

   25. MDMax Dickins25:34

       Um, but I went to one and they say shoulder to shoulder is the key to male bonding in Men's Sheds. And it's absolute-... You, you see them and you can't stop men talking in Men's Sheds. They go, they wang on. And people say, "Men don't talk." They do.

   26. CWChris Williamson25:46

       Mm.

   27. MDMax Dickins25:46

       If you set the context up, but you only set the context up if you don't treat men like they're exactly the same as women, and that's important.

   28. CWChris Williamson25:55

       What do

5. 25:56 – 33:24

   How Treatment for Men & Women Should be Different

   1. CWChris Williamson25:56

      you think are the, uh, ways in which men and male mental health is being treated like female mental health? What, what, what is female mental health and what are the ways that that tries to be fixed that have then been ported across onto men?

   2. MDMax Dickins26:12

      I think, I think it's how it's diagnosed. I should say I'm not a, I'm not a mental health professional so I'm just talking about some of the research I've read and my own personal experience. So there's this theory called tend and befriend, which a lot of psychologists are really behind. This is not some esoteric piece of nonsense that I've plucked out of thin air. You can Google it. There's lots of evidence for it. It's essentially how the different genders deal with stress and upset. Women tend to tend and befriend. They get really upset, they suffer a trauma, they seek people out, they want comfort, they want to talk about it. Men tend to do the opposite. They tend to withdraw or they tend to act out and they get, they drink a lot, they do drugs, they fight. So I think often we, maybe men don't understand they're having mental health problems or we don't understand men are having it because they're doing things that don't look like depression. They're not crying, they're not on people's shoulder, they're not low energy. They're just not there. Like, um, my... Uh, they, they won't hear this so I can say it. A, a friend of my parents is, like, incredibly obese and he's so obese that he's had his, basically most of his stomach removed, and he lost all his weight, and then his wife has left him. And I saw him the other day and he's put all... He's huge again. He's basically eaten through his stomach. And my parents and their friends were like, "Oh, you know, that's classic so-and-so. You know, he's a bit of a character. He loves his food." I'm like, "That's not... That's mental illness. That, he's depressed. He is depressed." And until you see that, this guy isn't gonna get any help. But it's because he doesn't look depressed because he's not doing what we would... If you got people to write down on a postcard, "What is depression?" They'd go, crying, uh, eyes on the floor, you know, all, all kind of all the body language and the... But, but it's different for guys and I think it's important that we understand that because otherwise we can't spot it.

   3. CWChris Williamson28:12

      I had a guy on the show called Adam Lane-Smith who's a psychotherapist working out of the Midwest, and he was talking about how male depression gets treated like female depression. That female depression is being made to feel like somebody hears you, like you belong, like you're cared for. But he had this quote and he said, uh, "Give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he'll crawl over broken glass with a smile." And the problem is that when you get men in and you make them feel seen and like they're safe and stuff like that, a lot of the time that... I, I, I don't think that that's necessarily what men want. They want somebody that will sit and listen, for sure, but y- most of the stuff that you've come up with so far, the shallow friendships that men have that are bonded together over the top of tasks, like, it's a d-

   4. MDMax Dickins28:58

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:58

      They're in a shed. It's literally a workplace.

   6. MDMax Dickins29:01

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson29:01

      It's a doing thing.

   8. MDMax Dickins29:03

      It's absolutely a doing thing. I mean, that's... And it's, if it was a sentence, it would be that. It's a doing thing. And also, the Men's Shed, to go back to that and to kind of, uh, connect it to men needing a purpose, what the Men's Shed is, it doesn't talk about loneliness on the ticket, uh, what it is. It doesn't talk about health. None of that crap. It's come to the Shed, make stuff, fix stuff, be with your mates. But also they're building, they're part of a community. They build the Shed together. It's like, it's, it's bootstrapped. It's blokes coming together. "What can we do?" It's... And it is that purpose. You're part of something. You're not just... You're fixing stuff, doing stuff, but you, you are part of something. And that's one reason which attracts people. Men need a reason to get together. And it is the pretense of the Shed that solves the problem, that you need... Men need the pretense. You've gotta give them one. Um, but also, even if you're not of that age where you're not depressed, I mean, if I ring up a mate and say, "Do you wanna meet up?" They'll go, "Uh, w- y- w- why?" (laughs) But if I say, "Do you wanna meet up and watch the football?" They'll go, "Yeah, yeah, I'll watch the football. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a (laughs) reason." Or, "Yeah, I'll play poker," or whatever it is. So th- th- there is definitely something to this stuff. And I think the thing... I hadn't connected it with purpose until with this conversation, but I think that is a big part of it.

   9. CWChris Williamson30:14

      What was the third potential reason that linked together the first two?

   10. MDMax Dickins30:20

       Um, so I mentioned, I'm gonna come to that. I mentioned the, the second thing that Dunbar said, and it was about what maintains friendships over time and its activities, building the habitats of friendships, uh, spaces where friendships happen. We have a lot of those when we're kids, when we're at college, if you go to college. As you get a bit older, they disappear. And those activities, if you wanna maintain friendships, you gotta build, rebuild them or keep them going, those routines, those rituals. But, so come back to the thing you just asked me, what do they need? They need time. So the third theory is that a big turning point in the social world of men, and also of women, but as I said, it's worse for men, is turning 30, getting into a serious relationship often, get- having a family, a lot of people, career gets more intense. You lose a lot of time, and there's one thing that friendships need. It's time, especially if you're a guy and they're based around sharing activities. 'Cause it's not have a chinwag on the phone. It's get together, play a round of golf. It's whatever. That takes more time. And if you think about as the world has... I, I, I would argue the world has got less friendly to friendship because we've got a lot of calls on our time. Uh, there's a thing, uh, there's, uh, you know, a lot more content, Netflix, whatever you wanna do, a lot more on social media with t-... The, the stats suggest, the research suggests we're taking that away from our friendships. There's all sorts of ways the world is less friendly to friendship. Uh, a big one is third spaces. So a third space is a space that isn't work and isn't your home, right? There used to be tons of them when you're, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, whether it's a church, it's a gym, it's a coffee shop, it's a, a, you know, a, a park. We used to hang out in these places. We'd meet new people. They're the place where we could maintain relationships, meet new people. They don't exist anymore. They've really kind of gone down the toilet for, w- for a l- for... In a lot of communities. You either live miles away from your work, you, you live miles away from your social life. I know I don't live in America, but I know in America that's often you're driving long distances to go and socialize in places. Certainly true in the UK. So that's, that's kind of the third argument. The context, whether it be, um, the places you meet or the amount of time available, it just makes friendships a lot harder.

   11. CWChris Williamson32:37

       Does that explain why time with friends peaks at 18 years old, that routinized thing?

   12. MDMax Dickins32:45

       Y- yeah, I th- I think so. I mean, that's, that's a really interesting study. I, I quote it in the book, but I have it in the end notes, I think the, the re- results. So I mean, un- so it's time with friends peaks at 18, then it, then it's time with your girlfriend I think takes over or time at work, and then it's time with your family. Yeah. So, so by the way, I should say that this isn't all bad news. Spending a lot more time with your spouse or with your family is something that men wouldn't do in the 70s, 80s. But they had kind of ton of working men's clubs to go to...

   13. CWChris Williamson33:13

       (laughs)

   14. MDMax Dickins33:13

       ... and other stuff like that. Yeah, so you could argue that's, that is moving things forward. But, um, yeah, I think it's definitely connected, connected to that.

   15. CWChris Williamson33:23

       Are

6. 33:24 – 40:21

   Defining Masculinity

   1. CWChris Williamson33:24

      there some common elements of masculinity that you found in terms of how people perceive men, what a man is, what he's supposed to stand for?

   2. MDMax Dickins33:33

      Common elements, uh-

   3. CWChris Williamson33:34

      Like the... in the way that masculinity shows up. Like what... if someone was asked, "What is a man?" Or "What is a masculine man?" Was there any common elements that you saw there?

   4. MDMax Dickins33:47

      Yeah, I think it's about... Uh, uh, a lot of the things we'll be familiar with. It's about winning, not showing weakness, not being seen as being intellectually inferior, um, sexually inferior, career inferior, strength inferior. I think that's when it's connected to humor. A big thing about masculinity is men are meant to be funny. Not all men are funny, but like, it'd be... You do not wanna be the guy that's known as not funny. Like or... Do you know what I mean? Like we really attach a lot of importance to being humorous, so that's a big thing. I think that connects to friendships and how we do and how we show up in them. Um, and I think loyalty is a big thing. But then we can get into this idea maybe about is, is intimacy between men, does... Is it simply different? So this is maybe the more provocative question that I kind of got to, which is I'll keep on being told that men have a friendship problem. They've got no one to talk to about all this stuff. But then when you actually ask men, "Define what closeness means. Tell me what a close friend is," they don't talk about feelings. They talk about other stuff. And they may be, maybe men's friendships aren't represented in the modern conversation 'cause we're measuring the wrong thing.

   5. CWChris Williamson34:58

      How so?

   6. MDMax Dickins35:00

      Well, for example, um, a lot... When you ask, uh, men about friendships, a lot of them talk about comfort. So that I'm really comfortable with my friend, right? We don't talk about a lot of stuff, but I just... I know he's there. It's d- it's, it's not a... it's not, it's not complicated. It's just we can hang out, it doesn't feel weird, uh, I feel really relaxed around him. They talk a lot in, in moral terms, men, about friendship, which is shit hits the fan, I know my mate's gonna be there on my doorstep. Someone has a go at me, they're gonna be on my side. They're super loyal. Um, this is resilient, this friendship. So they talk about it in those terms. They also talk about it a lot in terms of, um, like forgiveness, and I think this is connected to like we talked about banter earlier, that, what that kind of... Taking the piss out of each other. This can endure. It's like the power of forgiveness. Or the example I give in the book is, um, you know those phone ads where they kind of smash a phone with a hammer, they throw it in the sea, they set it on fire, then it's like the phone still works. I think men, for a lot of close friends, for men are like, "I can do that with my mate metaphorically and they'll still be my mate." And that's what closeness is. And then also shared adventure used to be a big part of like the iconography of male friendships. You think about war movies, you think about, um... When I looked at the friendships I really missed in my life, it was that shared adventure, that shared sense of mission, purpose kind of locked in that.... time of life when we were doing really difficult things together that we loved. Those are what I miss. That, for me, was close friendship. And it was shown in behavior, not in talk. It was in what we did.

   7. CWChris Williamson36:32

      So, do men need intimacy then, or do they need something el- is, is the word intimacy, is an intimate friendship for a man something that's different to the word intimate and what we usually think about that when we think about friendships?

   8. MDMax Dickins36:46

      I mean, that's a great question, 'cause, uh, I think, with... The semantics are important here. I think what intimacy means to men is different, and, and I think when we look at close friendships, we need to r- understand that that is, that exists and we shouldn't ignore it, and we should count it or notice it and not look down on it. But then, we, men also, and we know this from the mental health stats, men do need more areas to talk about certain things. They don't need hundreds of people they can do it to. But I think it goes to the tools thing, right? The toolbox. Have I got enough people and enough skills or the vocabulary to have these conversations when I need them? So, I actually looked at... I'll get to it at the end of the book, going like, when I'm a bit older, I'm 34, I'm having more conversations now with mates which are about bigger stuff. Like, you know, a mate who had a, you know, a nervous breakdown last summer, a mate who's, you know, lost a, lost a baby. Those conversations you don't have in your 20s often because your life is simpler. So, you have to have those chops. But I also really want the friendships that are like those other, like the shared adventure ones we just mentioned. So, I think you need both. But you're right, that word intimacy can fall in both directions, and I think it gets confused.

   9. CWChris Williamson38:01

      I think as well, the word intimacy and, and, and thinking about an intimate friendship, I think you mention it in the show that a lot of guys are just kind of keen to not come across as gay. Like, they just don't wanna be seen as gay, you know? It's one of the reasons I think why men standing face to face, it's gonna be... It's like, "What? Are you gonna kiss me?"

   10. MDMax Dickins38:19

       (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson38:19

       Like, how many times would, would your mate have said that if you stood a little bit too close? Like, "Fucking hell, mate, I'm not gonna snog you." But-

   12. MDMax Dickins38:25

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson38:25

       And so, I do think that there is a little bit of, yeah, I don't know whether it would be fear o- o- of coming across in that way.

   14. MDMax Dickins38:34

       Yeah, definitely. But I think it also gets into your bones and then we forget how it's got in there. At my school, everything you did, you'd be called a gaylord, whatever it was.

   15. CWChris Williamson38:43

       (laughs) I haven't heard-

   16. MDMax Dickins38:44

       If you had a dog's haircut-

   17. CWChris Williamson38:45

       Mate, I haven't heard that word in a decade.

   18. MDMax Dickins38:48

       Thank you. Gaylord. I was gonna say gaylord fat, but actually, no, let's not. American listeners, I don't know if you've got gaylord.

   19. CWChris Williamson38:55

       (laughs)

   20. MDMax Dickins38:55

       Maybe, um, gaylord.

   21. CWChris Williamson38:59

       (laughs) Fuck. Oh, God, I l- that is...

   22. MDMax Dickins39:03

       Long hair, you're a gaylord. Short hair, you're a gaylord. You speak French, what a gaylord. You s-

   23. CWChris Williamson39:07

       Mate, there was a, there was a...

   24. MDMax Dickins39:08

       ... Okay, gaylord.

   25. CWChris Williamson39:09

       There's a story I heard where, um, some guy, some, like, kid in school, some, it was year eight or year nine, so they were 12 or 13 years old or something. And this kid had come in with new shoes and one of the days, everybody had identified the fact, like, "Oh, new shoes." He was called new shoes for the rest of school. I mean, everybody had gotten a pair of new shoes in the period that he was called new shoes, but that was him.

   26. MDMax Dickins39:33

       (laughs)

   27. CWChris Williamson39:33

       And he's just (laughs) being, like...

   28. MDMax Dickins39:36

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson39:36

       (laughs)

   30. MDMax Dickins39:37

       I spoke to a friend who, um, he's a, he's, like... Yeah, he, he... A friend and his dad went to an old school reunion, and it was all, like, they were all, like, 65. They're all, old school reunion, the old boys school. And a guy walked in and everyone starts hitting the table going, "Worm! Worm! Worm! Worm!" 'Cause this guy had a small dick and was known as Worm at school. Even at 65, 200 people screaming, "Worm," at him. I mean, imagine that. I d- And does that happen at all-girl schools? I don't know. I don't think it does. Like, men have these brutal nicknames, and that is, kind of, like, shows the dynamic, right?
7. 40:21 – 50:55

   Is this a British Problem?

   1. CWChris Williamson40:21

      about reflecting on male friendships and the stuff that I've learned, especially this year, had a conversation with Nina Power about masculinity, I had a conversation-

   2. MDMax Dickins40:27

      Mm.

   3. CWChris Williamson40:27

      ... with Louise Perry about the sexual revolution, Matt Rhudd about men's mental health.

   4. MDMax Dickins40:31

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson40:32

      And I think this is not just a men, a male problem. I think this is a British problem.

   6. MDMax Dickins40:41

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson40:41

      I think that there is a, an Anglicized problem to this that we're talking about. And I've only been able to notice it since I've come over to America. So, the relationship that I have... And I, this may be self-selecting because I'm in Austin. The sort of people that come to Austin are a very particular type of people, blah, blah, blah. But since I've been in America, the general culture is much more uplifting. It is a lot more about celebrating other people's successes. It is significantly more open and attuned. If you text one of your friends and say, "Fucking hell, man, I'm having a, I'm having a bad day," it's like, "Look, I'll... Tonight I'll make... What do you wanna do? What should we do? Where do you wanna go? Let's do something. We'll do something cool." And that... I, I... The sense that you have in the UK, and it's difficult if someone isn't from the UK to, kind of, highlight it. But there's... It's a, kind of, a scarcity mindset. It's a bit of a, a zero-sum game. There's always a bit of piss-taking. There's a huge no-no around celebrating your wins because it's seen as being a bit of a gobshite or being big-headed or whatever.

   8. MDMax Dickins41:46

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson41:46

      And there's just constantly this below-the-surface ambient level of, kind of, like, stress, in a way, of, of n- not...

   10. MDMax Dickins41:56

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson41:56

       Not showing off too much, that everybody's on the, on the cusp to try and find some way to take the piss out of you. And I find that when I go back to the UK that I slip more toward that style of behavior, and yet when I come out here, it's not. So, I do think that this is, at least in part, something that's played into by British culture specifically as well.

   12. MDMax Dickins42:16

       Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I mean, for example, one thing I talk about in the book is that I- I'm really uncomfortable with hugs. Like, I th- I hate it, that, that kind of repressed, like...... absorbed faux homophobia from school, maybe. I'm like, it's not even po-

   13. CWChris Williamson42:30

       Just in case someone sees you hugging and calls you a gaylord.

   14. MDMax Dickins42:32

       Yeah. (laughs) Or call myself a gaylord.

   15. CWChris Williamson42:35

       Yeah.

   16. MDMax Dickins42:35

       It's like, "Where's that come from, that voice?"

   17. CWChris Williamson42:36

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   18. MDMax Dickins42:37

       And, um, it's, uh, but then I think that kind of repression of a, of a, of um, i- of emotion, if you, if you compare that to say French guys kiss each other on the cheek. I spoke to an Argentinian dude called Fernando De Souza who said, uh, "Argentinian men kiss each other all the time. It's very physically tactile." He runs a, an agency in the UK called New Macho, and what they're trying to do is change how men are represented in marketing. Um, so they're trying to re- rebrand Links, which used to be Spray More Get More when I was growing up, when I was a boy. I think now it's something else, a bit more inclusive. It's called Axe in the States. But he did some cross-cultural study into masculinity, and it is different in different places. But what they had in common was that masculinity was, uh, was performed, right? And you perform it depending on the context. So, there's certain things that are masculine in some areas and that are different in other areas, but it's the performance. I think what I realized was I didn't think I did perform my masculinity. And I went to a party with my girlfriend when I was... when I just confessed to having this friendship problem, and she saw me with the m- male guys, and she was like, "Do you realize w- what you're like with men? You're like completely different." You become this kind of belligerent, um, you know, chest is out, abrasive, loud, slightly cruel, but it's all bants. You kind of do that thing. And I, I've realized, yeah, I do put a performance on. And the masculinity was not just in me. It was between us, right? So, I think it's really interesting when you, when you say you go to Austin and you become slight, a slightly different version of Chris, and you come back to the UK, you switch into that version.

   19. CWChris Williamson44:07

       That mask comes back on again. Yeah.

   20. MDMax Dickins44:09

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson44:10

       Well, uh, I realized this looking back at my very lengthy time as a club promoter in the UK, and I realized that for a big, big chunk of time, what I thought was being a party lad and the life of the party was actually me lubricating my own social anxiety-

   22. MDMax Dickins44:31

       Mm.

   23. CWChris Williamson44:31

       ... with alcohol. So, what I was doing was I was pretty uncomfortable around other people for the most part, because I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to say to them. And this is something for young people, if you are, uh, especially in the UK, young people spend their time socializing in nightclubs. You go out Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, between the ages of 20 and 25. That's what you do.

   24. MDMax Dickins44:52

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson44:52

       That's how you spend your time, for the most part. But very few people that do that are actually meant to be there. The reason that you go there is 'cause it's what everybody else does. So, it's just this-

   26. MDMax Dickins45:02

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson45:02

       ... big mimetic game. And I didn't have a massive amount of stuff to talk to people about. So, I remember looking, uh, and dude, I ran a thousand club nights, right? I ran, I was the guy on the front door, the one that every single person in the city knew. And I remember standing in nightclubs and looking at other people laughing and joking and talking about stuff or seeming to talk about stuff. It's a club, right? So, it's super loud. And I always remember thinking, "Why is it that they've got so much to talk about when I don't really n- know what, what I should be talking about?"

   28. MDMax Dickins45:30

       Mm.

   29. CWChris Williamson45:30

       And what I realized was that they were talking about, "Mate, this song's mint, isn't it?"

   30. MDMax Dickins45:35

       (laughs)
8. 50:55 – 57:52

   Emotional Labour & Marriage

   1. CWChris Williamson50:55

      yeah, I, uh... What, you, you spoke, there was this term, em- emotional labor. What's that?

   2. MDMax Dickins51:00

      Yeah. So emotional labor is, um, it was a term originally created by someone called Arlie Hochschild, who's a sociologist, and it was about work. So emotional labor is the emotional work that people in the service industry do to do their job. So you go to a server who's having a shit day, but has a huge grin on her face as she gives you your latte even though she wants to stab you in the eyes, right? When, or, or, you know, the, the person, the waitress on the, on the airplane who's handing out nuts and she's had it up to her, up to her teeth with difficult passengers, but is smiling. That's emotional labor. But it's then grown to be this fe- uh, then f- it was, became this feminist idea that it's the work women do...

   3. CWChris Williamson51:42

      Mm-hmm.

   4. MDMax Dickins51:42

      ... to keep people's lives going. So it's, they're buying, uh, their husbands, um, uh, you know, dry cleaning. They are, uh, fixing, uh, you know, things in the supermarket. They're going, "Oh, on Saturday, we're going for dinner with the Chiltons," or whatever it is. All that work of remembering and organizing people's lives so they have a nice time, that men don't notice, um, and goes unpaid, is emotional labor or mental load. But connected to this, in the world of friendships and relationships, is this idea called kinkeeping, which is in families, it's the women who hold the family together. They organize the celebrations. A similar idea to emotional labor. They kind of organize the get-togethers, keep people up to date with each other's news on the phone. But then think about it in friendship groups, often men will outsource that social work to their wife and girlfriend. They treat the women in their lives like the HR department. Like, if they were being honest, they'd say, you know, "This is, um, Jane, and the Director of People Operations at Jeff Limited." That's the conversations they'd have. And it is true in my life. I was, I basically cuckolded my girlfriend social group, because it was easy, and I couldn't really be bothered, or I wasn't aware of the work that went into maintaining friendship groups. So like, connected to that third theory about time, women have the same time restrictions, generally, yet they haven't got the same friendship problem as men. So I think this idea of emotional labor is massively part of it, and is, is connected to how we hold relationships together.

   5. CWChris Williamson53:15

      Is there a problem with marriage, and d- does something happen when men get into marriages? Do they either settle in and believe that this is all I need to, or is there an issue with the Disneyfication of marriage that your wife should be the only thing that you need, some expectations going on here that restrict men's ability to have friendships, uh, post-marriage?

   6. MDMax Dickins53:38

      Yeah, there's, that's a massive... I think that's, there's a lot in that. Um, so there's loads of people who have studied this stuff, um, about the, the, the role, the way marriage has changed in meaning. It used to be that we didn't marry for love. We would marry for power or for resources. Uh, uh, i- i- the idea that we'd marry for love is actually very modern incarnation. Didn't come in 'til about the 1920s. So, what we've... It's a pretty new idea. But now, it is the absolute central thing, and people will stand up at their weddings, get teary, and say, "I'm marrying my best friend today." And everyone goes, "How lovely." And I suppose it is nice. But then, you maybe have a problem where if you've got, if you're with your best friend, why would you hang out with anybody else? So I think there is a cultural idea that your beloved should be everything to you, your emotional home, uh, your sexual home, your home for fun and leisure and, uh, as well as the, the parent you co-parent with. That's a lot of pressure. It also shrinks your life, if you're not careful. And, but then there's also part of it where maybe people buy into that and they don't like their spouse going off and having other friendships. I think there's a lot to that as well. But we are surrounded by this cultural idea that we should only want...... one massively important relationship and it should be in a romantic relationship.

   7. CWChris Williamson54:56

      I saw another post from Rob Henderson that said, "Social networks have a strong degree of gender homophily. Around 70% of women's personal social networks consist of women, and around 70% of men's social networks consist of men, with most, but not all, of the cross-gender members being family members over whom we have little choice. When two researchers asked a group of American adolescents to list their close friends from home and school, 72% were same sex."

   8. MDMax Dickins55:23

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWChris Williamson55:23

      So, I can see here just a game theoretic issue. If men are worse at making friends, and men have mostly male friends, that, just that itself is the reason why men are struggling to make friends and hold onto them. That's it. You don't need anything else on top of that.

   10. MDMax Dickins55:42

       I mean, I've n- that's, uh, I, I wish we'd had this conversation before I published the book. I think that's a good, that's a really interesting, it's a really interesting theory. Um, yeah. I, I think there, there's a lot to it and there's a lot of stigma and we are uncomfortable about cross-sex friendships as well. Like, I've had, I lived with women for 10 years, two, two women, and everyone was obsessed with the idea that we were banging or that if we weren't banging, we had banged or will bang. It was like, "No, it's fine. We won't and we haven't. It's all cool." But no, people are like, "No, no, no, you'll be banging I'd imagine." Like, (laughs) we can't, we can't get our head around it.

   11. CWChris Williamson56:18

       Yeah. What, what was that thing to do with, uh, was, is there an expectation around best friends as well? Obviously you've got women who have a, a social circle that's potentially, uh, more intimate than guys that have them distributed out. I remember in school I used to be asked, uh, "So, who's your best friend?"

   12. MDMax Dickins56:35

       Mm.

   13. CWChris Williamson56:35

       As if that was some sort of an expectation. And I always used to feel, uh, the same way as you maybe with the best man thing. "Oh, well, what if I don't have, what, what if they don't feel like I'm their best friend, but I feel like they're mine?" It's that unrequited best friend-ness.

   14. MDMax Dickins56:50

       (laughs) Yeah, the hierarchy in friendship is really awkward. But, uh, to go back to something Dunbar said, he actually looked at this. Women will often report having a best friend, and what's interesting, I think, is they'll often report being more intimate, as in, you know, closer with their best friend than they are with their spouse, whereas if you ask, if that was, this is naturally true of almost no men. But men, when you ask them about best friends, they'll go, "Well, I can't really name one person, but it's Kev, Steve, Jono, Paul." Right, I pretty much named The Beatles there. But, um, you know, they'll say it's a gr-, (laughs) it's a group, right? Um, and it's more casual. But then, (laughs) Dunbar said something interesting to me when I interviewed him, he said, "Because it's casual, when one person drops out of the group, it's like, ʻAll right, cheers then. See ya." And then someone else will fill in and it'll become a different dynamic." And it's like out of sight, out of mind. Not, n- not in an unpleasant way, it's just like, "We've got this. If you're over there, I don't, I'm not gonna worry about you." Whereas with, with women, there's much more of an effort to maintain that and they really miss that because it's much more-

   15. CWChris Williamson57:51

       Mm-hmm.

   16. MDMax Dickins57:51

       ... intense.

9. 57:52 – 1:06:29

   Importance of Bonding Through Doing Things

   1. MDMax Dickins57:52

   2. CWChris Williamson57:52

      I, the bonding over doing things makes so much sense to me as a guy that's run a lot of different projects, done businesses. The sort of bond, and this may be true for women as well, but the sort of bond that I have with the guys that I've gone through fire and brimstone trying to create a project or be on a sports team together or do whatever, is, it's beyond friendship.

   3. MDMax Dickins58:17

      Mm.

   4. CWChris Williamson58:17

      You know, there's even an upper bound on how friendly I can be with my friends that I haven't had shared suffering through trying to create something that's worthwhile and difficult.

   5. MDMax Dickins58:28

      You can't cheat that either. You have to do it. And, um, I think this is coming to maybe a ce- like, connected to so much of what we said. It's, I call it in the book the vulnerability industrial complex now, where everyone's meant to talk about their feelings and talk about, be, be very outward and, and very, um, verbose with how they relate to somebody else. Whereas actually, the, the, the behavior will show you a lot more and you, when you go through some- something with someone, they're being vulnerable, 'cause they're taking risks alongside you. They're, they're being sad, excited, um, angry. When you go through that with someone and when you're in com- complex environments or achieving diffic- difficult things, that is a form of vulnerability in itself that maybe, again, is not represented in a lot of conversations about vulnerability. And actually, Chris, when I looked at all these friendships, this was, uh, without, well, I don't wanna sound depressing, but friendship is such a confluence of you, the person, and the context. And once you leave the context or you change or they change, sometimes you can never get that back. It lives in that moment, in that time-

   6. CWChris Williamson59:47

      Mm.

   7. MDMax Dickins59:47

      ... and it is so special and rare and just fucking amazing. I, I've got a chapter where about a guy I used to be in a double act with on the comedy circuit in the UK and we came from being students to being professionals and it's like, wow, what a journey. And then when we stopped performing, and we tried our own things career-wise, we'd stopped being so close. And then when we get back together now, we're mates, but I'm different, he's different. That context doesn't exist anymore. And you're like, "Oh, wow." Um, I-

   8. CWChris Williamson1:00:20

      How do you think, how do you think people should feel about that? Should men feel wistful about that? Should they try and hold onto it?

   9. MDMax Dickins1:00:27

      I don't, I've, I've kind of wrestle with that. I think there's, it is, you should, I mean, you will feel wistful about it, but in a sense I suppose maybe a more positive framing of that is when you're having it, you should be, just reflect and be grateful of it. I think often we don't realize the importance of friendship until they don't, they're not around anymore, we don't have it. And when I look back, I was obviously obsessed and ref- reflected on my friendships while writing the book. I was like, "Oh man, I really miss that." But in the moment, I didn't realize how rare it was to have that or how rare it was. But it also, in a positive way, it shows you how...... it, it shows you that... I have this line in the book, and I know I shouldn't quote myself, sound like a complete wanker, but I say that friendship is something that grows on you like a suntan, right, when you're doing something else. And CS Lewis is a, he's a, he's like an English writer, obviously quite famous, but he wrote a book about friendship himself, and he says friendship needs to be about something. So like the, the, he says that the opening lines of friendship is, "Oh, you too? I thought it was just me." I'm paraphrasing that, but you know, that sense of being on a common journey, common mission. But friends look forward. They've got a spot on the horizon they're moving towards, right? It's about something. And so I, it's kind of the positive thing is, it doesn't happen, great friendship, when you're being timid with life. It is connected to attacking life, and it, it, it, you have... It's, it's a side effect of doing interesting, cool things. If you wanna go out and get more friends, I'm not sure that's the best approach. Go out and get a life and do, do cool stuff you're into. People will be there alongside you, side by side.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:02:03

       Let's fucking go. Dude, I love that. I love that so much. And it is, it, it is an action. There's a vector to friendship, especially amongst men. You know, how are you and this person going through something together? And that makes, you know... Look at me, bro-sciencing my way through adaptive explanations for friendship, but you and the people that you were closest to would bond together over the shared challenge of hunting, of collecting food, of ensuring that your tribe doesn't get killed by another group of people. Like, why do you think it is that football hooliganism is just so... Like, look at the way that these guys... They'll take a brick to the face for each other-

   11. MDMax Dickins1:02:39

       I-

   12. CWChris Williamson1:02:39

       ... because they support the same football team.

   13. MDMax Dickins1:02:41

       I always think that about heist movies. You know, you know those classic, that you know those classic things you read sometimes? It's like the old gangsters get together at 70 years old. They've got enough money, but they're not doing it for the cash. They're mad. They're gonna get caught, they're gonna put in prison for the rest of their life, but they're not doing it for the dimes. They're going, "Get the boys back together. One more job."

   14. CWChris Williamson1:02:59

       Yep.

   15. MDMax Dickins1:02:59

       But it's the stakes. I mean, this is, this is a thing you don't... Uh, this, again, without being too wistful, like the stakes of it, like the hooligans. I wouldn't wanna be a hooligan, but I kind of see it. It's the, kind of the risk of it, the stakes of it. Like Replicant, you talk about hunting there. You know, if we screw this up, we're dead. Or that's more sort of warfare, but you know, we're out and about. If we don't eat, we're gonna die. Those stakes are connected to friendship, and maybe it's connecting to that thing you had about purpose.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:03:24

       Mm-hmm.

   17. MDMax Dickins1:03:24

       It's gotta have some, some heft to it.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:03:27

       The problem that you have with that is that it makes friendship sound transactional. It makes them-

   19. MDMax Dickins1:03:32

       Mm-hmm.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:03:32

       ... sound like friendships of convenience, like the only reason that you have a sense of belonging or attachment to somebody else is because they can do something for you, that they're useful in a way. It sounds like using somebody, I think, and there is a romanticization around not just the Disneyfication of relationships, but also the same of friendships too, that people are supposed to be friends purely because there's kind of this soul to soul bond between you and somebody else. But it... There are rarely... There, there is a very small number of friends that I have held onto throughout my entire life that I've been able to maintain that deep level of, of connection with without there being something that we're working toward.

   21. MDMax Dickins1:04:16

       Yeah. Um, so to quote Aristotle again, he said there's basically three sorts of friendship. One is that friends that are useful to each other, so the transactional thing, so maybe we work together, so in an office. I think it's slightly different to some of these bigger kind of journeys we've been me- mentioning there. Second is we're friends because, um, it's pleasurable. So like, you know, I, I think you're great fun, I'm great fun. We have a great time hanging out. But the third one is kind of harder to translate, but it's about goodness. I'm with you because I see virtue in you and I really appreciate the virtue. So you can be not nice to be with sometimes, or you're not necessarily useful to me, but maybe I really admire, um, your courage or I really admire your wisdom, or the fact that you are kind. And that... You know, we don't have loads of friends in our life where we can say, "I just think this person is such a good human being and makes me a better human being." But then those also endure beyond context. So like, a lot of this stuff is like, they've worked it out years ago, but maybe like you say, we've narrowed down what we think a friend is. Disneyfication is a nice way of putting it. But again, it comes down to celebrating that, that when you've got it-

   22. CWChris Williamson1:05:26

       Yeah.

   23. MDMax Dickins1:05:26

       ... be really grateful for it.

   24. CWChris Williamson1:05:28

       Think about, this might be a more modern way that people put it, that they say, "I just think that they're a really good influence on me. You know, I like myself when I'm around them."

   25. MDMax Dickins1:05:36

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson1:05:36

       That's, that, that sense that you are a better version of you, or you see in them things that you would like to be like. You know, the training partner that always seems to gas you up a little bit more and you go, "Yeah, I wanna be around that guy. I don't wanna be around the training partner that's always making me feel down in the dumps when I went to go and train with them."

   27. MDMax Dickins1:05:53

       Yeah, absolutely. I've, I've got a friend called Philippa who whenever I'm with... Like if we go sit, we're in a room together, go to a party or something, I watch her work the room and I'm like, "She's just setting this room on fire." She's amazingly kind of, uh, kind, outgoing, interested, like listening the shit out of people. And I'm like, "What, what a, what a..." I'm looking like, "What a good person."

   28. CWChris Williamson1:06:14

       Mm-hmm.

   29. MDMax Dickins1:06:14

       So that, but that is... I don't work with her. I don't see her all the time. She's not useful to me (laughs) . Although I wouldn't say you're completely unuseful to me.

   30. CWChris Williamson1:06:23

       Yeah.
10. 1:06:29 – 1:14:07

    Max’s Thoughts on the Manosphere

    1. MDMax Dickins1:06:29

    2. CWChris Williamson1:06:29

       What do you think about the modern manosphere? Do you think the, that is helping men at the moment?

    3. MDMax Dickins1:06:37

       So it's an interesting one. So I think if social media and, and including manosphere within that, is a bridge into real connection, as in you're meeting and having experiences together, I think it can be positive. I've, I think it is a bit of a symptom of isolation more broadly that it exists, and you get in those groups...... often they get stuck in a vortex, an echo chamber of getting more and more extreme. And there is a, there is a shared purpose in extremity. So a lot of these people are a- attached to their often mad ideological beliefs because they are part of something. And these are boys and men in their bedrooms who don't have a social group, but they find it online. And to de- depart from some of these very eccentric views is to lose that. I think it's intimately connected to loneliness. Is it positive? I think it depends on the sort of messages they're finding there. A lot of pe- I mean, you mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier. I mean, I know you, you're, you're friendly with him. I- I've, I've never met, uh, Jordan Peterson. But, uh, if you find some messages for him and go, "Take responsibility for your life," and find a lot of positivity in that, great. If you find some other folks on that world who are giving you less positive messages and maybe entrench you in that isolation, obviously less positive. But there's lots of research that your online relationships are not as effective in terms of your well-being as face-to-face ones, and there's not really a way around that. I'm not saying you should only have face-to-face friendships, but you do need to get out of the house.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:08:16

       Yeah. I, I have a mixed feelings about the manosphere. Uh, proto idea that I've got about it is that this is first-wave manosphere work-

    5. MDMax Dickins1:08:26

       Right.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:08:26

       ... in the same way as you had first-wave feminism, and then each time that it kind of falls away... Actually, probably, no, it, it, it's second-wave manosphere. So I'd have said that the first wave was, uh, 2006 to 2014, '17.

    7. MDMax Dickins1:08:38

       Mm-hmm.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:08:39

       So that would have been your, uh, The Game, Neil Strauss. It would have been Tucker Max with, I hope there's a beer in hell. It would have been very much around pickup artistry and game and negging-

    9. MDMax Dickins1:08:49

       Yeah.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:08:49

        ... and neurolinguistic programming. That sort of fell away because society basically decided that that was a bit much, mate. And then what came back around were very similar sort of talking points, but now under the guise of red pill, black pill, alpha, beta, sigma, uh, MGTOW, incels, like, simping, OnlyFans, that was the language that got used. And I think that we're moving toward the tail end of that now as well.

    11. MDMax Dickins1:09:17

        Mm-hmm.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:09:17

        Because as soon as any movement can become, uh, memed, as soon as you can caricature a movement, it's kind of becoming a piss take of itself.

    13. MDMax Dickins1:09:26

        Yeah.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:09:26

        And I think that you're seeing a lot of that kind of space. People are starting to break off and try and find, like, holistic men's work or holistic self-improvement or organic... Like, they're trying to do something that, that moves it on a little bit more. Um, but there's certain elements, dudes... I, I had this lady, Nama Kate, on, who'd done some research into the incel and black pill forums.

    15. MDMax Dickins1:09:50

        Yeah.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:09:50

        And she basically said, I didn't know this, but that if you're in one of these, um, incel chats, that if you were to say that you had any positive interaction with a woman that day, that you would be very seriously ostracized or maybe even kicked out of the group. And I was like, "Oh, like, if you, if you got a girl's phone number at Starbucks." And she was like, "No, no, no, no, no, like, if the Starbucks server, if her eyes lingered at you for more than half a second." Because what that is giving to the group is an undue sense of hope. What people are bound together by there is, "We're all in this together. This is the shared purpose." And what's called ascending, so ascending up out of the black pill, incel world to somebody that may be one of the normies that's actually able to have sex.

    17. MDMax Dickins1:10:35

        Yeah.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:10:35

        That, that gives... It creates a delta between where all of the people in the group are and what they could be. And it's almost like, look, if nobody has hope, then there's no pain to feel that delta between what we could be and what we're not. And as you see other people rise up, that creates that compulsion and that pain in you. So what they're actually optimizing for in these groups is for people to never actually try to ascend. They're never trying to do anything which would pull them out. And the shared suffering is seen as a badge of loyalty.

    19. MDMax Dickins1:11:04

        Mm-hmm.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:11:04

        That's the fealty. That's the flag that you're waving. It's so wild.

    21. MDMax Dickins1:11:08

        Yeah. I mean, that's... There's also, what's, what's interesting about that is it's so... There's so many instances in history where that is, has kind of happened, where, where groups of people in difficult circumstances have been swept up in ideology and, and want, and, and want to get lost with it. I mean, it's, um, it's hard to overcome that, isn't it? Because it's sort of that ideological... Not ideological, that sort of primal urge to have brotherhood or have connection, but then, you know, then maybe plays into the dynamics of, of memes and of, of social networks online and algorithms and things. I mean, it's, it's potent. It's really interesting. I'd be interested to know what the next step of the manosphere looks like. I, I should... To give a positive... Maybe it's not out-and-out manosphere. I've got a bit in the book where I spent a day with a guy in Ipswich who lives with 26 life-sized sex dolls, and, uh, they're all around his house. And you'd think this guy would be really, really weird, but he's got two grown-up kids, he's been married, and he kind of... He made me banana bread when I was there. We had a cup of tea.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:12:17

        I hope he washed his hands.

    23. MDMax Dickins1:12:19

        (laughs) Oh (laughs) . Actually did seem- did taste slightly soapy.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:12:24

        (laughs)

    25. MDMax Dickins1:12:25

        Um, and, um, yeah, and he... I said, "So talk to me about this." And he takes photos of them. He's got his own studio, and that connects him to the doll community. And they don't like calling them sex dolls because they think it demeans what it is. They call... The- there is the doll community. And through his interactions and his work with these dolls, he's made an online community, and actually it's quite tasteful. It's not about sex. Does he occasionally use the dolls in that way? I'd imagine he does. Good luck to him, but (laughs) -

    26. CWChris Williamson1:12:59

        Godspeed, sir.

    27. MDMax Dickins1:13:00

        It's what... (laughs) But it wasn't about that.And actually if you look into the doll world, it's really interesting. I spoke to someone who spoke to RealDoll, who make, um, sex dolls and they're making... I can't... the name skips my mind now, but the, the, the world's first sex robot. And when they ask customers, "What do you want in this?" they're not talking about self-lubricating vaginas and gyrating nipples and all that stuff. They're saying, "Oh, we want it to be able to have memory for affectionate responses. We want it to be able to have conversations." They're actually wanting it to be about human connection. And my point with this is that this stuff that seems a bit off-putting, that seems a bit weird, that seems of guys who have maybe lost the plot, they can use these communities and i- as, as bridges into something more positive. And I think it's important not to... we have to have a complex and nuanced look at this stuff as well as calling out the stuff that's terrible. And the idea of Manosphere 3.0, yeah, maybe we... it could be a lot more positive.

11. 1:14:07 – 1:16:45

    How to Prevent Male Loneliness

    1. MDMax Dickins1:14:07

Episode duration: 1:17:22