1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity

1126: Richard Reeves | Rethinking the Purpose of Modern Masculinity

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Richard Reeves: you roll your eyes a little bit at male behavior and judging girls and women against that or the other way round and say, what's wrong with you? I have three boys. They're grown now, and I used to think, I wish you were more like your sister. They didn't have a sister.

I made one up.

[00:00:21] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. And turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional pirates.

Yeah, they still exist. Hacker astronauts or music mogul. And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started here with me is Richard Reeves, author and social scientist. He's also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

Didn't know that existed. Kind of glad it does today. We're talking about the gender gap, probably not the one you're thinking of. Well, actually it is the one you're thinking of. It's just kind of upside down from what you might assume. It turns out that men are falling behind women in pretty much every area at home, at work, and at school, and the gap is only growing.

Today, we'll explore what this crisis looks like, particularly in areas like education, work, mental health, and beyond. I actually found this episode both alarming and enlightening. I think you will as well. And now here we go with Richard Reeves. All right. You've said we're in a crisis of male inequality, and you've highlighted in your work how society often overlooks men's struggles.

And even saying that, I've got this little like itch in the back of my head where I go now, I'm gonna get a lot of emails just about this particular thing. And usually when we're talking about a gender gap, we're talking about the gap that women face. It's a brave move for you to have even written about this.

I would imagine there were a couple publishers that were like. How about writing about AI like everybody else? What do you think?

[00:02:24] Richard Reeves: Yeah, the good news is I don't know anything about ai. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you're right. I couldn't get a publisher to start with. It was a struggle precisely for that reason because people think, wait, is this like a men's rights thing?

Yeah. And you're like, angry white man rages against the modern world, feminism, women, et cetera. And so it was a bit difficult in some ways. But that's the problem, isn't it? Because you think, ah, this is gonna be difficult. So you don't have the conversation, you don't write the book, you don't do this podcast because you know, you know that merely raising the fact that there are real problems facing some boys and men somehow marks you out as a misogynist, right?

You've gone over to the dark, you've red pilled, you've gone to the dark side. You've turned against women, et cetera. And it's just such bullshit, honestly, that we can't think two thoughts at once. That we're not allowed to simultaneously care about what's happening with women, promote women, do the best for our daughters, et cetera.

And also think, wait, why are we losing 40,000 men year to suicide? Wow. Is that many? Yeah. Why are male wages flat for those without a college degree? Like, what's going on here? And, and basically, if we pay ourselves the compliment and each other, the compliment that firstly, two things can be true at once.

There's a bunch of stuff to do for women and girls and boys and men. And secondly, if we also assume goodwill in the personal speaker, if you don't assume immediately that just by raising the issue of one group, it means you automatically don't care about or even hate the other group. That's not true.

It's like saying someone who's got a son and a daughter, right? You're only allowed to care about one of them. Which one are you gonna care about? And if you care about him, you must hate her and you care about her, you must hate him. And it's just not how people actually lead their lives. And in the end, I just think.

The data's clear. A lot of boys and men struggling, especially those from poorer backgrounds, and if we don't talk about it, those problems can turn into grievances. If they're neglected, they turn into G and then we're in real trouble.

[00:04:15] Jordan Harbinger: And I'll get some stats in a second about how men are doing, but why do you think there's a tendency to downplay or ignore the struggles that men face?

Yes. It seems like, okay, we don't wanna be labeled as a misogynist, but is that it?

[00:04:25] Richard Reeves: The real reason I think is a genuine fear that if you start to raise the issues of men, you will somehow be diluting or retreating from the necessary work for women. If you've only got so much time, you've only got so much money, you've only got so much energy.

Right? You have to choose like it's a zero sum game basically. So it's not that they think you are even wrong in what you're saying, it's just that now is not the time to focus on those issues of men when there are still so many issues facing women. To be fair to the people who are concerned about, and look, you started the conversation Jordan by saying you've got a little bit of an ick, a little bit of a funny feeling about this issue.

I think you should, I think anybody talking about this issue should be feeling some discomfort. I think it is a difficult conversation to have, but. That's not a reason to not have it, because otherwise the only people having it are the ones who have no discomfort with it at all because they can say, of course men are struggling.

It's 'cause the bloody woke feminist agenda's taken over and we need to go back to the fifties. And so unfortunately, the debate is dominated too often by people who don't think it's an uncomfortable conversation. It is uncomfortable, but we have to have it

[00:05:27] Jordan Harbinger: anyway. That makes sense. You're right. It's a tough line to walk because you do hear from people who say, Hey, you're regressing in this area, but then you get people who are like, finally, Jordan is coming with us to the dark side, and we'll get to some of what the dark side means in a little bit.

But do you have stats off the top of your head about how men are not doing well?

[00:05:45] Richard Reeves: Yeah, so I've mentioned, I think one of the things that troubles me most is the rise in suicide. I mentioned it's 40,000 many years, four times as many men as women. And since 2010, the suicide rate among men under 30 has risen by 30%.

So it's rising fastest now among young men, and I'm really worried about that. I'm worried relatedly about drug poisoning. The rise in drug poisoning deaths among men this century has been huge. Is that overdosing? No. Unintentionally. What is drug poisoning? It's unintentional. So when someone's dying of a quote, accidental cause.

So that could be like car crash could be drowning, but drug poisoning is the biggest one now for men. And so it's, there's no evidence that it was deliberate. It's not a suicide, at least marked as an accidental overdose. Very often it's 'cause something's laced Now. A lot of fentanyl also, frankly, it's quite often 'cause they're on their own.

So there's no one to resuscitate if something goes wrong or there's something in the drug that you weren't expecting. So we just did a report showing that the rise in drug poisoning deaths among men to 2001 means that we've lost about an extra 400,000 men. In that time period. So the increase is the equivalent 400,000 men.

And for those who like their stats, that's the same as the number of men we lost in World War ii. Yeah, that's striking. That's a big number. So we've lost a world war's worth of men since 2001 from the increase in drug poisoning. That's incredible. So you've got this whole mental health issue. Now that's not to say back to what we were a minute ago.

There are huge issues around mental health, especially for teen girls, which a lot of people talking about. It's simultaneously true that we've got this crisis in male suicide, especially among young men, including kind of teen boys. And it's true that we're seeing really spiking rates of anxiety among girls and young women, I should say, and issues around self-harm and also attempted suicide and suicidal thoughts among young women.

Right? So there's, the mental health crisis is playing out equally but differently for young men and young women. I. And then in the labor market, like men without a four year college degree, who, the ones doing worse, their wages are the same today as they were in 1979. So that's nearly half a century of no wage growth.

That's an extraordinary fact. And actually people from low income back grants that they're doing worse than their fathers, which is really hard. That's hard to swallow, being economically actually poorer than your father is. And then in education system, a lot of this is 'cause of education. And so if you look at high school, huge gender gaps in high school.

Now, the top 10% of students in high school, if you just look at that top 10%, there are two girls for every boy. So there are twice as many girls as boys graduating top of their class from high school. And the gap in. Higher education now in college campuses is about 60 40 female male, which is for a really good reason.

More women going to college and for a really bad reason, fewer men going to college. But that gap, just to put a point on it, that gender gap in college is bigger than the gender gap we had in the 1970s, but the other way around. I see. Wow. It was just a bit less than 60 40 in favor of men, if you like, in the early seventies.

And it's now 60 40 in favor of of women. So we've reversed the gender gap in colleges now, and it wouldn't matter if the men who weren't going to college were doing great, but as I've just suggested, they're not doing great.

[00:09:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:09:08] Richard Reeves: There's a lot of reasons to be worried about what's happening to our men and our boys.

[00:09:12] Jordan Harbinger: It, it would be different if it was like, Hey, most men are just going to trade school, but they're still making six figures. There's a lot of plumbers, electricians, and other experts or whatever. That's kind of the myth. Yeah. That's what people say. Right? That's just not true anymore. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. That's kind of what I was hoping was true. I guess when I read about the statistics for college, I thought, oh, well, maybe more men are just getting apprenticeships or something like that. Yeah, but that's not the

[00:09:32] Richard Reeves: case. It might have been probably true for their dads actually. It might well have been true that their dad could get a good trade job or a factory job or a job in the mine or whatever without having to go to college.

But that's just much less true now. And then I'll say one more thing, which is related, I should have said this before, but about the mental health. Isolation thing. There's a lot of work right now about growing social isolation and loneliness, and that's true across the board, but it's particularly true for young men.

So Dan Cox is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, and he shows that 15% of men under the age of 30 now say that they don't have a single friend.

[00:10:08] Jordan Harbinger: A single friend at all. Does that mean even online or like they just mean no real life friends. No friends at all. It

doesn't

[00:10:15] Richard Reeves: distinguish between Aurora, just like, do you have a friend?

Oh my

[00:10:17] Jordan Harbinger: God.

[00:10:17] Richard Reeves: And so the isolation of a lot of men now, so what's happening is that the men who are struggling in school struggle at work. They struggle about friendship. They might struggle to form a family. Most men at the age of 30 are not dating. Most women under the age of 30 are dating.

[00:10:34] Jordan Harbinger: They're dating 40-year-old guys, but whatever.

Yeah, yeah,

[00:10:36] Richard Reeves: yeah. That's right. That's what the 40-year-old guys are hoping anyway. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, there's lots of overlapping problems. But I think underneath it all, there's just this sense among a lot of young men, which is just figuring out how to navigate this new world. A world which has seen a significant increase in gender equality or women are no longer economically dependent on men in the way that they were.

It's a good thing now that 40% of breadwinners in the US are women. That's just quadrupling in the last few decades. So we've just seen this huge change in the way that men and women relate to each other economically. The idea that the breadwinner, you're gonna be the breadwinner. And women needed to marry somebody or be with someone 'cause they needed bread, right?

But that's not true anymore. And that's a wonderful, amazing, liberating thing. But if we allow ourselves to say that even good things can sometimes have some difficult byproduct that's left a lot of men trying to figure out who they are. And I think a lot of men are ending up in our current culture feeling more than a bit lost.

[00:11:33] Jordan Harbinger: I can see that women's role in the household has expanded to provider of course, as well as caring for children. Men's role has not necessarily expanded similarly to also caring for children. Look, obviously they're stay at home dads. You don't have to email me and tell me you take care of your kids. I get it, but it's probably not quite the same

[00:11:50] Richard Reeves: scale.

Nothing like the same scale. I think I really like that word, expansive to what's happened is that we have wonderfully. And in completely still, but expanded the role of women, right? You can be a mom, you can be a wife, you can also be a CEO, you can be an entrepreneur, you can be a fighter pilot. Amazing.

But with men, what we've taken is that old script breadwinner provider, and that's gone away. We haven't really replaced it. We haven't expanded the role of men. And so there's this horrible lag now I think between this idea of what a man is supposed to be and what the reality is now of the economy. And so it's happened pretty fast and I think a lot of people are still reeling from it, especially a lot of men.

And that makes 'em very vulnerable to someone coming along saying, yeah, remember the old days when men were men and women were in and everyone knew their place and things work. That's a very appealing message to men who are currently like, I don't know what to do. And worse, sometimes they know what not to do.

They know that they're not the long list of things not to do. Mostly good thing, right. Don't mansplain, don't be toxic, et cetera. Good, that's good. But not really a very clear list of things they should

[00:12:56] Jordan Harbinger: do. It's not very actionable game plan. Yeah. And we'll get to toxic masculinity later, whatever that means.

But it is, there's this evolving masculinity, but your masculinity has to evolve. Okay. Tell me what that means. Oh gosh. I don't know. Figure it out, bro. And good luck out there. Yeah,

[00:13:10] Richard Reeves: exactly. Good luck. Just improvise. Everyone's improvising, right?

[00:13:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We're really not doing a great job. Those of us that are trying are also overshadowed by grifters, who are like, oh, I can come in and take advantage of this.

But you've mentioned that men are often treated as malfunctioning women, essentially. Can you explain what this means? I love that idea, that concept.

[00:13:31] Richard Reeves: Yeah, I think it's particularly true probably in classrooms, right? In schools. But then we can broaden it out, which is if you have this kind of default idea of this is how to behave, right?

Sit still and study harder and remember your shoes, et cetera, which because girls are more mature than boys on average, that's a bit better at that then. Then you sort of say, well, that's how you're supposed to be. And then you say, well, the boys aren't like that. So they're basically a malfunctioning girl.

And I think a good definition of a society that's a patriarchy is one where you take male ways of acting and being in the world and then judge women against that. And just say, why aren't women more like men? I'm old enough to remember when it was a big thing that women had to wear shoulder pads and learn to deepen their voice and stand in a funny way, assertiveness training.

Really? That sounds so ridiculous. Margaret Thatcher had to have voice training. It's kind of lower her voice because the idea was basically if women wanted to succeed, they had to become like men had to look, but think about shoulder pads. What's that doing? It's taking a female physique and it's saying you have to look a male.

That's obviously terrible. And we quite rightly mostly said that's absolute bs. Like we should change our workplace cultures. We shouldn't ask women to stop being women so that they can be CEO. We should just say women can be CEO as women, not as pretend men, but also the other way around. You don't wanna have classrooms or societies where it's, unless you are behaving in a stereotypically female way, sitting still.

Expressing your emotions in a more stereotypically female way or whatever it is. If you're just a little bit acting, then there's something wrong with you that way around as well. We just have to create a so where we're not judging one against the behaviors of the other. This

[00:15:02] Jordan Harbinger: explains so much of the problems that I had in school.

I've got two kids now, one's five. My boy is five and a half, my daughter is three. And I will tell you right now my daughter's probably more ready for school than my son, or at least they're close and he's two and a half years older than her, almost twice years old. That sounds about right. And it's crazy.

We'll say, okay, put on your socks and shoes and put your jacket on. And my 3-year-old daughter will have a little bit of trouble just physically putting it on, and then she'll be by the door and my son will be playing with matchbox cars and it's, hello. We told you to put your socks and shoes on, and then 10 minutes later he's got one sock on and he's looking for a snack.

And it's like, what is

[00:15:38] Richard Reeves: wrong with you? What is wrong with you? And actually, I'll ask you this question. Have you ever had the thought, I wish you were a bit more like your sister

[00:15:44] Jordan Harbinger: in certain respects, yes, but also I can really relate to this because as a kid I was the exact same way. I mean, they were like, oh, he's got attention deficit disorder and all these things, and it just turns out that okay, maybe that's true, but also it just turns out it was a boy.

Hello. All the boys were like that. Come on.

[00:16:00] Richard Reeves: That's right. There's a simpler diagnosis. Yeah, it's a boy. I have three boys. They're grown now. And I used to think. I wish you were more like your sister and they didn't have a sister. I made one up. I had an imaginary sister that I could compare them to because you know, I had these friends who had girls, and I do think as parents sometimes, and teachers and societies, that we can't fall into the trap of either elevating like this is a male behavior and judging girls and women against that or the other way around.

Just saying, and you roll your eyes a little bit at the boy and say, as you just said, what's wrong with you? And I did that with mine and I really regret it. I really lacked a lot of empathy around that.

[00:16:38] Jordan Harbinger: It's, I have to just realize that he's so young that I'm essentially his external prefrontal cortex that's operating outside of his body.

[00:16:45] Richard Reeves: And by the way, you'll have that for 10 years at least, maybe 20

[00:16:48] Jordan Harbinger: more years. I don't know when they finished developing that thing. Mine took a while. It is about 20 years. My daughter will say something like, Jaden will be standing on the picnic table and she'll go, that's dangerous. And he's like, I'm gonna try to fly.

And I'm like, listen to your sister on this one. I don't think this is gonna work out the way you think it's gonna work out. And it's just like constantly monitoring them. And then finally, now he'll say, that's dangerous, and then he'll just do it anyway. And I'm like, that's not the point we're trying to ring across.

But I remember when I was younger, my friend Katie was a really good student and they gave us these student homework books and you would write the subject and write what you had to do in the lines next to it and write when it was due. And I would ask my friend, Katie, how do you remember to look at that when you have homework?

And she goes, when I come home, I just look at it and I go, I. How do you remember to write down what you need? And she goes, when the teacher's telling you to do it, you write it then. And I go, but then, then you go home and then you pull this out and you read it and then you do your homework. 'cause I couldn't get all those steps.

That was not happening. She's like, idiot, all you do is write it down and then you do it when you get home. That was impossible for me to do. I didn't even get that until towards the end of high school.

[00:17:50] Richard Reeves: So many steps. If you think about what it takes to get your homework in, right, you have to be in class.

When it's set, you have to be paying attention. You have to make some kind of note like your friend write it down. You then have to remember later to look at your notes and then be able to read your notes. And then you have to, having seen your notes decide to do the homework rather than what you'd rather do.

And then this is the one that gets me. Lastly, if you've actually gone through all those steps and managed to do your homework, yeah, small miracle. You have to turn it in. That's right. Oh yeah. You have to remember to turn it in. That's right. With my boys, like even if they made it through all those, they'd come home and I'd say, did you turn in your chemistry homework?

And I'm, oh no, I forgot.

[00:18:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that sounds about right. And even if the teachers are like, bring your homework up, I'd just be sitting there staring at the wall and then it's, did you turn in your homework? Oh, I don't know where. You know, you know, it's like, where was I? I don't know. Yeah. That gap widened all the way seemingly for me anyway.

Widened all the way through school. A lot of the girls that I studied with in high school, it wasn't that they were smarter than all the guys, it's that they were organized in a way that now I see with my wife and I is like, still there. It's totally different, but it doesn't

[00:18:56] Richard Reeves: go away completely. But it's what actually, one of the things I find really interesting is that on GPAI mentioned a minute ago, right?

There's this massive gender gap on GPA. Girls just have much better grades than boys in high school, but there isn't on SAT scores. Boys are a bit more clustered at the bottom and at the top, but basically there's like huge gender gap on grades, but not really a big gender gap on tests. So I think what that tells you is what, exactly what you just said.

Like it's not that girls are smarter than boys all the other way round, in case we still have to say that hopefully people trust us enough by now. But what girls are really good at turning their homework in and that's what gets you a higher grade, like getting a good grade in your class is only very slightly about smarts.

It's about organization, it's about discipline, it's about paying attention, it's about all that stuff. And you know, like girls just get that stuff much earlier. And the biggest gap actually I think is early adolescence. It is those early high school years where the girls hit puberty earlier, they grow, their brains grow.

They just grow up. They become like young adults a year or two earlier than boys do. This is a fact. Anyone that's seen kids growing up knows that. Our education system doesn't really reflect that. It's one of the reasons I'm quite keen on this idea of starting boys in school a year later. So it just gives him a year to catch up.

We've done this

[00:20:10] Jordan Harbinger: with my son, we put him in preschool, then pre-K, and we're like, okay, he's finally ready for kindergarten. So we held him back 'cause he was on the age line and now we're like, oh god, that was such a good idea. I mean it was just so dang necessary. Meanwhile, my wife, do we need to hold Juniper back?

I don't know. And it's hard to tell 'cause she's three, but she is so much more ready, like I said, even than Jaden is at five for school. It's just absolutely unbelievable. I. Starting boys a year later probably wouldn't have been a bad idea. I didn't even think about just starting everyone

[00:20:38] Richard Reeves: later. Yeah. Just as a default, a lot of private schools kind of do it, say to the parents if they've got boys, especially if they're summer born boys, they're like, yeah, I think we should probably wait with him.

A lot of richer parents are doing it, but I think it should be a choice for parents wherever their kids are at school.

[00:20:52] Jordan Harbinger: What about investing more in trade schools? To go back to what we were talking about at the top of the show, it seems like I went to college because my parents were like, if you don't go to college, you're never gonna get a good job.

That was sort of like peak nineties parental wisdom from two parents who were the first in their families to go to college, I think, or one of the first That made sense, but I also didn't totally need to do that. I ended up at what you might call a trade school anyway, because I became a lawyer, but it's not quite the same thing that people are envisioning.

[00:21:18] Richard Reeves: Different kind of trade.

[00:21:19] Jordan Harbinger: It's funny, I always say I was painted into a corner and I did what a lot of people do and they're back to had have no other options and became a lawyer. It's true. It's just like a catchall for college overachievers that are like, I have no idea what to do with my life. They just go to law school.

When I was in Germany, there were different high schools for people who didn't show like they were gonna go to college and then they would go to a trade school and by the time they were 18, they were pretty much ready to go be a tool and die maker or a railroad track repair person or engineer of some kind.

And then you could go to college, but that was like you were gonna be academic and you were gonna go to a professional level of something. But even in Yugoslavia, they had a high school just for people who are gonna be police officers. It was like, this is where you go to high school and then you get out and you're a cop.

It's a totally different thing than we have here where it's like, oh, if you can make it, you can go to college and if you can't. I'll take fries with that. It's like we really just give up on those people a lot of the time.

[00:22:10] Richard Reeves: Yeah. So I think on the one hand, I don't want to in any way discourage people from going to college, especially people who maybe they don't have parents like yours who say you have to go to college.

They might have parents who are like, oh, college isn't worth it. And actually this kids are really smart and could do very well at college, especially boys right now. But on the other hand, I think you are right that the US just doesn't do very well on that trade school stuff, the vocational stuff. And actually there's one good reason for that, although I think it's outdoor, which is a fear of tracking.

There's a history in the US where we would have more vocational stuff in high school, but it would only be like the poor kids than very often the black kids who'd be put on that track. So it's like the biases about class and race really kicked in. And so people have felt very concerned that if you introduce vocational tracks like they have in Germany and Scandinavia, that it'll be the poorer kids and probably the kids of color who end up on those tracks.

So I get that fear, but on the other hand. It's not like our high schools are serving those kids amazingly well now. And I think that the fear of that is now getting in the way of progress and investing much more in it. Like one of the things I looked at was technical high schools, which are like just much more vocational high school.

And boys do really well at those schools. My dad went to one of those in Detroit. They're very sort of male friendly, and some of 'em go to college and some of 'em don't. But the point is they just get a better high school education. And right now a lot of boys just aren't getting good high school education.

So let's start there. And there's a bit of a, I mean from the UK as you as you know, but there's a sort of snobbery in the US about trade school and apprenticeships and people just sort really think it's lesser and that's just not true in Europe in the same way

[00:23:39] Jordan Harbinger: I've been trying to pop that bubble for years on this show where Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. So he used to get really upset because people would say, oh, hey Mike, I always watch your show with my son. And I tell him, this is what happens when you don't stay in school. And Mike's, oh, you mean the people that bring electricity to everyone in the city are not as good as you? What do you, again, like a.

CPA go f yourself, pal. And it's just like, what do you mean? This is what happens when you don't stay in school. You get a pension, you get outside every day. I mean, you get to work outside, work with your hands, helping people. It's just such an offensive notion that somebody who runs a railroad where you live is not as good as you because you spent more time indoors in school.

It's

[00:24:17] Richard Reeves: ridiculous. One of the jobs that we have a real shortage for now is linemen that people are gonna go and fix the power lines. I live in, um, east Tennessee when I, my home and when Helene came through, it just like wiped out. Like, and then you just saw these guys and it was mostly guys. There were some women of course, but like mostly guys who were just, it's one of the most dangerous occupations.

I think it's in the top 10 who are getting up there, taking the old ones down, putting new ones up. They're up there with electricity. They're the kind of wires so that I could get my power back. And I just, anybody who looks down their nose at someone doing that kind of work, I'm sorry, that person is just an asshole.

Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. It's easy to say, but then okay. Let's pass the apprenticeship bill. Let's have some technical high schools. The problem in the US like the turning away from apprenticeships, vocation, all the stuff we just talked about, it's bad for everyone, but it's particularly bad for boys and men.

'cause that is a way of learning that just seems to be a bit more male friendly as opposed to the normal classroom. So that's great. Let's do more of that.

[00:25:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So basically the jobs that many men would be well suited to do, we don't wanna do them because we don't want to have people go, ah, couldn't make it in the academic world, eh?

It's like, well, no, I actually kind of wanted this job. Use snobby SOB. Right. I understand that you also, you've talked before about heel jobs. I've never actually heard the term heel jobs. I guess it's a term that's being contrasted with STEM jobs. Tell me about this.

[00:25:34] Richard Reeves: Yeah, so it stands for health, education, administration and Literacy.

So the kinds of jobs that are in those fields or need those skills. And it's something that I came up with as a way to think about this alternative. And whilst it is obviously true that doing the jobs you just talked about, linemen, plumbing, hvac, driving amazing jobs, and we still need a lot of people in those jobs.

I just

[00:25:55] Jordan Harbinger: paid my HVAC guy the price of a small sedan. So yeah, the guy's doing

[00:26:00] Richard Reeves: fine. They're making good money. You, you have to get trained to do that stuff and they're really good. But there's also a lot of job growth now in the health sector in education. We have this shortage now of people healthcare and, and I'm really worried about the fact that a lot of people just don't see those as jobs that men should do.

And I just completely disagree. My son just became a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore City. Oh, wow. Whoa. In Baltimore. Yeah. Had he been to Baltimore before? My wife's from Baltimore and my godson lives there, and so we have a family go. It can be a tough neighborhood, man, but yeah, actually I'm just rewatching the wire and now I'm like, oh wait, that's where he teaches.

Yikes. I was sort of recognizing some of it, but he's one of almost no male teachers, and I just think that's a huge problem. Like the share of male teachers, it was 33% in the eighties, it's now 23% and falling, so we're just cratering the share of men in the classroom, and that's bad for three reasons. One, we need more teachers.

Two, they're pretty good jobs than the pays going up. They're much better jobs than people I think probably realize. And three, most importantly, I want the boys in the classroom to see men showing that education is a thing that men do. And one of my things I believe as a parent and now as a sort of policy, one more than anything else probably is people believe their eyes, not their ears.

Yeah. And if they see it, they see a guy like my English teacher, I struggled a bit in school and I was in remedial English and language and, and then Mr. Wyatt, the English teacher, God, he was a miserable old sword, as we say. Where I come from, he was a Korean War veteran, which might explain it why he was miserable, but he taught us poetry.

I. It was the first time I thought, huh, really? This is the thing guys do that guys can get into this. This writing poetry thing changed my life, and I'm just gonna say it would not have been the same if it wasn't a guy. And I think that's okay. Just as a woman, teaching science can be a huge role model for girls, et cetera.

Just guys in the classroom, just we need men in these classrooms and in these boys' lives.

[00:27:57] Jordan Harbinger: That's a really good point. I was never good at languages, and we had to memorize these verb tables and stuff like that, but then we had Mr. Wilson, and he was not only the football coach, but he was also the Spanish teacher and the French teacher in I think, middle school for me.

So it became like, oh, you don't have to be some kind of weenie academic guy to be able to speak French or Spanish. Because I even remember my friend saying, oh, languages are for girls, which is such a weird thing to save.

[00:28:23] Richard Reeves: But it happens though. It does. It's so weird because I actually think things get coded quite quickly.

Right? I think especially among kids, right? They code that as, that's not for someone like me. So they're like, oh, well girls do that, or boys do that, whatever. They're very sensitive to that. Especially as adolescents, I think they're very sensitive, like going against the grain and all that, and so it's a huge problem.

If they don't see male teachers, of course they won't think that teaching is a job for men. That's like blindingly obvious.

[00:28:45] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of being a provider, I can feed my kids. When you support the fine products and services that support this show, we'll be right back. I. This episode is sponsored in part by factor.

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Now back to Richard Reeves. You know, another weird thing that got coded wrong in my opinion is study abroad. It's almost always women doing it, which blows my mind because when I was an exchange student in the nineties. There were more women than men doing it, but I just thought that was random chance.

It turns out I looked this up, women are much more likely to study abroad. Even now, I assume that affects hiring because that's been one of the most standout things in my resume since 1998.

[00:31:43] Richard Reeves: Yeah, it's interesting. You get the data we were talking about earlier around education test scores, GPA, that's all interesting, but in some ways, these other measures are more revealing, more like twice as likely to study abroad women than men, twice as likely to do student government, twice as likely to join AmeriCorps.

Twice as likely to join the Peace Corps. All of those things, there are twice as many women as doing men. It's not obvious why, right? You could explain GPA with the school and stuff, but actually it's, it's really tough. When I looked at this study abroad thing, 'cause I found the same thing as you. They're like, it's just much more female.

Now you think that's kind of weird, don't you say, oh, well maybe it's 'cause the subjects, right? 'cause maybe women are doing like languages or history or something. But actually that's not true. It's like even within subjects you get that gap, right? So when people have done research on it, it's just like the girls, young women at that point of course, they just seem to have a bit more ambition, a bit more aspiration, a bit more adventure about them.

And so there's this weird counterintuitive thing where it's supposed to be the guys who are like out there adventuring and going west. It's flipped. Now it's the other way around.

[00:32:47] Jordan Harbinger: You know what? The only thing that occurred to me that I, and I tried so hard to figure this out just based on my own personal experience, which is all anecdotal, but whatever.

When I told everyone I was gonna be an exchange student and go abroad, one, it was a woman's idea. My girlfriend at the time, it was her idea for me to do this in the first place. She's the one who encouraged it the most. When I brought it up. She gave me the idea. Originally, all of my female friends were like, that's gonna be amazing.

Let me help you pick the country that you go to. Let's do pros and cons. And all my buddies, my guy friends were like, man, why are you gonna leave when you're gonna be a senior? It's gonna be awesome. We're gonna run the whole school. And it was like, I. Who cares? Run the whole school. I'm going to Europe for a year.

Whatcha are talking about run the school who care? That's the dumbest possible smallest thinking goal I could ever think of. And all the women were like, oh, I'm so jealous. You don't have to be here next year. That's gonna be amazing. So I was encouraged by my female friends to pack up and go somewhere and my guy friends were, they all thought I was just nuts for leaving.

You have a gym here, what more could you want? You know, it's just total opposite.

[00:33:46] Richard Reeves: They have gyms in Europe.

[00:33:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Although not as many.

[00:33:48] Richard Reeves: But it's interesting. Your experience is exactly what the research shows, which is that the effects of peers on men were to make them less likely to go. Peers were discouraging of studying abroad, whereas female E Exactly.

Your experience, although I have to wonder, I have to ask this question. When your girlfriend suggests that you go abroad for a year, could she be saying something else? Was that just a way of breaking up with you? Well, so she

[00:34:09] Jordan Harbinger: was moving to Norway to go to boarding school, so that was already happening.

That was like, Hey, by the way, so she wanted to get you closer? Maybe. I don't think she cared anymore, but then I said, oh, I'm so jealous that you're leaving. Same thing that most of the women were saying to me, and then I said, all my friends were getting in trouble. They're getting in more trouble. They're doing way more drugs that I'm comfortable with.

I don't wanna sit around drinking all day and Russ's basement. This is getting old and we're only juniors. And she's like, why don't you become an exchange student like Jane, that was a girl from Norway that was in our class. And I said, that would be cool. How do you do that? She goes, oh, I have a brochure sitting on my coffee table right now.

Next time you come over, I'll give it to you, or I'll bring it over to your house. And I just read this thing and looked at every country and the world just opened up right before my eyes when I saw this brochure and she was like, you have to do it. And I said, it's expensive. And she's like, my mom will help you convince your parents.

And she did. Her mom was a senator, so she was like, I'm calling your parents and telling them why this is important for you to do. And they believed her. So that's how I ended up an exchange student. You know, a little appeal to the story, but I

[00:35:11] Richard Reeves: mean, as you say, like it is, it's great for the resume. It's great experience.

It is also interesting, like girls, young women are more like to move away from home, right? So we're about to produce some research showing that half the counties in the US now have got more men than women in them. Because the women have moved away to the cities to get jobs and have more opportunities.

And so obviously they go away to college. And so women are now more mobile geographically than women as well. So you've got this situation where you're also more likely to leave home, buy their own home, move to a different place, go to college, study abroad, volunteer. And so there's all of these things that are just like skewing much more female now.

And that's great, of course, that women are doing all those things, but it's not great that men aren't doing those things. And so I think we've really gotta ask ourselves the question, what's happening with our guys now? So many of our young men where they're just not feeling that same level of motivation and aspiration as young women, right?

We don't wanna go back to a world where women were discouraged from doing it. Of course not. But we should worry when we see gender gaps like that two to one, we should at least be asking the question like, why is that happening? Is that good? But the trouble is back to where we started. Like so many people just don't even want to confront the fact that this could be an area where we should be more worried about men than women.

They just can't do that because they think politically that's not acceptable, and that's just get us into a horrible position.

[00:36:25] Jordan Harbinger: Another thing I'm worried about, I know we just got done talking about how great the trades are, but isn't automation replacing a lot of what was traditionally men's work? I know Uncle Frank's spit takes at the dinner table say that it's because the whole generation got lazy, but that's not really what's happening, right?

[00:36:40] Richard Reeves: No. The main reason why you saw this impact on men's jobs was exactly that. It was automation. I. Big one, but also free trade. So as we saw the competition, and so I can't remember the exact numbers, but there's the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the federal government, they have this measure of like jobs that require you to lift a certain amount of weight.

I don't know what it is like where you have to lift 50 pounds more than 10 times a day or the equipment, something like that. I

[00:37:01] Jordan Harbinger: know flight attendants have that, but that's 'cause they gotta be able to put people's luggage in the overhead thing. That's true. I hadn't thought of that. They still count. I'm sure they do.

I've heard them say that to me. 'cause I'm like, oh. Isn't that heavy And she's like, we literally have to be able to do this for our job or we can't work.

[00:37:16] Richard Reeves: Yeah. God, that's really interesting. I never thought about the uh, stewardesses doing that, but the number of jobs that require that sort of physical strength has gone from something like 30% to 10% and falling like it's single figures now.

And so those sort of physical strength jobs have either been replaced by automation or they've gone somewhere where the labor is cheaper. And so that's been a big cause of this decline in male employment and male wages. I think actually AI is gonna be very different. I actually think that AI might hit some women's jobs a bit more.

[00:37:45] Jordan Harbinger: It's coming for us lawyers. I know that all the lawyers are like, oh, it's never gonna be able to do, and I'm like, let me stop you right there. Everything that you can do, unless you're like a partner in a very specialized area of law, it can already do that. You just don't know how it works.

[00:37:57] Richard Reeves: That's right.

If there's one profession that should get wiped out by ai, it is law.

[00:38:01] Jordan Harbinger: It is. Yeah. Like it can't stand up at trial and argue for your client, but that's not what you do. You manage a spreadsheet, right. Briefs. You said, I may be paraphrasing here. Men and women's grip strength is now largely the same, which is such a weird, first of all, who's measuring this across generations?

That's such a bizarre metric to even exist.

[00:38:20] Richard Reeves: Yeah. I mean, I have to confess, that looked at some other studies since, and that hasn't replicated very well. Okay. Because

[00:38:25] Jordan Harbinger: I thought that cannot be just genetically from testosterone levels. That just can't be true. But what do I know

[00:38:32] Richard Reeves: the, it is true that younger men are actually like less strong than men used to be at their age.

And that women have gotten stronger, especially some women kind of in their thirties and forties. And so you can easily imagine a situation where 30, 40 years ago, like your mom didn't have amazing grip strength and your friends did. And now you can imagine a situation where your mom is going to like.

Pilates and CrossFit or your wife or, and actually the boy just got tendonitis from gaming or whatever. And that is true. The gap has narrowed, but the gap hasn't closed completely in the way of one study. It's one of those I, I'll confess to you, it's one of those studies I just thought that was so weird.

I put it in.

[00:39:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I agree with you. I thought what a strange thing to even be measuring.

[00:39:17] Richard Reeves: Yeah. But it's interesting, like it is capturing something important. Jonathan, he's work. Yeah. Yeah. He's been on the show a few times. Yeah. So John's got this great stat where he shows now that the average 15-year-old boy is less likely to break his arm than the average 50-year-old man.

[00:39:33] Jordan Harbinger: Well just 'cause they're inside all day doing nothing.

[00:39:36] Richard Reeves: Yeah. So it used to be that 15-year-old boys would fall out of a tree or they'd be out skateboarding or biking. So they'd fall over and break their on like most of us did. And the 50-year-old men were not doing that. Whereas now like the dads are all growing out on their mountain bikes.

It's true.

[00:39:48] Jordan Harbinger: And the

[00:39:48] Richard Reeves: suns are

[00:39:49] Jordan Harbinger: inside. It's true. Yeah. I certainly now at age 40 5:00 AM doing way more than I did, even as a teenager. Friends of mine are like, oh, remember when you were a kid and this happened? And I was like, man, I must have been even more of an indoor kid than I thought. Because all this stuff's happened to me now that now I'm finally 45 living life.

Before then I was, I was an indoor kid.

[00:40:08] Richard Reeves: Yeah. Better late than never.

[00:40:09] Jordan Harbinger: Better late than never. That's right. I always tell people, say I'm in the best shape of my life. They're like, wow. What's your secret? The secret is be in really bad shape for most of your life. That's really the trick from a really low base.

Exactly. The bar is on the floor. It's holding up from there.

[00:40:22] Richard Reeves: Yeah.

[00:40:23] Jordan Harbinger: Do you worry at all that the drop in male employment will result, or maybe even already has resulted in electoral shifts in the United States and in Europe for that matter?

[00:40:33] Richard Reeves: Yeah. I worry generally that when men are struggling economically, that that could be lack of employment, could be lower wages, could be some of these health issues.

One of the things we showed was that for men who are out of work, this is men without a college degree, half of them said that they had some sort of health problem. Usually it would be mental health problem or an addiction problem, whatever. So health and family, life and work, they all go together. So you might measure one thing.

Employment. But actually it's probably capturing a bunch of other things too, like health and motivation and all kinds of stuff. But yeah, there's pretty good evidence that once men become economically vulnerable, they're really struggling. They are much more open to an argument that is a more reactionary argument that basically is a, we need to go back.

It's an argument based on, let's go back to the world that your dad had, right? Let's go back to the world where men were the breadwinners, et cetera. And you can see how if you are a guy who's just really struggling. To find a footing, right? You're not doing well on lots of fronts. You can see how your struggles could actually put you in a position where you are quite open to that sort of politics.

And so I do think that without making a partisan point, I think that actually, 'cause it could be reaction left or right or whatever, I just think that when men aren't doing well, they're just much more politically available in a way. You saw that in the last election in the us. I think one of the reasons for that is 'cause they just feel like their concerns are just not being taken seriously on the political left.

And they're not wrong about that. And so I think that to some extent we've all gotta take some responsibility for what's happening.

[00:42:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I worry that if responsible parties don't address all these issues, that irresponsible people will take advantage of that. We've seen that throughout history in many

[00:42:15] Richard Reeves: ways.

That's exactly what happens. I think it's basically true that if there is a real problem, right? So you can imagine something like a made up problem, right? But if it's a real problem, you don't see governments and think tanks and. Podcasters and media taking that stuff seriously, reporting on it, tackling it.

Then someone's gonna come along and say, hang on. One of the things I've noticed is that some of the more reactionary online figures in the sort of men's sphere, what they do is they come along and they say, A lot of men and boys are really struggling. The powers that be are not paying attention to those problems.

They, in parentheses, they the elite, the whatever. That's because they've been overrun by woke feminists and they hate men. That's why you should click on my website, load my brochure for how to be a better buffer man or whatever, or vote for me or whatever. It's, the problem with that is the first statement is true.

Men are struggling, boys and men are struggling. The second statement that we are not paying enough attention to those issues is also true. The third statement, that's because the work feminists have taken over and hate men is not true. You can find a few soundbites, you can make it sound true. The way to address the problem of reactionary figures pointing are accurately to the actual problems of boys and men.

And pointing to the neglect of them is to not neglect them, is to make them sound crazy so that if they say they are not paying attention to the male suicide crisis, they are not doing anything about the fact boys are struggling in school, you can say, what are you talking about? We have whole policies around that.

What are you talking about? You sound crazy. The trouble is right now, they don't sound crazy. They sound plausible 'cause we are not doing enough to help boys and men. And that just seeds the political ground to the people who can weaponize it.

[00:43:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we've seen that with the rise of guys like Andrew Tate for example.

I don't think that's a partisan comment. He's far enough out there that he's off the

[00:44:06] Richard Reeves: reservation politically, I think. Yeah, that's right.

[00:44:08] Jordan Harbinger: I'd love to talk about the term toxic masculinity 'cause I don't think it's done anybody any favors because it basically doesn't mean anything. And if it ever did, it doesn't mean anything now, to me anyway.

I don't even know what people are talking about when they say it. Do they mean that masculinity is toxic? Do they mean that too much of it is toxic or is it a different variation of masculinity that is toxic? I don't have a clue.

[00:44:27] Richard Reeves: They don't, what it usually means is that they don't like what you're doing right now.

Yeah.

[00:44:31] Jordan Harbinger: That's all I know. That's all I know is they're trying to throw a label and then get me to stop talking.

[00:44:35] Richard Reeves: Good luck with that. That's right. No, it's actually, oddly, it used to mean something, right? So before 2016, it was a very academic term, mentioned a few times in footnotes journals. It was really about how men and some had actually just their own mental health issues, sociopaths honestly, for whom their ideas of masculinity had to come entwined with violence and kind of ance.

So it was a really very specific term, used in a very precise way in academia in 2016. It just burst into the mainstream and was suddenly being used for everything. And so suddenly, like everything was toxic masculinity. And so it became, I think at this point it's a slur. It also turns men off. I don't think it's very exciting to say to men, you know what?

We have a vision for modern masculinity. We could make you not toxic. People will say, well, not all masculinity is toxic. Like, okay, well tell me some good things about masculinity though. And they can't do that. 'cause then they fall into the trap of saying that there are some things that are more masculine that are good.

They don't wanna say that. And so it just ends up being this sort of turn that's thrown around. It's become very counterproductive. And the trouble is you put the word toxic next to the word masculinity and then you wonder why so many boys have been turned off by that debate. I think it's a problem in itself, but it's also just I think, a symptom of a broader problem, particularly on the center left in politics where just an inability to have a positive story to tell about masculinity.

I really come to believe that too many people even now struggle to admit that men are having problems 'cause they think men are the problem. And until we get past that, we're just gonna keep losing these men. What

[00:46:12] Jordan Harbinger: do you think of some of these Alts men's movements like you mentioned earlier, red Pill, I think you mentioned men going their own way.

M-G-T-O-W. I don't know if they say that as an acronym or not.

[00:46:21] Richard Reeves: I think they say ows. I,

[00:46:22] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, it's awkward. But first of all, what are those for people who've never heard of this and what do you make of those? I.

[00:46:28] Richard Reeves: If you get into the sort of manosphere men's rights stuff, there's a whole bunch of different issues.

So mug towels, yes. Men going their own way. That's one group. They're basically male separatists. What they're basically saying is, look, the whole system's stacked against you. If you do get a job, you're gonna be screwed over. And then if you do get a woman to have a baby with her, she's gonna boot you out.

The moment another guy comes along who's better than you, then you're gonna be on the hook for child support. So basically they're like, screw all this. They're just rejecting the idea of family, of fatherhood, of marriage, even of work in some cases. So it's a very strong reaction against this sense that like society's rigged against men.

Now there's a red pill movement, which is just a broader term for just like men who've basically somehow woken up and realized that the world has turned against them and that there's a kind of progressive feminist worldview now that's taken over, et cetera. There's incel, involuntary celibates. Men who can't get a girlfriend, et cetera.

And so there's a whole bunch of like different groups that are online now. And what I think about that is actually something like those groups can be quite supportive actually in many cases of those men. But it's also where reaction goes. It's like they feed off each other, they victimize themselves, they find someone else to blame.

I think the big problem with those men's rights groups, it's not that they're usually misstating that there are actual problems, it's that they want someone to blame. I. They find someone to blame in women or in the women's rights movements or in whatever. And the truth is that it is true that boys and men are struggling, but no one's to blame.

No one's deliberately doing it to you. So they end up being the least masculine thing of all in many ways, which is victims. Yeah, that's true. So the whole men's rights movement, like pretends to be this kinda super masculine movement, but actually they spend all their time complaining. Yeah. Whining online.

Exactly. Whining on Reddit, which is not very masculine,

[00:48:09] Jordan Harbinger: but who needs friends and relationships when you have the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. As Anthony Bourdain once said, travel isn't always pretty, it's not always comfortable, but that's okay.

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I was born at the right place at the right time in a good family. I'll let people decide if I have good genetics based on whoever's watching on YouTube. But I had luck in the job market, especially with timing. I had luck in business, but if any of those things at any kind of point had gone wrong, I might also easily be blaming women or society for my life, not turning out the way that I expected it or wanted it to.

So I kind of, in a way, I have real empathy for these guys. Me too. They're handling it terribly. It's just the worst way possible. Whining online all day. But I also really, I understand how they got there.

[00:51:49] Richard Reeves: Yeah. I think it's important that we do actually, I think there's a tendency to dismiss the underlying causes.

'cause you can think, look guys, this is not a very healthy response to the challenges you're facing. That's the right answer. Right? It is not to say. You don't face any challenges. What are you talking about? We live in a patriarchy, so it's difficult because you don't want to, in any way, be seen to be like justifying some of these movements.

But I also say one more thing, which having raised boys myself over, they're in their twenties now, is that actually, if boys are largely exposed to very liberal environments, liberal schools, liberal households, there's a good chance they're gonna go through a phase, right? They're gonna go through a phase.

It might be not be Andrew Tate phase, it could be Jordan Peterson phase, or Ben Shapiro, but they're gonna go through a phase because if all they're hearing is like a very progressive orthodoxy, I. Then they're gonna go online and they're gonna find it. It's almost like an act of rebellion as well.

Teenage boys especially love being transgressive. And so if all they hear is progressive Orthodox views, they're gonna transgress against them. And if you're a 15-year-old boy and you've got a feminist mom, the way to really get under her skin is start telling her like, I think Andrew Tate's got a lot of really good points.

Yeah,

[00:52:53] Jordan Harbinger: I agree. I think we push people to extremes. A lot of times it's to the right, but it's not always to the right. But we push guys like this to extremes because like you said, some of what they say is correct and then we refuse to acknowledge that, which just gets them to dig in their heels more. And it's not, this is a group of guys that want all women to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

That's an extreme reaction. To stimuli that they're getting it elsewhere. Our mutual friend, Ryan Holiday likes to say, we can't let the crazy people make us crazy. People, and the algorithms are trying to radicalize you. Political parties are trying to radicalize you, Grifters on the internet are trying to radicalize you.

So like can we be surprised that some of us get radicalized by the system that is doing that? Especially when you know, you get divorced, you lose your kids, then you get laid off, and of course you're not doing well. Of course you're gonna look for a scapegoat. Yeah. What advice would you give to young men navigating societal expectations and redefining their roles in today's world?

I know that's a really broad question, but you're the man for the job.

[00:53:53] Richard Reeves: Thank you. I'm not sure I am, honestly, I'm very proud of my three sons all in their twenties now, so I guess that's probably my best claim to expertise. Yeah. Look, your kids are functional members of society. Congratulations. Yeah, no, they're amazing.

I think the first thing is to just acknowledge that if you're struggling, maybe at school or if you're struggling to figure this stuff out, you're not alone. This is a perplexing time to be figuring out how to be a man. It is right for all the good reasons we've explained, et cetera, and the school system may not be working very well for you.

So the first thing is like, just give yourself a break. It's not that there's something wrong with you, right? It's not that you are not masculine enough or too masculine, or don't believe those people online telling you that there's something wrong with you that's not true. So at first, have some empathy, right?

Second thing is figure out a little bit for yourself. Who you want. Don't let someone else give you a script, whether it's me or somebody else. That's why I'm a bit reluctant to talk about this. But I think the third thing I'd say is like, if you feel good about being a guy, being a boy, being a man, good.

Feel okay about that? Feel okay in your skin? Feel okay with your male friends? If there are certain aspects of your behavior that just skew a little bit more male, it's good. That's fine. Hang out and have male friends, right? Make sure you've got kind of male friends. Have your crew, have your buddies, have your gang, whatever you want.

Like gotta look out for each other. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. And so those are the things about, be very thoughtful about you making your friends. Be very thoughtful about having your own scri and someone else do it. And don't beat yourself up. And also, it's a direct message to them, which is, we see you, we care about you.

You're precious to us. You're precious in our sight. We need you. The tribe needs you. And I do think that we're not good enough at saying that to young men anymore. We need you. The tribe needs you. I think that the contest for the allegiance of young men is always being fought. Young men, I think especially need to feel like park something bigger themselves to be allied to something, whether it's a team or a tribe or whatever.

And so let's find something to ally yourself to and be unashamed about that. I just saw this, I haven't written this up yet, but I just saw this kind of slightly worrying, disturbing survey, which finds that people, women especially, are much more suspicious of all male social groups than all female social groups, right?

So girls nights out, girls trips, girls groups are like good but suspicious of male ones. That's a real step backwards.

[00:56:16] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. When, when it's a boys, boys trip is you're gonna do something and then everyone's gonna, yeah, yeah.

[00:56:22] Richard Reeves: I get why? But I understand it, but I don't agree with it. And I think if we undermine male solidarity and we make men feel bad about wanting to hang out with men, sometimes you see the friendship recession I mentioned earlier, and actually we're signaling that maybe there's something bad about being male and.

That's something. Nothing intrinsically bad about being male. It's awesome being male, right?

[00:56:41] Jordan Harbinger: Wouldn't you say? Do you like being a guy? Yeah. I mean, personally I like it. It's great. I couldn't handle being a woman first of all, so it's the only option left on the table. That's right. Debatably. So yeah. I have to replay that clip for my wife when I want to go on a a boys trip this summer.

Hey, I'm sorry. Richard Reeves says

[00:56:58] Richard Reeves: the expert. You could say doctor, professor. That's right. PhD. Richard Re, he says,

[00:57:03] Jordan Harbinger: I have to authority. Exactly. Dror says I have to go get drunk in Berlin. I'm sorry. I don't have a choice. What steps can both men and women take to bridge? Maybe this growing disconnect in modern relationships too, because we see this all the time in marriage.

Men work less when they're not providers. They don't see themselves as providers, so they're working less. Divorce is harder on men psychologically. I read that in your book as well. And lower earnings from men result in less marriage. So it's not just like women are taking off without us. It's like actually everything's getting screwed up now and it's gonna get worse.

[00:57:36] Richard Reeves: Yeah, it is true that if men are floundering, it's hard for women to flourish. And so it's in everyone's interest to help your partner to flourish. And if it's a man, then it's gonna be flourishing more as a man, again, as a, as a woman. And I think that it's hard for me to kind of advise women. You can advise men if you want, just to avoid this landmine that I've said for you.

Well, maybe I will end up talking about women, but I think the secret probably is each of you putting equal effort in and appreciating and respecting the other for the effort that they're putting in, whatever that is. And if there's a bit of a division of labor, either the traditional way or the other way.

Cool. I was a St Home dad for a while. My wife knew I had the kids. I was on it. I was on it. I did that. That was my job. So she could worry about her job. Split every task 50 50. That's insane. It's incredibly inefficient. But we really respected and were appreciative for like when she was doing that earning and I was doing at home all the other way round, I.

I think in the end that's all we can ask of each other is that we can kind of look each other in the eye, trust each other that we're working hard and never roll your eyes. Have you seen that data from the Love lab about rolling your eyes at each other?

[00:58:40] Jordan Harbinger: No. I remember that contempt is the number one indicator of divorce and rolling your eyes sounds like it's part of that.

That's what it is.

[00:58:47] Richard Reeves: Yeah, I think that's right. So if you ever find yourself rolling your eyes at each other, then you are in real trouble. Because what that indicates is, is contempt. So lack of respect. And there's an old traditional saying, which is women need to hear that they're loved and men need to hear that they're respected.

And I'm gonna say there's a grain of truth to that. I do not wanna stereotype. I do not wanna say it's true of everybody. Don't fill up my inbox with, how dare you make assumptions about everybody. I'm sure like men need to hear their love too. But yeah, it does feel true to me. I just think there's some level I.

Which like if men don't feel that they're respected by their partners for their efforts, whatever they are, that's really corrosive to them. I think that men to some extent, for good or I do see themselves somewhat reflected in their partner's eyes. And so I do think that as the partner, as kind of woman of a man, just recognize that he to some extent is seeing himself through your eyes.

And so be very careful about how you look at him and what you say to him. And of course it's the same is true the other way around, of course, all the caveats. But I do worry, it's partly back to this conversation about toxic masculinity, rolling your eyes, boys trips, et cetera, which is that there's sometimes in our culture, a bit of a tendency to infantalize men now or to dismiss them, roll our eyes at them, tell 'em they're mansplaining, put them down a little bit.

And I think that's incredibly unfortunate, and we should make sure that we don't poison our own personal relationships with that kind of dynamic.

[01:00:15] Jordan Harbinger: I love that this is totally a non-sequitur, but Oh, well, I gotta say I'm worried about AI relationships supplanting human ones. God just given, oh my God. Just given the changing landscape where women no longer need men as much economically, and men are kind of like, well, if this isn't gonna work and I'm not good enough, I'm just gonna retreat into the internet.

What impacts do you foresee for men moving forward? It's only a matter of time until guys are like, who doesn't give me any crap? My AI girlfriend and the woman's who doesn't cost me money and tell me bad things and make me feel bad because he's emasculated my AI boyfriend that I can turn off when I go to sleep or whatever.

I feel like that's just right around the corner, man.

[01:00:50] Richard Reeves: Well, I think it's a serious point here is, but it's interesting, isn't it? It's more discussion of AI girlfriends.

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, that might come first because it's harder to program what women need for an AI boyfriend, whereas AI girlfriend I, I think we can all imagine the ingredients that go into that and how simple that might actually be.

Right.

[01:01:05] Richard Reeves: Good. So that's your inbox filling up, not mine now. Yes, I got you to say it. That one's on me. Yeah, I think that's, but it is interesting because there is a difference. Actually John, he who we talked about before, he's actually written a piece for us, for the My Institute on kind of really worrying that already, I think like young men, if they're lost, are particularly susceptible to becoming hooked by something online.

Think about porn like even before ai. I think if the world outside is difficult to navigate, hard dating, et cetera, it's confusing and the world inside is getting better and better by comparison to what was in the past. I think that's a, it's a huge problem and it's less, for me, it's some, it's less of a problem in itself.

Maybe if the guy's got an AI girlfriend, like I don't know if that's bad in itself. It might be, but I do know that it's bad if it's stopping him going out and meeting actual girls. Trust me, it will, it's displacing it and then he gets less skilled at it, which makes it harder for him, and so you have a really downward spiral.

I think on the other hand, the challenge for men is like much more like the AI husband than the AI boyfriend. So this friend, he just wasn't very good at listening to his wife. Talking about the same thing. She'd come home, she has this problem at work and she'd come, had this problem at work today. It's basically the same problem.

This person shouldn't like working with she. And he was like, classically male, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to fix it? What's the problem here, let's break this down. And you call this. And she's like, no, I just, I need to listen. So yes, he persuaded her eventually to listen to an ai. So they get, I dunno which ai, it was CLA or something.

And he programmed it, be an empathetic husband to my wife, call her Eleanor. So Eleanor. So she talks to it and says, I'm having a difficult time at work. It was probably my boss. And the AI says, Eleanor, I'm really sorry to hear that. That must really hurt. Do you wanna talk about that? And she's pointing at the phone saying, this is what I need you to be like.

And he's like, no, perfect. I'll go watch the baseball and I'll leave you with the ai. Yeah, you can use

[01:02:55] Jordan Harbinger: this for as long as you want. Honey. It's 20 bucks a month. I got it.

[01:02:58] Richard Reeves: Sorry. He just go to the basement. But behind the sort of humor of that is that actually. There may well be slightly different things that men and women are on average looking for from relationships.

And part of the challenge and the beauty of every human culture has been to find ways to bring us into this really kind of wonderful relationship with each other. Or we do meet different needs, et cetera, over the course of relationship. And then you start to worry, well, how much of that can be contracted out to ais?

And I think that's a big problem potentially.

[01:03:27] Jordan Harbinger: It is. And people, they'll say, oh, I don't really think that's gonna happen. And I think, okay. I tell 'em the following, and maybe you can disagree with me on this example here, but imagine that your friend is dating someone and they don't really like them that much, but they're in a relationship.

It's the first girl that he's dated for this long, and there's so many things wrong with that relationship, and they both see it, but they don't break up because they don't wanna be alone. So what is he not doing? He's not going out and meeting new people. He's not really working on his social skills for meeting new people.

He's not really raising his standards much above where he's at with her. He's just complaining about the death of it's

[01:04:01] Richard Reeves: atrophying, basically. He's atrophying. Yeah.

[01:04:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. What if he's not in a relationship with a girlfriend? What if he's in a relationship with an ai? He's got the exact same set of problems, except for he's got no reason and no motivation to go out to a bar with his buddies and get rejected or laughed at, or maybe just not talked to by the girl that he liked.

Why deal with that? You have to constantly be charging into battle almost socially until you get good at it and then you start to enjoy it. But if you never make it through that developmental phase, you probably won't ever be able to do that comfortably.

[01:04:36] Richard Reeves: I. Yeah, I think it's also part of a deeper challenge, which is that we have to get good at rejection and we have to get good at failure.

And that's how you build resilience. And if you retreat into this AI and online world, you just, you don't get rejected. Your AI girlfriend does not reject you. Whereas in real life, the real women and real girls are going to reject you. You are going to ask them out and they're going to say no. And that's just part of life and, and you're gonna apply for jobs and you're not gonna get 'em, and you're gonna work hard and you're not gonna get a good grade and you're gonna take an exam and you're gonna fail it.

And I just think it's part, a broader issue, which is that kinda rejection breeds resilience. And that's just as true in romantic life as it is in the other. And then, so you lose the skill, I think in the end you end up being de-skilled and then it's a vicious cycle because you don't have good skills around other people and kind of women especially, it's worse.

And you're very sensitive to rejection. I. And so you get rejected and you think I'm done. One girl says, no. You ask a girl out and the next in cell AI basement and if you're not careful, because it's risky, right? I remember first time asking a girl out in school, oh my god, your heart's in your mouth, right?

And then of course she said, no. In fact, a many of mine, and I did it together. We asked two girls out. They were both called Debbie. And so we asked both of them out. It was just coincidence. They were best friends with a case called Debbie. So we were gonna ask them out together. 'cause we were so terrified.

So we thought, we'll ask em out on a double date. So we got doubly rejected. 'cause they said, both said no to both of us. Brutal. Brutal. And you never recovered.

[01:06:09] Jordan Harbinger: That's what, yeah,

[01:06:11] Richard Reeves: that's right. I've never recovered. That's right.

[01:06:13] Jordan Harbinger: Dang. All jokes aside. What are some of the long-term consequences of neglecting these issues for both men and society as a whole?

Because I. This could affect future generations societal cohesion. I know I might sound like I'm overstating it, but if people siphon off too much, that's a really big problem.

[01:06:31] Richard Reeves: Yeah, I mean, there's lots of more sort of straightforward problems, which are like, we're just leaving too much skill on the table.

We're not making good use of our men if they're not in the workforce, that's bad for the economy. All the usual arguments you'd expect a kind of policy type scholar to make. Also, family life just is harder. I mean, if men's wages aren't going up, then what we're seeing is that kind of women are having to pick up more of that, and that's good in some ways, but also like we should be sharing.

You are pointing towards a potential longer term cultural problem. And it's too early to say yet whether we're gonna become South Korea, where there's such a huge divide now between young men and young women that the fertility rate is cratered. You're seeing a dating market is in shambles, also very reactionary politics taking over where it's just, it's almost like a simmering gender war basically.

And you're seeing us trending in that direction where you're seeing political polarization, the dating markets not working well. There's a lot of blame being flung around between young men and young women. So in the long run as consequences, of course, just for the men themselves, if a man ends up despairing or taking his life or not, just not having a purposeful, flourishing life, that's just bad period bad for women because they want, generally men, if they're gonna create families, they want strong, flourishing, good, interesting men.

But I also think that there's. A danger that we start to see family formation really being affected. I've been saying for quite a long time now that the declining fertility rate changes in dating we're fine. We're fine. To be fair, a lot more conservatives have been ringing the alarm bell on this for quite a long time.

I'm now pretty worried about it. We're about to publish some data showing that 15 to 24 year olds are much less likely to say they want to have kids than any previous generation

[01:08:23] Jordan Harbinger: I, I believe that

[01:08:24] Richard Reeves: much less likely. I mean, it's only happening now. They might change their mind, et cetera. And I mentioned the loneliness stuff before the dating problems, and so I actually think that if we don't find ways to lift up men, young men, help them educationally, help 'em economically, just help them in their personal life just to be as awesome as they can be, I think we're gonna have fewer kids.

We're gonna have fewer families think that's bad for everybody, bad for the economy, bad for women, bad for men. And so I would not have said this even probably two years ago, Jordan, but I'm, as I see them with the data coming in politically, culturally, economically, I didn't use to say there was a crisis.

I don't use the word crisis very. I think I might start to now because I just, I'm looking at these numbers and I'm looking at what's talking about a young man. I'm saying, we have gotta get ahead of this. We've gotta get ahead of this. We're reaching some tipping points. If we don't get ahead of this

[01:09:15] Jordan Harbinger: one, that's alarming.

And two, it completely makes sense and jives with just the anecdote. I always ask my younger cousins and friends and show fans questions like this, and I don't think any of 'em have said they want to kiss. Some of the more sort of conservative or religious people are like, yeah, I wanna have. Five kids.

'cause I grew up in a family of eight. It's like, oh, you're only having five. It's one of those. But my cousins and stuff, they're like, no, why would I have kids? My life is really good right now and I hope they change their mind. But when I was 20 something I said, yes, definitely I wanna have kids. So did my wife.

She was always like, yeah, I definitely wanna do this. My parents were quite similar with a lot of this. I think it's hard to update our beliefs to match the new facts at hand. So I can see a lot of people just saying, there's still so much work to do with racial equality and with women's rights, which, and they are correct on that.

But I think it's hard to say men need help and then update our belief structure to match that.

[01:10:09] Richard Reeves: Partly 'cause it's changed quickly. Right. It's an uncomfortable conversation to have. It's honestly one of the reasons I ended up having it. A lot of people just said, look, you can't do this. I'm like, look, I'm very boring.

I have charts at the time. I'm Brookings Scholar for the love of God. Like if I can't talk about this, who can talk about it? The more people said I shouldn't talk about it more. I thought, really? Wow. I must talk about it. Because if we're not having this conversation in good faith about real problems, I hope by now we've persuaded enough people, there's real stuff happening.

This is not made up. The men's rights movement is not making up problems that are a real problem, and if we don't talk about them and address them, it's not like somebody else won't be talking about them. That's what happens. As you said a while ago, if you neglect problems, they tone into grievances and problems.

So I get it. The sort of tiny violin, are you kidding me? Eye roll thing. I understand that instinct, but we've gotta get past it. I honor that instinct. We've gotta get past it. If we don't talk about it, someone else is gonna be talking about it. Yes. Do we need more women in politics? Yes. We need more women CEOs.

Yes. We need to close the gender pay gap. Yes. We need to reduce violence against women. Yes. We need more capital. Only about 3% of venture capital money goes to female founders. Is that a problem? It's a huge problem. Should we be doing stuff about that? We are, by the way, we are doing quite a lot about those problems and we still need to do more and we can tackle these problems of boys and men.

Anybody who says that we have to choose between them. People on the left saying we have to focus on women, can't focus on men. That's not sensible. People on the right who say, yeah, we should focus on men. To ignore all this feminism stuff for women. It's all quotes gone too far. The people I admire, people like the now former surgeon general, Vivek Murphy who said, I have a son and a daughter.

I'm worried about both of them. I care about both of them. And as a society, that's how we have to think about this. It's and not, or, and right now too much of our politics, especially around gender, is being framed as, or pick a side pink or blue left or right, insane. And it's got us to a very difficult place in our culture.

And so we've just all gotta give ourselves permission to care about boys and men, to advocate for boys and men, to help boys and men without living in fear of the fact that in doing that, we've somehow gone over to the dark side and become a misogynist. That is not true, and it's more of us that say that the less true it'll become.

[01:12:36] Jordan Harbinger: I. Richard Reeves, thank you very much. That was an awesome ending. I didn't wanna step on you. I hope that was where you wanted to land it. 'cause that was great.

[01:12:43] Richard Reeves: Fantastic. Crushed it. I said a lot of new stuff for you 'cause you're just an great conversationalist and interviewer as I knew, of course, from your work, but Oh, thank you.

I appreciate that. You're really good at this. Really good.

[01:12:53] Jordan Harbinger: Thanks, man.

[01:12:54] Richard Reeves: Thank you.

[01:12:56] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview trailer of our interview with Mike Rowe, host of Discover's Dirty Jobs and returning the favor. On why the advice follow your passion is complete bs

[01:13:06] JHS Clip: follow Your passion as a bromide is precisely what 98% of the people do who audition for American Idol, and they're lined up thousands of people who have been told.

If you believe something deeply enough, and if you want something bad enough, and if you truly embrace the essence of persistence and your passion, if you let your passion lead, you stick with it. Well, following your passion is terrific advice if the passion is taking you to a place where opportunity and your own set of skills will be able to coexist.

Passion is something that all of the dirty jobbers that I met possessed in spades. They just weren't doing anything that looked aspirational, so it was confusing. Took a guy in a plaid shirt sipping a cappuccino. That doesn't make sense. Well, guess what? Neither does a septic tank cleaner worth a million dollars.

That

[01:14:01] Jordan Harbinger: guy had a million

[01:14:01] JHS Clip: dollar business. I actually counted 'em up once. I could be wrong by a couple, but I put over 40 people that we featured on Dirty Jobs as multimillionaires. Passion isn't the enemy. It's just not the thing you want pulling the train. But look, I don't say don't follow your passion. I say never follow your passion, but always bring it with you.

[01:14:27] Jordan Harbinger: For more with Mike Rowe, including a behind the scenes look at some of his shows. And why we shouldn't view a blue collar career pursuit as a cautionary tale. Check out episode 2 64 right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I wanna be clear, again, this is not supposed to be something sort of anti-women. I know some people, they love to be offended.

Those people that do this for sport, they're gonna look for something wrong with this episode. I will finish with this. The US economy is $2 trillion larger than it would be without women. That is great for the country all around. Again, this episode is not about what women are or are not doing. They're doing great.

But this episode is about where men are actually falling behind. Nobody expected gender equality in the other direction. There's actually a bigger gender gap now than there was when Title IX was passed in the other direction. That's pretty serious business, and I'm not saying we need to get rid of any of these reforms.

I'm just saying us guys, we need to catch up. We need to pay attention to each other. We need to help each other out, and men are even much more likely to drop out of school at every level. Additionally, one in four boys is diagnosed with some sort of learning or developmental disability. That is a lot one in four.

Holy moly. Seems like the system is the problem, not necessarily the diagnosis here. Look, I've got some A DD I'm able to do quite a bit. If you haven't noticed. So far so good. I made it through a top law school. I practiced on Wall Street. Now I've got a little podcast that some of you all seem to enjoy here and there.

Turns out I just can't sit still for hours on end listening to somebody talk about calculus equations. I am not really convinced that that's a disability, but you know, I'm no doctor. All things Richard Reeves will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

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