The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 187. The Four Dos and Don'ts of Divorce ｜ Warren Farrell

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:54.060 Hello and welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:56.740 I'm Mikayla Peterson.

00:00:58.940 Quick update on my dad. He's not feeling well.

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00:01:17.460 This is episode 41, recorded on May 25th.

00:01:22.740 Jordan and Warren Farrell discuss the struggles of developing and growing as young men.

00:01:28.960 Young men all over the world are facing detrimental consequences due to educational pressure and the lack of exposure to a fatherly figure.

00:01:36.680 They discuss Warren's book, The Boy Crisis, influences that surround men's development, the importance of parental guidance throughout the adolescent years, raising awareness on mental health, and how to break these cycles.

00:01:50.780 I hope you enjoy this podcast and your week.

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00:03:11.480 Hello, everyone.

00:03:30.920 I'm pleased to be talking today with Dr. Warren Farrell, who I spoke with three years ago, almost to the day,

00:03:37.700 about his previous book, Why Men Earn More.

00:03:42.340 We're going to talk today about The Boy Crisis, which was published just after our last interview, so that's in 2018.

00:03:49.560 Dr. Warren Farrell was chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.

00:03:56.420 His books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 different languages.

00:04:00.380 They include the New York Times bestseller, Why Men Are the Way They Are, which must be a very thick book,

00:04:06.660 plus the international bestseller, The Myth of Male Power.

00:04:10.000 His most recent is The Boy Crisis.

00:04:12.300 We mentioned Why Men Earn More as well, which is a very good book.

00:04:16.080 His most recent is The Boy Crisis, as I said, 2018, co-authored with John Gray.

00:04:21.940 The Boy Crisis was chosen as a finalist for the Forward Indies Award, which is the Independent Publishers Award.

00:04:28.140 Dr. Farrell has been a pioneer in both the women's movement, elected three times to the board of the National Organization of Women in New York City, 0.99

00:04:37.020 and the men's movement, called by GQ magazine, the Martin Luther King of the men's movement.

00:04:43.400 He conducts couples communications workshops nationwide.

00:04:46.680 He's appeared on over 1,000 TV shows.

00:04:49.640 That's way too many TV shows.

00:04:51.300 And has been interviewed by Oprah, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Katie Couric, Larry King, Tucker Carlson, Regis Philbin, and Charlie Rose.

00:05:01.660 He has frequently written for and been featured in the New York Times and other major publications worldwide.

00:05:08.440 He has two daughters, lives with his wife in Mill Valley, California, and resides virtually at www.warrenferrell.com.

00:05:17.200 As I said, we spoke three years ago.

00:05:20.200 It was May 6, 2018, just before Dr. Farrell's book, The Boy Crisis, was published.

00:05:28.260 We'll concentrate today on this book and associated topics.

00:05:32.460 Hello, Warren.

00:05:33.480 So good to see you.

00:05:34.840 It is so good to see you.

00:05:36.540 More than normal, Jordan, for all the, you know, we've had more than the boy crisis.

00:05:41.340 We've had the Jordan Peterson crisis, obviously.

00:05:43.740 Yeah.

00:05:44.780 Very dull topic, that.

00:05:46.080 I don't know.

00:05:49.000 It's just amazing to me that during this process of you going through what you went through, not only with yourself, but with Michaela, with Tammy, that you're not only alive, but that you're also, that you also produce an extraordinary book as well in that period of time.

00:06:04.580 It's just beyond me.

00:06:05.960 No, thank you.

00:06:06.700 Yeah, well, it helped keep me afloat.

00:06:08.200 So I've been reviewing The Boy Crisis in quite a bit of detail over the last few days.

00:06:14.380 It's something I haven't thought about for a while.

00:06:19.060 Certainly, I've thought about it since our last conversation.

00:06:21.880 The world has twisted and turned in all sorts of strange ways since then.

00:06:25.960 And I suppose this issue has been pushed, this particular issue, the boy crisis, let's say, has been pushed to the back burner in a major way by all sorts of, well, cultural movements and by COVID.

00:06:37.920 And it's not precisely on the radar.

00:06:40.100 You mentioned to me just when we were discussing this issue, for example, at the beginning of our conversation today, before we started taping, that President Biden established a White House Gender Policy Council, which is supposed to focus on gender issues.

00:06:56.020 But in your opinion, pretty much only focuses on women and girls and is also supposed to focus on race, but pretty much ignores black boys, which is perhaps the intersectional place, to use a detestable phrase, where the crisis is the most noticeable.

00:07:12.120 So why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book, the title of your book, refers to something that is real?

00:07:20.560 And if it's real, why aren't we attending to it?

00:07:24.520 Why is it important?

00:07:25.380 Yeah, well, first of all, it's real, because in all 56 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject, including reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure, as you can probably imagine.

00:07:41.500 And boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school, and boys in general are much more likely to drop out of high school, especially in the United States.

00:07:54.200 And boys who drop out of high school are more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s.

00:08:00.520 This is a statistic before COVID, when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4% versus more than 20% for boys.

00:08:09.680 And so that's just the academic part of it.

00:08:12.900 On the mental health part of it, when boys and girls are 9, they commit suicide about equally and very minimally.

00:08:20.360 Between the ages of 10 and 14, boys commit suicide twice as often as girls.

00:08:27.060 Between the ages of 15 and 19, they commit suicide four times as often as girls.

00:08:32.540 Between the ages of 20 and 25, they commit suicide about five times as often as girls.

00:08:37.520 And most people don't even know this, pay attention to this.

00:08:41.660 But this is only the tip of the iceberg of the mental health issue.

00:08:46.340 There's, you know, where boys are far more likely to die from drug overdoses, opioid overdoses.

00:08:53.640 They're far more likely to be depressed if you measure depression in a way that includes male symptoms of depression.

00:09:00.520 Much, much more likely to enter into places that take care of people who are mentally, have mental problems and so on.

00:09:15.520 And when boys, and so I started asking myself, you know, what causes all this?

00:09:20.440 You know, and when I first submitted the boy crisis to the publisher and sort of in form of proposal, I outlined 10 causes.

00:09:31.100 And those causes included the environment and schools and so on.

00:09:35.720 But I kept coming back to realizing that the hub cause of the boy crisis was dad deprivation.

00:09:43.300 That the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside.

00:09:47.280 And so that got me really thinking about that.

00:09:51.300 So, for example, boys who are raised by moms and dads together and go from an intact family to a school that has very few male teachers, there's not a huge impact.

00:10:04.440 A little bit of an impact that's negative, but not much.

00:10:07.180 But if they go from a female only home environment, have only a female role model, then they go to a school with almost no male teacher role models.

00:10:18.960 They are much more subjected to much more vulnerable to being seduced by gangs as a as a pseudo family or trying to not having the postponed gratification that dads tend to bring to the family.

00:10:31.520 And so therefore, without that postponed gratification, they're more vulnerable to a drug dealer saying you can make money really easily by dealing drugs.

00:10:40.780 You don't have to worry about getting the best grades in school and you'll you'll prove everybody that you'll drive around in a nice car.

00:10:47.020 You'll be able to get the girls you can't get because you're you're sort of a loser at school, et cetera.

00:10:51.960 So I just started looking at all these things.

00:10:53.940 I saw that the sperm count of boys had dropped 50 percent, that the IQs of boys had dropped 15 percent.

00:11:02.080 And just I started looking and wondering about two things.

00:11:07.500 One is how amazing how much evidence there was for the boy crisis.

00:11:12.840 And the second was exactly the question you asked.

00:11:15.180 Since it's so evident and we're so focused on girls and women's issues, why are we not even seeing the boys and men's issues that are coming up and how damaging it is to women to not have father involvement?

00:11:30.020 For example, women that I had dated between my marriages were constantly talking about being overwhelmed.

00:11:38.760 And so women are losers by fathers not being involved. 1.00

00:11:41.820 Fathers feel a lack of purpose.

00:11:44.100 And they deal with the whole thing that you talk about in your first rule of, you know, not having not having some type of change of culture where there's a vitality to give them to give them purpose.

00:11:57.280 And so we're in a very challenging situation.

00:12:01.000 I did come to understand what the cause of it is, but but it really is depressing to see how ubiquitous that cause is.

00:12:09.180 So why do you think if the crisis is of the magnitude that you suggest, you cite some statistics in the early part of your book.

00:12:21.540 More men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers in all wars since 1945.

00:12:30.620 Suicide now takes more lives than war, murder and natural disasters around the world combined.

00:12:35.640 That might not include COVID, I presume that statistic.

00:12:38.720 Stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life and the rate of suicide is growing much faster for men than for women.

00:12:44.000 You mentioned that boys' IQ has dropped about 15 points since the 1980s and make a case in your book that that's related to fatherlessness.

00:12:53.280 We'll get back into that.

00:12:55.100 Boys scored lower than girls in the 63 largest developed nations in which the PISA, a set of international standard tests, was given.

00:13:03.920 Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math and science.

00:13:12.660 By eighth grade in the US, 40% of girls are at least proficient in writing compared to one in five boys.

00:13:21.800 One in five.

00:13:24.420 Boys who perform as well as girls are graded less favorably.

00:13:28.520 You know, we did some research years ago showing that agreeable children get better grades than their IQ would predict.

00:13:36.060 And girls are more agreeable than boys.

00:13:38.620 And so what that means is if you're less agreeable and more likely to be troubled, then because that is associated with being less agreeable, then you're graded more harshly than your pure cognitive ability would predict.

00:13:50.860 And that probably accounts for the gender difference, or at least for part of it.

00:13:54.740 Not that it particularly matters.

00:13:56.300 Boys have gone from 61% of university degrees to 39%. 0.90

00:14:02.680 Girls, the reverse. 0.98

00:14:04.400 Percent of boys who say they don't like school has gone up 70% since 1980.

00:14:08.960 I imagine it was already pretty high in 1980.

00:14:11.880 Boys are expelled from school three times as often as girls.

00:14:15.940 That's the same statistic, basically, as boys are more likely to be arrested for conduct disorder, juvenile delinquency.

00:14:22.700 Men are much more likely to be imprisoned.

00:14:24.540 And it's the same pattern there.

00:14:28.080 One in three children in the UK and the US grow up without a father.

00:14:33.820 And, you know, our culture pushes the idea constantly that all families are of equal virtue, let's say.

00:14:39.900 And I suppose that's justified in that it's self-evident that of all the things that people strive to do well in their lives, they strive to raise their children, I would say, more diligently than they might meet any other requirement or responsibility.

00:14:59.480 And so it seems cruel to judge the quality of the family, given the commitment that it takes, for example, to be a single parent.

00:15:07.640 But I'm releasing a podcast this week with Richard Trombley, who's perhaps the world's foremost authority on the development of aggression in children, development and regulation.

00:15:17.500 And his data certainly indicates that having a single mother, especially a single mother with issues, is a predictor of the maintenance of aggressive behavior throughout the lifespan, a major predictor. 0.56

00:15:33.180 Now, he associates that more with trouble on the maternal side, young mothers, young uneducated mothers, young uneducated mothers with psychiatric and other health difficulties who lack social support.

00:15:49.360 He hasn't concentrated so much on the fatherlessness end of it, but the upshot or the takeaway is the same.

00:15:56.780 These are families that are not producing children who have the same probability of thriving, let's say.

00:16:04.800 You said also Japan has increased its vocational education programs so that 23% of its high school graduates study at vocational schools and they have a 99.6% employment rate.

00:16:17.260 That's something we can talk about as well.

00:16:19.360 So your book is peppered with, well, painful statistics, I would say.

00:16:30.460 Why do you think we don't attend to this, Warren?

00:16:34.000 I think historically and biologically, men were programmed and really through animals, including insects, right on through to human beings.

00:16:45.720 We were programmed to be able to be willing to die in order to get women's love. 0.94

00:16:51.440 And so in every generation had its war.

00:16:53.840 And in each generation's war, we said some version of Uncle Sam needs you.

00:16:57.540 And we pointed to the uncle who, in the Marine uniform, on the mantle, and we were so proud of him.

00:17:06.460 He died in World War I or II.

00:17:08.900 And the boy sees that the way he can get love and approval and respect, even though he's being criticized by this person or that person or in school or at home, is he can be a soldier.

00:17:20.960 And so we inspire boys to be disposable.

00:17:26.240 And when somebody is likely to be lost, you don't develop as much emotional attachment to that person.

00:17:37.240 And if your way of surviving is for males to be willing to lose their life so we're not under Nazi rule, et cetera, you begin to develop a connection between caring about men largely to the degree that they are willing to protect women and die for women.

00:18:00.440 And so you don't care about the people who are dying so much if you have an incentive to have them be willing to die in order to protect you.

00:18:14.560 Joe, it's a disposable male hypothesis.

00:18:17.600 That would be the hypothesis on the evolutionary psychology front.

00:18:20.640 I mean, one of the things I've noticed is that my critics, let's say, like to parody my audience as, well, angry, white, and young, and male, let's say.

00:18:34.400 But the thing that's interesting about that is that perhaps you could give me the benefit of the doubt and say that if that is my audience, and my audience is certainly much broader than that, and that wasn't who I was targeting, let's say.

00:18:46.320 But even if it was, well, is there something wrong with talking to those people who are alienated and angry and perhaps for some genuine reason?

00:18:57.280 The answer seems to be, the default answer seems to be, they're so contemptible that anyone who even tries to help them is to be regarded with extreme suspicion.

00:19:06.300 And it seems to me that that's, in some manner, a reflection of the phenomenon that you're discussing, which is a very, what would you say, if it's very deeply rooted and fundamental, at least from one perspective.

00:19:22.060 So, you know, I was thinking today, maybe our culture set up so that the most esteemed people are highly successful men, but the least esteemed people are unsuccessful men.

00:19:37.720 And so maybe that's the strange paradox, is that men, in some sense, have it the best if they're occupying the pinnacle of achievement, but they have it the worst if they're at the bottom of the heap.

00:19:54.320 And that seems right. If you look at women's dating preferences, for example, compared to men, women are disproportionately attracted to successful men and disproportionately likely even to rank men of average attainment as below average, whether it's attractiveness or any of the other criteria by which such things might be judged.

00:20:17.720 So, you know, the question is, well, one question is, if it's so deeply rooted, what makes you think there's anything that we can do about it?

00:20:30.000 I mean, you haven't had any luck, for example, convincing the White House over years to pay some attention to boys, essentially, even though they're the problem, let's say.

00:20:42.220 You might think that even from the perspective of prevention, there would be some attention paid in that direction.

00:20:50.180 But this bias is so pervasive that it seems to even interfere with that.

00:20:56.140 Absolutely. So a few things, lots of really good things you brought up.

00:20:59.660 So let me deal with the first thing on the anger issue.

00:21:01.820 One of the I don't know if we've discussed this before, Jordan, but I've been teaching couples communication workshops for 30 years and just produced a 30 a Zoom course on that a few days ago.

00:21:15.460 And one of the things that is fundamental to that course is is that men and women and this is gay couples as well and trans couples and and even parents and children all complain about their partners or their parents or their child's anger.

00:21:31.540 And almost. And one of the things that I work with them on is to understand that anger is vulnerabilities mask.

00:21:39.860 And the moment you see your partner as angry, look for the vulnerability that created that anger, that felt the fact that they felt rejected or the possibility that they felt rejected, the possibility that they felt misunderstood, the possibility that they said what they feel they bother that bothers them over and over again.

00:21:59.860 But it's been ignored. And every time that they say that, say what bothers them, there's a response to it that disconnect that cuts, cuts them off and interrupts them before they finish their full feeling.

00:22:11.680 They're not drawn out. And the response that they get is an argument.

00:22:16.140 And so they tend to not bring up issues that really concern them because it's only going to be met by an argument that will escalate the problem.

00:22:23.640 And so they end up walking on eggshells. Now, who does that? Men, women, both sexes do that.

00:22:28.820 And it doesn't make any difference whether it's straight or gay couples. They both do. This is a complaint that I hear from literally everybody.

00:22:36.080 And so when when your audience is is criticized as being angry, I would just ask, you know, if you if you look at that anger as the vulnerability, how is that audience not being heard?

00:22:47.640 And the way you are serving that audience is to hear. So if to the degree that that audience is part of part of your audience is is is is serving that audience by healing them, by having them have a place where they feel heard as opposed to dismissed.

00:23:04.900 When someone feels dismissed, they become depressed, they become they turn inward.

00:23:11.000 And an example of that is when men and fathers and mothers go through the family court system, fathers are much less likely to feel heard and the family courts feel treated as equals.

00:23:22.060 Now, that's another reason why I wanted to talk to you before and today in my clinical practice.

00:23:27.540 I had men who were fine, upstanding men who were absolutely ground into nothing by the family court system.

00:23:36.840 I mean, I pulled all the tricks I had out of my hat.

00:23:40.300 One client in particular, a medical professional who whose life was completely destroyed by the family law system.

00:23:46.900 It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, to use a terrible cliche.

00:23:50.960 We tried every trick in the book to keep him afloat.

00:23:53.860 What he wanted was 50 percent access to his three kids.

00:23:56.540 And he was a really good father.

00:23:57.800 I went out with him a number of times with his kids and watched how he interacted with them and how he taught them and and and how he cared for them and went to his house and looked at how he set up their bedroom.

00:24:08.220 And he did this guy did everything right.

00:24:10.240 He was extremely high in conscientiousness.

00:24:11.940 So unsurprising.

00:24:13.420 But, you know, he had his driver's license taken away.

00:24:16.420 He had his passport taken away.

00:24:17.700 He had his livelihood demolished by ill-founded rumors by a spouse that was hell-bent on his destruction.

00:24:24.060 I mean, we even went so far as to have him pick up his kids when they made the switch in front of a really, really busy supermarket.

00:24:32.200 She would pull up behind him right in front of the doors of the supermarket.

00:24:35.760 The kids would come out.

00:24:36.720 She would stay in the car.

00:24:37.740 The kids would come out and go into his truck and pull away so that everything that transpired between the two of them was in full public view all the time.

00:24:47.580 And despite that, she managed to get into his car a number of times.

00:24:50.480 But anyways, he he he he was just demolished.

00:24:53.720 And I've seen this.

00:24:54.640 And, you know, I get criticized.

00:24:56.400 Maybe maybe we can go into this a little bit.

00:24:58.900 But I get criticized for a couple of things by men regularly.

00:25:05.560 One is I get criticized because I stand up for traditional marriage.

00:25:09.200 And there's always a proportion of men who write.

00:25:12.960 And they're usually men who've been demolished by the family court system who say, look, you should stop telling young men to adopt a permanent relationship.

00:25:20.640 Get married because the family court system is so prejudiced against men that to sign a marriage contract, if you sign it with the wrong person, is, you know, tantamount to a.

00:25:37.140 Well, let's not call it a death warrant, but but it's a very bad idea, you know, and my response to that is, well, you're basically married if you live together for six months anyways.

00:25:46.880 And so I don't see how the marriage actually adds to that, you know, in terms of in terms of risk.

00:25:54.600 But it's not like I don't understand that there's a point there.

00:25:58.360 And it's it's interesting because I do believe that the family court system I've looked at it.

00:26:03.140 I've been involved in it several times.

00:26:06.180 Wasn't to my benefit, I would say.

00:26:10.640 The men have the men who are objecting have a point.

00:26:13.020 And then I'm also suggesting to young men, another point of criticism, that, you know, they adopt traditional responsibilities to the degree that that's possible and that that's where they'll find meaning.

00:26:22.860 But, you know, some of your work makes me second guess that, at least to some degree, wondering if.

00:26:32.480 I just don't see an alternative, I suppose.

00:26:34.560 I suppose that's really the issue is that, well, what do we have?

00:26:37.680 We have our jobs, we have our careers, we have our loved ones, we have our families.

00:26:41.940 That's life.

00:26:43.060 And if you don't have that, well, then you're adrift.

00:26:45.480 That's the purpose void that you talk about in this in this book.

00:26:50.120 But if the traditional.

00:26:53.400 Pathways to meaning, let's say, are no longer reliable.

00:26:57.640 What's a guy to do?

00:26:58.880 Let's say we really we really so to affirm what you're saying and put a piece of data to that, when people are going through the family court system, mothers and fathers are going through the family court system.

00:27:11.420 The father is eight times as likely as the mother to commit suicide from the frustration, obviously, of not feeling able to connect to his children.

00:27:23.100 But what very few mothers and fathers understand is that, you know, dads have adopted in their traditional role sort of a father's cast 22.

00:27:32.380 They learn to earn money.

00:27:34.520 They learn to love their family by being away from the love of their family.

00:27:38.220 They often do things like they may drive cabs.

00:27:42.000 They may they may quit their passion of being an elementary school teacher, becoming a superintendent or a principal of schools.

00:27:48.700 They hate a hate administration.

00:27:50.880 But they end up earning more money because they want their children to do better than they had a chance to do in their life.

00:27:57.260 They want the children to go to a good school, which means a good school district, which means a more expensive home,

00:28:01.960 which means that if they were a musician or an actor or a writer or that elementary school teacher,

00:28:08.600 they have to give up that for the most part because they'll earn more doing something that they like less.

00:28:14.220 And so we've right, which is something that was just part of the pay gap.

00:28:17.520 That's never really emphasized is that one of the ways you earn more and you outlined that in, I think, a great book, why men earn more.

00:28:26.320 I think that is a great book.

00:28:28.680 You know, you point out that you earn more for doing jobs that are less desirable, intrinsically desirable in some sense.

00:28:34.580 I mean, that's part of the equation, at least their jobs are more dangerous.

00:28:38.420 They take you away from home more often, et cetera.

00:28:40.620 And those are disproportionately male jobs.

00:28:44.020 I mean, the guy that I saw who got demolished so badly, you know, his wife claimed to be the primary caregiver

00:28:50.500 and the courts are tilted so that they favor the mother, especially in the first three years of a child's life.

00:28:55.480 And I've had some sympathy for that perspective for a variety of reasons,

00:29:00.780 although I think I've rethought my stance and believe that 50-50 custody default is the appropriate default.

00:29:10.620 Just like 50-50 default with regards to money earned during the life of the marriage is the default.

00:29:18.420 But my client worked a lot to provide for his family.

00:29:25.100 And so, and his wife stayed at home and was with the kids all the time as a consequence.

00:29:31.000 And because of that, when they went to court, she had the upper hand in the custody negotiation

00:29:38.680 because the judge believed, perhaps, that it was in the best interest of the children

00:29:43.200 that they continue with their primary caregiver.

00:29:46.800 And that's a very hard argument to push aside, given the strength of the mother-child bond,

00:29:54.320 especially in the first, especially in the first year.

00:29:57.480 I mean, maybe, maybe the first year is exceptional.

00:30:00.960 Perhaps it's not.

00:30:02.000 Perhaps we have to move to 50-50 regardless. 0.87

00:30:04.440 But what do you think about that?

00:30:06.920 Well, I, there's four, one of the things that I talk about in the boy crisis

00:30:10.560 is the four must-dos of after divorce.

00:30:14.240 And this is like, I'm now putting huge amounts of research together

00:30:17.820 into sort of four simple things.

00:30:19.460 But one, the number one and most important is that the children have an equal amount.

00:30:25.580 By the way, this is if you want the children to do almost as well as they would in an intact family.

00:30:32.100 Not as well, but almost as well.

00:30:33.800 Okay, so this is a child, see, that's something we should establish here, too, as a principle.

00:30:38.540 My sense is always marriage is for children, not for adults.

00:30:43.400 Exactly.

00:30:43.840 They're the primary, they're the primary target of, of, of rank-ordered importance.

00:30:50.360 Children first, and then the adults.

00:30:52.840 Marriage is for children, not for adults.

00:30:54.740 That's, that's a very immature way of looking at the world.

00:30:56.700 If you think your marriage is for you.

00:30:58.580 You're, you have a free choice when you have children to have the children or not have the children.

00:31:03.540 That's like having a free choice to take the job or not take the job.

00:31:06.780 But once you take the job, you take the responsibilities with it.

00:31:10.040 And, and so, so in court, what I talk about, I do a lot of expert witness work on this issue.

00:31:15.760 And in court, what I explain is that we now, we now, for the first time in the last five or six years, we now have really incontrovertible evidence that four things are really needed if we want the children to do the best to divorce.

00:31:30.820 Number one is an equal amount of time with mother and father, the closer you get to 50-50, even when the child is like a one year old or just born, it is, that is, that leads to the greatest possibility of a positive outcome on so many measures that we'd have to spend almost a half hour talking about those measures.

00:31:50.700 Well, I'd like, I would like to talk about that to some degree, because it's, it's somewhat counterintuitive.

00:31:55.080 So I think it's important to delve into that.

00:31:57.980 Absolutely.

00:31:58.760 And I'll be happy to do that.

00:32:00.100 Okay.

00:32:00.820 And then number two is that the father and mother live within about 20 minutes drive time from each other, because when they don't, oftentimes, they become very resentful of the other parent, because they have to go to that other parent's home and miss their soccer practice.

00:32:16.100 So therefore, they don't get the skills and the teamwork and the continuity to be good on the soccer team or miss their best friend's birthday party or whatever.

00:32:24.820 And so there's a tension when the father and mother live after divorce, more than about 20 minutes drive time from each other.

00:32:33.200 Number three is that the children cannot experience any bad mouthing or negative body language from mom toward dad or dad toward mom.

00:32:44.500 Because when the child looks in the mirror, and let's say the child's a boy and hears that your father is irresponsible and your father's a liar and your father is this and that, that boy is looking in the mirror and saying, well, maybe I'm a narcissist like my dad.

00:32:59.780 Well, the boys, young boys play dad.

00:33:02.940 And so whatever they think of his dad is going to be is be going to enter their space of fantasy.

00:33:08.840 And I mean, what they play out in their fantasy play is their destiny.

00:33:12.980 Yes.

00:33:13.480 And so that image of future masculinity.

00:33:17.560 I mean, I always think of Captain Hook when I think of that, because Peter Pan stays Peter Pan because he doesn't want to be Captain Hook.

00:33:24.140 And it's a brilliant, it's brilliant mythologically, that story, because it's got it exactly right.

00:33:29.120 If you conceptualize the great father as power hungry tyrant, which is increasingly the way we conceptualize our entire society, and we call it patriarchal, then why would you want to grow up to be that?

00:33:41.800 Why do you want to be that adult?

00:33:43.760 And so if the mother is modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes dad, she's also modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes future mature son, since he's going to be dad.

00:33:56.860 Yes, exactly.

00:33:57.500 And then that boy hearing that both, let's say if he hears that from the mother, by the way, this is true father to mother also.

00:34:03.680 I mean, dad mouthing in the part of the father of the mother is really damaging to the child, because not only is that child half the genes of the other parent, but also the child can't bring it up to either parent.

00:34:16.400 Because if it brings it up to the parent that made that complaint, it loses that favoritism of that parent.

00:34:24.820 If it brings it up to the other parent that your dad said this, or mom said this about you, that destabilizes the child's future even more.

00:34:32.880 Right, so the child has a terrible secret all the time.

00:34:36.220 Betrayal.

00:34:36.700 The child's in a state of betrayal all the time, no matter what.

00:34:39.480 Exactly.

00:34:40.580 And I've seen children used as weapons continually in exactly that manner.

00:34:45.160 It's appalling.

00:34:46.600 It's appalling beyond comprehension.

00:34:49.740 And then the fourth thing that's very important is that the children, that the parents rather, are in couples communication counseling or relationship counseling, not just when there is an emergency.

00:35:00.580 When there's an emergency, everything has to be made as a quick decision, and there's a tendency to see the other parent's worst intent, whereas long-term counseling allows the father and the mother to see, to have time to hear the mother or father's best intent about what they're doing and why they're doing it.

00:35:17.660 Well, so at the bare minimum, that means that the couple gets together in an administrative sense to sort out the necessary details in the presence of a relatively, what would you say, interest-free, commitment-free, bias-free third party.

00:35:33.900 Exactly.

00:35:34.280 It's really a management ploy, in some sense, rather than a counseling ploy per se, or at least you could parse it out in those two ways.

00:35:41.220 Obviously, once you have children with someone, you're married to them permanently in some real sense, and so that has to be taken care of, and a lot of taking care of a marriage.

00:35:52.760 I do make this point to some degree in Beyond Order, when I talk about making space for romance, a fair bit of marriage's administrative detail and getting that right, I mean, that does allow you to see some goodwill

00:36:10.980 on the part of your partner as well.

00:36:13.540 If you guys have been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that Dad and I have received NAD infusions in the past to help with health and have seen results like improved mood and energy levels.

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00:40:55.040 Yes, absolutely.

00:40:56.120 And you brought up a moment ago, too, the different developmental advantages that happen when father and mother are both involved.

00:41:05.740 And those developmental advantages include the father involvement.

00:41:11.200 So after marriage or after divorce, father involvement, lack of father involvement, is the single biggest predictor of suicide.

00:41:19.880 It is one of the biggest predictors of a child not graduating from high school, dropping out of school.

00:41:27.860 It's a very big predictor of a child being aggressive but not assertive.

00:41:34.940 And last time when we did our last interview together, we talked about the whole roughhousing dimension of things.

00:41:41.420 And I'm not going to go through that again because of the fact that people can go to that other interview and see that.

00:41:46.260 But there are about nine differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting.

00:41:52.280 And a lot of those differences, moms are so good at, say, spotting sons and daughters, you know, gifts. 0.94

00:41:59.060 Like, say, sweetie, you sing so nicely or you're going to be a great actress or a musician or whatever.

00:42:04.480 You should try and do that.

00:42:07.140 And dads are likely to affirm that but not so vociferously at first but are more likely to say some version of a, well, you know, if you want to be a gym, you know, if you want to be in the Olympics, you've got to practice all the time.

00:42:22.120 And we'll, yes, we'll give you some tutoring or we'll go out of our way and take you to gymnastics practice.

00:42:29.060 But if you're not really focused on, if you're focused on responding to tweets and going to parties and doing other things, you're never going to become an Olympic gymnast.

00:42:39.780 So you have to make a trade-off.

00:42:41.080 And the dad is much more likely to enforce the boundaries around that trade-off and require the child to focus and discipline, focus and have postponed gratification around what they say they want to do and give up support for the child if the child doesn't follow through with that and only has a dream that they're not willing to have the discipline to fulfill that.

00:43:07.260 So that's, okay, so there's a real hypothesis there, which I think is worth delving into because one question obviously is, well, why is it not good to be without a father?

00:43:18.440 And is it not the case that someone else, maybe two females, for example, could play the paternal role?

00:43:25.620 And obviously that's true to some degree, if we could specify what the paternal role is.

00:43:30.260 But you make a very specific case, which is quite an interesting one, which is that it's fathers primarily who are responsible for the instantiation of delay of gratification.

00:43:40.260 Now, we should point out that among psychologists who are leery of IQ as the best predictor of success in the long run, the vast majority of those psychologists, whose opinion I do not agree with, by the way, is that the thing that predicts better than IQ is the capacity to delay gratification.

00:44:02.840 And that seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness and trait conscientiousness, which is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness, the ability to make and maintain verbal contracts.

00:44:14.760 Conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term success outside of general cognitive ability.

00:44:19.840 I would also say that in cultures where families are more likely to be intact, and so we could say Southeast Asian cultures, for example, and point out that children from Southeast Asian cultures do disproportionately better in North America than children of North American parents.

00:44:39.020 The reason for that seems twofold.

00:44:42.240 One is more correlational, perhaps, in that those families are much more likely to be intact and so to have fathers.

00:44:49.200 But the second is that the advantage that is accrued to those children seems to be in the domain of conscientious striving.

00:44:58.020 It's work ethic.

00:44:59.280 It's the ability to delay gratification.

00:45:01.540 And so if it is the case that father involvement is a key predictor of the capacity to delay gratification, then that's an absolutely crucial issue.

00:45:13.380 And we need to know, well, is that true?

00:45:16.740 And we also need to know if it's true, why it's true.

00:45:20.660 And perhaps it has something to do with the relative disagreeability of fathers.

00:45:25.020 So women are more prone to negative emotion than men, and they're more empathic and compassionate and polite than men.

00:45:37.180 Men are more disagreeable. 0.52

00:45:38.380 And disagreeableness is the best predictor, by the way, of criminal behavior from the personality perspective, even though it's not a very good predictor.

00:45:46.000 But if you're really, really disagreeable, that's one of the things that can land you in jail because you don't take other people into account.

00:45:53.260 You can be callous and cruel and unkind.

00:45:55.320 But just because something has its pathologies in the extreme doesn't mean it's not necessary in moderation.

00:46:03.540 And disagreeable people are better at saying no and at setting boundaries and at being cruel to be kind, let's say.

00:46:12.340 Well, sure, you're good at that.

00:46:13.980 You want to do that.

00:46:14.720 But here's what it's going to take.

00:46:16.080 And I'm going to draw boundaries.

00:46:17.420 And I'm going to draw lines.

00:46:19.380 And you think that's father's.

00:46:20.840 And what evidence do you have for that?

00:46:23.420 Oh, my goodness.

00:46:24.140 Just, for example, one of the things I'll talk about is the difference between boundary setting and boundary enforcement.

00:46:32.160 And dads and moms will both set boundaries very similarly.

00:46:34.960 They'll both say, you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas.

00:46:38.420 And children will test boundaries pretty much exactly the same way.

00:46:41.540 They'll have as few peas as possible before they get their ice.

00:46:44.420 Absolutely.

00:46:44.760 And they balance on that edge and push because they want to find out exactly where that border is.

00:46:49.560 My son, who's relatively disagreeable, man, he pushed boundaries at every opportunity when he was between two and four.

00:46:56.720 It was really something to behold.

00:46:58.320 He was a force of nature in going right up to the line and pushing on it just to see what was going to happen, you know.

00:47:05.720 And so, go ahead.

00:47:09.440 Yeah, and then, but the difference between moms and dads is not the boundary setting or the children's challenge, but rather the boundary enforcement.

00:47:19.140 The child will be able to say to mom some version of like, you know, I had a tough time in school today.

00:47:24.760 I really fell down because I was teased by this boy, and he's the best, most popular boy or the most popular girl in the school.

00:47:30.320 He'll usually would be the boy that would tease him.

00:47:32.900 And, you know, and so mom is saying to herself, you know, well, what am I going to do here?

00:47:37.340 Am I going to be, get into a big argument over a few peas when he's depressed? 1.00

00:47:41.480 That would be insensitive and stupid. 0.99

00:47:43.740 So I'll tell you what, sweetie, you know, you can have this many more peas and then you can have your ice cream. 0.99

00:47:48.640 And then the boy will see, ah, negotiating is, or girl will see, is negotiating is a possibility here.

00:47:54.680 So from a position of weakness.

00:47:56.220 Yes, exactly. I will have half that many peas that mom, you know, set aside. 1.00

00:48:03.180 And then mom is going again, you know, all right, now he at least tried.

00:48:06.740 I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

00:48:08.740 Okay, you can have the ice cream now.

00:48:11.380 Whereas dad is much more likely to go, I'm sorry, we have a deal here, sweetie.

00:48:16.540 I know you had a bad day in school, but you need to finish the peas.

00:48:21.060 The deal is before you get your ice cream.

00:48:23.340 Oh, daddy, you're so mean. Mommy doesn't do that to me. 0.99

00:48:25.820 And dad goes, well, you know, you can continue to complain, but this is my rules now.

00:48:34.000 And if you continue to complain, there'll be no more ice cream.

00:48:36.320 There'll be no ice cream, even as a possibility tomorrow night.

00:48:39.700 Now we're forcing, the child is getting forced to have to pay attention to doing what she or he needs to do.

00:48:45.820 Finish the peas before she or he gets the ice cream, what they want to have.

00:48:49.680 Okay, so let me take what you said apart a little bit from a personality perspective.

00:48:54.160 Okay, so I'm going to hit it from three perspectives.

00:48:57.320 So the first is, I've always been entranced by the Disney movie Pinocchio.

00:49:01.500 And Pinocchio is about the development of an autonomous individual, right?

00:49:04.960 Someone who's free from having his strings pulled by others and who isn't a wooden head, but someone who's alive and can think for himself.

00:49:12.060 And as Pinocchio develops, he faces a number of temptations.

00:49:16.040 And one is to become an actor, which means to become a deceiver or a player of parts rather than the real thing.

00:49:22.560 But another is to become a neurotic wreck who wants vacations.

00:49:26.520 So he's tempted by Pleasure Island.

00:49:29.580 And the way the fox and the cat tempt him is by convincing him that he's ill, convincing him to capitalize on that, and convincing him that the respite for his illness is a vacation from his, a permanent vacation from his responsibility.

00:49:44.120 So the temptations are deceitful actor and neurotic victim.

00:49:48.700 So it's a very perspicacious film.

00:49:51.280 It's a remarkable film.

00:49:52.500 But in any case, now let's take that apart a little bit.

00:49:54.840 So I'll first make an observation from my own marriage.

00:49:59.180 My wife is no pushover. 1.00

00:50:01.180 And she's relatively low in agreeableness by female standards. 1.00

00:50:05.140 But what I observed in our relationship was that it was hard for her to discipline the children, especially when they were very young.

00:50:13.380 And I think the reason for that was partly temperament.

00:50:16.940 Because I think the feminine temperament tilts towards compassion and nurturance. 0.99

00:50:21.960 Whereas the masculine temperament tilts more towards tough love.

00:50:29.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:30.340 Fine.

00:50:30.720 That's good.

00:50:31.240 Thank you for filling in there.

00:50:33.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:33.720 It's conditional.

00:50:34.740 There's a conditional element to it.

00:50:36.520 And then judgmental element.

00:50:38.380 Unjudgmental love, by the way.

00:50:40.320 But conditional approval as part of total love.

00:50:44.440 Right.

00:50:44.820 Good.

00:50:45.180 Good clarification.

00:50:46.520 Absolutely.

00:50:47.400 Right.

00:50:47.680 Because the container is love.

00:50:49.480 Yes.

00:50:49.880 But that can mean delay of gratification, right?

00:50:53.280 And there's a cruelty in delay of gratification, even when you impose it on yourself.

00:50:57.460 It's a cruelty in the local sense, because it causes distress.

00:51:00.860 I mean, right now, my son and daughter are teaching their son, who's only slightly over one, no.

00:51:10.160 And I told them how to do it.

00:51:12.040 So, for example, he sits at our table out in the backyard.

00:51:15.420 And he reaches behind and he's tearing the plants out of the green wall that's behind him.

00:51:20.960 And so, that's a no.

00:51:22.160 And I said, I encouraged them.

00:51:24.700 I said, look, take his hand, hold it firmly so that he can't move it.

00:51:30.400 Say no.

00:51:31.340 Hold him until he stops struggling to undertake his goal-directed activity.

00:51:36.500 He'll probably cry.

00:51:38.380 As soon as he stops resisting, let go and give him a pat.

00:51:42.300 So, you do that 20 times.

00:51:44.040 Then when you say no, he'll cry and stop.

00:51:48.160 And then 20 times after that, he'll just stop.

00:51:50.940 He won't cry.

00:51:51.540 So, 40 times and you've taught him no, which is an amazing thing, because then you can let him go free.

00:51:57.780 Because whenever you say no, he'll just stop.

00:52:00.120 And so, you can facilitate his freedom instead of having to be a helicopter tyrant parent, who I've seen many of,

00:52:07.300 who is one step behind their ambulatory two-and-a-half-year-old, you know, interfering with absolutely everything he does,

00:52:14.400 because he can't grasp a basic principle of socialization.

00:52:17.860 In any case, no has some pain associated with it, because otherwise it wouldn't produce tears.

00:52:25.100 And no is a very, very hard thing to learn.

00:52:27.340 And no is what the world teaches, not just what people teach.

00:52:30.640 In any case, back to my wife.

00:52:32.900 She spent the first year bonding with the child and also learning how to respond, essentially,

00:52:39.040 especially in the first six months, to his or her every whim.

00:52:42.260 Because a crying infant demands instant recourse.

00:52:46.600 And a crying infant is always right, especially if they're under six months of age. 1.00

00:52:50.800 But then, when the kid becomes ambulatory and starts to require discipline, the woman is required to switch from this primarily empathic role,

00:53:00.440 which is facilitated by hormonal transformation post-pregnancy, by the way,

00:53:05.120 from this primarily nurturing role to a role that is, in some ways, in the local environment, its antithesis.

00:53:13.160 It's very hard for women to do that. 1.00

00:53:15.280 And so, my observation has been that they need, they require someone else to bolster that element,

00:53:22.620 because it runs at counter-purposes to what they're required to do in early infancy.

00:53:28.280 And so, okay, so delay of gratification.

00:53:31.060 We're going to focus on that.

00:53:33.020 And an example illustrating what you're saying, and this is hard data-based example that I talk about in the boy crisis,

00:53:39.660 is bedtime.

00:53:42.080 So, what we know when we look at bedtimes set by mothers and fathers is that moms will set bedtimes earlier than dads will.

00:53:52.400 Dads will set bedtimes later, but the children end up, when studied, going to bed earlier when they're with the dad than they do with the mom.

00:54:01.700 And so, why is that?

00:54:03.100 What the dad will be more likely to do is say some version of, like, okay, bedtime is 9 o'clock.

00:54:08.120 And whatever, when you get all your chores done, when you get yourself, you brush your teeth, you change your clothes, you've done your homework, et cetera.

00:54:17.400 And I see your homework and it's done well.

00:54:19.720 Then any time that you have between when you're finished, when your sister and brother are both finished, your homework, et cetera,

00:54:27.360 that time you have to play or do or ask me to do whatever I want.

00:54:31.300 Read your favorite story, et cetera.

00:54:32.540 With mom, she's more likely to, and so the kids end up rushing to get through everything that they need to do.

00:54:41.620 It is postponed gratification.

00:54:43.040 In order to get what they want to have there, this story read to them, some roughhousing before bedtime and, you know, something along those lines.

00:54:50.880 And then with the understanding that they will then, everything will be cut off at 9 o'clock.

00:54:56.620 The children with mom are more likely to, mom says, you know, bedtime is this time, it's 9.30, let's say.

00:55:05.460 And the children gets to be 9.30 and one of the boys or kids will say, you know, well, I haven't done my homework, you know,

00:55:12.620 knowing that mom will want the child to have done his or her homework rather than go to bed without having homework be done.

00:55:21.300 And so mom will say, well, all right, you should have done your homework before, but we'll allow you a little bit more time to finish your homework off.

00:55:30.940 And so the boy is able to, or girl, is able to manipulate more time than that 9.30 time and stay open even, or stay up even later.

00:55:43.120 What the dad makes clear to the child is that if he or she does not, if they use up all that time and they haven't done the homework and it's now 9 o'clock your bedtime,

00:55:55.660 sorry, but you are, you will not, you'll just go to school and not have your homework done.

00:56:02.200 That's your responsibility to get that done by this point in time.

00:56:06.320 And so the, um, and so that's one of the sort of dynamics that happens that leads to children being more likely to be focused on doing what they need to do.

00:56:16.740 And, um, and also children brought up by mothers are more likely to be ADHD.

00:56:22.380 If they're brought up predominantly by mothers, 30% of children are ADHD. 0.52

00:56:26.500 That includes the average between boys and girls.

00:56:29.340 Boys are obviously more likely to be ADHD.

00:56:31.160 Uh, whereas with fathers brought up predominantly by fathers, only 15% are likely to have ADHD because you can see from those examples that the, the boy or the girl, the children are required to focus on doing what they need to do.

00:56:46.800 Get that homework done, get their teeth brushed, uh, before they get what they want to have.

00:56:51.880 Um, and the same, we talked last time about rough housing, how, uh, the children, the children were, um, were prevented from having more rough housing fun.

00:57:01.380 If they pushed their sister or their brother out of the way and they didn't consider their, the, the, the, the needs of their brother and sister.

00:57:09.440 So back, back, back to the, the personality differences.

00:57:14.980 So women are higher in negative emotion and they're higher in trait agreeableness. 1.00

00:57:20.240 And so the way to manipulate someone who's high in negative emotion is to manifest negative emotion and to say, um, here's a bunch of reasons why I'm not doing so well.

00:57:31.480 And so I deserve a break.

00:57:33.660 And that, that, so because of the sensitivity to negative emotion, the fact of the negative emotion is more compelling because it's more deeply felt.

00:57:42.360 And then the agreeableness means that there's a much higher probability of being felt sorry for.

00:57:49.740 And, and you can see that in the positives light when you're dealing with infants, because when they're in distress, the proper response is immediate gratification of their desires.

00:58:00.560 But that's not a good long-term strategy, which is, I think, likely why, well, I don't exactly understand the relationship with lower agreeableness.

00:58:08.960 It's certainly the reason for the emergence of conscientiousness, which is a cold virtue and which involves delay of gratification.

00:58:15.980 Now, men are not more conscientious than women.

00:58:19.560 They're more industrious and industrious to some slight degree and less orderly.

00:58:23.960 And those two combined make conscientiousness.

00:58:26.380 But the agreeableness difference is definitely, you know, it's, it's quite pronounced.

00:58:30.220 And so, you know, partly what you're arguing for from the perspective of a personality psychologist is the necessity for two parent families really on temperamental grounds on and really on biological grounds.

00:58:43.940 I mean, these things are mutable to some degree, but not easily.

00:58:46.440 And the other thing that's quite interesting is that, and this is something everyone should really listen to, is that they're anti-mutable given the way that our society is proceeding.

00:59:00.360 So you might say, well, there are these personality differences between men and women, higher neuroticism in women, so that's proclivity to negative emotion, and higher agreeableness. 0.62

00:59:12.040 But if we made our societies equal, those personality differences would go away, and then we wouldn't require bi-gendered parenting. 1.00

00:59:23.240 But what's happened is that if you go to the Scandinavian countries, where the attempts to equalize the social landscape have gone the furthest, and in some sense had the most success, there are notable exceptions.

00:59:39.980 So if you rank order countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies, now, and that doesn't require that any of them have perfectly egalitarian policies, it just requires that you admit that some cultures are more egalitarian than others in their attempts and their practices, and I think only a fool wouldn't put the Scandinavian countries at the top of that list.

01:00:04.500 Then you'd say, well, what that should mean is that in Scandinavia, the personality differences between men and women are minimized, and in authoritarian countries, they're maximized.

01:00:15.380 And exactly the reverse is what happens, is if you iron out the wrinkles in the social landscape so that it's more egalitarian, men and women get more different with regards to their interests, people versus things.

01:00:30.000 So women get more interested in people and less interested in things and less interested in the STEM fields, at least in partial consequence, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and they get even more different than men in terms of their neuroticism and their agreeableness, not less. 0.69

01:00:47.840 And so that argues against easy social amelioration of this necessity for bi-gender two-parent households. 0.57

01:00:59.440 Yes. Yes, the children that seem to do the best are ones that have, they're in intact families, or as I mentioned before, the children have about an equal amount of time with both parents, and that there is a checks and balance parenting.

01:01:13.380 So a child will come to the father, the mother, and say, can I climb the tree in the backyard?

01:01:18.320 And mom will say, well, maybe in a few years, sweetie, but not right now.

01:01:22.160 You're too young, and you could really hurt yourself.

01:01:24.780 And the child will ask the same thing of a dad, and the dad will be more likely to say, well, yes, I guess so, but be careful.

01:01:31.260 And then if the mother finds out, the father and the mother will go, well, wait a minute, you're not blah, blah, blah.

01:01:37.200 You're playing one against the other here, kid.

01:01:39.500 Good work, but no.

01:01:40.720 Yes, but, well, the kid will play one against the other, but one of the best responses to that is for the child to be able to see the mother and father negotiating.

01:01:49.840 Right, right, absolutely.

01:01:51.340 And saying, you know, well, yes, you can climb the tree, but you can't go beyond this branch this high, and you can't, you know, go on these branches.

01:01:59.820 And dad, you need to be out there under the tree so that in case the child falls, you know, the child will be cushioned by your fall.

01:02:09.060 And don't get preoccupied with the cell phone.

01:02:11.040 In fact, maybe give me the cell phone while you're out there with Ginger or Mary under the tree.

01:02:16.880 Right, so they see the negotiation between masculine and feminine taking place.

01:02:21.000 Why do you think that's so important?

01:02:23.300 And you say there's research supporting that specific proposition.

01:02:26.900 It's a very specific proposition.

01:02:28.660 So what's the research?

01:02:30.120 Well, it's both specific and metaphorical.

01:02:32.560 Specifically, we now know that children climbing trees makes them worry about what risks are worth taking, what risks are that fires synapses that are outside of their normal synapse firing development.

01:02:48.020 And the data that we have for that is that the IQs of children doing risk-taking behaviors like climbing trees increase as they do that risk-taking behavior, and they increase their psychomotor functioning.

01:03:02.420 Okay, so there's this concept that a Russian developmental psychologist came up with, Vygotsky, called the zone of proximal development.

01:03:12.140 And one of the things he noted was that, I believe it was Vygotsky who discovered this, it might not have been, but it's the same phenomenon, so it doesn't really matter.

01:03:21.160 So if you analyze the way that parents talk to children who are developing their language, so infants who are still learning to speak, the adults don't speak to the infant in terms that the infant can understand precisely.

01:03:36.820 The adults speak to the infant slightly ahead of its developmental trajectory, and Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development, which is the key zone to be in if you're going to learn.

01:03:49.280 So imagine, and I make much of this in my books, that there's a domain that you've already mastered, and so that when you operate in that domain, the things you want to happen, happen.

01:03:58.680 That's the domain of order, and then there's another domain where all hell breaks loose, and you don't know what to do, and that's the domain of chaos, but there's an intermediary where you're expanding your zone of competence through exploration, and that's really where consciousness operates, and that's where we learn.

01:04:18.580 And so risk-taking behavior isn't exactly risk-taking behavior, it's embeddedness in the zone of proximal development.

01:04:26.540 I'll give you an example, so it's germane to your example.

01:04:30.280 So when my kids were little, I bought this old wrecked wooden play set, monkey bars and swings.

01:04:39.620 It was dilapidated, but I took it home and sanded it down and repainted it and, you know, gave it about five or six more years of life, and my daughter, who was about two and a half at the time, would go out there on that monkey bar, and so it was a ladder going up about six feet, which was a pretty decent ladder for a little two-and-a-half-year-old, you know, and so we were inclined to watch her.

01:05:04.340 And she would stand on the first rung and then move her foot a quarter of the way up towards it, and then half a way up towards it, and then three-quarters of the way up towards it, and then she'd put her foot on the rung, and then she'd do the same with her next foot, staying in that zone of proximal development.

01:05:20.180 Can I move a quarter of a step? Can I move half a step? Can I move three-quarters of a step?

01:05:25.140 And we'd watch her do that, and doing that, she pinned all those movements together and mastered climbing up the monkey bar, and it was much to our satisfaction. 0.91

01:05:34.340 To watch her, because she was taking, she wasn't taking a risk exactly, she was pushing herself out into the zone of proximal development, and engaging in this mastery behavior.

01:05:44.220 So you could say in some sense, and I believe this to be the case, that the masculine spirit encourages and facilitates the transformation.

01:05:51.240 So if the feminine is concentrating on who the child is now, and what that child now needs, the masculine is concentrating on how that child can move to the next developmental stage, and pushing that along.

01:06:06.420 Is that a reasonable presumption?

01:06:08.840 A, yes, and B, here's an example of that also, that coordinates or connects perfectly with that.

01:06:14.860 But the data shows that dads are more likely, for example, to use words that the child does not yet understand, or does not understand at that time.

01:06:25.460 And the mom is oftentimes looking at it and saying, well, you know, why are you saying that, you know, the child doesn't understand what you mean?

01:06:32.200 And the dad's conscious or unconscious sort of feeling is, I want to plant seeds.

01:06:38.540 And after the child hears this in different contexts, she or he will begin to sort of understand what that word is and what that means.

01:06:46.800 And moms feel it's just, moms are more likely to feel, that's just so insensitive. 0.99

01:06:51.880 So being in this zone of proximal development, like, I brought that into the conversation because you talked about risk-taking.

01:07:01.340 And so what you could say is that as you push the boundaries of the zone of proximal development, you enter the domain of risk.

01:07:10.020 And so then the question would be, what personality elements are capable of tolerating the transformation of the zone of proximal development into the zone of risk?

01:07:20.620 And the answer to that would be lower neuroticism and lower agreeableness.

01:07:26.080 Because lower neuroticism would mean you wouldn't worry as much.

01:07:30.040 So the magnitude of the perceived risk would be less.

01:07:33.080 And lower agreeableness would mean, well, even if there is some risk, you don't care as much.

01:07:38.120 It's like, it's okay.

01:07:39.380 Now, it's not like you don't care about the risk exactly, although it is that in some felt sense.

01:07:44.660 But the reason for that is that, well, there's another judgment, which is, well, the risk is worth taking.

01:07:49.960 Because there's more than one risk at play here.

01:07:52.220 There's the proximal risk that you engage in when you push yourself, but there's the distal risk that you engage in when you don't push yourself.

01:08:01.060 Yes, you're right on target there now.

01:08:03.440 And this is why so many of the differences between male and female-style parenting are so important to understand.

01:08:09.840 And one of those that sort of connects to what you're saying is the differences that moms and dads tend to get into about dads teasing children, which feels to many moms like it often results in the child crying when the teasing first starts.

01:08:26.580 But it begins to teach the child a whole series of skill sets.

01:08:31.620 You know, what tones of voice are teasing or playfulness?

01:08:36.460 And it's like roughhousing.

01:08:38.460 It has a lot to do with play.

01:08:39.640 Teasing is an abstraction of roughhousing.

01:08:42.060 Exactly.

01:08:42.920 Precisely.

01:08:44.080 You know, what eye contact is being playful.

01:08:47.200 What eye contact is serious.

01:08:49.080 What body language?

01:08:50.820 What I'm exaggerating now.

01:08:52.440 You get off the bed because if you don't get off the bed, daddy will always make life hard for you.

01:08:59.780 You know how bad daddy is.

01:09:01.920 And, you know, the child starts laughing.

01:09:04.640 Maybe after a while, maybe one time, this going like that, the child goes, oh, my goodness, he's scared.

01:09:11.980 And so then after a while, the child learns that, oh, that's daddy having fun.

01:09:15.580 That's us having fun.

01:09:16.580 And they begin to distinguish between make sure you get off the bed as fun versus make sure you get off the bed as, you know, something that is.

01:09:25.260 Right.

01:09:25.640 Well, they also learn to distinguish between what's mean and what's funny.

01:09:29.680 You know, I mean, when I was watching my children, especially with regards to their sibling rivalry, which is likely to emerge in children who are less than three years apart in their birth order.

01:09:40.560 And sort of in proportion to the closeness of their birth.

01:09:46.780 So if you want to minimize childhood sibling rivalry, you space the children out three years.

01:09:51.620 We don't know what that does to their relationship across time, but we know it minimizes sibling rivalry.

01:09:55.860 In any case, I wanted them always to stay on the funny side of teasing because teasing can easily turn into torture.

01:10:03.420 And so they had to learn these extremely fine gradations of humor.

01:10:08.280 And to do that, they had to play on the edge.

01:10:11.620 And the question is, how necessary is it to have the capacity to allow your children to play on the edge?

01:10:17.520 And fathers have that by temperament more than mothers do.

01:10:21.260 Now, but you, you know, you pointed out something really interesting.

01:10:24.160 You didn't exactly make the claim that the father was necessary.

01:10:28.720 You made a more subtle claim, which was that the dialogue between the father's higher risk tolerance and the mother's lower risk tolerance is necessary.

01:10:38.580 And that takes place, that can take place within an intact marriage.

01:10:41.480 But you also said it can take place in a marriage that's been broken apart as long as the couples commit to a long-term communication strategy, a long-term supervised communication strategy.

01:10:53.300 Yes, yes.

01:10:54.080 So it's the dialogue maybe that's really the issue here.

01:10:56.500 It's the interplay between masculine and feminine.

01:10:59.880 Is that the key thing rather than the presence of both?

01:11:02.940 Because you can imagine a man and a woman in a household who don't communicate ever about anything. 0.95

01:11:08.360 And I can't imagine that that's going to be an optimal environment for a child, despite the fact that both parents are nominally there.

01:11:15.120 Yes, yes, absolutely.

01:11:16.700 The children do well when both parents are involved about equally.

01:11:23.040 And that's because of a lot of subtle things here.

01:11:25.320 One, for example, is hangout time.

01:11:27.680 And particularly boys, if you ask them, like, how is soccer today?

01:11:31.120 The boy will say, OK.

01:11:33.760 But with hangout time, not much more.

01:11:36.820 Well, what else happened?

01:11:37.700 What happened at soccer today?

01:11:38.840 Nothing much.

01:11:39.420 You know, and then but if the father has hangout time, let's say in a divorce situation with the child, the child is likely maybe they're one's doing homework, the other was doing their different type of work.

01:11:52.280 And they end up in the kitchen together and they're looking through the thing.

01:11:54.960 And then the boy will say, you know, Daddy, I don't get it.

01:11:59.240 If you're playing soccer and you're doing really well.

01:12:01.700 And I was goalie last week and this week I wasn't goalie, but I thought I did really well.

01:12:06.260 And the coach even said I did really well.

01:12:08.460 But now he put he put in Jimmy for goalie goalie instead of me.

01:12:12.960 What's that about?

01:12:14.680 And that's when children with hangouts with hangout time, both boys and girls tend to to do much better than they do when they just are asked a quick question for a conversation.

01:12:27.060 For daughters, hang out. 1.00

01:12:28.320 They need time for the questions to bubble up of their own accord.

01:12:32.600 Exactly.

01:12:33.560 Or some little thing reminds them of something.

01:12:36.820 You know, if you ask a child, how are you doing?

01:12:38.900 Oftentimes they'll say fine.

01:12:40.520 But if you said, you know, if you ask them something specific, how did you like having the ice cream taken away from you by by somebody at school?

01:12:47.280 Then they'll have a response to that.

01:12:49.580 So when something triggers something that is very specific, the child will tend to sort of open up and on his or her own terms.

01:12:58.440 And interestingly, I said hangout time was very important for boys.

01:13:02.560 Psychologically, some researchers at the University of California, Irvine, said it's the single greatest predictor of psychological security in girls hangout time with dads.

01:13:12.740 And hangout time with moms and dads has a different dimension to it.

01:13:16.840 The children know that if they if they say say a problem to mom, she's more likely to be reassuring.

01:13:22.300 I'm sure that I'm sure that I wanted you to do really well.

01:13:27.080 He was probably just giving the other the other the other person a chance because in order for them to feel good about themselves, like you did when you play goalie.

01:13:35.780 Whereas the child is usually likely to know that the dad is more likely to say, well, you know, what did you do that maybe was not so good as a goalie?

01:13:45.940 What do you think you can do that's different with it, with the with the coach next time?

01:13:50.480 Did you ask the coach directly why she or he took you away from being a goalie?

01:13:54.940 And so the children more of a problem solving approach or a problem.

01:13:58.780 And you think that's associated with a positive developmental consequence for IQ?

01:14:03.560 I think it is.

01:14:05.020 It's not that lower IQ fathers tend to get divorced more often by any chance, is it?

01:14:10.760 Well, we do know that that mothers are who are well educated are far more likely.

01:14:16.900 About 90 percent of divorces come from mothers are initiated by the plaintiff is the mother.

01:14:23.960 And when the mother is well educated, she has other sources of income, other sources of education.

01:14:28.780 And and security.

01:14:30.500 And she also knows, obviously, that in the family courts, she's far more likely to have the children and the father is far less likely.

01:14:38.640 You know, she's more likely to have the right to the children. 1.00

01:14:40.880 He's more likely to have to fight for the children.

01:14:43.360 And and so there's all sorts of dynamics going on there.

01:14:47.480 But I think the most important thing here to understand is that, like we were talking a bit before about teasing,

01:14:53.260 there are so many developmental advantages to a lot of the things that dads do.

01:15:00.980 But I want to really make it clear that dads don't say to moms things like,

01:15:06.100 I'd like to roughhouse with the children because it will increase the children's empathy.

01:15:10.400 I'd like to roughhouse with the children as it will increase their social skills.

01:15:14.280 I'd like to tease with the children because it will increase their social abilities to to have to break.

01:15:19.820 God, who could stand to be married to someone who did that?

01:15:22.780 Yes.

01:15:24.180 And the result of that is that, you know, moms can't hear what dads don't say.

01:15:28.560 And one of the so one of the reasons why communication about what is and dads need to take responsibility for reading about what there is

01:15:38.820 that we do that's differently and what the outcomes are of the things that we do differently.

01:15:44.780 So I've never heard of a father say to a mother, you know, the teasing that I do with with with our daughter or a son,

01:15:52.980 you know, when we go into when kids go into the workplace and they haven't learned how to be they haven't learned teasing.

01:15:58.460 They feel the teasing is sort of an insult.

01:16:02.180 Right.

01:16:02.800 They're touchy.

01:16:03.700 They're touchy.

01:16:04.520 And they can't take a joke with a sense of humor.

01:16:07.480 Exactly.

01:16:07.660 We had very explicit discussions about such things in my household.

01:16:10.800 So, I mean, I wanted the kids to be inoculated against casual insult.

01:16:18.880 You have to take that with a sense of humor or it just mounts.

01:16:23.020 I've seen people who can't respond to that initial testing, you know, and it's partly what people do to see if you're socialized.

01:16:31.240 You see, because people want to socialize with people who are about as socialized as them.

01:16:36.280 And so what they'll do first is throw out some teasing and see what happens.

01:16:39.760 And if it evokes a playful response, then they know that the person that they're dealing with can be relied on to play and has been reasonably socialized.

01:16:48.220 You're hitting the nail right on the head.

01:16:49.820 And the commerce of masculinity is the trading of wit-covered put-downs.

01:16:56.720 And men learn as they grow up that I think probably the reason that that happens is because men learn that if you can handle criticism, you're not going to be successful.

01:17:09.120 And if you're not going to be successful...

01:17:10.460 You're also unpredictable because it means that if something small and upsetting comes along, you're going to get big and upset.

01:17:16.440 And that isn't what you want.

01:17:17.480 You don't want someone who's going to get upset about something small.

01:17:21.900 It's too dangerous in a crisis.

01:17:24.420 Absolutely.

01:17:25.060 And so from a male point of view, from most men's point of view, the feeling is if you can't be teased, you can't be trusted.

01:17:34.000 Right, right, exactly.

01:17:35.480 You can't be really respected.

01:17:37.000 And here's the type of problems that that creates in the workplace.

01:17:39.820 So if you're a dad talking to the mom about teasing children, help her see how this evolves into the workplace.

01:17:47.240 So in the workplace, a girl, a woman oftentimes may get teased and she will interpret that teasing like, you know, did you see you have a new dress on?

01:17:58.780 Did you get that to flirt with the boss? 0.58

01:18:01.220 Or do you have, you know, you're dressed, you must have dressed in the dark last night?

01:18:04.920 Or something like that.

01:18:06.300 That's something if you say it to a guy, they come back at you with some funny counter point like, you know, well, that would be typical for a short man to say.

01:18:16.540 A version of that.

01:18:17.540 And the men with each other, when they can tease each other like that and play with each other, that means that they're beginning to trust that man and move them into their league of people they can respect and trust.

01:18:32.740 Whereas if the woman hears something like that comment, she might feel it means that she's being discriminated against in the workplace.

01:18:42.500 So she takes that perspective and says...

01:18:44.340 That would be particularly true, I suspect, if she didn't have a lot of masculine presence in her life.

01:18:49.700 Exactly. 0.91

01:18:50.560 You know, that girls who don't have brothers are much more likely to be raped. 1.00

01:18:53.940 I didn't know that.

01:18:56.820 That's interesting.

01:18:57.580 And I do believe that.

01:18:59.280 And because a lot of the...

01:19:01.280 And this does confirm a number of things that I've heard of people who are experts in that area.

01:19:06.100 And that's very, very deeply sad.

01:19:08.540 And particularly what's reinforcing this.

01:19:10.720 You were talking about how things in today's culture sort of reinforce this.

01:19:14.780 So let's say this woman is new to work and she's being tested out by being teased. 1.00

01:19:20.440 And she feels really insulted and she interprets the teasing as discrimination against her, as opposed to interpreting the teasing as...

01:19:29.900 As an attempt to include her.

01:19:31.720 To include her.

01:19:33.240 Yeah, exactly.

01:19:34.200 So she goes to HR.

01:19:36.320 It's an invitation to play.

01:19:38.340 It's an invitation to play.

01:19:39.960 It's an invitation to be...

01:19:40.920 If you're skilled at it, right?

01:19:42.220 I mean, a tease can go too far and then it's insulting.

01:19:45.400 But the really good tease is right on the edge, right?

01:19:49.140 And then that's also...

01:19:50.280 It's also a compliment to the person who's designed to receive it because you're facing them with the proposition that they can tolerate a comment.

01:19:59.020 They're sophisticated enough to know when a comment is right on the edge.

01:20:02.520 And they're resilient enough to tolerate it and respond in kind.

01:20:06.560 So it's a compliment of the highest order to push like that.

01:20:10.060 It is so important that you said that.

01:20:12.020 And that's exactly right.

01:20:13.160 That's exactly what teasing does test for.

01:20:15.560 And that's exactly what men who tease each other are testing for.

01:20:19.160 To see if the playfulness can be met with playfulness.

01:20:23.300 It can be met with even a greater challenge that requires them to participate in the process.

01:20:29.220 But institutionally today, we've taken...

01:20:31.880 And you think part of that's crucial to IQ development?

01:20:34.680 I do.

01:20:35.620 That's interesting because, I mean, that teasing banter is a form of what?

01:20:40.880 Dynamic wit.

01:20:41.680 It's like a dance.

01:20:42.440 I mean, some cultures have really perfected that.

01:20:44.560 You get...

01:20:45.220 There's subcultures in England, particularly, where that's elevated to an art form.

01:20:50.240 And you see that in places like Newfoundland and Canada as well, and in Alberta as well, I would say, in the rural areas in particular.

01:20:57.880 Yes, absolutely.

01:20:59.200 And so now what we've done is institutionalized this teasing as a problem.

01:21:05.580 So the woman, upset that she's being discriminated against, goes to HR and says, I was discriminated against what he said to me.

01:21:14.580 Right.

01:21:14.920 That's failing a test in a more profound way.

01:21:18.140 Because one of the things you do when you're in elementary school and junior high school and high school, for that matter, and then in the workplace, is tease someone and see if they run off to find a figure of authority or whether they can deal with it themselves.

01:21:29.480 Exactly.

01:21:30.080 Because you assume that if they have to run off and find a figure of authority, that they're not mature enough to solve their own problems.

01:21:35.980 That's exactly right.

01:21:37.480 And so what we...

01:21:38.440 So the woman reports it to HR, and HR really is no longer HR.

01:21:42.760 It really should be called H-E-R, because it focuses almost always a complaint by the woman about usually a man.

01:21:50.600 And the...

01:21:50.980 Do you know what the stats are in proportion of workplace complaints that are brought forth by women compared to men?

01:21:55.800 I know the OCR stats, the Office of Civil Rights stats about complaining is about, I think it was a fellow named Joseph Eck, who's done the research on that.

01:22:06.920 And I think he said it was like 19 to 1, 19 complaints by women about men for each one complaint by men about a woman.

01:22:14.920 Right. And that's funny, because, you know, the men probably generate the grounds for complaints more often, being more disagreeable.

01:22:21.740 And the women are more sensitive to the negative consequences, being less emotionally stable, more neurotic. 1.00

01:22:28.440 So it's...

01:22:29.640 That's a place where men and women don't feed back so well to one another, you know?

01:22:35.060 And it's unfortunate, but that...

01:22:36.920 Well, I have wondered, you know, if men and women can inhabit the same workplace over time.

01:22:42.200 We don't know that.

01:22:43.480 I mean, I've been called reprehensible for even bringing that up as an issue, but it's not like we know.

01:22:48.500 We haven't...

01:22:49.180 The data aren't in.

01:22:50.040 We've only been working together, in some sense, for 50 years.

01:22:53.940 And there's plenty of evidence for sex segregation. 0.53

01:22:57.040 It seems to be the norm rather than the exception that, you know, once a gender, a sex, starts to dominate a field, 0.78

01:23:03.600 that that dominance becomes more and more predominant until it becomes almost total.

01:23:07.560 You see that with engineering.

01:23:08.860 You see it with nursing.

01:23:10.320 Those are extreme cases, but it certainly does happen.

01:23:13.480 Well, they're not as extreme as bricklaying, which is like all men, but women have... 0.96

01:23:18.500 You know, women haven't moved into the bricklaying domain, so we don't know what would happen if they did. 1.00

01:23:22.720 They won't, but...

01:23:23.780 So we won't know, but, you know...

01:23:25.180 No, and the challenge here is really enormous, because in the sexual area, it's very rare that a woman is interested in dating somebody at work who is earning less than she is,

01:23:40.900 and doesn't have as high status, and the great majority of women that I've seen that were single when they entered the workplace and then married somebody. 1.00

01:23:50.400 A significant percentage of them have married somebody in the workplace, but the great majority of that significant percentage have married somebody at least at their level and usually above them at work.

01:23:59.680 Yeah, it's hypergamy, right?

01:24:00.920 And it characterizes women with regard to potential for generous earning, essentially.

01:24:06.560 And unsurprisingly, I think it's an attempt to balance the economic scales, because women take the brunt of pregnancy and the brunt of the first year of child rearing, I would say, as well.

01:24:19.660 So, and they make themselves vulnerable as a consequence, so they need to redress that inequality, and that's how they do it.

01:24:28.480 But there are consequences to that that are very severe in the socioeconomic, in the social spheres.

01:24:34.780 Absolutely.

01:24:35.400 And then when a man above her does take interest in her, and it's explicit about it, you know, it can either result in courtship or a law court.

01:24:48.040 Courtship of one form or the other.

01:24:49.660 Yes, or, and a law, yes, a courtship of one form or the other.

01:24:54.380 And so it's a really, and what the biggest problem that's happened in the last 15, 20 years, especially since Hashtag Me Too, is that I have not yet spoken to a single corporate CEO who has not said some version of the following to me.

01:25:13.580 You know, Warren, I used to say, you know, Warren, I used to love mentoring women, but I have a wife and I have children.

01:25:19.400 There's no way, shape or form that I will mentor a woman today. 1.00

01:25:22.760 Right.

01:25:22.960 Well, it was increasingly insisted upon in my workplace at the university that if I ever had a female in the room with me, that the door be open. 1.00

01:25:33.960 I mean, and as soon as that's the rule, you're done.

01:25:37.580 You have to start rethinking everything.

01:25:39.220 Can you travel with your graduate students?

01:25:41.700 Can you be in the same hotel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:25:44.900 As soon as you have to start thinking about those things, that means the risk has become so great that you're much less likely to engage in such activity.

01:25:53.400 And mentoring is a very intimate relationship.

01:25:55.620 It is, and it oftentimes does.

01:26:00.660 I mean, many men are particularly inspired to mentor to a woman who's younger that is attractive, and many younger attractive women increase their caring about and their love for a man who they see as a result of his mentoring.

01:26:20.640 Yeah, well, you know, across cultures, women prefer men who are about four years older.

01:26:24.400 There's some variation, and that actually is one of the things that is moderated in the Scandinavian culture.

01:26:29.340 So that age gap is less rather than more in the Scandinavian cultures.

01:26:33.560 But that goes along with the general tendency to hypergamy, which is preference for a mate who's at or above you in the social hierarchy or the socioeconomic hierarchy.

01:26:44.960 It's really the social hierarchy, though.

01:26:47.040 Which create enormous problems in different cultures, like in China.

01:26:50.600 When we do analyses of the most popular dating site in China, you see that women want a very high percentage of women.

01:27:00.940 I think it's in the 92 to 93 percentile approximately of women want men who own homes and own cars. 0.52

01:27:09.460 But of the people on the dating sites who are males, only a very small percentage of them own homes and cars.

01:27:17.260 Right, well, and we should also point out that women aren't actually going for the home or the car. 1.00

01:27:21.760 They're going for the ability to produce the home and the car. 0.87

01:27:24.100 Of course, yes.

01:27:24.780 Right, they're using them as secondary markers for competence, essentially.

01:27:29.060 But, and then they, you know, you cited an interesting stat here, too, which I thought was worth talking about.

01:27:39.040 On who should pay the bill on the first date.

01:27:43.640 72 percent of women think that a man should pay the full bill on the first date. 0.96

01:27:50.460 Now, remember, they've already selected this man, and what that means is that he's likely to be at or above them in the socioeconomic hierarchy, and perhaps slightly older.

01:27:59.180 So, you know, in some sense, they can afford, he can afford to pay better than she can.

01:28:04.680 But in any case, 82 percent of men think the same.

01:28:09.040 And so men are playing the hypergamy game even more intensely than women are, at least with regards to that particular statistic. 0.68

01:28:17.740 So, and this gets into the psychology of the pay gap, because many women feel okay about that, because they feel like, okay, men earn more than I do for the same work.

01:28:29.220 When, when we, and in fact, that is not really accurate.

01:28:33.500 Here is what is accurate.

01:28:35.920 Fathers earn more than moms do. 0.99

01:28:38.980 The pay gap is not men, women.

01:28:41.240 The pay gap is dads versus moms.

01:28:44.520 And when dads become dads, they're far more likely to give up the things that they love to do that pay less, and do the things that they like to do a lot less, you know, quit that musician gig that paid much less, and do something responsible, quote unquote, like selling product Y.

01:29:03.660 Yeah, and they, that's also in line with the data that show that, you know, most, most young men, many, many young men abuse alcohol.

01:29:12.940 Most of them stop when, around 27, but that's also when they get married.

01:29:18.100 And so, they, they stop engaging in primary gratification.

01:29:21.920 And that's another example of that delay of gratification, as far as I'm concerned, that ability or willingness to sacrifice.

01:29:28.280 Yes, and it's also part of your, your whole, your whole rule about the, you know, it's important to have stable structures, but it's also important to have flexibility and structures and part of it.

01:29:38.100 You know, it's so funny that we, it's so rare that we can have a real conversation about this, because let's say that the pay gap, well, you know, it's certainly not obvious what degree the pay gap is caused by female hypergamy. 0.97

01:29:51.460 Right, if men demanded of their dating partners that they earned more than they do, my guess is that there'd be a pay gap in favor of women, because men are incentivized to earn more, because if they don't, that the consequences on the, in the sexual market, but it's not the sexual, it's the intimate interpersonal market, right, to not be cynical about it, because it's, it's not all short-term mating that people are motivated by, quite the contrary.

01:30:20.660 Well, they're motivated to take the dangerous, more dangerous, less desirable, farther away from, from home and family and interest, for that matter, jobs, because the payoff is disproportionately large for men who do so.

01:30:35.300 And you see that, you know, you see, and it's exaggerated at the upper end of the distribution as well, which is what you pointed out with regards to the dating sites.

01:30:42.360 You know, like, 70% of men are rated as below the 50th percentile in attractiveness by women.

01:30:49.280 And so, not only are there rewards for earning more, there are disproportionate awards for men for earning more.

01:30:58.120 And that goes along with the proposition that we put forward at the beginning of this conversation, I think that was recorded as well, that, you know, the most admired people are men, but the least admired people are men as well.

01:31:11.100 And there's a lot more least admired men than there are most admired men.

01:31:15.260 And that's true in brutal force on the dating scene, on the websites.

01:31:20.000 Absolutely.

01:31:21.920 And as I said, part of the reason that this is sort of all justified is because, you know, after all, men have privilege and, you know, and men are, you know, are, and the pay gap is really a reflection of the fact that, you know, men do less work and earn the same or, and...

01:31:39.820 Yes, which is complete bloody nonsense.

01:31:41.640 That's just not true, that stat.

01:31:43.360 There is a gap, but the reason for the gap is very, very complex and involves many factors, including the ones we discussed here, which you take apart so nicely in your book, Why Men Earn More.

01:31:55.160 I think you have 13 reasons that men earn more, you know, that's quite a few reasons, and privilege isn't one of them.

01:32:02.960 It's actually 25 differences between the choices that men tend to make and the choices that women tend to make.

01:32:10.100 25.

01:32:10.440 25 differences are things that do lead to men earning more money, but...

01:32:16.540 Could you list a few of those now?

01:32:17.980 Because it's such an interesting, it's such an interesting topic.

01:32:21.440 Men are more likely to take hazardous jobs.

01:32:23.780 They're more likely to take jobs like logging or trucking.

01:32:27.940 They're more likely to take jobs that require them to work weekends or evenings.

01:32:32.780 They're more likely to take jobs that have very little people contact, like being an engineer, but most men do like people contact, but many of the jobs with less people contact, like being an engineer or mathematician, tend to pay less.

01:32:49.880 The men are more likely to work longer hours, so the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, when you hear somebody works full-time, that only means that they work 35 hours a week or more, not 40 hours a week, which is what you usually think of as full-time.

01:33:11.640 Well, the average person who works 44 hours per week makes twice the money as somebody who works 35 hours a week.

01:33:21.900 It's twice.

01:33:22.800 I see.

01:33:23.180 Well, I remember one of your stats, which was, I think, 10% more working hours is 20% more income, something like that.

01:33:29.700 But that's a much more dramatic statistic.

01:33:31.860 44 hours is twice as valuable as 35 hours.

01:33:34.920 Yes, and men are much more likely to work that 44 hours or more per week.

01:33:40.700 Right, and thus not be there for their children as is exposed in family court.

01:33:44.900 Exactly, and that, of course, is very fascinating.

01:33:48.340 It's what I call the father's catch-22, that dads learn to love the family by having to be away from the love of their family.

01:33:54.920 But when the Pew Research Center asked dads who were full-time working dads, would you prefer to remain full-time working?

01:34:05.940 Or if you had the option of leaving your job full-time and being full-time with the children, which would you prefer?

01:34:15.020 However, 49% of dads said who worked full-time, so these are not sort of loser dads or dads not inclined to work, 49% of dads who work full-time said that they would prefer to be home with their children full-time and maybe work a little bit or not outside of the home.

01:34:33.860 And yet, that question is almost never even asked of dads.

01:34:40.500 Usually when middle and upper middle-class people are married and they have children, the mom generates three options. 1.00

01:34:46.840 Option one is to work full-time.

01:34:48.660 Option two is to be full-time with the children.

01:34:51.100 Option three is to do some combination of both.

01:34:53.860 And dads, you know, they have three options, too.

01:34:55.920 Option one is to work full-time.

01:34:57.640 Option two is to work full-time.

01:34:58.920 And option three is to work full-time.

01:35:00.760 Or more accurately, if they're a working-class person to work two jobs, if they're more of a white-collar worker, they'll tend to sort of work more hours at the job that they're doing.

01:35:13.280 And so that type of, these types of differences are not seen.

01:35:17.060 And the easiest way to see these is that women who have never been married and never had children, they earn 117% of what men who have never been married and never had children earn. 0.79

01:35:30.760 It's only when men get married and have children that they begin to do what you were talking about before and start taking on a commitment, a new responsibility.

01:35:43.300 Okay.

01:35:43.580 So your claim, it's no wonder you're so popular.

01:35:46.980 Your claim is essentially that men don't earn more because of privilege.

01:35:50.420 They earn more because they take responsibility.

01:35:53.220 Not that women don't. 1.00

01:35:54.400 I'm not saying that.

01:35:55.340 But I'm not saying that.

01:35:56.960 They're taking responsibility in a different way because they're focused on the children and maybe they sacrifice their career for that.

01:36:02.860 And maybe that's what they want to do.

01:36:04.080 But it doesn't matter.

01:36:04.840 They're still doing it.

01:36:06.140 But the reason that men earn more is because they're earning more for the people they love.

01:36:11.180 Yes.

01:36:11.620 Even politically liberal people who normally believe in minimal sex roles, when it comes to the children being born, the mothers are much more likely to sort of, even if they're working full-time, remember we said full-time is 35 hours a week, they're much more likely to go from maybe working 45 hours a week before to doing a few things that are different. 0.92

01:36:32.300 One is to working not only fewer hours, but finding a job that is closer to home so they can be more flexible.

01:36:41.060 And we see this, the best way I think to understand the difference in the pay gap is to look at what happens with women who own their own businesses versus men who own their own businesses.

01:36:52.800 So take two groups that are quite equal.

01:36:54.960 They both have MBAs and so they're committed obviously to work.

01:37:01.080 The Rochester Institute of Technology studied both groups of men and women with both MBAs who own their own business.

01:37:08.900 Women earned only 49% of what men earned.

01:37:14.240 And so the assumption when they started this was, wow, women who own their own business, they don't have the discrimination of discriminating male bosses. 1.00

01:37:25.720 And so therefore they'll be valued more, they'll probably earn as much or more than their male counterparts.

01:37:31.600 And the answer was no.

01:37:33.340 So the Rochester Institute of Technology then investigated that further.

01:37:37.800 And they asked women and men, which is the most important values for you in owning your own business?

01:37:44.400 72% of the men said the most important value for me was greater income.

01:37:50.340 Only 29% of women said it was greater income. 0.52

01:37:54.520 The women wanted more time. 1.00

01:37:56.800 They wanted time.

01:37:57.860 They wanted stability.

01:37:59.580 And they wanted safety.

01:38:01.440 Also, men were much less concerned about safety than women were, which is why, you know, all of your hazards. 0.96

01:38:08.080 That's why Uber drivers make more when they're men, at least in part. 0.98

01:38:11.680 Yeah.

01:38:12.640 And higher risk tolerance.

01:38:14.460 Yes.

01:38:14.780 And let's say you don't have a college education or even you've dropped out of high school.

01:38:20.040 And so if you're, you might get a job as a garbage collector.

01:38:24.820 You have to get up early in the morning.

01:38:26.640 It's dirty.

01:38:27.640 It's hazardous. 1.00

01:38:28.880 And yet a female who has an art degree, a master's degree in art, may earn less than that garbage collector. 1.00

01:38:37.300 And partially it's because, you know, people tend to need their garbage picked up more than they need a new piece of art.

01:38:42.580 And so these are so many of the 25 differences that are between men and women.

01:38:49.620 But the good news about this.

01:38:51.020 How did we get to an estate, Warren, where the given 25 differences is a lot of differences.

01:38:58.140 And it doesn't make for a very big difference in pay, by the way.

01:39:02.180 Even the most radical proponents of the unequal pay theory are struggling to come up with a figure that exceeds 15%.

01:39:10.800 So 25 differences amounting to 15% isn't that much of a difference.

01:39:15.800 But, you know, if the data are so clear that it's fathers who are driving this and it's relatively self-evident, I would say, if it was single guys that were driving this, you could make a case that it was for selfish, pleasure-seeking purposes, right?

01:39:33.900 And that would fit pretty nicely into the privilege narrative, right?

01:39:37.320 Power-hungry, greedy, selfish, short-sighted men with privilege make more money.

01:39:43.640 It's like, well, wait a minute, it's fathers. 0.57

01:39:45.600 Oh, so why are they doing that?

01:39:47.160 And never married women who have never had children earn 117% of what never married men who have never had children earn.

01:40:00.660 Never married women who have never had children, they are more likely to plan for their careers and they do earn more. 0.97

01:40:06.560 And what's most astonishing is that never married women who have never had children have earned more than never married men who have never had children since the 1970s.

01:40:16.080 Just now, it's just now, it's 117% more.

01:40:19.520 And so exactly what you said is true.

01:40:22.000 It is not, never married women who have never had children, they tend to focus on their careers, whereas never married men who have never had children, they're much more likely to be able to do something like music or art.

01:40:37.020 And gay men historically have often been very successful in art because they've been usually never married men who have never had children.

01:40:44.580 And they've been able to afford to do things that were less likely and dependable to produce money.

01:40:50.460 Oh, I've never heard that explanation before.

01:40:52.660 That's, that's, that's quite an explanation.

01:40:56.640 So, so let's delve into that a little bit more deeply, the, the time and money issue.

01:41:01.380 So when women rank order their preferences when they have options, so these are the middle class, upper middle class women you talked about, they're going to go for more time. 1.00

01:41:11.360 And I presume that they want more time to spend that with their kids.

01:41:16.360 That's been my observation.

01:41:18.260 That's the number one thing.

01:41:20.100 Okay.

01:41:20.780 And then men are making more money instead, but it's fathers that are making more money.

01:41:25.680 So they're making more money for what reason?

01:41:28.000 Is it like, exactly?

01:41:29.640 Is it for their kids?

01:41:30.620 Is it for their wife and kids?

01:41:31.720 Is it so that their wife maintains her attractive, her attraction to the man?

01:41:38.900 Because that's a, that's a big issue that no one ever talks about.

01:41:41.960 Right.

01:41:42.180 I mean, within marriages, I've seen this many times.

01:41:46.180 Within marriages, if the male takes a status hit, he also takes a attractiveness hit and it's a severe hit.

01:41:55.200 I've seen this many, many times and no one will ever talk about it, but it's definitely the case.

01:41:59.720 Here's the best way to understand that bridge.

01:42:02.100 The man takes a status hit.

01:42:04.160 He starts losing respect for himself.

01:42:06.700 His wife starts losing a little bit of respect for him, wondering whether or not that this is going to result in a job down the line or whether some promise or belief that he has is going to manifest.

01:42:18.900 Yeah, or if she's really the man he thought she was, she thought he was.

01:42:22.240 He feels that less respect.

01:42:25.440 And a woman is, and I think every woman will agree with this, it's almost impossible for a woman to love a man she doesn't respect.

01:42:34.240 And there is this.

01:42:36.120 I think it's that the opposite is true, too, but maybe the grounds for respect differ.

01:42:40.700 The grounds for respect differ.

01:42:42.400 And also a man, there's more flexibility with a man on the respect issue.

01:42:48.660 There may not be more flexibility in terms of first falling in love on the beauty issue.

01:42:52.720 Women have their burden that they have to that they have to live up to as well. 1.00

01:42:56.860 But the but on the respect issue, it's very challenging for if a woman begins to lose respect. 0.99

01:43:03.960 She begins to lose love and men sense this and therefore they oftentimes brag or boast or or, you know, overstate their potential in order to be able to make themselves attractive.

01:43:16.380 And we see this in so many levels and the Lois Lane level, Lois Lane, you know, she had no interest in Clark Kent, but she fell in love with Superman.

01:43:26.020 And once she fell in love with Superman, she wanted Superman to be able to cry and express emotions.

01:43:31.020 But the man who did cry and express emotions and feelings and sensitive Clark Kent, she has zero interest in, you know, women are oftentimes say I'm opposed to war. 0.86

01:43:41.820 But look at the she's much more likely to fall in love with the officer and a gentleman than she is the private and the pacifist.

01:43:48.480 And, you know, and they we talk about this even in high school, most everybody's gone to high school and most high schools have football games and and the and the women are the cheerleaders go first and do it again for the guy that scores the touchdown or cat either by throwing the pass or catching the pass.

01:44:08.700 And if the guy feels like it's too dangerous for him to play football and he leaves the football team, it's very rare that the that the cheerleader says, you know, I noticed how well how good your listening skills were when you were in the huddle and how warm and tender you are.

01:44:24.000 I want to continue cheering for you. No, she tends to cheer for his replaceable part.

01:44:28.640 Another number seven risking his life with a concussion or a spinal cord injury.

01:44:33.880 Well, this is non this is non trivial behavior.

01:44:38.060 I mean, because you look at the the football team, I've been writing about that recently.

01:44:42.300 The football example is particularly interesting, especially because it's such a trope in American, especially in American popular culture.

01:44:49.480 Everybody knows the story. Right.

01:44:51.400 But what's so interesting, too, is the men will on the team will elevate their best player to the highest position of status, despite the fact that they all take a hit in terms of sexual attractiveness by doing so.

01:45:05.180 I mean, maybe, you know, being on a winning team elevates a rising tide, lifts all boats.

01:45:10.860 Well, definitely. But but it's still the case that they'll take a relative hit within the confines of the team to elect the man to the position where he's most likely to receive the favors of attraction from the most valuable, the most desired women.

01:45:25.440 Yes, exactly. So, I mean, trying to puzzle out the role of sexual selection, thinking that through, because men, men select the women that men select the men that women select.

01:45:36.920 It's very, very interesting to watch that happen.

01:45:40.180 And yeah, absolutely. And you'll see this, you know, both sexes figure out very carefully.

01:45:45.320 And when people say, well, men are more competitive than women, that's not really true.

01:45:50.260 Both sexes are very competitive for getting having the goodies that lead them to be have the greatest amount of choice. 0.97

01:45:59.380 So women will compete with other women about how they dress, what their dresses look like. 1.00

01:46:03.780 If a woman is at a party and she's interested in one or two of the guys at that party and a really attractive woman comes through the door,

01:46:10.720 she will assess what her chances are and what, you know, how she should position herself to make sure she gets the contact with the man that she really wants to make contact with.

01:46:21.580 And the men will do the same type of thing around, you know, the things that they feel will lead a woman to be attracted to them.

01:46:28.860 Well, this also makes it very, it's very difficult for men to figure out, this is another reason why I question the long-term viability of,

01:46:38.480 not that I truly question it, but these questions arise in my mind, the long-term viability of mixed-sex workplaces,

01:46:46.460 the rules for competing with other men are pretty clear.

01:46:50.660 The rules for competing with women are not clear at all.

01:46:54.840 Yes. 1.00

01:46:55.940 Because if you're a loser, you're still a loser. 1.00

01:46:58.040 But if you're a winner, you're just so easily a bully. 0.99

01:47:00.560 So it isn't obvious what, how men can negotiate that.

01:47:06.360 Well, they have to negotiate it through negotiation.

01:47:08.900 That's the only possible outcome.

01:47:10.320 But it definitely makes things much, much more complex.

01:47:13.980 And it's also, it's complex, at least in part, because as you just pointed out,

01:47:18.840 within the sexes, the competition is about different things.

01:47:23.580 So, or sorry, between the sexes.

01:47:26.400 No, no.

01:47:26.780 Within the sexes, the competition is about different things.

01:47:29.460 So when a woman competes with a status, with a man for status, she's competing for male status, not female status. 0.70

01:47:38.060 And so what to make of that?

01:47:40.340 Well, why that would be rewarding to her isn't that obvious.

01:47:43.000 And I think that's part of the reason why so many women bail out of high-pressure situations, jobs, when they hit their 30s. 1.00

01:47:50.600 I mean, part of it is that they would rather be with their family, and for obvious reasons.

01:47:55.620 But the other unspoken elephant in the room is always, well, why would it be particularly rewarding for a woman to attain status in a masculine hierarchy?

01:48:07.580 What benefit does that confer on her? 0.65

01:48:10.000 Well, more income.

01:48:11.000 That's one of them.

01:48:12.180 But that confers no attractiveness advantage.

01:48:16.140 Whereas for men, it accrues a tremendous attractiveness advantage.

01:48:19.800 It's definitely disproportionate male versus female.

01:48:23.520 I would say, though, that if a man has a choice between two women, and they're both equally attractive, and their personalities are pretty much the same, etc., and one is more successful than the other, the man is likely to be more attracted to the more successful woman.

01:48:40.040 But he's also likely to be afraid of rejection by that more successful woman.

01:48:45.520 Yes, definitely, definitely.

01:48:46.640 He will feel that that more successful woman will have more options. 1.00

01:48:50.700 She will have more options.

01:48:51.880 She will have more options.

01:48:52.660 And she'll have higher demands as well, because she's going to want to make—that's the real issue. 0.92

01:48:57.160 That's where the rejection issue comes in.

01:48:59.020 It's not even necessarily that she has more options.

01:49:01.760 It's that because she's more successful, her criteria for what constitutes acceptable are going to be elevated. 0.78

01:49:07.580 They may even be elevated to the point of impossibility for her.

01:49:10.980 Exactly.

01:49:11.740 And the real fear that the man has is the fear of being rejected.

01:49:17.960 Yes, definitely.

01:49:19.260 And I think that—well, I've made light of that by teasing my class, my students.

01:49:27.420 You know, I said, well, what's the joke?

01:49:30.640 Well, you're perfectly suitable as a companion, but in no way should your genetic material be allowed to propagate itself into the next generation.

01:49:40.180 Right?

01:49:40.760 That's the core of rejection.

01:49:43.100 And it cuts to the bone.

01:49:46.780 It cuts to the bone.

01:49:48.180 And it isn't obvious that that's sufficiently understood, how terrified men are of female rejection.

01:49:56.260 Well, that's part of the turning to pornography, I would say.

01:50:00.620 And the advantage of dating sites like Tinder, because the rejection is taken out of the game, essentially, or it's hidden, masked.

01:50:07.320 Tinder is a revolutionary technology because it alters the reward structure, reward and punishment structure in dating.

01:50:16.000 I mean, it's incendiary and named properly.

01:50:20.700 Pornography is basically access to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection at a price you can afford. 1.00

01:50:33.000 Right, and with the commensurate responsibility.

01:50:36.700 None.

01:50:38.080 Except to yourself, right?

01:50:40.120 But that's easily foregone in the moment.

01:50:41.760 And the challenge of it is that the more, so boys who are usually doing less, young men who are doing less well in school, who are not the football players that are getting the 15 different women coming up to them and risking rejection,

01:50:57.640 who are not the student body presidents, who are not standing out in one way or the other, who are not getting great grades, not part of the honor society, et cetera.

01:51:05.060 The non-standout men, the ones that are oftentimes dad-deprived, that have minimal postponed gratification and so on, and they tend to do badly in school or drop out of school. 0.63

01:51:17.460 Those boys feel like losers, and they know that women tend to not date losers.

01:51:23.160 They tend to date winners, and they end up in the unemployed, and what women are looking for, and much more likely to be in their families, live with their families, 66% more likely.

01:51:36.800 Oh, yes, that's another statistic.

01:51:39.200 Young men between 25 and 31 are 66% more likely than young women to be living with their parents.

01:51:45.520 Yes.

01:51:45.860 And more young men are living with a parent than with a partner.

01:51:49.480 Yes, and you don't find women looking for men that are living in their parents' basement or looking for men... 0.66

01:51:58.660 No, well, that's just a joke, which is why you could insert it there as a cliché.

01:52:03.000 Everyone understands exactly what that means.

01:52:04.980 It means failure to launch.

01:52:07.000 It means Peter Pan, right?

01:52:08.760 It's a joke.

01:52:09.560 And those women are therefore more likely, those guys rather, are much more likely to turn to pornography because they sense they're being rejected by women, and then they turn to this beautiful woman that they can be turned on by.

01:52:24.540 The challenge with pornography is that the more you get into it, the more you tend to be stimulated by more and more risky things, and more and more salacious things, or things that are...

01:52:35.680 Yeah, well, that's because novelty enhances pleasure.

01:52:40.140 So that's the addictive element of it.

01:52:42.220 Precisely.

01:52:43.300 And then the female who is interested in that guy and does come over to be with him physically, she often feels like this guy is more interested in something that happened in the pornographic things that he's been watching.

01:52:57.940 She feels like an object, and because she is being treated like an object...

01:53:02.860 Well, and also, those are the men who aren't going to be particularly sophisticated in their treatment of women, because how could they be?

01:53:09.260 They have no experience.

01:53:11.280 Precisely.

01:53:11.960 And so the pornography ends up haunting them on multiple levels, and leads them to often turn back to pornography to avoid continuing rejection, and only convinces them that a real-life woman is somebody that he would fail on one level or another with.

01:53:28.900 And so it's a really...

01:53:29.900 Have you ever seen Robert Crumb's representations of bird-headed women?

01:53:35.620 No, no, I haven't.

01:53:36.560 Robert Crumb's an underground cartoonist, and he was the feature of a documentary which you should...

01:53:41.400 You and everybody else who's listening to this should definitely watch.

01:53:44.860 It's absolutely...

01:53:46.420 It's the best documentary I've ever seen about anything ever.

01:53:49.600 And he draws these women. 0.81

01:53:52.760 He was a loser in high school, by his own admission, by every single category you could possibly generate. 0.95

01:53:58.000 And so it's a study in loser psychology. 0.92

01:54:02.660 But it's really complex, because he was a loser who was extremely intelligent and unbelievably creative, and who had two brothers who were probably more intelligent, more creative than him, although also more psychopathological. 0.61

01:54:15.480 And then he became successful.

01:54:17.100 He was one of the establishers of underground cartooning back in the 1960s, and spawned arguably even graphic novels.

01:54:27.420 You know, I mean, he's a major player in that niche.

01:54:30.660 And the documentary is a brilliant analysis of the relationship between failure and success, and sexual failure and sexual success.

01:54:39.240 Because in one memorable scene, he talks about...

01:54:43.260 He drew this card when he was a high school kid of a heart being ripped apart when he got rejected by this girl that...

01:54:49.000 Or by all girls.

01:54:49.820 He said he was beneath contempt.

01:54:51.380 He wasn't even in the category of comprehensible dating partner, right?

01:54:56.740 He was outside the game entirely.

01:54:58.400 So he's rejected by the feminine as such.

01:55:02.120 He draws these pictures of bird-headed women with teeth, you know, and they're powerful, big thighs, big rear end, like powerful, physically powerful, intimidating women, like mothers. 1.00

01:55:16.400 Draws sometimes these characters of little tiny men climbing up the legs of these huge tree-like women.

01:55:23.280 But they're very aggressive and domineering.

01:55:27.860 And the reason for that, at least in part, is because every woman he ever approached was rejecting and aggressive in the extreme.

01:55:36.820 Treated him with nothing but contempt.

01:55:38.680 And then he says in an unbelievably memorable piece of the documentary,

01:55:43.080 That all changed when I got successful.

01:55:46.420 And you can just hear the resentment and the bitterness in his voice, even though it did change.

01:55:51.020 And he wasn't that old when he became successful.

01:55:53.340 He was in his mid-twenties.

01:55:55.020 You know, plenty of time to be on the outs completely and to experience life at the bottom of the male dominance hierarchy.

01:56:01.900 And even farther down the female dominance hierarchy, let's say, in terms of desirable men. 0.99

01:56:07.620 It's called Crumb, the documentary.

01:56:09.760 I would highly recommend it.

01:56:11.140 And it's absolutely brilliant study.

01:56:13.900 And he had, well, he had an authoritarian father and an indulgent mother.

01:56:20.000 And she plays a key role in the documentary.

01:56:24.980 And it's awful.

01:56:27.900 It's awful.

01:56:28.820 It's a study in Freudian psychopathology that's deep beyond belief.

01:56:34.280 I've seen it like 40 times, showing it to my classes and walking through it clip by clip.

01:56:39.220 But, but anyways, it's a study. 0.91

01:56:42.880 You don't see the world from the perspective of down and out male loser.

01:56:47.760 You know, there are subcultures that sort of exist there.

01:56:51.120 But this is the, this is the only examination of that place in the world I've ever seen that I thought really, really nailed it.

01:56:59.460 The, the documentarist was a friend of the family.

01:57:01.600 So he, and Charles Brothers, one of them ended up a sexual offender who lived on the streets of San Francisco.

01:57:07.120 And the other committed suicide by drinking furniture polish when he was like 55.

01:57:11.220 After being bullied terribly in high school and living in his mother's basement, essentially, for his entire life.

01:57:18.820 Oh, awful, awful.

01:57:21.120 But, you know, you watch the documentary.

01:57:22.900 It's not, it's not like people really, there's, you generate some compassion for the people in the documentary.

01:57:29.720 And what they've gone through.

01:57:30.840 But I wouldn't say that compassion is what's primarily elicited by the documentary.

01:57:35.740 And that goes back to this discussion we had right at the beginning about, you know, what kind of empathy we have for the men who aren't making it.

01:57:47.840 And the answer seems to be very, very little.

01:57:51.380 Let's go to social policy with that.

01:57:53.340 We might ask, okay, in light of this, what do we do?

01:57:56.820 And I would say, this is what I've recommended.

01:57:59.480 I've recommended to young men that they take, that these are the facts on the ground and they're not going to change.

01:58:06.200 And that if you're being rejected chronically by women, or if you're terrified out of your mind about that, and perhaps rightly so, 1.00

01:58:14.560 you should take a good hard look at yourself and see what it is that you have to offer.

01:58:18.640 And so, are you as educated as you could be?

01:58:22.100 Are you working?

01:58:23.800 You know, are you looking for a job at least?

01:58:25.880 Are you trying to get out of your parents' house?

01:58:28.380 Are you taking the steps necessary to become gainfully employed, productive, generous, and attractive?

01:58:35.120 And, you know, that tangles us back up with something we also talked about in the beginning,

01:58:40.580 which is the criticisms that have been directed my way by men,

01:58:43.880 which is, well, you're asking men to live up to a stereotype that essentially undermines and devalues the vast majority of them.

01:58:51.980 You're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

01:58:54.260 And your emphasis on responsible marriage, given the state of current family law, is nothing short of reprehensible.

01:59:01.440 And so, you know, my approach is do what you can at the individual level to put yourself in the game.

01:59:08.060 But there's much more to the story than that.

01:59:11.360 Absolutely.

01:59:14.860 This is really complex because the good news is there's a lot you can do to choose a woman who is the right woman. 0.98

01:59:25.020 And so, for example, looking at when you both go out to dinner, is she open to paying?

01:59:34.280 Is she if she if she isn't paying, does she does she cook a dinner for you the next time around?

01:59:40.160 How does she treat the waiter, somebody that can't do her any any good?

01:59:46.160 Ask her about her former relationships, how they broke how they broke up and who was at fault?

01:59:53.280 Was is there any accountability and responsibility on her part?

01:59:56.660 Of course, ask these same questions of yourself as well, especially about former relationships and how they broke up.

02:00:03.700 And and so that's so choosing the right woman is probably so what are you looking for there?

02:00:09.820 You're looking for generosity.

02:00:12.880 You're looking for kindness down the hierarchy, right?

02:00:16.620 So that's how does she treat people who are social inferiors, so to speak, at least in that context, like waiters.

02:00:23.440 And then with regards to previous relationships, is she capable of some self-analysis or is it always the guy's fault?

02:00:31.880 That reminds me of that Atlantic Monthly article, one of them.

02:00:35.300 I'm unfortunately can't remember who wrote it, but was this woman in her late 40s detailing out all the high quality men that she had rejected many, many, many men by her own account.

02:00:47.040 And during the entire article, there wasn't any recognition whatsoever of any time when it might have been her.

02:00:55.800 It was like, I read these 40 men didn't live up to my standards.

02:00:59.900 It's like, well, after the fifth one, didn't you start thinking maybe the problem was on the other side of the dating table?

02:01:05.940 But the answer was obviously no.

02:01:07.720 And she was obviously still single.

02:01:10.620 So but so what are you looking for there exactly?

02:01:13.460 And why did you why did you bring that up at that point?

02:01:17.040 Well, because one of the ways that you can be involved in the game of marriage in a way that is positive is by making the choice of the woman differently than what we tend to do.

02:01:33.520 We many men look at a woman.

02:01:35.920 She's beautiful.

02:01:37.320 And and our desire to be sexual with her leads us to sort of, OK, we'll pay for dinner.

02:01:42.600 We'll promise this. 0.58

02:01:43.440 We'll go.

02:01:43.980 We'll go here.

02:01:44.720 We'll go there.

02:01:45.340 And we should point out, too.

02:01:47.140 I just want to point out something.

02:01:48.700 I talked to Randy Thornhill recently, one of the world's preeminent biologists.

02:01:53.420 And before we get to thinking that this sexual attractiveness is nothing more than mere shallow mindedness and impulsive gratification,

02:02:02.020 is all the cues of sexual attractiveness are tightly associated with physical health and fecundity, which is the ability to procreate.

02:02:09.480 And so even if men are blinded by beauty, which which I do believe is true enough, there are reasons for that at the deepest possible level still have to do with the desire to continue the human species.

02:02:25.600 So it's it's shallow in one sense, but not in another.

02:02:29.760 But your point is, there are other markers that are characterological that are more subtle that need to be taken into account.

02:02:37.580 Yes.

02:02:37.920 Both sexes have very huge reproductive draws.

02:02:42.580 I mean, every from an insect right on up through human beings, women tend to procreate and have children with it with the alpha male. 1.00

02:02:51.940 You know, a good example of this is buck elks.

02:02:53.700 And among buck elks, the females, 85 percent of them will have reproduced with the male that has the biggest rack.

02:03:02.920 But what it takes to get that biggest rack is an exhaustion of 30 percent of the minerals, nutrients and calcium in the buck elk.

02:03:11.760 So the second that he reproduces, if he doesn't get rid of his rack immediately, he's likely to die before winter sets in and he's able to replenish the the nutrients and the and the minerals and so on.

02:03:24.560 So his his his his his rack was very productive for being able to procreate.

02:03:32.520 It was very productive for being able to attract the female.

02:03:35.780 But it was also his weakness that is and that's very symbolic of men, that men's weakness is our facade of strength because it was strength because we could use that rack with a not me.

02:03:47.660 But the buck elks could use that rack to, you know, to to get rid of other predators or people that were the female didn't want to protect the female when she was creating the child and so on. 0.99

02:03:59.280 But once but he was also being used for being part of the next generation's benefit of producing the next generation's machine.

02:04:09.060 And as you said, when we you know, we once we have children, we really live for the next generation.

02:04:13.680 And so now the next question becomes, as humans, are we are do we want to create more options for ourselves?

02:04:22.740 And so and are we at a point now where survival is mastered enough in the middle and upper middle class that we have with them?

02:04:31.260 Then we are chosen merely for our success.

02:04:35.080 And I think the best explanation of that comes in Japan, where the millennials in Japan have a game called Kuroshi.

02:04:43.800 And of course, Kuroshi means death at the desk or death from overwork.

02:04:47.780 And the game, each person has a little Kuroshi figure and they compete to get to the top of the ladder.

02:04:53.660 It might be the political ladder, might be the economic ladder, might be the religious ladder.

02:04:56.860 And as they compete to get to the top of the ladder, the one who gets to the top of the ladder first commits suicide, not in real life, but in the game.

02:05:05.840 And the point that the Japanese millennials are communicating with each other is that the that what we did to become that successful man who was who was the most attracted, who was the most able able to be eligible for sex and for love is we unbecame a human doing climbing to the top of the ladder.

02:05:29.680 And we I'm sorry, we unbecame a human being, we didn't even think of ourselves as a human being, that's why we're committing suicide, we have just just by competing to be at the top of the ladder.

02:05:42.520 We've worried about what position we wanted, how to have working more hours, pleasing the boss, pleasing the corporation, not not selling something we wanted or doing something we wanted.

02:05:54.360 And we we've lost we never even considered ourselves as a human being.

02:05:58.660 And so now we Japanese millennials are going to start looking at the the loss of ourselves as human doings, loss of ourselves, rather, as human beings.

02:06:08.860 And that is and that's the in my opinion, the where we need to consider going that as we have children with this is balancing act of do our helping our children see the value of being that artist, that painter, that's doing what you love to do, combined with, is it creating enough income to be responsible to your family to do that.

02:06:37.000 And, and, and, and, and yes, it will lose you some women, but if you're developing emotional skills and emotional intelligence, that may not attract as many women as the football player that risks his life and spinal cord injury, but it may attract the type of woman you want.

02:06:55.900 And for me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me between marriages, when, when I would go out with women, they would, you know, I would share with them what I did.

02:07:04.920 But part of that was sort of redefining equality for them.

02:07:09.460 And it was not offering to pay for the bill, the whole bill on the first date.

02:07:13.380 It was talking to them about the options, like I can pay on the first date, and maybe you can do something like cook dinner for me on the second date type of thing.

02:07:22.060 But I'll tell you, many, many times I feared, not many times I feared, I know a few times that I said something like that, that I knew there was going to be no sex that evening, whereas otherwise it probably would have been.

02:07:34.240 And so, you know, it's a risk that you take inside of yourself.

02:07:38.720 But for me, what I wanted to select for was a woman who wanted me more for who I was and less for what status I had or what predictable status I had. 0.99

02:07:48.360 So, well, what do you think? What do you think about the advice that I advice?

02:07:55.280 I don't really think I give advice exactly. I'm trying to explore ideas and that exploration has certain consequences.

02:08:02.460 But certainly, you know, I do, as is my role as a psychologist, I do, you know, encourage the people who are reading me to do what they can with what they have to the best of their ability.

02:08:14.140 And I don't see that we have a truly viable alternative to essentially classic sex roles.

02:08:24.580 I know they're under pressure for all sorts of different reasons, including the ones that you've outlined.

02:08:29.320 But, you know, in some sense, it's the only game in town.

02:08:34.920 Now, what can I mean, there are things we can do, though.

02:08:39.260 You talked about Japan, for example, where they've really invested heavily in vocational training, which seems to me to be a no brainer.

02:08:49.040 It's like maybe without having to revamp the entire relationship between men and women, we could say, well, wouldn't it be good social policy for everyone concerned to pay some attention to the vast majority of men who could use vocational training, for example, as an avenue to success in all domains of life?

02:09:10.000 And why are we so unable to do that when the Japanese can do it? 1.00

02:09:14.180 Yes, we really are. There are so many things like that that we can do.

02:09:19.500 I mean, schools, for example, we could have one of the things I've suggested to the White House, both of the Trump administration and also under the Biden administration, is starting a male teacher corps in which men are trained to be teachers,

02:09:34.140 particularly in dad-deprived areas, school districts, and they get free scholarships, they get full scholarships for college.

02:09:43.460 But yet, in exchange for that full scholarship for college, they have to serve three or four years as a teacher in a school district that has few male teachers.

02:09:52.780 Another thing I've suggested to both, and so you think that's, I'm thinking of objections to that selection on the basis of gender, let's say, which I'm, you know, pretty much temperamentally imposed to, but in some sense, but this, this is a data-driven suggestion.

02:10:11.280 The data suggests that there are areas that we, so it's differentiated, it's not ideologically driven, it's a differentiated solution.

02:10:19.440 There are, there's data indicating that the provision of male role models in places that are deprived of those, the addition of male role models in the domains that are deprived of those would be of benefit to everyone concerned.

02:10:33.720 And so that's a targeted social policy.

02:10:36.080 Yes.

02:10:36.380 It's not an ideological statement.

02:10:38.280 Precisely. And in fact, it's even more complex than that.

02:10:40.500 The way that I've suggested it is that you don't just get males like me.

02:10:45.220 I consider myself more of a nurturer connector male.

02:10:49.640 You also get more traditional males so that no matter who your son is, if you're, if you've grown up in a home without a male role model in the home, without a biological father, particularly in the home, that you have, that your son, no matter what he's prone toward, what his unique self is,

02:11:07.680 that he's able to go to find a role model, find a role model that is, that it's not just another nurturer connector male, but, you know, a construction worker or a man that's retired from a more of a profession that was more traditional, like a logger or whatever, firefighter, and that your son is able to see that possibility.

02:11:32.060 And then also the nurturer connector male as a possibility.

02:11:35.060 And so that those things be offered.

02:11:38.060 Another suggestion that I think is by far the most important one that I made to both administrations is the, the importance of creating a father warrior program, WARR.

02:11:50.060 And because every generation, you know, historically speaking, as you, as you read in the boy crisis book about the purpose void that men have, by no longer being as needed as soldiers and no longer being as needed as full-time breadwinners, that the male have the option of seeing himself as possibly involved in some, and I lost where I was going with that.

02:12:17.320 You, you, you were talking about the male warrior idea and the need for purpose and the social policy associated with that.

02:12:25.220 Yes. And so I, what I've suggested to both White Houses is the importance of creating a father warrior program where we're saying we need young men to be full of fully involved, learn all the traits of being a responsible, emotionally connected father.

02:12:42.580 Uh, we need women to, to, to, to, to value this in men as well. 0.62

02:12:47.840 Um, uh, and so.

02:12:49.160 And how would that work practically speaking?

02:12:51.400 Like, uh, I'm always thinking about incentives.

02:12:53.640 Like if we wanted to incentivize young men to be responsible fathers, which I think is exactly the right role to be playing in every, virtually every role that a man plays is the role of responsible father.

02:13:06.320 That's the right role, not everyone, but virtually everyone, how do you incentivize that at the level of social policy in, in, in, in a practical way?

02:13:15.280 The number one thing you do is you honor it.

02:13:17.840 Um, so for example, when we had each generation had its war and we said, uncle Sam needs you.

02:13:24.540 When men are told they are needed, that gives them purpose.

02:13:28.320 That gives them drive.

02:13:29.540 That gives them honor.

02:13:30.420 Okay, so how do we, okay, so how do we, um, say fathers, you are needed without saying single mothers, you're inadequate because that's the killer, right? 1.00

02:13:43.460 That's the killer right there because one implies the other or that's the theory.

02:13:47.540 So, you know, and this is, uh, this is a shoal upon which our culture is, is wrecking itself is how do we reward behavior that is eminently pro-social in the broadest possible sense of the word without punishing, simultaneously punishing those who are excluded from that, but struggling to do the best under the conditions that have presented themselves to them.

02:14:11.840 Absolutely. We, we say to mothers two things. One is we honor mothers for being just overwhelmed. I mean, I've never, uh, between marriages, I dated a number of almost all the women I dated were women who had children.

02:14:25.660 The word that they used most frequently was overwhelmed. Um, and the, and so many of the mothers, I tended to, to date very bright women. And so they often felt caught between, they could do better

02:14:39.140 in work. They could go further. They could go farther. Uh, they weren't up to the, their full level, but, and they could do better as mothers. They felt guilty as mothers that they didn't have enough time for their work and they didn't have enough time. 0.74

02:14:51.760 Yes. Yes. Guilt all the time. There are, whatever they're doing is inadequate because they're not spending enough time with their kids and they're not spending enough time on their work. And both of those are true in some sense.

02:15:01.640 Absolutely. And when they would, they would say, I want to spend more time with you, but I'm caught between my work and my, um, the other trade and, and, and, and my, and my love interest. And so, um, and so what the, the, the larger social message that needs to come out, come, come out to men is men, women need your help. Women do not need, not, we must not leave women, uh, to feel like they have.

02:15:29.580 So is it women or mothers, mothers? I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I mean, it's just, it's important to get it right. Right. I mean, women, you might not need men's help. Mothers, you do. And so do your children.

02:15:41.920 Right. Exactly. So that you're, so that when you focus on mothers being overwhelmed, every mother hears that. When you say to a mother, when a mother hears, we're now going to be emphasizing the importance of dads getting in there to balance the picture with you, to help you out, to be, to, to, to not have you have the entire burden.

02:16:04.720 And mothers do hear that in a positive way. If you are simultaneously saying, which I think is a hundred percent true, that you have just been, that you've been overwhelmed and you've been, we respect and honor the fact that you've, you've, you've, you've taken so much responsibility.

02:16:20.500 Um, but it is not helpful for you to have, to be pulled in so many directions. It is not helpful for the children.

02:16:28.260 It's not optimal for the children.

02:16:30.400 It's not optimal for the children. Um, and it's not helpful for the dad because the dad is experiencing a purpose void, a feeling not needed and unwanted. And men with purpose voids, uh, tend to, uh, look for a purpose.

02:16:42.500 Yes. Yes. Tend to, um, purpose and, or, um, look for, uh, be, uh, be negative sometimes in their purpose.

02:16:50.180 And we need to help mothers and fathers in the whole country understand.

02:16:54.440 Okay. So this sounds great. So why the hell don't you have any traction with Trump or with Biden? Cause that pretty much exhausts the options.

02:17:02.240 So what's going on?

02:17:04.260 Well, I, I, you know, with, with Trump, they, uh, the Trump administration said they were very excited about it.

02:17:09.440 They, uh, asked me to write up a speech that Trump would give and he never gave it.

02:17:13.920 Um, and so, um, with any idea why, I mean, you'd think it would have been useful to him.

02:17:20.540 You you'd think given his constituency, I would have thought it would have been a hundred percent useful to him.

02:17:26.120 I, you know, I made the case that there are about 20 million parents that have children, uh, that, um, boys rather, uh, that are in failure to launch mode in some way, shape or form.

02:17:36.480 Um, and that these mothers care more about their sons and they care about their party label, uh, that this could open an entire themselves, maybe even.

02:17:44.380 Yes, exactly. And I said this to both the Biden administration and the Trump administration.

02:17:48.560 Uh, the Biden administration was at least, you know, the 14 people that I met with at the white house and with HHS.

02:17:54.540 Uh, they said, uh, they were very, all to a person, extremely enthusiastic, uh, with the Democrats.

02:18:01.060 I've gotten much more of a resistance, um, when the white house council on gender policy, uh, was created.

02:18:06.920 And I objected to that, not including boys and men and fathers, um, and, uh, and said that you couldn't possibly say you were in favor of diversity and inclusion when you excluded fathers and boys and men.

02:18:20.140 And then they said that.

02:18:21.320 It's only 50% of the population.

02:18:23.720 Yes. Yes. Or 49% or whatever.

02:18:25.840 Uh, but, you know, but it's one thing if you just say boys and men are not important, it's another thing to say.

02:18:31.580 Yeah. I'm in favor of diversity and inclusion. And then to say that the second mission of the gender policy council, um, is to have racial justice and not understand that racial justice can, that the single biggest group of people who are having challenges in the, in the culture are black males.

02:18:48.680 And, you know, if you, if you go to a home city.

02:18:51.700 Which is a prime example of the intersectionality that's being touted as crucial to the development of our entire culture.

02:18:58.440 Yes. Yes.

02:18:59.220 Or it's the prime example, perhaps.

02:19:02.420 Indeed. And here.

02:19:03.980 Because I think black women are outperforming black men on average. 0.64

02:19:07.860 In almost every metric.

02:19:09.300 Yes. Yes.

02:19:10.380 Exactly. So, so, you know, well, that does beg the question.

02:19:15.880 I mean.

02:19:16.640 Well, what question does it beg?

02:19:18.580 Well.

02:19:18.860 You know, maybe one question it begs is where exactly is the systemic racism?

02:19:25.540 The racism.

02:19:26.900 Use a horrible phrase.

02:19:28.040 Yes, I don't even want to go to systemic racism.

02:19:30.920 But if, if the, if the goal of the white house gender policy council, um, is to have racial justice as it says it is.

02:19:42.760 But then you wouldn't, but then they go ahead and exclude, uh, black males from racial justice and only focus on black females.

02:19:52.900 That is undermining racial justice because these, as we know, since the 1965 with the Moynihan report, um, the, when we did studies of inner city crime and the fear when, uh, Patrick Moynihan went to do that study was, oh my goodness, he's going to be blaming black people.

02:20:09.620 People is going to be racist.

02:20:10.620 In fact, he ended up finding that it was not blacks per se, uh, that we're creating the crime. 0.96

02:20:16.340 And it was just that one 25, at that point in history in 1965, it was only 25% of the children who were being raised in families, um, were without father involvement.

02:20:27.980 And almost all of the crimes that were being committed were from the, the dad deprived children.

02:20:34.200 Well, now that hasn't changed that, that, well, that hasn't changed except one thing has changed.

02:20:38.740 The percentage of children who are raised in dad deprived mode in the black community has gone way up 25%.

02:20:45.980 What do you think of the counter arguments to that, that have been raised recently that black men are just as involved with their children.

02:20:51.640 And it's just that it's in ways that the, you know, privileged white community, Jesus Christ, isn't recognizing.

02:21:00.160 And that that's just another form, that idea that, you know, the black father is less engaged, just, just another racist trope.

02:21:07.580 No, some black father, there are, um, a significant number of black fathers who are involved with their children.

02:21:14.400 That is not where those children, that those are not the children that are having problems.

02:21:18.920 As long as the black mother is also involved with the children.

02:21:22.780 Um, so when, whenever you have that, um, and, and of course the, the social policies we were talking about before, you know, the, of, of giving money to the women, infants and children program and other program where the, the female who did the black female or the white female who did not have, um, a father in the home, she would be helped.

02:21:43.760 And if the father was not in the home, that did reinforce very significantly, um, the propensity of the mother to say, let's say the father wasn't earning very much money.

02:21:54.560 So the father would, if you, if you live away from me, um, we'll be able to get government support.

02:21:59.760 And so then that right incentive, um, for living, watch your incentives, right.

02:22:04.960 And we have to realize today, it's not just that the, um, African-American families now have more than 70% of the children who are raised with minimal or no father involvement, or what I call dad deprived children. 0.59

02:22:16.660 But also at the time of the Moynihan report in 1965, there was only 3.2% of Caucasian families whose children were living in dad deprived situations.

02:22:28.860 Now that's gone up to 35% in Caucasian families.

02:22:33.440 And so we had this enormous dad deprivation in it's in these dad deprived, uh, families that, um, watch what's going to happen in the fall.

02:22:42.700 We're going to have significant numbers of school shootings.

02:22:45.480 And one of the things that we see with school shooters, um, in the, in the 21st century, every school shooter who shot, shot 10 or more, um, people killed 10 or more people.

02:22:55.100 Every one of them was dad deprived.

02:22:57.020 Um, we, um, when we look at, when you look at the prison population, it's 93% male.

02:23:02.280 And the great majority of those males are, um, dad deprived males.

02:23:07.220 Um, I, I think I've never experienced something that was more touching for me than when I ran for governor and I spoke of California.

02:23:14.400 And I spoke around that a few prison populations.

02:23:16.680 And I talked to these prison populations, almost all male.

02:23:20.260 The first question I would ask is, you know, how many of you had an involved father in about three or 4% of the hands of the prison population, but would go up.

02:23:28.680 And then I would talk to them about all the, the, the things that dads do that are different from what moms tend to do, like the teasing, like the postponed wedding occasion, like the rough housing and what the psychological value of those were for the children's growth and development.

02:23:43.300 And I had these guys with tattoos and, um, you know, and muscles that I'll never have, uh, coming up to me and saying, crying and saying, I never realized I was worth anything.

02:23:54.880 I thought I was better off probably in prison because I was the worthless person in the family.

02:24:00.200 And suddenly for the first time, I'm feeling like I want to get out of prison to help my children, uh, not have the problems that I had and not go and, and not make the mistakes that I made.

02:24:10.440 Um, and so there's this enormous desire on the part of men to know that they're valuable as fathers.

02:24:17.820 You know, my, my sense as a clinical psychologist has always been that a kid has to have one role model sometime in their life to, to make it.

02:24:30.140 They have to have someone to mimic or they can't make it.

02:24:33.160 Now you can get that in a variety of ways.

02:24:34.720 I remember reading Angela's ashes, it's a great book by Frank McCourt and his dad was a recalcitrant alcoholic who drank the family's livelihood and health away.

02:24:45.580 It was awful, but he kind of separated his dad into good dad and bad dad and bad dad was drunk evening dad and good dad was sober morning dad.

02:24:56.640 And he got his mimicry from good sober morning dad, you know, so you can, you can pick it up in bits and pieces from different places.

02:25:04.900 But if you're, even if you have an intact nervous system, you know, and you're not suffering from burdens right at the point of your birth from, from deprivation that's, that began before you were even around.

02:25:17.620 You need to have at least one model in your life that shows you what the good version of you could be, because otherwise, how the hell do you know what it is?

02:25:27.160 And it needs to be embodied, right?

02:25:29.020 So you can see it play itself out.

02:25:30.720 So then you can play with it.

02:25:33.020 Yes, absolutely.

02:25:34.220 Let me, and let me to that effect, let me address the females in the audience here listening to this that are single moms and, and what can you do? 1.00

02:25:42.860 So the number one thing that you can do is take a look at the differences between dad style parenting and mom style parenting, because oftentimes the things that dads do look like they're not caring about the children, the things like teasing, the things like roughhousing, the things that letting the children take risks, like, you know, climbing the trees, like we talked about, they all seem like this, the tough love decisions are often seen, you see the toughness without the love very frequently.

02:26:10.420 And so take a very careful look at that.

02:26:15.240 Make sure that if you're still, if you still have the dad at all around or available, that you get into family dinner night discussions where everybody learns how to listen to everybody else's perspective in the family.

02:26:28.540 Learn how to do a negotiating of that, that checks and balance parenting.

02:26:33.640 But it's absolutely impossible to get the biological father involved, and I'm afraid that the biological father, children do better with the biological father than they do with the stepfather, mostly for the...

02:26:44.640 Step parent elevates risk for abuse by a hundredfold, if I remember correctly.

02:26:48.660 It's a very, stepfathers almost always are never allowed to be more than advisors.

02:26:54.880 If you do have a stepfather, work on that issue that I talk about in the Boy Crisis book on how to engage the stepfather as a real equal, assuming that he's a responsible and loving man.

02:27:08.020 But if all those things fail, make sure you get your child at the age appropriate time into Cub Scouts.

02:27:15.180 Cub Scouts involve children involved in Cub Scouts for two or more years have a very significant increase in character development over children that are involved in Cub Scouts minimally and or not at all.

02:27:29.320 Boy Scouts are a wonderful deconstruction of masculinity.

02:27:33.440 They've really figured out how to bring out the best in boys, faith-based communities.

02:27:39.660 Children who are in faith-based communities, make sure your faith-based leader gets your son involved in small groups with other boys his age.

02:27:50.540 And make sure he encourages your son and all the boys in the group to talk about their feelings and their fears so that they can see that they're not alone in those feelings and fears.

02:28:02.900 Make sure your children are involved in what I call the liberal arts of sports.

02:28:08.300 But by the liberal arts of sports, I mean team sports, also pickup team sports, and also sports where you have to develop your own skills.

02:28:19.340 You're part of a team like in gymnastics or in tennis, but you're not interacting with the team all the time.

02:28:25.820 Each of those things will develop in your son different types of skill sets.

02:28:29.480 The most important one that oftentimes moms don't realize the value of is the value of pickup team sports. 1.00

02:28:37.160 Let your son or daughter be at the school without your supervision.

02:28:43.340 Let them pick up a game where they have to decide without somebody supervising them how big the court should be, the basketball court should be, should be half size, full size.

02:28:52.720 One of the fouling rules, who do you check, is perfect developmental skills for being an entrepreneur and being able to make decisions without supervision.

02:29:04.640 Obviously, team sports are pretty obvious what their benefits are.

02:29:07.940 And developing skills that are dependent on this team are part of the liberal arts of sports.

02:29:16.260 So spend time in the Boy Crisis book, looking at what you can do as a single mom.

02:29:21.940 One of the things I liked about your books and why men earn more as well is that they're full of information, but they're also practical and they have practical advice.

02:29:34.320 Here's things you can actually do, which is something people apparently appreciate about my books.

02:29:39.080 So it's nice to have it detailed down to the level of action.

02:29:42.320 I want to close because I know we've exhausted you.

02:29:45.140 Um, what, why did you receive such, I would like to know why you think you didn't get more traction with the Trump people, but then I would like you to tell me what's up with the Democrats.

02:29:56.140 Why didn't you get, why did you get rejected so out of hand when you put forward these perfectly reasonable propositions, which in principle should be in accordance with what they're claiming to support?

02:30:07.940 Yes, even the Trump people, this is what I'm going to say now is 10 times, 10 fold this issue with the Biden people, but even the Trump people were fearful that the single mother would feel criticized and they were afraid of losing that, the support from her.

02:30:24.400 And, um, and, um, and so that was, that was what I heard behind the scenes was the, the gap between, um, it being very much recommended by the people that I spoke with versus actually having a, um, a presentation delivered by Trump.

02:30:39.380 The other thing was that they were fearful that it would, it would call attention to Trump's failed marriages and, um, and his, his womanizing, and they didn't want to open that door.

02:30:51.060 So those were the, um, from the Biden side, um, it was like, it was, well, the best example of this is when I went to Iowa and I interviewed, um, nine of the presidential candidates that were Democrats.

02:31:06.440 And most of them, um, were very excited, especially Andrew Yang and, um, um, uh, Senator Hickenlooper, John Hickenlooper were very excited about what I was saying.

02:31:16.860 Andrew Yang already had a mastery of what was, um, what the problems were with boys.

02:31:22.620 He was on the tip of maybe being able potentially to talk about the issue.

02:31:26.080 Um, while, when I finished talking with both Andrew Yang and, um, and Hickenlooper, um, especially with Andrew Yang, the female, um, campaign manager came up to me and said, I'm sorry, Warren.

02:31:39.020 We just cannot have him talk about these issues. This will alienate our feminist base. This will alienate, uh, women who are single moms. Um, it will not, um, and we want, we want also many of the women who are divorced. 0.90

02:31:52.560 We want them not to feel that they won't have the choice of going off and starting a new life and bringing their children to a new location with a new man. Um, and so we are afraid of losing that bait.

02:32:04.040 Those two. Yes. Well, and to hell with the old man. Yes. And so it was really, um, and they were honest with me. That's the good news. The bad news is that, um, this was the case. And so with the, when the Biden administration, um, created the white house gender policy council, which was a day or two before he was actually inordinated.

02:32:22.940 Um, the, um, the, um, and it was focused on, you know, women and girls and, um, you know, and, and both black women and girls and white women and girls. I protested and, um, and talked with Jen Klein, who's the co-chair about this many times.

02:32:38.940 And her only answer over and over again, Ms. Warren, um, uh, president Biden cares about men and boys, Warren, president Biden cares about a father, the fathers and my responses, my, my constant hammering of her about, well, then, then it should be written into the white house gender policy council to create these father warrior programs, to create these, um,

02:33:00.940 these programs of dozens of dozens of which I suggested, uh, that could, um, increase and improve the lives of boys and men. And I was met with no answer. Like just.

02:33:12.540 So what, what's the problem? What's the problem? As far as you're concerned, we might as well have it right out. What the hell's going on?

02:33:19.060 In, in Jen Klein's case and in the, um, in the, in the feminist, uh, in the, the liberal political leadership, uh, in the Democrats, it is just a fundamentally,

02:33:30.440 and totally honest belief that, um, women have it worse than men, that boys and men, and the, the constant image that comes up for the political liberals is Warren.

02:33:44.800 Right. So it's the gender, it's the classification of the world by sex. That's the problem. It isn't who has problems and how do we help them? It's, it's the classification first and the problem.

02:33:56.740 Second. It's, we live in a patriarchal world dominated by men who made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women. The proof of that one is that, um, look at who's at the top of the political ladder. Look at who's the top of the, um, corporate ladder. Uh, look at who's the top of even the religious ladder.

02:34:14.340 Right. So it's right back to where we started, which is identify that tiny minority of men who are hyper successful, generalize that to the masculine, uh, universe at large and to hell with those that are in the middle or the bottom, which is, so what is that hypergamy in female politics? Is it the same thing?

02:34:34.940 And it's, it is not the realization that the men at the top are often at the top. They're earning that more money, not because they feel more fulfilled or this is their choice. They felt obligated to earn money that somebody else spent while they died sooner.

02:34:51.280 Right. So it's not even true for the people who have the privilege, much less true for men anywhere else on the hierarchy.

02:34:57.240 Correct. And when I say to them, things like, you know, it isn't male privilege. Do you consider it male privilege for every, um, generation during their war to train the boys and the men, uh, to be, uh, the ones that died in war so that you could be protected and saved? And it's just like closed mouth. Uh, what about the, um, the legislation?

02:35:18.320 That's become a real issue in Korea.

02:35:20.420 Yes.

02:35:20.860 In South Korea.

02:35:22.060 Oh, actually, I didn't know that.

02:35:23.560 Oh, yes. Yes. There are no shortage of men who are not thrilled about the fact that they are conscripted for two years and the women aren't. 0.99

02:35:30.980 Now, you know, my sense is, well, the women pay their dues in childbirth and pregnancy and, you know, but nonetheless, it's, it's an issue and it's producing no shortage of resentment and friction among young Koreans.

02:35:43.580 And here in the United States, you know, it's still the law, um, which is probably the most unconstitutional law that most violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection laws.

02:35:53.320 It is still the law in the United States that your son who's 18 must register for the draft.

02:35:58.740 If he doesn't, um, he's, could be fined a quarter million dollars.

02:36:02.280 He could be put in prison for a year or two.

02:36:04.800 He can, in 42 states, he can lose his driver's license if he doesn't register for the draft.

02:36:11.180 Um, he, and there's a whole series of other, he could never go to a school that gets federal money, which is virtually every school, including private schools.

02:36:18.800 This is all the punishment that men have, male, your son has if he's 18 and doesn't register for the draft.

02:36:25.420 The punishment for females is zero, uh, because they don't have to register for the draft. 1.00

02:36:29.860 They have the option to join.

02:36:30.900 So what do you think of that, Warren?

02:36:32.300 Like the, the old fashioned patriarchal part of me thinks, I think two ways at the same time, you know, unfortunately about that.

02:36:40.260 I think, you know, I do believe to, to some degree that that's the balancing of the scales, you know, that as you pointed out in your own book, you know, men die in war and women die in childbirth.

02:36:54.080 Now they don't die in childbirth so much anymore, but they did. 0.57

02:36:57.220 And, and, and in, in great numbers and was terrible pain and, and, and all of the privation that went along with that obligatory responsibility, tremendous amount of that has been ameliorated.

02:37:08.260 Not all of it, but a tremendous amount.

02:37:10.040 Thank God for technological progress.

02:37:13.000 And so, but, but having said that, well, it doesn't sit well.

02:37:19.420 The idea of women drafted for frontline combat doesn't sit well with me.

02:37:24.180 Yes, and I think there's an answer to that, which is we don't have to draft people for frontline combat.

02:37:31.540 There are, there are, there are men that are not suited to that.

02:37:33.760 There are women that are not suited to that, but we're, but I think it's a good solution would be either you don't have registration for the draft, which creates a different set of problems and not having a ready group ready. 1.00

02:37:45.660 But say you, but you have people register at the age of 18 for some type of service of say six months or more.

02:37:54.620 And, and, and then you, you mark off the type of service that your personality, that your, that your contribution can make.

02:38:03.100 You could be a healthcare frontline worker.

02:38:05.940 You can be a volunteer in this way or that way.

02:38:08.740 So if there's mandatory service, it's mandatory for all, but the service itself can differ and, and, and everyone could have some choice in that.

02:38:17.280 And who knows, maybe there'd be enough people pick frontline combat to fill the necessary places.

02:38:22.400 It's possible.

02:38:23.320 I mean, there are people who are constitutionally inclined towards that.

02:38:28.060 And if there isn't enough people for that, then you do a supply and demand type of phenomenon.

02:38:31.780 And you raise the income for the people who do want to.

02:38:35.500 Right, right, right.

02:38:36.480 Which would be, that would, right.

02:38:37.820 Exactly.

02:38:38.200 That would be the equitable way of dealing with it is, is increase the hazard pay.

02:38:42.400 Yes, exactly.

02:38:43.080 Right.

02:38:43.460 And you'd watch the demand and you'd watch the supply increase.

02:38:46.700 Exactly.

02:38:47.040 Because there'd be people who are right on the line, right, right on the edge.

02:38:50.360 Exactly.

02:38:50.940 Right, right, right, right.

02:38:55.500 Any final things to say?

02:38:58.220 Yeah.

02:38:58.380 Well, I guess maybe the most important thing I'd like us to all get is that there are so

02:39:05.040 many things like hashtag me too that are so valuable for us to hear the pain and the experience

02:39:13.280 that women go through, but hashtag me too as a monologue is a disaster because it needs

02:39:21.000 to be a dialogue.

02:39:22.300 Yeah.

02:39:22.760 Just like it needs to be a dialogue between men and women in a family.

02:39:26.060 Exactly.

02:39:26.500 We need to hear that, that men have pain, men have all these, these, you know, the, the

02:39:32.160 50 plus developmental challenges that I talk about, that men feel lonely, isolated, that

02:39:38.980 men, why men suffer more because when, because one thing we need to do it just for compassion.

02:39:47.220 Secondly, there's so many misunderstandings and anger that is happening by, we say on the

02:39:54.320 one hand, men are, we have toxic masculinity.

02:39:58.740 They don't express their feelings.

02:40:00.540 They don't say who they are.

02:40:02.260 And then we, we make men pay an enormous price when they do express their feelings.

02:40:06.640 And so, so many young men feel caught between a rock and a hard place.

02:40:11.020 Yes.

02:40:11.240 Well, I would say that's happened in my case, you know, because I have this unfortunate

02:40:14.880 proclivity to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, which has haunted me my entire

02:40:19.400 life, but is still quite pronounced.

02:40:21.260 And it isn't exactly obvious to me that, you know, my radical left-wing critics are above

02:40:27.260 using that as a weapon.

02:40:29.440 It's quite interesting to note, you know, and maybe they're justified in doing so.

02:40:33.640 I'm not saying that.

02:40:34.700 That's, but that's, it runs contrary to their hypothetical theory.

02:40:37.980 Yes.

02:40:38.380 Yes, exactly.

02:40:39.060 And, you know, and I've said man after man, by the way, I have the exact same character

02:40:43.660 as if my, if my wife were here listening now, she'd be really chuckling because anything 0.99

02:40:48.200 that is, you know, what I had to hold myself back when I was talking about the memory of

02:40:52.500 the, of the men in the prison population coming up to me afterwards and themselves crying.

02:40:57.740 Right, right.

02:40:58.900 Yeah, I think you just about got me there too.

02:41:01.940 Interesting.

02:41:02.960 The hashtag MeToo dialogue is, is so important, not just for empathy, but also to, to eradicate

02:41:11.520 the toxic part of masculinity that keeps feelings all to oneself.

02:41:16.020 Because when you do that, you end up having a volcano build inside of you and it comes

02:41:20.840 out as the anger, it comes out as distance, it comes out as drinking, it comes out in

02:41:24.880 destructive behavior.

02:41:26.360 And it also comes out in things like school shootings, mass shootings, committing crimes.

02:41:32.900 And so both to protect ourselves from the mass shootings, from the ISIS recruits, almost 0.95

02:41:37.380 all of whom are dad deprived males and females.

02:41:40.120 And also out of the-

02:41:42.580 And is there data, is there data on that, Warren, with regards to recruitment for-

02:41:47.540 Yes, there is.

02:41:48.580 In fact, it was done by three sociologists who looked at the studied ISIS recruits in

02:41:54.820 Lebanon.

02:41:55.780 And after doing that, they anecdotally told each other afterwards, you know, a lot of these,

02:42:01.920 these guys have, don't have their dads and they were trying to get involved with ISIS to

02:42:08.460 have some sense of a purpose beyond themselves.

02:42:12.020 And while it was never part of our questionnaire, they went back and then did a systematic study

02:42:18.180 of the men asking, including that question that had not been asked at the, at the beginning

02:42:23.160 and found that to be the single most common denominator of the ISIS recruits.

02:42:28.180 By the way, there's 89% male ISIS recruits and 11% female ISIS recruits.

02:42:33.760 And the females had dad deprivation as an issue, as well as the males as the single biggest

02:42:39.180 characteristic.

02:42:42.040 Patriarchal ideology as a substitute for paternal relationship.

02:42:46.040 Yes.

02:42:46.560 Yes, absolutely.

02:42:47.200 And just a need to have some sense of purpose and feeling of being needed.

02:42:53.720 And that's one of the things that dads are so good at as working with moms.

02:42:58.420 Moms are so good at identifying a child's gifts, nurturing the child's gifts. 1.00

02:43:03.860 And dads are so good at the tough love oftentimes that are necessary to help the child achieve

02:43:10.640 those gifts.

02:43:11.640 Yeah.

02:43:11.800 Well, I thought, you know, it seems to me that the central characteristic of the benevolent

02:43:16.480 paternal spirit, parodied as the patriarchy, is encouragement.

02:43:21.460 Oh, encourage.

02:43:22.600 Well, I would, I think I'd take a little bit of a different issue there.

02:43:26.020 I think moms and dads both encourage a lot.

02:43:29.680 But moms oftentimes repeat the encouragement. 1.00

02:43:34.040 And when the child fails, are still encouraging.

02:43:37.800 Whereas the dads say, if you want to get to that outcome, you need to not do that texting.

02:43:44.620 You need not to, you know, do all the things that that outcome requires.

02:43:48.680 And they tend to sort of enforce those boundaries and hold the child accountable to a greater

02:43:54.020 degree.

02:43:54.720 Does that make sense?

02:43:55.860 Sure.

02:43:56.380 Sure.

02:43:56.900 That's, thank you very much for talking with me today, Warren.

02:44:00.380 It's much, much appreciated.

02:44:02.280 You don't exhaust me.

02:44:03.180 You energize me.

02:44:04.100 I just so.

02:44:04.460 Oh, well, I'm glad to hear that.

02:44:06.120 And I hope that, I hope that everybody finds this conversation useful.

02:44:09.840 Thank you.

02:44:10.260 Thanks again, Nate.

02:44:11.400 Thank you.

02:44:11.760 You too.

02:44:12.060 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 16, 2021

187. The Four Dos and Don'ts of Divorce ｜ Warren Farrell

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