Sean Williams and Danny Gold contrast Scott Galloway's Notes on Being a Man with Corinne Lowe's Having It All, critiquing Galloway's anecdotal advice while championing Lowe's data-driven exposure of the "squeeze" where women bear disproportionate domestic burdens despite career ambition. They reference the Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere and specific policy proposals like gender-neutral parental leave and bias-proofed hiring, ultimately arguing that men must read Lowe to understand structural inequalities rather than relying on self-help narratives that ignore female exhaustion. [Automatically generated summary]
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My wife, Callan, and I are avid readers.
Our nightly ritual involves 15 to 20 minutes of reading in bed before lights out.
And once in a while, we read a book that we feel the other should read or would enjoy reading.
Such was the case when she handed me Corinne Lowe's book, Having It All, What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours.
And the economist and associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School has indeed written quite a book.
Now, on one level, Callan knows I love data.
On another, she wanted me to read it because some of Corinne's points about relationships and home building.
Specifically, about the division of labor that goes on around the house that we purchased nearly four years ago.
Now, we're pretty good at certain things.
For example, we each cook three nights a week.
Whoever cooks the meal packages the leftovers and cleans the counters, stove, and sink, while the other person who enjoyed the meal does the dishes.
Now, we've been doing this for years, and it works really well.
But like a lot of men, I have blind spots, and Corinne's book is really good at pointing them out.
Because it is a book written for women, but after reading it, it's the type of book that I think all men need to read, especially young men.
We just watched Louis Thoreau's Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, and while I have some criticisms of the film overall, and we're actually going to feature it on next Thursday's episode here at Conspirituality, Louis did a really good job at exposing how fragile these puffed up misogynist assholes really are.
That's usually what happens when you confront these so-called men's men, and all Louis had to do was ask a few basic questions and put a microphone in front of their mouths.
Regardless, these men still have enormous influence over a lot of other men, especially younger men and boys.
And I wish I had the money to give all of them copies of Corinne's book.
I've long noticed that so much of what passes for dating advice in these spaces never actually includes input from women.
And Lord knows how awful it is when a bunch of men start making assumptions about things they know nothing about.
So in that light, I want to sort of compare Corinne's work with another book that I recently read, Scott Galloway's Notes on Being a Man.
I didn't particularly want to read it, but Matthew was doing a few episodes on Galloway and we picked the book apart for a recent main feed episode.
I fall in the camp of thinking Galloway offers some solid, if not basic, financial advice when appearing on news shows as he often does.
He argues for a higher federal minimum wage.
He wants expanded antitrust enforcement.
He definitely wants more oversight of tech platforms.
And these are all policies I can get on board with.
But when I saw he was writing a self-help book for men, I cringed a little bit.
This is a dude who posted a photo of himself shirtless during a TED Talk while expressing a visceral disdain for fatness.
And I just knew it would spill over into his man-to-man advice, which it did.
In no way am I placing Scott in the same category as the Menosphere creeps I just mentioned, like Sneeko or Myron Gaines.
They're all generally interested in young men, though.
The podcasters because it's the target audience and monetization vehicle, and Scott because he has three sons and is a college professor, so he's dealing with younger people all the time.
And again, to be clear, Scott is much more empathetic to women.
But reading Corinne's book so soon after Scott's, I just noticed a few glaring differences, which is what I want to unpack today and make the case for having it all being a book all men, young and old, should read.
I'm Derek Barris and you're listening to a Conspirituality Brief, the book men actually need.
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Now, let's get into the books.
Both books examine the struggles of career, relationships, and family, but from vastly different perspectives.
Their main points of contention center around the value of relentless ambition, how to manage relationships, and who is truly disadvantaged in today's society.
Spoiler alert, Scott focuses on the boys' issues when in reality, women have always and continue to face many more challenges at both individual and systemic levels.
The bias toward focusing on the male crisis plays out heavily in media coverage as well, where it's presented as an existential threat.
And I mean, yeah, when men go berserk, wars happen.
But the female crisis is at least equally relevant when it comes to the well-being of society, perhaps more so as Corinne argues.
When it comes to work, Scott argues that balance is a myth.
He insists that achieving high economic status requires an obsession with work during your 20s and 30s.
And he views work as a defining characteristic of a man's identity.
And in order for you to reach the pinnacle later in life, you have to burn a massive amount of fuel early on.
Corinne refreshingly rejects this approach.
For context, she was the breadwinner in her marriage.
Her and her ex-husband were both financially successful at first, but then he left work to start a business, and she was left carrying the economic burden and the lion's share of housework, which I'll get to in a moment.
As for career ambition, she says the lean-in mentality glorified by Cheryl Sandberg only serves capitalism and bosses by demanding women work harder to overcome structural barriers that they did not create.
She advises women to stop romanticizing work and treat their job as a technology for converting time into money, which is a phrase that I really love.
She advises setting strict boundaries to protect sleep, leisure, and sanity.
Basically, she's arguing to remember that work is a means to an end, not an identity to pursue.
Here's how she frames the idea, quote, let's stop romanticizing work.
Instead, let's see it as a tool to help us reach our ultimate goal, maximizing utility.
How is it a tool?
Well, work can do something amazing.
It converts your time and effort into money, which can be exchanged for other things that other people are better at making than you are.
Jobs give us an ATM that we can put time and effort into and get money out of.
Very pragmatic, very grounded advice.
Now, back to relationships, and this is a really big one.
And I can't help but turn back to the buffoonery of the Manosphere and how they treat women.
If you watched Inside the Manosphere, you remember when Louis Thoreau confronted Myron Gaines, the douchebag behind Fresh and Fit, about his division of labor.
His work brings in the money, so his former girlfriend Angie, at the time they were together, she did all the cleaning.
Now, to be clear, this is the traditional setup.
And if some people like this dynamic, I'm not here to say it's wrong.
But in this case, Myron had Angie cleaning all the time while also engaging in one-sided monogamy, meaning he could fuck whoever he wanted while she had to remain faithful to him.
And you see on screen how much she's not on board with this, which is why at the end of the film, you find out that they broke up, and all signs point to her leaving him.
I bring this up because when the tension around one-way monogamy came up, Myron ordered that Angie go clean the studio, a really stark portrait of this so-called traditional man.
And again, I don't want to imply Scott Galloway advocates for any of this because he doesn't.
But when it comes to relationships, he explicitly warns against keeping a ledger in a marriage.
He believes that couples who constantly keep score waste energy and end up feeling like they are losing.
Instead, he advocates for providing surplus value, which he translates as giving more love and support than you take without keeping track of who did what.
Now, if it sounds like there's a problem to this system, yeah, there's a real one, because most of us have shitty memories, first of all, but this is where data come into play.
Corinne points out that a man who earns 20% of household income does as much housework as a man who earns 80%.
After having a child with her partner, she quickly realized that she was still doing most of the housework.
And as a behavioral economist, she insists that women must keep score to combat inequality.
She advises women to track their household and childcare tasks in 15-minute increments on a spreadsheet so they can confront their partners with hard data and renegotiate the division of labor.
And it's very helpful.
My wife and I made a spreadsheet covering all monthly expenses because I cover most big ticket items.
She manages all the recurring expenses like toilet paper and paper towels and soap.
And the same happens with labor.
I take care of yard work and garbage, but she was managing a lot of the daily tasks.
And when you have it written out in front of you, the imbalances become quite clear.
So I don't personally think you have to go tit for tat with every duty and expense, but pretending that ledgers aren't helpful is nonsense.
And I would say Scott should really consider keeping one if you want to have a really truly equitable relationship with your partner.
Which really gets to the bigger picture here, the social crisis.
Scott's book sounds the alarm on boys and men, arguing that they are increasingly adrift, lonely, and economically unviable.
He critiques the cultural demonization of men, and he calls toxic masculinity an oxymoron while arguing that men need to reclaim a healthy aspirational masculinity based on being protectors and providers.
So, first off, let's stop pretending toxic masculinity doesn't exist.
It absolutely does.
That doesn't mean all ways of being masculine are toxic, but again, I'll just reference inside the manosphere here.
Boys being boys is a chronic crisis that needs to be addressed to even start to understand the acute modern crisis Scott is invoking.
And I don't think anyone will walk away from that film not thinking that men can be fucking toxic.
Meanwhile, Corinne focuses on the crisis of female exhaustion.
She points out that women are breaking under what she calls the squeeze, which represents women trying to match male career trajectories while still carrying the bulk of the domestic load.
To her, the system is fundamentally built for men and stacked against women, which I'll say why the Trump administration, which is predominantly composed of men, hates all analytical tools like DEI and critical race theory.
They don't even want to see a ledger.
Corinne also notes that 89% of the world's population lives somewhere with falling marriage rates.
So this phenomenon is global.
But she's not pinning it on male loneliness.
She writes, quote, when I see these falling birth and marriage rates, I see women pushing back on a system that isn't working for them.
Now, Scott isn't blind to gender imbalances.
He writes that female advancement in the past three decades is stunning, and he explicitly states that no one should want to slow that trajectory.
However, he firmly believes the modern crisis is distinctly male.
He claims society treats empathy as a zero-sum game, which correctly focused on the struggles of women and other marginalized groups for two generations, but now actively ignores young men.
And so to him, the primary crisis facing young women is actually a direct byproduct of this male failure.
Because young men are struggling, young women now face an intensifying competition for a shrinking pool of what they view as viable mates.
I mean, I'm sorry, but talk about making it all about you.
Corinne says the true crisis, one she backs with data, is female exhaustion and stalled systemic progress.
She points out that the women's labor force participation in the closing of the gender wage gap actually plateaued in the 1990s.
Instead of men being the primary victims of the modern economy, she discusses a profound crisis of female happiness and cratering mental health among women.
And it all gets back to the squeeze.
When women entered the workforce, men did not reciprocate by taking on an equal share of domestic labor.
Female Exhaustion Crisis00:05:47
In fact, despite all the emphasis on the male problem, Corinne points out that when women's earning power was growing in the early 2000s, their overall happiness cratered.
She writes, quote, this decline has been in absolute terms.
Women's happiness is lower than it was 20 years ago, but it's even larger when considered relative to men whose happiness has been improving.
Besides reading data, Corinne has conducted her own experiments.
In one study, she had male and female participants negotiate with random partners for a $20 reward, noting how men acted when negotiating with other men compared to women and vice versa.
What she discovered flips so-called common business wisdom on its head.
She writes, quote, Our experiment showed that women not only weren't worse in negotiation than men, but also that they were better at making sure some kind of mutually beneficial deal was struck, rather than being so rigid that no one ended up with anything.
In a professional setting, the cost of such negotiation breakdowns could be enormous.
Imagine, for example, ending a long-term contract or partnership, and possibly much larger than a failure to get slightly better terms in an agreement.
But despite this evidence, I've never once heard of corporate seminars for men instructing them on how to negotiate more like women.
As she points out, what you generally hear is advice for women on becoming more cutthroat, which doesn't say much given who's usually giving that advice.
Now, onto child leave.
As shitty as it is in America, it favors women in terms of length.
But then something insidious happens.
Women take on many functions of childcare, which then turns into men saying, well, she's good at that, so she'll have to continue to handle it.
So not only do mothers have to battle a child penalty when returning to work, and Corinne shows that younger mothers have more trouble advancing in their careers and earning more money, which levels out a bit when they turn into their 40s, but they're also burdened with many more tasks because their husbands don't want to learn what only they are supposedly good at.
I actually find it a bit funny that men are often perceived as cold, rational actors and women are the emotional bunch because their advice on choosing partners is the exact opposite here.
Scott emphasizes physical attraction followed by alignment on passion, values, and money.
He thinks men should find a partner they want to be affectionate with and who genuinely wants to see them win.
Meanwhile, Corinne suggests a much more transactional, cold state approach.
She writes in depth about how the hot state of romantic love blinds women to the eventual compromises they have to make.
So she advises women to treat dating like a job interview for a co-CEO, actively assessing a partner's potential track record with laundry, childcare, and their willingness to share the invisible mental load of running a household.
I also have to say it's funny that Scott suggests such alignment when he writes shit like this.
This is from his book.
Yoga?
It was mostly an excuse to meet women.
The studio is called Muti.
80% of the students were hot, easy to approach women.
I ended up dating two yoga instructors.
For a man who doesn't know many people in New York and wants to clear his head and get some exercise and go on dates, I highly recommend yoga.
All right, fuck it.
All right.
He mentions this studio called Muti.
I don't know it.
But he also talks about how he mostly works out at Equinox.
And if there's one thing I'm qualified to speak about in this life, it's yoga at Equinox in New York City, where I taught thousands of classes in the aughts and early teens.
There were two studios in particular that come to mind.
There's Soho, where the yoga studio is all glass and it's positioned right next to the stairwell leading into the men's locker room.
And then there's Chelsea, which is right on the High Line, also all glass.
And it was subject to the invasive stares of construction workers while the High Line was being built.
The High Line, if you don't know, if you're not from New York, it was an abandoned railroad track, elevated railroad that they turned into an awesome walking park.
And Equinox just happened to have a property on it.
Now, in both cases, I would watch men just stop and stare at the dozens of women in my class, which is not a comfortable scenario.
I mean, the stairwell down, I would just see dudes just staring right at the women.
So Scott telling dudes to go to yoga to fuck just falls really flat, especially when it's being weighed against his advice to match on values.
All right, tangent over on that.
Scott sees marriage as a powerful engine for wealth creation.
Meanwhile, Corinne looks at data pretty differently.
Her book warns that modern marriage is often an economic trap for women.
Both writers admit that divorce is financially devastating for both partners, and they also both agree that women come out of divorce in worse shape.
That said, Corinne advises women to treat divorce like a business negotiation with a difficult but important client.
They also both offer parenting advice, but that's not a topic of special interest to me.
Divorce as Business Negotiation00:05:26
I kind of glossed over it when it comes to actual raising of children.
I don't have children, so it's not something I'm particularly skilled at talking about.
So the advice, weighing that out would be a bit different for me.
But I do want to share one powerful passage on the overall topic of children that Corinne wrote.
She writes, quote, I coined the term reproductive capital to describe the economic resource that fertility represents.
Precisely because reproductive capital carries economic power, being able to decide who gets to fertilize their eggs gives women access to resources.
One can also note that societies that attempt to limit women's power tend to take away their right to decide whether, when, and with whom to have children.
Yeah, hello, MAGA America.
Okay, then, what is their advice for fixing these problems?
Scott focuses on broad economic and educational interventions that give young men better opportunities to launch and build viability, as he puts it.
As mentioned earlier, he wants to raise the minimum wage, he says $25 an hour, which he says will combat the housing crisis and make young people economically viable.
We need to raise federal minimum wage, absolutely.
He also wants to expand higher education.
Scott criticizes elite universities for relying on scarcity to build luxury brands.
So he wants the top 20 universities to expand their incoming freshman seats by 50% within a decade.
He also advocates for mandatory service jobs.
He believes every young man should be required to work in a service job, for example, in hospitality.
He argues that this serves as a boot camp for life that builds resilience, humility, and the empathy required to function in society.
I fully agree with this idea.
My very first job in eighth grade was as a waiter in a swim club.
I went on to work as a buser in a restaurant.
And then, of course, my very luxurious job is a server at the Olive Garden.
I also worked in retail for a while.
I think it's really good to be in those positions just to learn how to work with a team, to learn how to interact with the public, and to also understand how the public perceives the positions.
And so, to create relationships and understanding around that, because when I see people acting like real assholes to waiters or to retail clerks or just ignoring them, I'm pretty sure they've never been in those positions before.
So, I think that level of empathy is definitely called for.
All right, last one: Scott wants to regulate the addiction economy.
He strongly supports state laws and school policies that physically restrict cell phone use in the classroom.
He's been advocating for this for years.
I don't know what schools are like today.
All I can say is I can't imagine having a phone in a situation where I'm supposed to be expected to pay attention to the teacher and study lessons.
So, I don't have super strong feelings on that not being a parent, but I just don't see good things coming from having a phone in classrooms in general.
Now, meanwhile, Corinne argues that women leaning in will never equalize the gender wage gap.
And so, she advocates for a systemic overhaul to stop penalizing women for biological realities.
Here are a few specific policy recommendations she puts forward: government-funded shorter parental leave.
She points out that when employers are forced to foot the bill for maternity leave, it creates a financial incentive for them to discriminate against hiring women of childbearing age.
She also writes that shorter periods of guaranteed paid leave, eight to 12 weeks, actually result in less workplace discrimination than extended six to 12-month leaves.
And that'll most likely be debated by fans of the EU model, where I believe a lot of women by law are given six months off.
I could be wrong on the months, but I know it's definitely way longer than in America.
That said, I find her use of data in this situation pretty informative if you're going to work in the American system.
She also has a use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave that she advocates for, noting that men often use paternity leave to catch up on work, not childraising activities.
And she cites academics who write a lot of papers while they're away.
So, instead, she wants a cultural shift at home.
She points to evidence from Spain and Sweden that shows mandatory paternity is crucial for getting men to take their share of the parenting load and establishing lifelong equity in domestic labor.
Corinne also argues for provider-neutral child care subsidies, and these subsidies should be paid out equally whether a family purchases care in the open market or a mother chooses to stay at home and provide it herself.
She believes this will structurally recognize that taking care of your own child is a valid economic activity.
Bias-Proofing the Workplace00:01:53
And two more, redesigning career timelines.
She feels employers need to create local routes parallel to the career express highway.
So, as an example, she says offering 60% client loads or creating holding patterns for residencies and partner tracks so that women don't have to choose between their reproductive peak and their career peak.
Finally, bias-proofing the workplace.
She wants to see an end to subjective hiring bias, so she recommends evaluating resumes side by side rather than sequentially.
She also insists that organizations must stop relying on women to do non-promotable tasks like office housework or mentoring for free, and instead guarantee that these tasks are included in formal performance reviews and distributed equally to men.
She writes about at one point when it's time in a meeting for someone to take notes.
She notes that women will often volunteer themselves for that, or that men will just default by default look at the woman to do these sorts of tasks when they should be spread out equally across genders.
Now, whether or not men learn from Corinne's book is one thing, but I really do advise them to read it.
I feel like Scott was well-intentioned when he was writing his book for the most part.
There's just so many angles he won't be able to consider.
And so much of the conversation around male loneliness revolves around women.
Sure, some are about male friendships and vulnerabilities, but most of it tilts towards relationships, sex, and family.
And I'm not sure why any man would limit advice to only half of the equation.
And Corinne has given us an excellent resource for filling That gap.