We return to the podcast circuit in 2026 to examine Scott Galloway: NYU professor, prolific podcaster, and, more recently, part-time life coach for struggling young men.Joining him on an episode of Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson, we are invited into one of the few remaining forbidden conversational spaces: men, masculinity, and men’s problems. You may have been misled by the relentless popularity of Joe Rogan, Modern Wisdom, The Tucker Carlson Show, Triggernometry, The Diary of a CEO, Huberman Lab, and several dozen adjacent properties into thinking these topics are already discussed at length on a near-weekly basis. Alas, this turns out to be a dangerous illusion.In reality, even mentioning men’s issues requires an extended ritual acknowledgement of women, failure to perform which risks immediate cancellation. Braving these cultural headwinds, we wade into manly dialogue about masculinity, sex differences, and male malaise. Along the way, we ponder the intricacies of culture war evolutionary psychology, anthropological wars over Man the Hunter, optimised dosages for manly whingeing, and whether making boys learn French verb conjugations qualifies as a human rights abuse.So get your notebooks ready for some important notes from two of the most masculine men in the modern male podcasting space. Men...LinksModern Wisdom: The War On Men Isn’t Helping Anyone - Scott GallowayThe Diary of a CEO: Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn't Build WealthAcademic papers ReferencedChanges in gender-based hiring bias (large meta-analysis): Schaerer, M., Du Plessis, C., Nguyen, M. H. B., Van Aert, R. C., Tiokhin, L., Lakens, D., … Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration. (2023). On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 179, 104280.Epidemiology of alcohol use disorder by marital status (US, NESARC-III): Grant, B. F., Goldstein, R. B., Saha, T. D., et al. (2015). Epidemiology of DSM-5 Alcohol Use Disorder: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(8), 757–766.Protective effects of marriage on life expectancy (US Medicare sample): Jia, H., & Lubetkin, E. I. (2020). Life expectancy and active life expectancy by marital status among older US adults: Results from the US Medicare Health Outcome Survey (HOS). SSM – Population Health, 12, 100642.Widowhood and well-being (contrary to claims of increased happiness): Adena, M., Hamermesh, D., Myck, M., & Oczkowska, M. (2023). Home alone: Widows’ well-being and time. Journal of Happiness Studies, 24(2), 813–838.Meta-analysis of the widowhood effect on mortality (men and women): Shor, E., Roelfs, D. J., Curreli, M., Clemow, L., Burg, M. M., & Schwartz, J. E. (2012). Widowhood and mortality: A meta-analysis and meta-regression. Demography, 49(2), 575–606.Marriage and life satisfaction across the life course (multi-country): Mikucka, M. (2016). The life satisfaction advantage of being married and gender specialization....
Hello and welcome to the Cody Legurus, a podcast where anthropologists and psychologists listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matthew Brown.
I'm the psychologist from Australia.
With me is Chris Kavanaugh.
He's the Wayland Smithers to my Mr. Burns and he is the anthropologist from Japan.
Hello, Chris.
I was about to do a Smither's impression, but I realized I can't remember.
Like I can visualize him, I can hear him, but I can't do it.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
I can't do it either.
I do feel more akin to Mr. Burns more and more, I think, as the years.
I was trying to work out, is that the right dynamic?
But yes, you do make me think of Mr. Burns.
You want to build a big giant thing to block out the sun.
The sun.
Well, I think I need some sort of antiquated rejuvenation treatment, something that Mr. Burns would have, like some sort of concoction comprising, I don't know, quicksilver, laudanum, and ether, just directly into the veins every morning.
I need that kind of thing to keep me going.
Well, speaking of keeping you going, Matt, before we get to the main topic of today, there's something I need to play.
Now, I know you haven't heard this.
The listeners, they recently were dealing with quite a lot of things that you dropped on them in the last episode.
And one of our Patreon members, Linda Sears, produced something which I think you need to hear.
So here you go.
Old Squeaky's Lament.
My name is all Squeaky.
I live in a dungstone town.
My story's an old one.
I'm worn and I'm broken down.
My mad, he once loved me.
He drank and we laughed out loud.
Yes, those were the good days and now they are gone.
Take heed of the new ones, so shiny and beautiful.
For they will replace you and you will be pitiful.
Please pray for old squeaky.
Sip your scotch and remember how.
Those were the good days and now they are gone.
Yes, those were the good days, and...
Wow.
It was very touching.
Touching.
Yeah.
I mean, aren't we all squeaky in a way?
Yeah.
Just we squeaky.
I mean, look, look to windward, Chris.
You know?
That touched me.
I teared up a little bit thinking about that.
And I like that there was creaky sound effects added in.
I don't know if there was an actual like chair that was causing that or if that's that thing you call FX, right?
But yeah.
Well, Linda's a professional.
So, you know, you could have, you know, that kind of thing is going to work.
You won't know whether it could be FX or not.
It's so.
Professional chair, squeaker.
Yeah.
Guys are part of a she's got she's got extras.
She's got a guy, you know.
She's got a guy, you know, he does.
She's got a guy.
She's got a guy.
Yeah, she knows a guy.
And Linda also did a very nice, I think, birthday song, which was very good.
It was difficult to open the file.
It took a few goes.
But we got there.
It was worth the trouble.
This one too.
This one too.
So there you go.
But actually, one of the other Patreon people converted it to an MP3.
So, you know, that's why it made it easy to upload.
So thank you to all the patrons and to all a good year.
I don't know when this will be released.
I was about to say Merry Christmas New Year, but it's unclear when this will come out.
So I'm sure Christmas and the new year will pass, but you know, they might be around there.
So anyway, happy Christmas and New Year.
Can I say that?
Are we allowed, Mark?
Will they let you?
Are we allowed to?
Well, gee, yeah.
Happy holidays, Chris.
Happy holidays.
That's better.
Actually, did I already whinge about this online on the podcast?
But I was so irritated.
Every year we whinge about this.
No, no, well.
Well, you know, like that is obviously a trope in the United States, which is stupid, I think, because it's not really real.
But it's one of those things that I don't know.
It came from the United States, this idea that you can't say Merry Christmas.
You have to say happy holidays because it's exclusionary to everyone who's not a Christian.
And there's probably some grain of truth buried in there somewhere that is locally contingent to the United States.
But what really pissed me off is finding an Australian account trying to like, you know, called Reclaim Australia or some bullshit.
And it was trying to stoke up culture war bullshit by making a big deal about, you know, Merry Christmas, you know, no more, no more, you know, happy holidays, whatever.
No, that's never, that's not even, that's, that's, that's bullshit twice removed.
It's so lazy.
I mean, make up your own culture war.
Like, I'm not against trying to stoke culture war bullshit in Australia.
I understand that everyone's going to want to do that.
Everyone needs a hobby.
I know, but they should put in, take the trouble to make up their own culture war bullshit, not import it holus bowlers from the United States.
Make your own bullshit up.
That's right.
What?
You can't say good day now?
They won't let you.
They'll let you say good day.
Go with that.
You're not allowed to like, who was the guy that died by getting stung by this thing, Ray?
What was that guy's name?
Oh, Steve Irwin.
Steve Irwin.
I'm not allowed to like him.
You're definitely allowed to like him.
Actually, I just saw a video of him like teaching a couple of cooker boroughs to be friends.
Cookerboroughs.
Yeah.
I like that this memory still remains.
So there we go.
That's our, that's our, you know, culture war themed introduction along with old Squeaky's Lament, which is really the star of the show.
I have actually been told off for calling people mate when not being aware of their gender or referring to a mixed group.
But then I was like, hang on, hang on.
This is Australia.
You can call everybody mate.
Everybody is a mate.
You know, young, old, male, female.
Everyone's a mate.
And isn't there something beautiful about that, Chris?
Well, that's like guys now, isn't it?
Guys is like that because it's not guys and you don't need to say guys and gals.
I mean, you can if you want.
You want to sound like you're from the 50s.
Yeah, but it's like a Broadway musical.
I find myself sometimes when I'm typing all right guys on the Patreon or whatever.
I'm like, should I wait?
Hold on.
This is all right.
And I'm like, no, it's fine.
It's fine.
Don't let these culture war narratives sip into my head.
I like to call people guys.
I've sometimes not used the guys wanting to, just in case, you know, and I think.
Guys is inclusive.
Everybody's a guy.
We're all guys.
I feel more comfortable.
I feel like I'm on firmer ground with mate.
But you know, you're not.
Okay.
You know, we'll just stick with me at then.
Yeah, means we can say me.
But I can't say me.
That's cultural appropriation.
If I said, hello, meets, everyone would be like, what?
Is he doing some weird Evo psych thing where he wants to talk about his potential meat choices?
Oh, I feel like you and I have a deal where we're allowed to appropriate each other's culture at this point.
That's true.
Actually, that's right.
I am.
You're allowed.
I have adopted a few Irishisms.
I like.
You're allowed.
Yeah.
I like how you guys say shite.
That's a good idea.
That's good.
You're allowed to say that one.
You can say top of the morning, DA, if you want.
I mean, people don't say that.
I don't really want to say that much.
I find myself wanting to say shite a lot more than top of the morning, but maybe that's just.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
I give you the Irish past, Matt.
It's bestowed on a few people, but I'm allowed.
And you give me the Australian past.
So, you know, whatever.
And that means we can say certain words.
Oh, why can't I just say it, Matt?
Why can't I say it?
Political career?
Because I can say cunt, right?
If I'm in Australia.
That's all right.
It's a harsher word in Ireland.
This too is for adults, Chris.
We can say whatever the hell we want.
Well, I'm just saying, because I don't use that word, even though it is used in certain segments of the UK.
I reserve it for like when I really want to.
Special occasions.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And you, Australians, you overuse it.
So now it's.
Well, some of us do.
Some of us do.
I've seen your Instagram comedy videos.
People are saying that all the time.
Yeah, it's just cut this, cunt that.
I'm a terror on Facebook.
Nobody look at my Facebook.
Yeah.
Well, there we go.
There we go.
Okay.
We've went over our allotted banter time.
Yeah.
Sorry.
This time, but that's okay.
So probably part of what has happened here is that we've been primed, if you will, by listening to the content that we're going to cover today.
We're covering Scott Galloway.
This is a person that has been requested repeatedly.
There was a kind of little, you know, a lot of people saying, what about Scott Galloway?
What about Scott Galloway?
He's been on the list for a while.
I hadn't really listened to his stuff.
You had, Matt.
You were more aware of him, right?
And a lot of people were saying, no, don't be silly.
Scott Galloway is not a guru.
And yeah, I'd say equal proportions there.
Yeah, and I used to listen to him, put the cards on the table.
I listened to him.
I've listened to him recreationally with no thought of covering him as a guru, just purely for my own pleasure on his, you know, whatever financey type podcast that he's got with some young guy who seems very smart and on the ball.
Was that the Professor G Pod?
That's it, I think.
Yeah, that's the one.
And they mainly deal with finance stuff when they talk about AI and they talk about, I don't know, whatever.
To be honest, I've stopped listening not because I thought Scott Galloway was a terrible person and a guru, but just because it's like half of it is speculation about what's going to happen in a year or two with the stock market or with AI.
And, you know, nobody knows.
So I don't think his guesses were any better or worse than anyone else.
But I will say in his defense that, you know, when he does talk finance, he does a responsible thing.
It's pretty generic advice, which is don't try to time the market.
Don't try to pick stocks.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you're better at this than you are.
He gives the same advice as, oh, he's the famous stock picker guy, Bernie Warren.
You know, the old guy.
One of them died.
Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett.
Thank you, Chris.
Yeah.
So he basically gave the same advice as Warren Buffett, you know, which is kind of boring because most people already know that.
But, you know, fair play to him.
That's the advice he gives.
So I think he's all right in that regard.
Okay, so that's what you think of him.
Who is he?
You know who he is?
I'll tell you, Matt.
I don't really know.
I listened to him for ages, but I never tell you.
People are listening, going, I don't fucking know who he is.
And that's fine because he is an American academic, author, entrepreneur, and public pontificator on various subjects.
He's a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where apparently he's taught brand strategy and digital marketing for two decades.
And he has a bunch of books and a bunch of podcasts.
I think his current podcasts are China Decode, or at least he used to be on that.
The Professor G podcast.
He co-hosted the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher.
I don't know if that's what it's still called.
He had something called Office Hours.
He's got like a podcast empire.
And I came across him because he started cropping up in all the kind of not manosphere podcasts, but you know, the modern wisdom diary of a CEO, these kind of long-form, indulgent conversation things.
I saw him with Joe Rogan as well.
So he seems to be doing the podcast circuit.
And in part, that's because he has a new book out, which is called Notes on Being a Man.
Just published last month.
So what it says, he explores the contemporary challenges facing men and boys in modern society, including economic instability, loneliness, and shifting cultural expectation.
And the book is combining like a personal narrative with broader social critique, advocating for principles such as healthy masculinity, emotional resilience, and stronger social connections, and so on.
So we decided, okay, well, this is kind of up our alleyway.
This is a little bit more relevant than the financial stuff, which can be your indigurism.
But as you mentioned, Matt, like most of his financial stuff is fairly moderate advice.
But a multiple hour conversation with Chris Williamson about men and men issues, that is fertile ground for guruism.
I think that might draw him out, hey.
Well, you know, he's talking about the problems that men are facing, Chris.
Talking about what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that?
Well, we'll get to if there's anything wrong with that or not, but there's no inherent problem with talking about that.
I am a young man.
I feel like I'm a very young man.
No, no.
Well, I'm not a young man.
I'm a middle-aged man like Scott Galloway, except he's older.
But I am the follower of young men to be, right?
Boys, as they're sometimes called.
So, you know, the things they're talking about, they're relevant, right, Matt?
There's issues, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the other thing to mention is I actually did listen to him on diary of a CEO as well.
And that was more financial focused advice.
And I do want to just give credit, first off, because I heard something that is very rare and kind of made me positively disposed to him initially.
Okay.
This was him being asked about, you know, like his special qualities because he's giving investment and advice and so on.
Where did you learn about money?
Because I think about my own life, I think there's key moments of quite frankly luck.
Yeah.
Where I was exposed to information because I was invited into a room, physically, literally into a room, or I was through no decision of my own, someone came into my life.
Yeah.
Or in my case, maybe one of the biggest blessings I ever had is when I went off, dropped out of university and pursued entrepreneurship.
My brother decided to go be an investment banker for 11 years in London.
And then when I had my first exit, he messaged me one day and said, hey, I'll manage your money and I'll quit my job and come work with you full-time.
And that's my older brother.
So like life gave me the greatest gift anyone could ever have been given.
That rings so true.
So I think of three things as you said that.
The first is the smartest thing I ever did was being born a white heterosexual male in California in the 60s because it gave me unfair advantage.
It gave me access to free education at the University of California and access, 76% admissions rate when I applied UCLA.
The admissions rate this year is 9%.
I came a professional age in the 90s when the internet was coming online.
So I sort of had these wins at my back.
And also, just to be blunt, everyone that was raising capital looked, smelled, and felt like me.
They were all white heterosexual males.
And I didn't even realize at the time what privilege or unfair advantage I had.
So the first is just sheer luck.
The second is environmental.
I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary.
And people who don't grow up with money, people who grow up with money just can't really truly empathize with what it's like to grow up without money.
I felt as if there was this ghost following me and my mom around, constantly whispering in our ear, you're not worthy.
Your mom fucked up, which means you aren't worthy.
And so I very early decided that I was, that economic security was really important to me.
And I want to be clear, you can't make a decision to be wealthy.
A lot of it is luck.
So am I right in thinking that Scott came from a relatively poor background, maybe single mother, something like that?
Is that what he was alluding to?
Yeah, although he does, he does mention that through leader relationships with his mullows partners, that they took an interest and helped him and stuff.
So it isn't like a, you know, a tale of deprivation to things.
But yes, I think his point is that he's starting off with white means.
Yeah, Cool.
All right.
So yeah, that's refreshing to hear.
Always good for, I guess, modern liberal success-oriented people.
Anyone talking to the diary of a CEO guy, because the culture very much is about you can be anything.
You can manifest any destiny that you can imagine if you have the right attitude, the right willpower, and the stick-to-idenness.
And I don't think this is sort of something, it's a cultural thing that applies to the West generally, but specifically to the United States.
And it isn't left.
There are left-coded or liberal-coded versions of it and right-wing, conservative-coded versions of this.
But what they have in common is that individuals, you know, you have the power within you to succeed and accomplish anything.
And the environmental or the systemic or luck doesn't really come into play.
And on one hand, I think it's a healthy attitude because it kind of encourages you to be proactive.
And even if it is somewhat delusional, it's better to sort of have that attitude than to sort of be defeatist about things.
On the other hand, I think we've just seen so many examples of people taking it too far, especially people who are successful in some way, shape, or form, who then just look down at everyone else who isn't in the same boat as them and think that they have these special powers that make them masters of the universe, right?
Rather than having a touch of humility.
So that's a long-winded way to say I quite like that.
Yeah, that's the bit that I liked as well.
It's just, you know, Elon Musk is never going to emphasize the structural and, you know, the factors that are just random chance that relate to his success, right?
And Scott Galloway is not downplaying his individual features, which he, you know, he goes on to talk about in other parts of the interviews and so on.
But he is, you know, like politically, where you put him is that he's a moderate liberal, right?
He's not really a progressive.
He's definitely not a leftist, but he does have that view that environmental and, as he said, like white meal identity features give him a leg up, right?
And that's just something you very rarely hear in this sphere of people talking.
So I just thought it's nice.
And similarly, you know, we were talking about finance and all that kind of thing.
Again, Matt, when he was talking about that.
I got exceptionally lucky to get there.
By the way, see above in 2008, I was broke.
I was broke at the age of 42, 43.
That did not feel good.
I got very lucky, started a company, bull market the last 16 years, right place, right time, exceptionally lucky.
But you should be able, you should have a number.
You should say, this is the amount of money I need.
And once I get to this number, enjoy it and start giving it away.
We, we really need to, because I'm thinking about the lens that I kind of think about this conversation through is like different stages in my own journey and the advice that I would have wanted from you at different steps in my journey.
And I just flash back to working in those call centers where I was making just about enough money to, well, to be fair, if I'm being completely honest, I did have disposable income.
But when I was poor, I was reckless with my money.
So I would get the 500 pound disposable income on payday, leave the call center, go and buy a 400 pound TV, flat screen TV, and put it in a room where the TV was as big as the wall of my room.
And I'm really trying to zoom in on that person who is so far away from nine figures.
And they're like, okay, Scott, I want to be Scott Galloway.
So what is the set of steps or the mindset, the fishing rod I need in my mind to become Scott Galloway nine figures?
Well, the first is, the first is some of it is luck.
Again, a lot of my success, if I'd been born in Europe, I don't think I'd have that number.
Europe's not as forgiving of entrepreneurs who failed.
I've had a lot of failure.
If I lived in China, I think there's a decent chance I'd be in jail.
So the smartest, again, the smartest thing I've ever done was being born in California.
So you're saying to move?
Does that matter?
I don't think that was the message.
That was his area for C.
Yeah, yeah.
So Darren, the CEO guy, it is all about mainly guys, I think, that are wanting to, you know, get to the top.
How do I be a success?
You know, what are the secrets?
All that stuff.
Yeah, Scott Galloway, I think, is helpfully pointing out that, look, you can do your best and so on, but, you know, there's a lot of luck and circumstantial stuff associated with it.
Well, it's the bit where he says, you know, like I was broke at 42 or 43, or like I had a series of like field companies or whatever due to market forces.
And you're just like, whenever CEOs are usually, or, you know, people are giving that thing, it's often like part of the mythos.
They didn't do anything wrong.
But he is doing the correct thing of saying, sometimes I got lucky in a positive way.
Sometimes I got lucky in a negative way.
And like you said, his general message is, therefore, you need to apply investment practices and whatever that can ride out these kind of ups and downs of markets and fortunes.
But it's it's just that it's refreshing to hear someone acknowledge, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't always successful.
Things don't always work out.
And kind of also emphasizing that this is a survivorship bias issue, where like there are companies that feel there are people who go broke, but they're usually not the ones being interviewed on podcasts unless they have come back in some way, shape, or form from it.
Yeah, exactly.
The survivorship bias thing is real.
Yeah, like even in a very small way, I can think of older guys in my own life, like around my father's generation, some of whom sort of turned out to be seemingly much more successful than others.
And the ones with good self-awareness were very clear that, look, they had a couple of strokes of luck.
You know, they had some abilities and they made some good decisions and stuff like that.
And, you know, but there isn't necessarily something that distinguishes them from people who were a bit less successful.
So, you know, that's a healthy attitude.
It's very different from the Elon Musks and everyone else who, as you said, it's complete survivorship bias where, you know, if you're one of the lucky ones that are up there and the wealth has multiplied and so on, or maybe it's not wealth, it's some other metric of social standing and success, right?
Could be in academia or science.
Then you, with this, you know, 100% hindsight bias, you look back and craft a narrative of how all the special things about you and all the special decisions that you made that inevitably led you to rise to the top.
And I really, as a statistician, I really, I really hate that.
You know, we talked about this when we covered the genius myth of Helen Lewis's book, but I really do think it is the case that in any circumstance that you're in, there will be a mixture of right environmental factors where like they're talking about which country you're in, what is happening in the market at the time, so on and so forth, right?
And personal factors, personal factors.
Yeah, personal idiosyncratic factors.
Yeah.
And your choices, right?
And decisions you made to not take this opportunity and take that one and so on.
And like where you put the emphasis in large part often depends on what you want to emphasize as being important.
And like in general, left-wing people tend to emphasize more the structural and societal factors and the right-wing libertarian type rather emphasize individual personal qualities.
But the reality is, you know, it's always a mixture of the two.
So you can, you know, craft a narrative that like plays up one or the other.
So it's just nice in this environment to see where people are very rarely doing that, like somebody acknowledging that there are, you know, broader structural factors at play.
And one other thing, Matt, this is, I'm cheating.
I'm doing the diary of a CEO episode, which I don't think you listened to, but there was another part of it that I also wanted to highlight before we get to the Chris Williamson interview.
And it was following on from that bit where they're talking about how to be a success and all this kind of thing.
And if a kid hasn't gone to university or some of the things that haven't got the information and they've stumbled across this podcast, but they're working in, I don't know, like a equivalent of a Wendy's or a Burger King, for example.
And they just like, how do I get out of this Burger King, Scott?
I'm a cashier at Burger King.
Yeah, look, I don't, I want to be clear.
I think there is a certain downside to the notion that we live in a meritocracy.
And it creates a lot of rage and shame among young people.
And that is the notion that in America, especially, anyone can be anything.
Well, not really, boss, because the problem with thinking we live in a meritocracy is that if you don't make it, you fucked up.
It's your fault.
Yeah.
And there's dignity in every work.
What I would say to someone working at a Burger King or in fast food that wants something bigger, work really, I was on the board of Panera Bread, which is a fast food chain or quick service.
They call it QSR.
They don't like the term.
Someone who was hardworking and showed up at work every day on time and worked with their colleagues and acted like they own the place probably within two years could be managing the place and making 60 or 80 grand a year.
Now, I'm not suggesting you go all in on food, but there's always dignity in work.
There's always opportunity for people who work hard and act like owners and are good people and try and look out for other people and are good managers.
That might just be for you a means to an end where you're workshopping other stuff to say, how do I get to school?
How do I get to training?
How do I find a better job?
How do I save for a one-year apprenticeship program to become an electrician?
How do I start meeting people?
You got to pay your bills.
There's dignity in all work.
It's refreshing.
Yeah, it is refreshing, especially in that milieu CEO type situation because it's so obviously true, you know, and in the real world, not in the kind of internet, like sort of fantasy land.
Like the world doesn't need, doesn't need that many CEOs.
It doesn't need that many bloody masters of the universe.
It doesn't need that many bloody professors, that's for sure, right?
It needs electricians.
It needs people to run the local bakery.
It needs people to install solar panels and do landscaping.
I plan to employ these people very shortly.
God knows we need them.
And yeah, I mean, one of the things I like about Australia is that I think more than most places in the world, I think it is still actually, if anything, it's probably becoming more true as we're seeing the sort of white collar and the university bonus decreasing.
But even before then, Australia was kind of known as the working man's paradise, right?
And in fact, being a trade is a bloody excellent way to make a lot of money.
You know, if you want to make a lot of money, you could become a doctor, medical specialist, or I think do something like pump sewage systems, right?
Or install solar panels for that matter, or do any number of trade-oriented jobs.
You know, and I think that they deserve the good money they get because often the work is either dirty or it's difficult or it's arduous or whatever.
It's maybe not as pleasant as sitting in front of a computer or, you know, supervising PhD students and having little meetings or writing about interesting articles for journals.
Right.
So they should get paid better.
And I like that about Australia that I think largely they do.
So, you know, just stop imagining that the only thing that makes you successful, the only thing that is a worthwhile job is some sort of like one of these weird things that has attracted social cache.
And it is obviously involves people who are running big businesses or being, you know, tech leaders and Silicon Valley types, but also, you know, the so-called thought leaders or, you know, this sort of, these people at some sort of cultural apex of, you know, social cache.
I mean, they shouldn't be respected as much as they are.
Well, yeah.
And I'm also thinking, though, that the specific example, right?
He's not, I mean, he was talking about electricians and whatnot, but he was just talking about like working in a service industry, working as a cashier or a thing.
And like, the thing is, I've worked in a variety of different jobs when I was at university and so on.
And I met people working there, like that was their life, their job.
You know, that's what they did.
They weren't using it as a stepping stone to get to the next thing.
And they weren't all like in senior management positions and they were living their lives, right?
Like it is true, some jobs are going to be less fulfilling and all that kind of thing, but there's just this notion that a lot of the self-help kind of world operates in, which implies that everyone is meant to be at the head of a company or whatever.
And the reality is the world can't function like that.
There has to be people working in post offices.
You know, there's nothing wrong, just to be clear, nothing wrong working with a post office, but I just mean that people often don't, you know, put down on their what I see myself doing in X years.
But everything that I'm involved in, like every part of my life, going to a supermarket, going to a Starbucks or whatever, there's just all people working there, right?
And they're all jobs.
So like, it's just refreshing to hear someone on one of these podcasts say, maybe you are going to work in fast food.
And that shouldn't be something that you're humiliated about or that you think isn't worthy, right?
Because like you can do other things.
You know, people live for the, you know, the weekend and it's just, and in the same way, Matt, you talked about academia, right?
I'm not permanently employed in academia.
Of course, I'd like to be permanently employed.
I'd like to get a professor position.
Maybe I won't.
And if I don't in the end, it doesn't mean that one, I was fucked over or that, you know, the system is completely fair.
No, like there's some amount of people who are in academia who are good and don't get a job and they have to do something else.
And that's, that's just the reality of it.
And I'm not saying the academic system functions, you know, well to allocate merit-based positions.
I'm just saying that that's the way it goes.
That's the real world.
You got to put on your big boy pants.
Yeah, exactly.
This is pretty tangential, but I think actually Ian Banks' culture novels have got a good take on this.
And I think it's kind of appropriate where, you know, he imagines this post-scarcity type society where, you know, AIs basically could do everything.
But so in that, in that universe, like people still do things, right?
They still do jobs and they do them because it's sort of, it brings them pleasure, right?
It makes them happy to do things.
And some people like run a cafe in this fictional universe because, you know, they get to, they get to talk to customers and, you know, it's nice to make coffee and people are happy and so on.
And some people are whatever, professional game players or whatever.
Like people have their things and the intersection between things being a hobby or just a pursuit, some sort of vocation or whatever and a job is kind of blurred.
Now, we don't live in that society, obviously, at the moment, but I think it's a healthy attitude to have, right?
Like, you know, just like in Ian Banks' world, where there are like super intelligent AIs that can do anything, like playing chess or go or solving, you know, maths problems better than you possibly can.
But it's silly for you to feel like this makes you worthless, right?
Like there's no vote you're doing anything, right?
You can still solve math puzzles.
You can still play chess and enjoy it.
You know, you can still, you can still cook food, even though it might make more, you know, might be economically rational for you to buy it from some professional or some automated way of making it rather than going to the trouble of doing it yourself or gardening or a thousand other things.
You can make a podcast when you're not the best podcast in the world.
You might not have prepared.
You might not have prepared.
You might not be good at speaking, but you get out there and you do it anyway.
That's what I'm saying.
That's it.
You know, I'm climbing up walls.
I'm well aware I'm not the best person, nor will I ever be the best person that existed for doing that.
But that's not what you do.
That's not what I do.
So agreed.
Agreed, Matt.
We're agreed on this.
Okay.
This is our philosophy such as it exists.
Okay.
Well, so far, all I'm hearing is that Scott Galloway is a great guy with excellent opinions.
So job done?
Are we are we done?
No, no, we don't quite.
We have set off on a good food.
Now, let's see where the rest of this goes.
So, just a highlight, by the way, Matt, the topic for today, it's Chris Williamson and Scott Galloway talking about men's issues.
We are men, we're qualified in this respect.
As I mentioned, I have two young men that I am raising currently in the values of menmanship.
It's like penmanship, but so much harder.
So much harder.
That's right.
So here.
And you have a son.
You have daughters as well.
I have daughters.
They have boyfriends.
They have boyfriends.
And you've taught them about how hard it is to be a man.
You've made them recite the creed.
It's all I talk about with them.
Yeah.
So we are allowed to have opinion on this, okay?
Another group is you could say we're not qualified, but here we are men and and we have sons.
All right.
So these issues are relevant to us.
Um, no.
So the thing I wanted to point out was they won't let you talk about this, though, Matt.
They won't let you talk about this.
This is a critical conversation around truly the future of humanity.
But we don't have to talk about this.
This report is absolutely shocking.
This is a crisis and young men are struggling.
So I sat down with two leading voices on societal issues to discuss the rise of millions of lonely, addicted men.
That was the Dario FSEO, a different conversation.
We're not going to play clips on, but I just like, you know, we can't talk about this.
So I sat down to have like a huge conversation.
And I can literally find hundreds of these conversations.
There's podcasts that release content daily about, you know, men's men's stuff.
So you can't talk about it.
But somehow, people are seeming to talk about it every single day.
Yeah, I mean, this has been a funny joke ever since the IGW was fresh and new, right?
Oh, yeah.
This is when it started.
They kind of, they just, you can't talk about this.
They won't let you talk about this.
And then it proceeds to go on where all of social media does nothing except talk about that.
Yet it never stops saying that you can't talk about this.
I know.
You literally can talk about this on Chris Williams' podcast.
I swear to God.
You definitely can.
You definitely can.
Listen to your week of it.
That's right.
Joe Rogan podcast and Chris William podcast and probably many more, many more in the top 10 or 20.
He's in the top 10 worldwide.
So these are the most popular.
These are not niche podcasts that nobody listens to because you're not allowed to talk about this stuff, right?
These are the most popular podcasts in the world where they do, you know, incessantly talk about men's stuff, stuff that men like, stuff that men don't like, stuff that great sound gears, and all the problems we've got.
Even in the case of things that you aren't really allowed to talk about in polite society, like Warhammer 40K, right?
Like that is a niche, but that's become more acceptable.
It's fine.
A lot of things have become socially acceptable that shouldn't have become socially acceptable.
Well, but in that case, Matt, there are still very successful podcasts and shows about Warhammer 40K, but it's a niche.
They're not in the top 10 worldwide.
But as you say, when it comes to men's podcasts, they are very, very popular.
And you are allowed to talk about men's issues with Joe Rogan and Chris Williams and so on.
So they, I really feel they should retire that you, what they want to say, what they mean is in liberal progressive media, there is not enough emphasis placed on men.
You can agree or dispute that, but that's what they're actually talking about because it's objectively true that people are talking about men's stuff quite a lot in popular podcasts and media.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, with that said, then you might see where this is going from the tone of that.
But there's a very short introduction actually to this one where he just says, hello, Scott.
You know, nice to see you.
They're sitting together.
It's a very nice set.
And then we get straight into the meat of the issue.
We've never done a live podcast.
We've never done an in-person podcast.
We've hung out and we've recorded, but we've never done the same two things.
Oh, welcome to London, man.
Thank you.
You did an interview with BBC Global that was titled.
Young Men Are Struggling.
What does this mean for young women?
This men struggling, women most affected framing is wild to me.
Does that irritate you in the same way as it does me to have to do this weird sort of land acknowledgement to the challenges that women face, even as we're talking about the problems that men are facing?
I think it's productive to think of it as a societal problem.
Well, moving to solutions, I think the only way you get stuff done here are the most effective way to get stuff done.
And the lesson is I've spent the majority of my life struggling with this issue professionally.
And that is, I think I'm good at being right.
I'm not very good at being effective.
And there's a difference.
And if you really want to help young men and you want to get, think about starting a conversation against programs and a change in mentality and a focus on the investments needed to lift up young men.
I think it's done more effectively through the context of lifting up all young people.
So the basic line is women aren't going to continue to thrive and the country isn't going to continue to prosper as long as young men are flailing.
So this needs to be a collective effort.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Chris Williamson there.
He's got a bit of a grievance about this, just how annoying it is.
You have to acknowledge the problems women face before you can even get to talking about the poor men.
But Scott Galloway, I think, sort of, he doesn't really bounce the ball back.
He sort of, you know, he doesn't buy into that.
He's saying, look, this is a problem for everyone.
You know, it's just about helping young people in general.
We can focus on men, focus on women, but really it's not a competition.
Yeah.
And there was an invitation to grievance monger.
But as you say, Scott takes the option of saying, well, look, you know, the reality is if we want to get things done, it's better to focus on messages that are effective.
So yeah, it's just an interesting choice to come out with because like while I understand the frustration that Chris Williamson is presenting there, like a BBC article that frames something in one particular way, does it make a huge difference?
Like, I don't know.
Anyway, it's just, I think as we'll see as this goes on, there's a lot of focus put on like individual stories that people have seen in the media, like some headline, right?
And I, you know, when we talked to Helen Lewis, she was pointing out that a lot of the times media outlets or interviewers or whatever, they're just looking for an interesting angle, right?
Something that the majority of people won't have said.
So it might reflect a bias, but it can also just be people, you know, targeting something.
So I'm not dismissing that that could reflect a biasing in the way that men's problems are seen that would be frustrating.
But I'm just saying I'm glad that Scott Galloway takes the approach that he does in response to him.
Yeah.
And maybe don't read too much into a particular headline that, you know, is often just picked, as you said, to try to get some clicks or whatever.
I mean, I think if you could, you could look at a lot of headlines that are involving meds problems and maybe they're not all like the one that triggered you.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
That's it.
Look for the disconfirming examples.
That's the kind of thing, right?
But Chris Williamson is not really deterred.
I do understand.
And I get the difference between ideological purity or like reality-based insight and effective communication and press release and stuff like that.
I had this conversation with Richard Reeves as well.
I'm just so sick.
of this land acknowledgement thing where we have to prostrate ourselves and say, well, we know that women have, it's only been recent that they got equal access to education and employment.
And we must not forget that maternity leave must improve.
And after we've done all of this work, we can say.
And now we can talk about male mental health.
And now we can talk about male suicide.
We don't.
Could you imagine if there was a video that was titled, Young Women Are Struggling?
What does this mean for young men?
That wouldn't happen.
At no point does somebody do this disclaimer about the struggles of men in suicide in order to talk about female breast cancer.
That doesn't happen.
Oh, there's definitely, look, there's a bias, but it's understandable.
For 99% of our time on this planet, there has been, you know, men of my generation had an advantage.
And so the muscle memory, the reflex reaction, the gag reflex is understandable.
Yep.
Yep.
So it's still very upsetting to Chris.
Actually, I had to Google this because, you know, just to check whether this is just, is it true?
Like every single, they have to do this land acknowledgement to the problems of women before you can have it.
So I just typed in men's problems and searched on Google for news articles.
Top ones coming up.
Q ⁇ A, eating disorders and body image, two overlooked problems for men.
No mention of women in that article.
It's not just a feeling.
Men are falling behind on many key indicators that there's a bunch of things there.
No mention of women.
Global Health Study, men worse off than women for 20 top health problems.
Body image issues, mental health problems.
Why are men afraid to seek help?
No reference to making the problem about women.
And Paul Krogman seems to be in on it as well.
Anyway, my point is there is that I'm sorry that this one BPC byline triggered Chris Williamson, but it's not universal that a news article has to frame a challenge or an issue affecting men only in terms of how it affects women.
That's just not true.
He's citing one example.
Yes, and obviously there are more than one example, right?
Like there are more, but I looked at just the top two or three pages of results from Google.
You already did more research than Chris Williamson did about it.
That's it.
And the point is, but in that tiny sample of 30 articles, I didn't see a single one that framed the issue as, well, let's talk about women.
Why does this affect women?
Or how this problem that seems to be about men might be affecting women as well, or something like that.
Yeah, I know, but I will say that if you want to give the Steelman version of it, what he's arguing about, again, is like this particular genre of articles, which is popular in like the most left-wing progressive spaces, right?
But as you're highlighting, that's not the majority of articles, right?
So like in a particular oeuvre of progressive outlets, this is what you will see things free and pass sometimes, right?
But that's not all of media.
So your target here should be much more limited and your claims like much more restricted in terms of what you're saying.
So yeah, I mean, this isn't a problem with Chris Williamson in particular.
I guess I'm a little bit triggered by it because it's just so ubiquitous.
You'll see, you know, someone on Twitter or someone's written an article on Substack or whatever.
And it generally goes along the lines of: I saw this one article and it triggered me.
And this article, this reflects everything that is indicative of whatever.
It could be academia.
It could be all the news outlets, the liberal media, whatever it is.
And it's just simply not.
It's not representative.
It's one article that someone wrote that triggered you.
It's like the version of the feminist glaciology, right?
That's right.
That they know so much of.
And that paper to a certain audience went, look at this, look at this outrageous thing.
All of academia is just poisoned with nonsense based on feminist classiology.
Yeah, that's all we're producing.
Yeah, it's just an absurd, like statistically, it's just absurd.
That's my issue.
And it's certainly true, as you said, that articles that might be spurious or annoying or frivolous will exist.
They will exist.
Lots of them.
You could collect dozens.
Dozens.
Dozens.
There's dozens of them.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
So I agree.
I agree entirely with this.
But I also want to note there that Scott Galloway, again, avoiding the temptation, right?
Because he says, well, well, no, you know, that's understandable, isn't it?
Because like the reality is there's been a lot of misogyny throughout history.
Women have had a bad deal.
So you understand why people would be reflexively emphasizing that, okay, we are going to talk about man's problems, but yes, we do recognize that in the global context and historical context, women have had a harder time.
Like, so he doesn't seem to have the strong reaction that Chris has has because he's like, you know, well, it's understandable, right?
But that doesn't work, Matt.
So it continues.
So there's still a lot of misandry.
And but it's understandable.
People, because to the right's credit, they recognize the problem facing young men before anybody else.
Unfortunately, I think that that void was filled by some voices that kind of conflated coarseness and cruelty with masculinity.
And I think at least initially, and I think you've helped a lot, the conversation wasn't very productive.
And it created sort of a reflex reaction or a gag reflex that when you start talking about these issues, that you're sort of leading up to what feels like a bit of misogyny, where the answer for a lot of people who've been talking about the problems with young men is to return to the 50s where non-whites and women didn't have as much opportunity.
So I kind of get, I kind of get some of the gag reflex.
What I don't understand though, and what I think people are just so blind to, have you seen this unalive dialogue online with women saying, why would I go on a date when I can be unalive?
Which means murdered.
It's a politically correct way of saying I can be killed.
And that I'm taking a risk going on a date.
And the fact, you know, the data is the following: that if you go on a date with a young man, he's 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you.
You're four times more likely to die on the car ride over or drown or choke.
So the notion that you're somehow taking this huge physical risk by being around young men.
Is that men or a bad thing as well, right?
It's just not a bad thing.
It's just not true.
I get it.
So what did you think of Scott Gilloway's answer there, Chris?
Well, so this is on the back of him talking about this kind of double standard about talking about man's qualities versus women's qualities, which we can talk about in a minute, right?
I think there he highlights an important connection, which is like one of the reasons that people are somewhat reactive to this framing is that when this framing cosms up, it's often accompanied by misogyny and like Andrew Tate shit or pickup artistry or this kind of thing.
So like there is a correlation.
You know, Chris Ruben and stuff like to talk about reality-based assessments.
The reality-based assessment of if you meet a man and he's starting to talk about men's issues in great depth and these topics, the likelihood that he's a well-adjusted individual who isn't a misogynist, it's not up there at like 50-50, right?
Like I'd say that you're more likely to find people talking about these topics who do have a significant anti-woman part to their position.
So I like that bit, but I do think whenever he's talking about this, you know, again, another trend, a lot of this is to do with like trends that they've seen online.
You know, the thing about women saying they'd prefer to be trapped in a park with a bear than a man, or they're scared of being killed on every date they go to and stuff.
That's that's silly.
And he's right.
That is silly.
Statistically, it's silly.
It's a silly thing.
If the majority of people held that opinion, it is an opinion that is unrealistic and deserves criticized.
But I think most of that is driven by like, again, social media and a particular genre of like, you know, TikToks and tweeters and whatnot, some of whom are engaged in intentional rage baiting of these communities, right?
So just like you have the toxic masculine manosphere space, you also do have leftist liberals who enjoy arguing that white men deserve to die and, you know, Like triggering the right-wing people or the man, right?
Like it's...
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I agree with that.
I think, I think, yeah, like it is discourse-oriented stuff.
And obviously, people will frame their spicy take in the most extreme way possible, right?
You know, why would I go on a date when, you know, I could be murdered or whatever, right?
Which is over the top.
Statistically speaking, fortunately, in most countries, certainly Western countries today, murder is incredibly rare.
It's much rarer today than it has been pretty much for virtually any time that the human civilization has been around.
On the other hand, Chris, I think there is some directional truth in those concerns from women, right?
Men don't tend to need, like when they are going to a nightclub or they are walking along in a, you know, a certain part of town, do not have to fear or take care in the same way that women do, right?
And there is men are responsible for 90 to 95% of all female homicides.
And the flip side is only 5 to 10% of male homicides are caused by women, right?
They won't let you talk about this.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm doing the thing where I was saying, but here's some, but you know, like, I mean, you know, it's still rare.
It's still rare.
But men are the people doing the violence, right?
And same with domestic violence.
Like, I think about a woman every week, right, is killed.
You know, you're most likely to be killed by a partner, right?
A boyfriend or a husband.
And about a woman a week is killed in Australia.
And they, you know, 82% of, you know, sometimes men, sometimes men are killed or, you know, have, you know, extreme violence upon them by their partner.
But still, 82% of the victims are female here, right?
Matt, I'm going to flag something up.
Like, I agree with all of the things that you're pointing out there, but I would be hypocritical if I didn't note this because I'm going to complain about it later.
Like, I am skeptical when people cite disembodied 95% of people do X or 80% of things do Y, because often it's just drawn from a specific study, right?
And then extrapolated ideas.
Hang on, the specific percentages, like forget the specific numbers, right?
It's about four in five, right?
It's it's no, I agree.
Like, like the numbers would differ between Australia and the United States or this time, but you know, the point stands, right?
Don't quibble with my.
Okay, yes, I agree.
And the point does stand.
And I think one of the things which is sort of surprising here is like the reason for that discrepancy is because men on average are bigger, stronger, more prone to violence, right?
Like this is this is the reason of the discrepancy.
This is part of the stuff that they talk about on these podcasts and in this conversation, right?
So surely Chris Williamson can apply the logic to, well, there actually is a discrepancy.
So I agree.
And I'm not disputing that like, oh, you know, which one kills more men or women?
Like, no, no, no.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying I have a particular aversion whenever there are like popular statistics that are cited because it's often a more complicated picture.
Right.
So like I don't doubt one woman in Australia being killed a year from partner violence.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Sorry.
Yeah, I meant to say a week.
Did I say a year?
One a year would be good.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I, but that is also the kind of statistic where people use it as a campaign, right, to increase awareness of a problem.
And then when people look in this statistic, they can see.
I mean, the under, I mean, I was talking about ratios there, right?
So the ratios are very much prejudicial against women.
I mean, that is, women tend to be the victims, right, far more often of extreme violence like that.
But, you know, what you said still stands, right?
Which is that it is fortunately still very rare, right?
Places like Tokyo.
It's not as rare as one in a year.
Not that rare.
Not that rare, sadly.
It would be good to be zero.
But, you know, in Brisbane, Australia or Tokyo, Japan, you know, people aren't getting murdered left, right, and center, right?
But the concerns of women about, you know, whatever, it doesn't have to be being murdered, right?
It can be some lesser form of violence, like ranging just down just to being hassled and being made to feel and very, very uncomfortable, right?
That's not nothing.
And, you know, those statements are directionally correct.
And so it would just be nice to see the Manosphere people, even Scott Galloway in this case, because he sort of just dismissed that as it's very rare.
You know, it's a baseless concern.
I'm sure if you thought about it for a few more moments, you'd realize that it's not an entirely baseless concern.
I think he would say that elsewhere.
And I also think that, you know, in all the conversations, I've heard Chris Williamson acknowledge this too.
So it's just like when they get caught up in their feelings that they become, you know, like a little bit hyperbolic.
Hyperbolic and rhetorical.
That's what I'm pushing up against.
Yes.
Well, you know, so you might think, no, well, okay, that point is done.
Not quite.
Understand the point that in order to push a campaign for something that is politically unpopular at the moment, you need to signal allyship and Awareness of groups that may have an issue to this.
I just find it, I find it quite exhausting and I find it quite irritating.
And I brought it up to Richard Reeves.
He made a really great point, which was one of the issues you see with anybody that cares about something and campaigns a lot is as they continue in their career and they feel like nobody's listening, they ramp up the intensity of how inflammatory they are when they speak.
And, you know, you can see this with climate change activists, right?
They're like, the planet's burning.
Like, we need, here's orange paint on a fucking Van Gogh, whatever.
I'm going to glue myself to the M25 because nobody's listening.
And the odd thing is that that kind of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric just turns more people off to turn people on.
But I get, even in myself, who I think I'm usually pretty well regulated, I find in myself this rebellion, this desire to rebel against, I can't be bothered to have to say, I understand.
I want to do it once at the start of my career and say, hey, here are all of the things that women have had it tough in, but you need to do it each time.
It's like landing a plane in Australia.
Landing a plane in Australia?
Yeah, I don't, I don't really, I didn't get the analogy.
But the thing here, Matt, is like, I just, I find this a bit whingy, to put it mildly, right?
Like, the point doesn't sound very manly, Chris.
Whingy.
Yeah, it doesn't.
I just, I mean, good God.
Like, if you don't want to make the disclaimer, then don't do it and deal with the consequences, right?
Most people will probably judge you for it because you haven't acknowledged, like, you know, it's like when Konstantin Kisson, whenever he was talking recently and he was saying, you know, we really have to talk about men problems, a man thing.
And then he was like, you know, women, yeah, feminists, I've heard, you know, they do make a point.
You know, maybe women had some problems in the past, but like, you know, and it sounded like pulling fucking teeth from him to just say, yes, obviously women have been discriminated against, right?
And like, that's the thing that people pick up on is like in this sphere, it's perfectly fine to spend two hours lamenting the plight of man.
But when women are invoked, it's usually that they're doing something wrong.
Or like, has the pill been harmful for them?
Is sexual liberation actually bad?
Are they considering the issues around the reproductive stuff and how it's going to affect their life and whatever?
And like, obviously, this is nowhere near the level of Stefan Molyneux.
But I, but I think this is just like part of the bit that gets me is, all right, you don't want to do the disclaimers, then don't do them.
Like, just, you know, who's stopping you from doing it?
It's like, it's you, right?
Because you feel that there is a pressure that you should do that.
But if you're going to whinge about it, this is the worst thing is like doing it, then endlessly whinging about it.
Like, just don't do it and say, I'm fucking not doing it or do it and shut up.
This segment is taking much longer than whatever disclaimer he's imagining he needs to say at the start of a conversation.
Yeah, I guess I don't talk about, I don't think about men's specific issues or even women's specific issues that much.
So I've never really found myself thinking about having to, I don't know, make disclaimers or recognize the other side of it.
But I've been really interested, Chris.
I mean, you've listened to a lot of Chris Williamson content.
Presumably a large proportion of it is dedicated to hot topics relating to men.
Does he prefix every conversation with a long recognition of how hard women have got it?
No, no, he does, he does make reference to those things, you know, on occasion.
But, but I would say I've probably heard, I wouldn't say it's one for one, but I've certainly heard whinging about doing that as like a significant proportion of how often it's done.
So, this particular conversation about I don't like that I have to constantly apologize for talking about men's stuff is a frequent topic.
Okay.
A frequent topic, right?
It's not a rare thing.
So, maybe this is a big takeaway.
Chris Williamson, look, he gets a pass.
You don't have to recognize the issues that are occurring to women historically or whatever.
You can just go ahead and talk about men.
Just stop whinging about it.
That's the thing.
Double in gene.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't like to complain about that you had to do it before if you want to stop doing that.
But there's another angle to that too, right?
Which is that a lot of those issues, they're around whatever, competition in the workplace or education, like vis-a-vis women.
They're about sexual success, mating success, and whatever.
Education achievements.
Yeah, again, vis-a-vis women, right?
Are men getting hard done by women, right?
And see, that's different from talking about men's issues per se, right?
Because I, in Australia, we actually have heaps of health.
They love doing health advisory.
And I remember seeing on TV and on posters and stuff like that so many times, you know, men in depression and suicide.
It's a big problem for men.
You know, there's a men's shed movement.
Like, no recognition of women.
Of course, there isn't.
There's no need for it, right?
Just get yourself checked for testicular cancer.
And by the way, you know, also, you know, cervical cancer is a big problem for women.
We mustn't forget that.
That doesn't occur, right?
So you certainly can, even from government advisory, right?
You absolutely can talk about men-specific issues without that because they are not part of this kind of war of the sexes type, you know, the relative standing or relative kind of how many allowances, how many advantages are given to men relative to women.
When you're doing that, which I suspect is kind of more what Chris Williamson is sort of the issues that he's talking about, then yes, you should be acknowledging that.
Like if your big thing is, oh, it's so hard for men to get ahead in the tech industry.
It's so hard to get promoted and get a foot in the door.
Men have got it really tough.
Then you have to have to go, well, actually, it's even harder for women, clearly, because.
Oh, oh, but it is the case, I think.
Here's my pushback to you.
And Helen acknowledged it as well, right?
There are industries now where it's harder for men.
There are industries where there is a preference towards female candidates and minority candidates or this kind of thing.
And is that from like what, like equity type hiring policies?
Like, why?
Why is it more difficult?
Yeah, I think so.
But also just, you know, in general, there are also professions that are like more female dominated, right?
But which ones are you thinking of?
Nursing, teaching?
Psychology?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, first art, those are like free.
So those are bad examples for you and Helen, because this is funny.
I'm arguing the feminist position against Helen.
It's ridiculous.
But I mean, those are bad examples, right?
Because yes, they are dominated by women.
Psychology is teaching and everything is.
No, but also the men who go into those professions arguably have a big advantage, right?
Like my brother, who's a primary school teacher, they love male teachers, right?
Because they would like to get more of them.
So anyway, I'm just saying.
Well, no, but I'm just saying there's a difference to it.
And look, the same as OIT.
Hold on, I'm sure a lot more men like going into IT.
But the other thing is there are like initiatives that mean that like this is what Helen was talking about, right?
That like the publishing industry, for example, right, or media spaces, the kind of intellectual, whatever, like writer type spaces, again, emphasizing those things.
So there are industries where there is going to be beneficial effects to being female.
It is true.
But what I would say is like in most of those contexts, it will be that historically that is not going to have been the case, right?
Depending on the status of the positions and so on.
But like for most high status, like high paying jobs, there is going to have been a previous gender bias towards men, right?
But I just think in that circumstance, it isn't going to be the case that there's no industry you can find where there's no benefit to being women.
For example, Matt, there was a meta-analysis done just last year, I believe, where they looked at the, you know, those kind of posting out the resumes with the different names on it and looking at response rates, right?
And historically, they've been used as examples as discriminatory practices against women and minorities because they received less callbacks for interviews.
And a recent, like very well done meta-analysis about them showed that that had reversed in the past like 10 years or so, where there was now an advantage to having a female name on whatever, an application for.
Just out of curiosity, are any of those effects like really large?
Like is it a big advantage either way?
With that particular paper, I can't remember.
If I'm recalling, I believe it was a big effect in a preference for male historically.
And then it kind of came to parody and then went the other way.
And now there is a bias towards women.
But I would imagine it's not going to be the bias like it was at the beginning towards men and white people.
But I do remember, you know, you're talking about psychology effect sizes.
So like put it in there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, we got off on a bit of a sidetrack.
I mean, I was just saying that there's a difference between a profession being dominated by men or women and there being some sort of act of discrimination there or it being harder for the minority, right?
Because it's kind of not the case in examples like teaching or nursing, where actually it's pretty easy to have that career as a man, should you choose it.
They would love to have you because it's kind of handy to have a man around sometimes when you're dealing, you know, in a hospital or a classroom or whatever.
So yeah, I'm just saying there's a difference between those two things.
Yeah.
I guess my point with these, and maybe it was a point that you were making as well, is like, if you want to talk about the discrimination faced by Tamils in Sri Lanka post-independence, right?
For example, there is like a policy in Sri Lanka, which is very much focused around promoting Sinhalese identity and Sinhalese language, right, as the official language, which discriminated against Tamils, right?
Who previously were in roles within the government administration in part because of colonialism, but also just because of other historical reasons, where they were using English and they had higher representation in colleges and stuff.
So there were explicit policies introduced to discriminate against Tamils.
And those were discriminatory policies.
They did lean to significant changes.
But if you talk about them without mention of like why that occurred, like what is the context whereby Sindh Lee's identity was emphasized as Buddhist and Cindy Lee's particular, and it is the context of like an anti-colonial thing, right?
So in the same way, I think with men and women, whenever you're talking about discriminatory treatment that could exist in a profession towards women now, it makes sense to me that if historically there was a, you know, a discriminatory preference for men, that it's just normal that you would mention that that is the case.
But now this situation is like this.
Like women previously were very strongly discriminated against in education.
Now, men are doing worse on average, right?
And this can be that affirmative actions were successful or whatever the case might be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Contextualizing stuff isn't something you should be whinging about.
Yes.
Right.
This is true.
Now, but of course, they're done with that anyway, Matt.
That topic is finished.
Right?
Like every single time you're doing a comedy show, every single time that you do it, you need to say this thing.
And it just feels like true.
Douglas Murray's got this great line where he says, true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.
And I think that that would be a lovely indication where, okay, the conversation around men struggling, you know, when that actually gets started, when we know that that is widespread accepted, when you're able to talk about it without a disclaimer at the beginning.
I think that's fair.
So one example.
So Title IX, 40 years ago, it was 60-40 male to female college enrollment.
We decided that was unacceptable.
To have 50% more men in college and college has been and still is to a certain extent, maybe to a lesser extent, but still a fantastic ticket for economic mobility.
And we decided it was unacceptable to have 50% more men in college than women.
So we passed basically what was affirmative action, discrimination, unfair advantage for women.
Same merit, same scores, lift them up.
But it was headed in the right direction.
Women were ticking up.
Where are we now?
Exact same place, 60-40, women to men, and it's headed in the wrong direction.
It actually, the numbers even get worse when you look at graduation rates because men drop out at a higher rate.
I've heard no to seven times more men dropped out during COVID than women as well, I think.
So that would be an example, I think, where Scott Galloway correctly contextualized things, right?
But he did want to emphasize those issues, right, that men are facing and young men are facing in education.
But he didn't have to ignore the historical circumstances.
It didn't take him very long to reference it, right?
It was less than 20 seconds or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And yeah, you know, and the contextualization is important there, right?
Like before, you know, tertiary education was a much rarer thing.
And it really was like a ticket to, you know, middle class wealth and success, whatever you want to call it.
It's not so much the case at the moment, right?
So it's very true what they're pointing to, which is the increasing gender split in favor of women in terms of tertiary education, right?
I think in Australia, it's about 60-40 in favor of women.
They also split along those subjects, yes, like we talked about, education, teaching, things like humanities and social sciences, especially psychology, very much female.
And nursing, yeah, pharmacy, that kind of thing.
Whereas the male-dominated fields, still like engineering, computer science, IT, that kind of thing.
Now, that could be social.
It could be preferences, however you want.
Biological, evolutionary drives.
Yeah, evolutionary drives.
The male evolutionary drive to code is just something.
This is something.
Yeah, but there are like, you know, we're not a, what do you call it?
Blank sleeve is pod.
No, we are not.
There are differences.
I do think, I do think there is a male autistic tendency to get into stuff like coding that doesn't involve talking to anybody else.
But, but, you know, I mean, the contextualization there is important, right?
So the pay gap, despite this difference in education, actually is pretty much non-existent.
You know, and if anything, men are doing a little bit better.
And that's because men tend to not do the full-on educational thing, you know, going into debt and getting all these qualifications.
So you can get pretty poorly paid.
This is Australia.
Yeah, so you can get pretty poorly paid as a psychologist or a nurse or something or a teacher, rather go into the vocational trades, construction, electrical plumbing, that kind of thing, which is something men tend to like to do and earn quite a lot of money quite quickly.
So I'm just saying, I'm not saying it's a nothing burger.
These are real social trends.
All I'm saying to you, Chris, is that the interpretation that they are putting on it, which is that this is an indication that men are struggling.
They're just, you know, they're failing, right?
Maybe they're not failing.
Maybe, maybe the guy that chooses to be an electrician isn't failing.
That's all.
I'm just putting it out there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is this is true.
And now the other thing I will say there, again, Matt, just to just to do my own whinging attack on whinging, like Chris Williamson's thing at the start, that like, you know, every comedy set having to add in the disclaimers.
Again, Matt, the reality is humor focused on like how annoying women are to men.
It's very popular.
It's a very popular genre of comedy, just as men annoying women is a popular genre of comedy.
So like, what, what fucking woke comedy is Chris Williamson attending where everyone is just constantly giving disclaimers before they make jokes?
Or historically, again, in comedy in general, is it hard to find portrayals of nagging stepmothers or of women who are like overly neurotic and annoying to their husband?
I've seen that in a lot of comedies recently.
So yes, you also have the feckless husbands, right?
You have Homer Simpson.
You know, I've heard the men's rights advocates talk about this, that, you know, look at all these bad meal, the male followers are always incompetent.
And yes, these motifs exist also because like all of it is pointing to real things as well, real underlying dynamics and stuff.
But it's just that notion that I don't know, they kind of invented persecution where like you can't go to a comedy club and make a joke about women without getting cancelled now.
Like, can't you?
Can't you?
I think you can.
I think it's okay.
I've seen Jimmy Carr sets and I've seen any number of stand-up where they're making jokes about differences between men and women still.
Still a topic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got to say, I don't, Chris Williamson's grievance in this regard doesn't feel authentic to me.
Sorry, Chris, if you're listening to me, but it just does not.
It feels like it's being hammed up because, you know, it plays well.
I understand that it plays well with grievance mongering is a facet of our garometer.
I understand why it doesn't feel like Chris's heart is in it.
I feel like he's playing the role.
Oh, that's an interesting take.
Well, I'll note as well, Matt, that just almost everyone that's referenced by Chris Williamson is like Douglas Murray, Richard Reeves.
We'll go on to see there's like a particular tenor of the people that are cited.
And I'm just noting that it's not a random cohort.
In any case, there was one thing I skipped over, Matt, that maybe we'll have more sympathy for Scott here or not.
Let's see what you think.
Okay.
So he did, in that whole segment, he did have one point where he kind of threw a bone to Chris Williamson, and it was this one.
So if I say at a conference that women have been showed a better bedside manner, better studies that make them better doctors, everyone politely collaps and nods their head.
Even I think the people who may not agree with that feel pressure to nod their head.
If I say that throughout history, men have been more needed to be more risk aggressive, either to fight wars or immediately pick up a spear and go hunt something to feed the tribe.
And therefore men have an easier time making the leap of faith to be entrepreneurs and they're more risk aggressive and start crazier ideas, there's a very uncomfortable pause in the room.
You can say women make better doctors, better lawyers, better consultants, and people acknowledge.
And if you were to say, though, men might on average have the skills to be better entrepreneurs, at least initially.
And by the way, none of this means that we shouldn't have, we should be biased against men in applying to medical school or we shouldn't be funding women as entrepreneurs.
But you're allowed to acknowledge, well, the whole world should be run by women.
Yes.
Wouldn't that go on?
Well, okay, the patriarchy has sort of worked for 3,000 years.
Maybe there's something to men being leaders.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
You don't say that.
I don't believe that.
Yeah.
I'm not quite sure what the point is being made here.
Like, I'm not denying some of the underlying assumptions that he's got there, right?
On average, men tend to take more like risky type moves for good and for ill, right?
Especially when young.
Once you get to my age, then we're pretty much androgynous.
And, you know, I think it's probably also true that on average, women, and I think Scott Galway mentions this later on, that women develop much more quickly in terms of, you know, be able to communicate well, being able to socialize well, and a certain kind of maturity, right?
You know, so I'm not denying those gender differences.
And I also take the point that I think it has been fashionable, I suppose, to point out, oh, you know, actually, you know, surprise, surprise, women can be really good doctors, maybe better doctors than men, right?
Because they're more likely to listen and so on, right?
Whatever.
And I understand that that was a kind of a fashionable thing to do.
But it's also like, who cares?
Like, what's the point of this?
Like, everyone acknowledges that those statistical averages don't actually mean anything for an individual person, right?
You can have a woman that would be a terrible doctor.
A man with who would be a terrible doctor, right?
Bloody, you know, the university entry scores to enter medicine at the moment, you have to be in the top 1% academically.
So 99% of both men and women are definitely not going to be able to become doctors just purely on grades alone, academic grades.
So it's just, I just don't understand.
Like, like, what's the point there?
Is it that we should be acknowledging as a society more the good things that men have to offer or what?
I think the argument is there's a double standard, which, and I would agree there is, especially like in liberal spaces.
And I actually, it might be flipped the other way in conservative spaces.
But like he's saying, if you give a talk at a university and you elucidate that women are better at men on XYZ, you won't be chastised or people look at you funny.
But if you give a talk saying men are better than women at ABC, that people will like be more uncomfortable with that, regardless of the quality of the data.
And that's true, right?
That is true.
Right.
So this is indicative of, I don't know.
Like I discomfort with the notion that there are gender differences where men are different and better at something or more suited to particular things than women.
because of the history of discrimination.
And I think this is a vile point that like people are uncomfortable emphasizing that men are better than women at something because of that history, right?
Because of the history of women being told they're not as capable, you know, they're too emotional and so on.
So they don't make good leaders and all this kind of thing, right?
I mean, obviously that's not true when you see the male leaders that exist around the world, Lilo Busk and Donald Trump most notable, right, in the contemporary phase.
But I do think this point that especially in liberal and academic spaces, there is a double standard of sorts where people are uncomfortable emphasizing gender differences that are like complementary to men being better at something.
Sure.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I understand that.
That's like a, yeah, for understandable reasons, I suppose, that especially in progressive spaces, as they say, giving an academic talk, it would just make people more uncomfortable.
I mean, it's just, I suppose my point is, is that like, I think it's a bit silly either way.
You know what I mean?
Like, like one, it's perfectly fine to do it either way and acknowledge that there might be some gender difference.
I mean, the one thing that came to my mind is actually good old IQ, right?
So IQ is one of those things where the overall, there is virtually zero, you know, statistically undetectable differences between men and women.
On the other hand, in terms of the subfacets, you tend to see that women consistently score higher on the verbal fluency and memory subfacets of IQ.
And you tend to see a male advantage with the visual spatial stuff, visual, spatial tasks, mental rotation and stuff like that.
The good old, what is it, word cell versus shape rotator type dichotomy, right?
You know, and it's like, okay, that's fine.
That's interesting.
You know, like, it's not a huge difference.
You know, we're talking about an average here.
But it's like, that doesn't make me uncomfortable to talk about it.
I mean, I guess it depends on the spaces.
Like if you look at certain kinds of the more sciencey areas of psychology, for instance, I've seen heaps of papers where it's just like they just talk frankly about all that stuff and it's, it's fine.
It's like whatever, who cares?
You know what I mean?
But I suppose in a more humanities type sociological type discipline, then it's more kind of like, what's the narrative you're trying to spin around it or something?
Exactly.
Like, I mean, I do think that this is the case where if you want to publish a study saying that men are discriminated against in some field, you better be sure your methods are rock solid.
Whereas if you want to publish an article that says that women are discriminated against, the barrier is going to be much lower.
And that is true.
Like, I understand that that's a real thing.
But you know what's a much bigger thing, Chris, in academia in terms of what's fashionable and not fashionable, what's cool and not cool?
It's like, it would be fine to talk about gender differences, especially with something like risk-taking and gambling problems and proclivity to violence and crime or whatever.
It'd be fine to talk about that in terms of men having all the problems or women having all the problems, as long as you talk about it as being a cultural phenomenon.
I think that's the main aversion in progressive spaces to there being any kind of biological substrate to any of that.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Now, the last point, I just want to make sure I understood this right because I initially thought that Scott Galloway was endorsing the view that like the patriarchy has worked for 3,000 years.
So therefore, like that was okay.
I was kind of like, that's like saying, you know, theocracies were great for most of his life.
I don't think that's what he was.
Yeah, I understood that's not no, he was, so he was presenting it as that's the flip side of the women should own the future, all women should be leaders, right?
The flip side is saying, well, men, you know, have ruined society for thousands of years.
And then, because he does say, I don't believe that.
So I think he was just contrasting them, right?
As like, these are like mirror images of each other and they're both wrong.
I hope.
It's kind of a weak argument either way, right?
You could look at all of history and all the men that have been running countries as emperors and kings and prime ministers and what have you, dictators and so on.
And you could go, hey, you know, we've done all right.
So the men must be pretty good at it.
Or you could say, look at all the problems we've had.
I know.
If women had been doing it, it would have things would have gone a whole much better, a whole lot better.
So it's a pretty weak point, right?
It doesn't hold any water either way.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Well, Naima, have you considered how much torture is involved in attending a French class and potential gender differences?
A French class.
A French class, yeah.
Now I think about it, it does sound pretty bad, but yeah, go ahead and enlighten me.
As a father of two boys, I can tell you that my son, the idea of my son, and he's getting better, he's calming down a bit.
The idea of him having to be in French class doing French verbs for 80 minutes, I literally think it's torture for him.
Like physical, physical torture.
Be quiet.
Don't move.
Don't get distracted.
Yeah, please, sir.
Raise your hand.
You just described the activities that are much more easily adapted by a woman.
But moving to solutions, I actually think the majority of the solutions that would really lift up young men are solutions we can apply to all young people.
A more progressive tax structure that lowers tax burden on people through their current income.
I make the majority of my money buying and selling stocks and houses and assets.
My tax rate is lower than you.
I would bet that the majority of your income comes from this, from earning money.
Why is sweat taxed at a higher rate than money?
It seems to me it should be flipped.
Everything we do, I think, over the last 40, 50 years from a tax and legislative standpoint is nothing but a transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's where I think Scott Galloway is doing well.
He's firing on all cylinders there.
Like at the beginning there, sorry, remind me, Chris, what was the very first point you made, though?
Well, yeah, the tax language we can talk about, right, which I also agree is interesting and like his kind of wheelhouse.
The first bit is boys don't like to sit still in class.
They find it hard.
That's right.
Yeah.
So they're going to like taking a French class is going to be torture for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, he's pointing to something that I think there's probably some, not that I've researched or anything, but I suspect there's some reality to it, right?
Which there probably is a sex difference in terms of that, you know, disruptive behavior.
Disruptive behavior, being less likely to focus, pay attention or whatever.
Like in like in our little primary school, and I know this because we live next to it, where my kids went, like there were some kids in prep and year one that just hated school and then they would just refuse to go.
And then when they were forced to go, at some point during the day, they would just run for it.
They'd just bolt.
So you just had this funny situation where they're like bolting out the through the front gate and the teachers are trying to head them off, but they're quick, Chris.
They're really quick and they're just tearing off for home, right?
It's generally the boys, right?
It was in my recollection, it was pretty much always boys who were doing that.
Now, so I think there's probably some truth to that.
I mean, it's not true of my son.
So you've got to be careful of anecdotes, right?
I know that there are lots of kids with ADHD or various other issues.
And it may well be that it's, you know, boys are overrepresented.
But, you know, be careful of anecdotes because definitely my son is a total SWAT and can sit down and concentrate.
No trouble at all.
Whereas my eldest daughter, she's a bit all over the shop.
So, you know, individual differences swap these gender differences.
But at the same time, my little pushback there, though, is that let's take it as true, right?
That the girls have an advantage here on scholastic pursuits, which involve sitting down, following instructions, paying attention, not getting distracted, focusing, right?
Then I'm sorry, but those are the skills you need at university later on and afterwards at an office job, at an academic job like mine.
You know, I mean, if it's the case that that's less suited to boys, then the boys should be going into trades or other things rather than stuff that's forced that where they're required to sit still and be quiet so much.
Yeah.
So the bit that got me is like, you know, they're talking about French class.
Would Scott Galloway say the same thing about physics and computer science?
It all applies.
That's right.
It's the same thing.
You're sitting in the room concentrating, right?
And so like, I do think while I agree there is sex differences, right, between, you know, disruptive behavior and all this kind of thing, I think that's pretty well established.
I just think that there's conflicting narratives at play here because the other classes were boys are overrepresented.
And I think these two same people would emphasize, well, this is a, you know, this is a sex difference, right?
Like boys like the computer science and that kind of analytical approach or whatever more, right?
And we shouldn't demonize that.
But why are French verb conjugations?
You can't have it both ways.
You can't have like affirmative action for boys to like change the rules for school to accommodate them while also accepting that they might have proclivities that are particularly well suited to entrepreneurship or leadership or physics or coding or what have you, right?
If you accept that there are some things that boys are better at, you have to accept that there are some things that girls are better at.
And if you don't like the affirmative action for women, then anyway, I'm not attributing any of this to Scott Galloway.
I'm just pointing out that, I don't know, I'm just not.
There's potential contradictions.
There's a contradiction.
I think this is the point for me is like, if you're going to make an anecdote like that, right?
And people will think, oh, yeah, my son would be tortured learning French verbs.
But like, just apply it.
Nobody likes French verbs.
Nobody likes the French.
Just apply it across more.
Like think about the counter example.
So are you saying that boys don't like maths?
Because what?
So are they going to be happy sitting 80 minutes doing maths?
You got to apply it consistently.
Like, so this is this is part of the issue I take.
But in any case.
But anyway, obviously heaps of boys do, right?
Because heaps of boys like to do stuff.
Yeah, they get along fine.
Like computer programming involves just sitting there for hours staring at a screen in rapt concentration.
There's a certain kind of mental state, which is certainly not all boys, right?
It doesn't suit all of them.
Not all boys.
I also, you know, I am wondering at times when I hear these kind of things about like what they're imagining schools to be.
Like, because I think what they want is this kind of weird American school where I've seen where it's like there's basketball classes and there's dragons on the ceiling and the teachers are doing explosions with the thing, right?
But when you look at like the conservative fantasy, which I'm not, Scott Galloway is a liberal, right?
That's his thing.
But like Chris Williamson, the other guests.
But this is something that American liberals love, Roy, just like Steiner schools and stuff like that, like alternative.
alternative modes of education.
But the Chris Williamson side of the pool, right, will often kind of romanticize the schools and the past, right?
But like those schools were much more straightforward.
Much, much more rich down.
That's right.
Put your pen and it can quill thing and are you going to get smacked around the head.
And boys then managed to go to school and finish and they had an advantage.
So like, why is it naive that boys are suddenly not capable of doing that?
Because like, you know, the British civil service or whatever, I doubt it was a barrel of laughs.
Entirely stuffed by men, though.
That's how the empire was built.
Anyway, but I mean, okay, so there's that.
I just, I think we agree.
There's just a logical issues there that are just left unresolved.
But after that, I think Scott Galloway did very well.
I think he straight away he segued to, you know, but the main issues are things that are affecting young men and young women.
Everyone.
Equally.
And that is something that is music to my ears, right?
That is true.
Yes, and this is one of the things that he does, which I like.
Like sometimes he does play into Chris Williamson's streaming of things, right?
But he very often, he's got like message discipline, right?
I think it's because of this thing that's being a marketing person and a podcast pro, right?
That he'll he'll switch back to the message.
And his message is in large part what you just heard there, which is like, yes, there are these issues.
Yes, you know, in a way, he's having to do the disclaimers for Chris Williamson, where he's like, yeah, it is, you know, it's all unfair.
But, you know, let's talk about solutions, right?
What are the solutions?
Okay, the solutions are things we can all agree on.
Yeah.
So like, you know, maybe that's a bit for Chris Williamson to think about, are you forcing Scott Galloway to issue disclaimers before he talks about his tax shit?
Yes.
I mean, that's definitely what's going on because Scott Galloway is kind of forced by politeness to acknowledge the grievance framing, the men versus women framing that Chris offers, and then has to judo flip it to something more positive and productive.
So that's worth thinking about.
Anyway, I like the way he took that.
And I think I'm very sympathetic to all those points he raised, the financial precarity, the way at the moment that money earned by investments or an increasing proportion, basically, of the economy or income is driven by people with money as opposed to people earning it.
And that, in effect, is a kind of an oppression of the young by the old to a large degree, as well as the rich versus the poor.
So yeah, those, I think, I mean, the problems that unite young men and women are far bigger than the problems that divide them.
That's what I would say.
Yeah.
Well, now, one thing that comes up a fair bit in this kind of content, and this conversation is no exception, is the topic of evolutionary psychology.
Oh, you're going to hear this.
Now, I want to make one thing clear.
In general, in liberal species, people are very down on evolutionary psychology with good reason.
So people have covered.
There's terrible, terrible in that genre.
But Matt and I, okay, we are unique in a certain respect in that we are very pro evolutionary psychology in you should take account of evolution when you're thinking about human psychology.
It is absolutely true that like human psychology has been shaped by evolutionary priors, just like everything else.
The fact that we're social primates explains lots about our behavior, our social focus, so on.
I have no issue with people doing evolutionary framing and explanations for behavior where they provide the relevant evidence.
And the kind of manosphere version of this is actually frankly irritating because of the bad rep that it spreads through the entire like field of anybody mentioning evolution because invariably, what they want to talk about is a kind of application.
This is why, this is why men hunt and women nest.
Yes, men hunt, women nest.
Also, how this applies to dating dynamics, right, there's a very big emphasis in the manosphere, in this kind of content, towards dating habits and how it's explained by evolutionary things.
Right, and there some of it is relatively firm and some of it is much less well supported, right.
So i'm just just flagging that up that like, we're probably going to end up talking about these kind of things, but we have no aversion yeah, to evolutionary framings like, in fact, I think there should be more of them, just done well yeah, just to under, if you're, if your interest is just understanding human behavior, why we like the things we like, why we do the things we do yeah um, then I think it's great.
Unfortunately, of course, it's super popular in popular culture, and this for the same reasons that Iq was popular.
For all the wrong reasons right, for all the wrong reasons.
And it it, it does, as you say, like tarnish it.
Basically, the academic Iq is a great comparison yeah yeah, like like legitimate within its domain as a field of inquiry absolute shit as soon as it enters the popular discourse, because it does so for all the wrong reasons and people have the worst motivations for doing so.
So I think it's a.
I think it's a good parallel and I just wanted to underline what you said, which is that basically I endorse evolutionary and biological explanations for for human behavior.
We're not blank slatists.
But there are so many problems in in the way it gets reflected in the popular discourse.
One of the big ones and this is actually even true of the critics as well as the, the people that accept it mindlessly or some version of it mindlessly, which is the assumption that because there is an evolved predisposition towards something, then that makes it natural, that makes it good and that makes it right and it is unchangeable.
It is isn't something we should change.
Right, that is the implication and that isn't true.
Right, you can accept lots of things that we have evolved predispositions to, that are not particularly helpful, that are not particularly healthy, that are not particularly suited to the modern world or our modern culture or our more human uh, sense of what's right and wrong, and you don't have to accept it.
Right, but you don't.
You don't need to Deny it and pretend that those things just don't exist, but you don't have to accept them as being good and right and inevitable either.
So I think it's nuanced.
This was the correct interpretation of the selfish gene as well.
That is the message of it, that you are not a prisoner to selfish genes anymore.
Even Richard Dorky.
Back in the 1970s.
Like, he emphasized that many times.
Anyway, still doing it.
It didn't do any good.
It didn't prevent it all going wrong.
I mean, it didn't prevent him from giving terrible tips as well.
Never mind.
So here we go.
And as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, if you have an imbalanced sex ratio, the power is with the rarer sex.
And because of women's selection preference and this rising up through the socioeconomic ladder, they have created an imbalanced sex ratio to the benefit of ultra-high-performing men who use and discard, don't commit, play the game.
Yeah, the and what some of the research shows is the following: is that a lack of a romantic relationship?
There's a cartoon of a woman in her 30s, like one of the biggest tragedies in the world is a woman in her 30s who hasn't found romantic love or a partner.
She's alone, she's living with cats on a rainy day in a big sweater, staring out the window, thinking about what could have happened if she'd only found love.
And her parents feel like they've failed and society has failed her.
The reality is, men need relationships more than women.
And that if you look at the data around what happens when a young man, when a young woman doesn't have the benefit of a romantic relationship, she oftentimes pours that energy back into her friends and her professional life.
Men oftentimes, not all men, but a lot of men or more men pour that energy back into unproductive things.
They go deeply online.
They're more prone to conspiracy theory.
One in three men who don't either cohabitate with a woman or are married by the time they're 30, there's a one in three chance they're going to be a substance abuser.
Widows.
Chris, did you fact-check this one?
I think that's basically right, the thing that he says at the end there, that, you know, men whose partners die who are widowers or get divorced, or in fact are single generally, I think they're much worse off than their partnered brethren.
That's what I vaguely recall.
Yes, they're much worse off, but I mean, much, you got to quantify it, right?
But like, but the one in three.
Like, it's not radical, and obviously some people are very happy being single.
But just, I think the statistics are that it's basically right, that men don't do quite as well being single or divorced or whatever as women.
Yeah, although, so directionally, the claims are correct, but every time I looked into a figure that they cited, you know, trying to find the study that related to the headline or whatever, it was basically always overstated or made more hyperbolic.
Like the claim here is one in three unmarried or not cohabitating men are having some substance abuse, right?
And again, when I looked into that, it wouldn't surprise me at all that the rate is higher, right?
For unmarried men, for lots of lots of reasons, including just that, you know, rates of alcoholism and stuff go down whenever people are in marriages.
Yeah, rates are higher for men across the board, right?
Yes, rates of men are higher across the board.
And actually, I find a study that was looking at alcohol use disorder, right?
So just on alcohol in the US across lifetime and in the past 12 months.
And with men across the lifetime, the overall rate was 36%.
Okay.
One in three.
But that includes like mild, moderate, severe.
And by marital status, so it was 35% amongst the never married.
Amongst the married, it was 27.2.
Okay.
So like it is lower, but Scott gives the impression almost that it's almost non-existent, right?
Like unless you're not in that relationship.
Widowed separated were on the similar rate.
So it didn't really change.
So the protective effect persisted.
But yeah, so like 27 to 35 is a less dramatic difference, right?
Than what it kind of implies when they say one and three men.
Because like the marriage rate is almost one in three rounded up as well.
Yeah.
What about the thing at the beginning?
I was a bit confused there because Chris Williamson said that women getting educated and earning more money is basically giving more power to men because now there's more women competing for fewer men.
Now, I think I know what he's alluding to, but he seems to be a little bit mixed up because still there's still fundamentally the same number of men and the same number of women, right?
Yeah.
Unless you're, you know, in China, I don't think there's a huge sex imbalance.
Although I feel like if there is even a 0.1% sex imbalance that, you know, they're going to be on top of it more than I am.
Chris Williamson will be aware of it.
So yeah, but so what are you suggesting he's mixing up, Matt?
Well, I think what he's trying to say, I mean, there are issues actually with actual sex imbalances in terms of people partnering up, but it's mostly felt by older women, especially, you know, 60 plus or even 50 plus perhaps, who are in the marriage market, because men die earlier.
And those that don't die don't tend to take care of themselves as well.
And so I guess there is actually a genuine dearth of men in those older age brackets in terms of being available.
But what he's talking about is that the downside of women having more equality, being better educated, earning more money is that, according to Chris, I think they will only consider men who are better educated than them or similarly and earning more money than them or similarly.
So that's what's creating an imbalance in the market, which according to him is creating this situation where there are these alpha men who are in that situation that have the pick of the litter and go around like little gadflies, trifling with ladies' affections, which I'm sure Chris would not approve of.
I see.
Okay.
Well, yes, that does make sense in terms of like what he's outlining.
So, well, although you have it, Matt, so I don't have any government on that.
I don't think it's, I think there's multiple things wrong with that point, basically.
I mean, first of all, men do still earn a lot more than women across the age groups, mainly due to women going out of the workforce when they have children.
Yes, recently women are tending to be more likely to go to university, but that doesn't necessarily translate into higher average wages these days.
And yeah, you know, a lot of women are perfectly happy to marry someone who, I mean, I've got a colleague for, I've got several colleagues, actually, female colleagues, because I work with a lot of women because I'm in psychology, right?
A lot of female colleagues.
And so I know who their partners are.
And yeah, often their partners are treaties.
And that'd be earning more money than them.
It's a perfect example.
Well, the conversation continues.
This is a short clip, but just more evolutionary psychology statistics coming at you.
Widows are happier after their husband dies than when he was alive.
Widowers, less happy, right?
Men on average in a relationship live four to seven years longer.
Women do live longer, but only two to four years.
The reality is weird.
It's a great deal.
What's that?
It's a great deal for guys.
Partnership is a great deal.
So again, just to mention, I don't doubt the direction of the effects that they're looking at.
But when I went to check these statistics that they're citing so confidently, right?
Like men live four to seven years longer, women two to four.
I can't find that being a consensus view at all, right?
There's like, there's different figures that are cited.
And also the thing about widowers being like more happy when their husbands die, I mean, I understand, but again, not something that you can find in the literature.
There are headlines associated, you know, with a study shows that widows were happier after, but it's like always talking about like a specific study, right?
And it's not something broadly general.
It's not like all studies show women are happier when their partners die.
No, they don't.
And actually they go on to talk about the widow effect, right?
Like the thing that a lot of people are more likely to die, right?
After their partners die, right?
And so wouldn't that contradict that kind of claim that like they're all, you know, it's just, so it's not that I'm saying all the claims that they make are wrong, but they kind of, the way it feels to me is that they've basically come across a factoid that supports, you know, the thing that they think is true.
And then they put, I don't know, like a Joe Rogan cooties file or whatever.
They probably have a folder or some, you know, place where they store these articles and facts.
And then they kind of memorize them and throw them out.
Right.
And it's, it's just completely the wrong way to approach this kind of topic because you could say things like, in general, men live a little bit longer whenever they're in relationships.
And the effect might be slightly less pronounced for women.
But that doesn't sound as scientific or compelling as the men live four to seven years longer, whereas for women, it's only two to three.
And like, no, but the precision that applies is not there.
So it's just very frustrating because every time I checked the statistics, it was like, there is some truth to this, but the, you know, the confidence and the magnitude are overstated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is incredibly common in the in podcastistan.
And it's because obviously that the reality is not super compelling or interesting, right?
There are lots of little effects.
You know, being married is in general good, but, you know, benefits might be a bit less or more and whatever.
Divorce men might have worse outcomes, whatever.
But when you control for this, it's whatever.
And we're talking relatively small effect sizes.
And it basically doesn't amount to a compelling story.
So I think what's annoying you is that what you get here is a kind of paint by numbers caricature.
There's grains of truth in it and it may sometimes be directionally correct, but the way it's framed is much bigger and brighter and provides the kind of basis for this sort of, I guess, in particular, Chris Williamson is prone to it, this sort of pseudo-evolutionary theorizing.
Yeah, and it's, you know, it's the same kind of approach we saw with Dr. K, with Huberman, with like any number of people in Jordan Peterson, right?
It's decorative scholarship, really.
Like they want to make a point and they want to throw in like studies and statistics to meet that point.
Now, I do think Scott Galloway, for example, is going to have hired people and done research for his book and had this is where probably these figures are coming from.
But again, it's the wrong way to approach research literature and stuff like this, pulling out like little individual shark figures.
That's why earlier, Matt, I was saying, you know, if it's one woman a week or it's 10 women a week or it's, you know, whatever the statistic is, the kind of directional thing is the more important thing than the specific statistic.
Yeah, I mean, what matters is the effect size is what you're getting at, right?
So I'm being a little bit lazy with the one woman a week because that's obviously that the reason I thought of that is that it's something that was quite widely discussed in Australia, right?
You know, as a you know, domestic violence.
But that's obviously based on the Australian population, right?
You go to a bigger population, it'll be more women a week, smaller population, less.
What actually matters substantively is the effect size there, which is which is quite huge, right?
The differential between male and female deadly violence versus the other way around, same goes for sexual violence, is quite massive.
So I wouldn't quibble with their numbers if they were more than just directionally correct and more than just, oh, yes, I can find some single study that found this number.
But if it was a consistent, strong effect that was actually meaningful, and then it might be worth having a bit of public discussion about.
Right, right.
And so just to be clear, I mean, it will sound nitpicky to people, but it's not arguing that there isn't a thing where people live longer whenever they're in marriages in general, and that this effect might be larger for men than women.
I don't care about that.
Like that, that sounds perfectly plausible to me.
It's the claims of precision that are presented, which get my heckles up.
And we'll see why as we go on.
So in any case, a little bit more about this reasoning and approach and how it might apply in specific circumstances.
This time from Scott.
And one of the things I said on another podcast that got a lot of pushback was: I think, at least initially in a relationship, I think men should pay for everything.
But the pushback comes from men and women.
Yes, mostly women.
Women immediately said, you're using money to control me.
This is the patriarchy.
And my view on this is the following: that a woman has a much shorter window for propagation and mating.
So her time during that was fertility years is more valuable.
So scrutinized more aggressively.
Well, and the downside of sex, quite frankly, the risks of downside of sex are greater for a woman than a man.
In addition, a man benefits more from a romantic relationship than a woman.
So there's an asymmetry of benefit.
And I think you want to offset that financially.
Well, I think it shows a certain level of commitment and a recognition.
That's what I meant by the reliable signal thing.
Yeah.
By saying, I'm interested in this.
I'm serious.
I recognize the asymmetry.
I recognize that this is better for me.
Allow me to rebalance it a little for you by paying for dinner.
And I think that's, I think that's a great take.
Yeah, more casual evolutionary theorizing.
Yeah, it's just, I think, I mean, Scott is not as deep in this as other guests that are on Chris Williamson's pod and stuff.
But there does come a point when you start looking at interactions through this evolutionary lens, right?
where it's like all of these things are game theoried out by, well, let me compensate you for the potential that we might have sexual relations on this.
At least, you know, that's a higher cost risk for you.
So I should pay for dinner, right?
It kind of like, I don't know, it just strikes as over extrapolating.
And like, there's a lot of things going on in dating.
you know, psychology and all that kind of thing.
And like, I don't care about Scott thinking that men should pay for for dinner.
You know, you can argue that or not and people can have different opinions on it.
But it's the appeal to, well, look, what I'm saying is just science.
Yeah, it's like it's the appeal to scientific necessity that's that's icky.
Like, you know, I understand those things around there are, there are sex asymmetries in the human species and so on, and they can translate into a bunch of different things.
But yeah, like you, Chris, it's again, it's like IQ.
It's like, just because it's a scientific thing, that kind of taking it as a prescription for this is how things should be is just, one, it's quite icky, but it's also just, it's just kind of wrong.
It isn't necessarily so.
I mean, ultimately, people could do whatever the hell they want, right?
Ultimately, if the woman wants to go Dutch or pay for dinner, she can, right?
Or you can argue about it if you want to or whatever, right?
Or you can offer or not, right?
And she might want you to or not.
But ultimately, none of this shit matters, right?
Because people are just going to do what they're going to do.
I mean, I could go ask my daughter right now, who's 20 years old, and ask her if she would terribly mind if a boyfriend or a guy that she was going on a date with paid for dinner.
I'm pretty sure the answer would be no.
She would be fine with it, just like she's fine with me paying for dinner.
Yeah, so but they'll say, you know, it's, it's general.
It's the narratives in the culture that say this is like toxic masculinity or whatever.
But like, I think this, again, is speaking to the fact that that is a very specific slice of, you know, American progressive culture, whereby this would be like a huge controversy that you might get cancelled for suggesting or whatever.
Like, I just think there's a constant over extrapolation.
But anyway, there you go.
There was evolutionary psychology logic applied.
So there's more of that to come.
And there's actually a reference to anthropology that I want to discuss.
But before that, we have to, you know, take a moment, as we often do, to listen to some grievance.
I would push back on what you said about how the woman in her 30s who's got the cat and is in the jumper thing.
I think that archetype's gone.
I think that it's very lauded and applauded now for women to be deep, deep, deep into their 30s and still just doing themselves.
Yeah, because kids on their own.
Again, there was this idea that I came up with when talking to Richard Reeves, actually, I called it the soft bigotry of male expectations.
So you were talking about how if you were to say women are able to be better doctors, better this, better that, you get applauded for it.
But if you say that there are some things that men are better at, that's not.
If you were to say that those things, CEO leadership, that that is something that women should aspire to do, you would also get applauded for that.
If you would say developing your nurturing nature, being more sensitive, being more caring, being able to tap into your EQ as a woman is something that you should develop.
That's the sort of thing that you wouldn't.
I came up with this soft bigotry of male expectations thing.
So he came up with the soft bigotry of male expectations, which I'm struggling to link that to his grievance, right?
I mean, well, I'm familiar with it now, what the grievance is, which is that it's terrible that we think it's good that women should be doing whatever, traditional or stereotypically male roles.
We're like, go, girl.
But the flip side, we're totally against it.
We will never admit that there is something that men should be encouraged to do.
Or we are keen to say that there are some things that women are better at, but we won't say that there are things that men are better at.
I don't know.
I just doubt all of that, right?
I doubt every single premise that goes into that.
Like on one hand, like it's true that we have a much more androgynous culture now, right?
In that we do think that men and women can do basically anything, right?
If they want to, and you can get good and bad ones of every case.
And whatever the statistics are or means about number of, you know, people entering this, whatever, it doesn't really translate to individuals.
So I think that's an important point.
Like, for instance, like I used wavelets.
It's a mathematical method in my PhD quite a bit.
And I learned a lot about these Dorbicis wavelets.
And I had the textbooks on them.
Ingrid Dorbicis, right?
And a crazy good mathematician.
So who the fuck cares whether or not there's 10% more male preferences or skills or whatever to go into study maths when like what matters is what individuals want to do.
So you'd be encouraging and say, fantastic.
And say, but I don't think anyone is saying to men, oh, well, you should, you shouldn't be doing whatever, a stereotypically female job.
I've got a friend who works as a nurse.
I know someone else who's in the caring professions.
And actually, they are lauded for it.
People think that's great.
And in fact, it's a common topic.
And I know this because my brother and mother are teachers, where they're often talking about the special things that male teachers bring to secondary school, right?
And primary school for that matter, in terms of role models and dealing with rampunctious young boys and stuff like that.
So I haven't encountered any of this, any of this kind of unwillingness to admit that there's anything that men might bring to the table.
So yeah, I just doubt every little thing.
I just feel like it's a manufactured grievance that Chris has got going here.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, it'll come up again, but the notion that women that are unmarried and childless in general report being like less happy overall than those that are married and have children.
Again, this is another thing where it is true, but the statistics vary, right?
And it kind of depends when you're asking.
It's one of those things that came up where, you know, if you ask at the end of life, you actually find very little difference between people.
But if you ask people in, you know, 30s and 40s, things can be different.
So, and it's the statistics I think that they're mostly referencing are that from general social surveys in the U.S., the amount reporting being very happy with married women with children is around 40%, right?
And married women without children, around 25%.
And unmarried, around 22%.
This is from like a specific study that showed this, right?
So those would be some substantial differences.
But again, this is, you know, that's focusing on the very happy thing, right?
So that's a Likert scale with five points.
Like there's other things going on there, and it would depend how you collapse things down.
But overall, that there is a benefit in terms of self-reporting.
It's true, just the same way there is overall a ban of it or, you know, people report being happier when they're religious.
But whenever you look at that literature in more detail, a lot of the effects are like they're contaminated by a whole bunch of other things, right?
Exactly.
And the effects are relatively modest in any case.
And it's quite complicated.
And there is diverging evidence.
I've seen studies showing that, and I even forgotten because I think it's, I've seen it both ways, but aren't there studies showing that unmarried people or people without kids are happier?
I mean, again, but this is the thing.
Like, I don't doubt there are studies where you can find that, right?
And you can find headline cases where it's going to go that way.
But that's the problem is like this approach to science just ultimately ends up like dueling citations, the individual studies, right?
But the issue is just picking one and then building a narrative out of it, like a simplistic narrative that kind of assumes that the effects are much, much bigger than they are and that they apply to everyone.
Universally.
Universally.
Yeah, because I mean, I know this is an English-speaking podcast talking and the host is the US and UK, right?
Like, but almost everything they say in lots of respects doesn't tee up with my experience in Japan.
And that might be because it's Japan and there's a lot of differences, right, about the society.
But just the way they talk, it's just like the US is the world.
And I hate that.
I hate that.
Like Australia doesn't even get included as a place.
But okay.
Anyway, so we stop there to just enjoy that grievance for a minute.
Then we get the anthropology map.
There was a study, an anthropological study that was redone on the amount of big game hunting contributed to by women.
Turned out that the data had been fucked with an awful lot.
The reanalyzed thesis was women did just as much big game hunting as men and sometimes even more.
But there was loads of fuckery in the data.
One hunt was counted to say if you contributed to one hunt, that was one to one.
It didn't count the number of times that that happened.
So a man could have gone out on 50 hunts a year and the woman went on one, a woman went on one and they were counted as one and one.
It also didn't count what the women were hunting in terms of how big was the game, et cetera, et cetera.
And it made me think there was obviously an agenda to trying to put forward women as being able to do the thing that the men did just as well as the men, which implicitly derogates what the women can do that the men can't do.
So we want the women to be able to do what the men can do.
But if we laud what the women can do that the men can't do, that's somehow lesser.
And I was like, that's really fucking sexist.
That's really judgmental and superbly patronizing to women.
Okay.
Okay.
So I assume you found this study.
I know this study.
I complained about it at the time when it came out, right?
It was a plus one paper, The Myth of Man, the Hunter, Women's Contribution to the Hunt of Grant Across Ethnographic Context.
I can't remember if I talked to Manvier about it, but like, I'm pretty sure we did on the episode.
But like, this was when it came out roundly criticized as being unlikely.
Like it was a paper that came out, had a specific analysis of the data.
People pushed back on that.
And Chris Williamson is right insofar as saying this likely reflects a bias, right?
An agenda-driven interpretation of the diet.
Because when you look at all the researcher degrees of freedom that they exercise, it's clearly all towards like increasing the number, right, of the representation of women as hunters.
But the thing that has to be counted, Matt, is that the paper that he's referring to that is publishing the critique of it, it's a year later.
Female foragers sometimes hot, yet gender divisions of labor are real.
I comment on Anderson at all.
And this paper comes out a year later and is written by, I think, around 15 different anthropologists, right, who basically go through and say, you know, no, look, the evidence doesn't support this, right?
And I'd seen other critiques before that.
So the thing which we often mention and that someone like Chris should contend with here is, okay, so if that original paper shows that there's like a biased agenda amongst like a certain set of scholars, or if that's what you read, you know, that paper is as illustrating.
What does the fact that a corrective paper was published in a higher impact journal less than a year later by a bunch of authors who are anthropologists?
And like it's this kind of thing where they take a single study because it gets headlines.
Because, you know, this was, of course, because this study had a controversial claim, right?
A kind of counterintuitive claim.
It resulted in it being covered in all papers, BBC, The Guardian, Daily Meal, right-wing tabloids as well, right?
And that's why it's achieved attention.
But the way that they should understand literatures is a single paper pushing a controversial reinterpretation of a literature.
The fact that it gets published does not mean that therefore everybody in the field is now signed on to that.
And that's it, right?
It's the same thing that people do when nature publishes a paper about sex spectrums or whatever.
Right.
And you're like, that doesn't mean now everyone in science has signed on to this interpretation of a particular like opinion piece in nature.
That's right.
Not everyone at university has signed on to the feminist classiology thesis.
No.
Nobody cares.
Yeah, the other, okay, so putting that aside, you're quite right, of course.
There's this just this over-extrapolation and narrative building out of a single study, bad though it sounds in terms of its methodology and likely biased.
As you said, you know, this stuff is corrected and there are heaps of other studies which aren't anything like that and might be biased in a different direction.
So if you're going around like a little magpie picking out the shiny things that support the narrative or the outrage that you're looking to build, it's just a wrong way to go about it.
Yeah.
So the abstract for that paper, just for example, the one that was criticizing it said, you know, this is academic politeness, right?
But they also say Anderson et al., that's the original paper, have started a useful dialogue to ameliorate the potential misconception that women never hunt.
However, their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gender divisions of labor and foraging societies.
Furthermore, a myopic focus on hunting diminishes the value of contributions that take different forms and downplays the trade-offs foragers of both sexes routinely face.
We caution against ethnographic revisionism that projects westernized conceptions of labor and its value onto foraging societies.
That is a, I think, a nice way to present that debate with like a strong rebuttal.
But again, this is not something that is forbidden to be published, right?
This paper got published.
So what does that mean?
Is there an agenda to undermine it now, this claim?
Like you've got to apply the things consistently.
And I, yeah, I just don't see that happening that much.
So there we go.
I looked into this literature.
There's another one that was quite influential, which was about like interpreting the goods that were deposited in a burial site, right?
With like female remains and some of them having hunting implements and what this indicates, right?
But again, there's been revisions suggested about that paper, but it's all revisions within the broader context that the literature overall strongly supports that there is a gendered division, right?
Most cases it's like debating around the edges about the extent to which that might be overrepresented because of like biases in older scholarship.
Well, I would say this, Chris and this applies, I think, to Chris Williamson and those researchers who presumably had a kind of uh, something of an agenda to promote oh, you know, in prehistoric times there wasn't gender division of labor.
It's just like I don't think it matters, like the fact that there was a gendered division of labor in 20 000 Bc, in hunter-gatherer societies, I think has absolutely no bearing on whether or not there should be a gender division of labor today.
And and it certainly has no bearing on the on whether or not women can do things like hunt big game if they want to.
You know what I mean.
I'm pretty sure they could, and we don't hunt big game now anyway right, not not to eat, not as a job organ.
Does only idiots do so?
I mean so.
I mean just applying like, what is the connection to that and real life?
Because I just know that the narratives that spin off this, that you know men are aggressive kind of explorers who need to be out there leading, doing exciting, dangerous things, and women should stay at home because that's where our evolutionary biological imperatives are, and the proof of that is that there was a gender division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies.
It's all just a very long bow to draw, yeah.
Well, maybe this is this is true, but but maybe Chris can spell out the logic for you a little bit better if you were to say, well, being a mother uh, you know allo parenting coalition, building within a, a local group of of aunts and friends and grandmas, and stuff like that's not local spatialization and making sure that, whatever the the, the environment is kept tidy in a manner that men would struggle with, or the cooking, or the cleaning, or the carrying, or the raising.
But no no no no, you should be looking at big game hunting, and i'm seeing this.
Whatever men do is seen as desirable for women to do, and implicit in that is so much fucking sexism that is.
The call is coming from inside the house.
Like you do realize that you're like stereotypically cooking yourselves as women.
You're saying what we can do naturally is implicitly less valuable.
Yep yep, do you get the logic?
I'm familiar with it.
I mean, this is something that actually some feminists have talked about, right?
Yeah, women's work is undervalued and house uh, household tasks are not treated as like an economic job right, but they are in terms of time span and there's a bit of a.
So there's a nuance to the equality thing, which is that you don't necessarily assume that whatever it is that men were doing in the 1800s is the thing that is the best thing to be doing, that everyone should want to be doing.
If you don't want to do that, I think this applies equally to men and women, right?
Let's say you do want to stay at home and look after the kids, or you want to not focus on making money or being a player up in the civil service or in a big corporation, then that's fine.
But I I think that's what the modern consensus is.
You know that that if you're a man or you know male or female, it's okay.
So I again, I just think I don't know.
I just keep hearing Chris Williamson attributing a kind of a, a very, I don't know, cartoonish attitude to all women or all progressives are all of society.
Yeah, I mean what they're basically talking about.
There is, but in terms you'll, you'll be familiar with Matt, Go Ahead, Galadrial from the original Lord Of The Rings movies that we watched right with Vigo Mortison and all in that, versus Galadrial as represented in the Rings Of Power series, where she went from, you know, a very powerful elf queen woman to a, a kind of kick-ass warrior, taking down cave trolls and in armor,
basically doing the things that the, the men warriors, can do better than them and I.
The general argument around those things is like there's no the kind of girl boss archetype where, you know, in movies and stuff, they represent slight female people being able to like be very large men and that this is a common trope now.
And it's valorizing like, you know, kind of fighting and martial prowess or these kind of things saying it doesn't matter, you know, like what size you are or that kind of thing, which is obviously not true.
And I mean I do think there is aspects of that which are true, like I prefer the Galadrial as represented in the original Rings Of Power was terrible overall, but it's.
I guess it would be the same thing as the Orcs having, you know, developed like emotional lives and family lives that we must represent as well, and I think there is perfectly legitimate things to criticize her.
But again, that's like, to a certain extent, that is, trends within presentations in Hollywood or that kind of thing, rather than.
That reflects, you know, what everybody in society has agreed to overall.
Yeah, I would caution reading too much into it.
Like in the Two Towers Of The Lord Of The Rings, you had Legolis like riding a shield, like it was a skateboard going zing zing, zing with the arrows, right that's.
That's also not particularly realistic right, but that's very masculine, though.
Man in the in the 90s, when skateboarding was it's elf coded maybe I don't know.
But I mean, my point is is that you know movies and books and you know whatever art generally takes all kinds of liberties to make a good story right, and they want to make a good story, or a bad story, or a bad story, as it might be.
You know, you have.
You have men fighting dragons and winning when they clearly wouldn't right.
That's, that's the real thing.
That people don't talk about, the men fighting dragons, this parody, but yeah well, and it continues.
Matt Schultz told me this story of his wife.
She used to work at Google And they would go shopping and they would have their daughter with them.
IVF, like difficult journey in order to be able to get there.
And the ex-workmates from Google would say, oh, so where are you now?
What are you doing now?
And his wife would give this answer and Andrew said, fucking killed him.
He says, oh, I'm just a mum.
And he said it was the just that made him feel like, oh, she can't, it is a very difficult needle to thread to be able to take pride in being a homebuilder as a woman.
And in that, that is every there are some women out there who don't desire a family and it's the right decision and so on and so forth.
It seems like eight in ten childless women didn't intend to be childless.
This is Stephen Shaw's work.
Fucking four in five.
And there's groups of grieving.
These women grieve families they never had.
Yeah.
And so there are some.
There's one in five, whatever it is that I've made this decision and that was my choice.
So on and so forth.
I just again, I just, I'd caution against reading so much into it.
I can imagine saying, oh, I'm just a mum or something like that.
And they don't necessarily mean in the sense that they are.
Yeah, no, I just, I just, I just caution about this building very strong narratives out of whether it's a tiny little study that you remember or it's something that somebody said offhandedly or a manner of phrasing words.
I mean, that's the kind of fine reading that people, I think, rightly criticize the liberal arts kind of side of academia for doing, like reading too much into this sort of social criticism and so on.
But I think people like Jordan Peterson and Pegot with their symbology and mythology and finding narratives and meaning in Pinocchio and everything, and Chris Williamson too now, what they've discovered is it's actually really fun, right?
To go scanning through popular culture and all the little things that people say or that you might see in a movie or something and then reading a huge amount into it.
You know, there's a grain of truth there.
Yes, movies might have a tendency to be unrealistic about men and women, you know, fighting with swords and stuff like that.
They're unrealistic in so many different ways when they represent medieval fighting or World War II fighting, right?
It's generally very boring, uncomfortable, dull, and not in the least bit glamorous or fun, right?
So a whole bunch of liberties are taken to make things fun.
People will say things like, oh, you know, I'm just to this or I'm just to that.
It doesn't necessarily mean all of the stuff that you're projecting into it.
That's what I want to say.
Yeah.
Though, you know, there are things that are true about, you know, the value of being a muller or housewife being somewhat denigrated, right?
Or that people express regret later in life in large-scale studies whenever they look at, you know, people that are without children and whether they intended that and whether they have any negative feelings about it.
Like when I looked into that, Matt, there was a consistent result, you know, that makes that not too far out of the range of possibilities.
But like Chris Williamson's presentation here, that he just really cares about like women, you know, not getting their first shit from society when they're like operating in the role of a muller.
I know that this is a thing that the Manila Sphere and whatnot kind of bring up as a talking point that they're like, they're just wanting to, you know, ensure that women recognize, you know, that they are valued whenever they're performing these traditional roles.
And we shouldn't have a society which denigrates them.
And like, I'm on board with those, but I feel like the broader assortment of their material is not presenting that they have this deep-seated care for how women are perceived by society.
It isn't the number one concern.
No, not that it's the number one concern.
And that like the general thing with the concern is like, actually, women will be happier if they are staying at home with children and not operating in the in whatever professional fields they're operating in and stuff.
Like that is what it's almost always orientated towards emphasizing, right?
Yeah.
Like, so there's not, there's not that much time spent on presenting the counter argument, you know, presenting statistics that might counteract the view, right?
Like around people in societies, for example, where there is less choice around that and sentiments about women's empowerment in countries with like a very strong, you don't have to look very far to look at non-Western countries which have far more strict gender roles, far less equality between men and women.
And actually, in some of those societies too, you know, you do have the narratives, which is, oh, no, the women are not being oppressed by being, not being not allowed to drive or having to keep their faces covered and have to stay at home or can't go out except in the company of a man.
Actually, you know, they're happier like this, right?
This is our way of showing how much we cherish them and how much, you know, we want to protect them.
And so you can make a story about that.
But I think if you're a woman, you'd be right to be suspicious that maybe it's a self-serving kind of story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, now, so we'll get away from the evolutionary psychology at least temporarily.
And we're going to get into the discussion of masculinity, Matt.
Oh, God.
The problem is we're not allowed to celebrate it.
Okay.
I don't want to talk about gender issues or evolutionary psychology or any of this stuff anymore.
I know.
Especially not sex.
I will talk about sex.
But just imagine, Matt, that this is what Chris Williamson and Co do every single week, like week in and week out.
They can't get enough of it.
Like this is literal torture for me because, yeah, just the topic is not super stimulating.
It feels like too much like wallowing in grievance most of the time.
But this is literally, you know, bread and butter stuff over on those channels.
And God bless them.
I mean, at least someone, thank God someone's talking about it.
I guess someone's going to do it.
Yeah.
Someone's got to do it.
The problem is, is that we see it as a zero-sum game and that recommending that people, men lean into their masculinity or women lean into their femininity is somehow seen as taking from the non-binary community and is insulting.
So, and if you, especially on the, on the, on the, the male side, if you tell, if you say women are more nurturing, women should lean into the fact that my partner can hear my kids get up in the middle of the night and knows exactly what they're doing and that they're about to come into our room.
And I mean, I sleep through the whole thing.
My kid comes home from school and or from his soccer match and she says something went wrong.
He's not doing well.
It seems fine to me.
I mean, there's just an intuition.
But if you're to say that, it feels as if, well, are you saying women aren't as good in the boardroom?
It's like, no.
Meanwhile, being strong physically, being prone to taking risks, being more prone to action, being in some cases aggressive, those are wonderful attributes that have served our nation and our society really well.
And people born as men have an easier time leaning into those things.
But those things are positioned as violence and reckless.
Unless it's a woman.
Unless it's a woman.
She's a leader.
She's a baller.
She's a badass.
And the reality is you want, when Russians pour over the border in Ukraine or a house is on fire, you want some big dick energy.
And I think it's okay to celebrate certain masculine attributes and certain feminine attributes and realize that the most productive households in history, the most secure, loving, productive households in history bring a mix of very distinct masculine and feminine energy.
What do you think?
Well, I don't disagree that it's fine to celebrate masculine and feminine energy.
I think that's fine.
And I'm quite happy to also acknowledge that there are lots of good things about these stereotypically male traits.
The reason, by the way, some of them are vilified a little bit, right, is that, yes, there is a place for like hyper-aggressive, violent, risk-taking type men, like who will do anything to kind of dominate a situation, whatever.
And, you know, they're in the Marines, right?
Or maybe, maybe, arguably, some form of law enforcement.
But the fact is, is that those roles in a modern culture are actually much less needed than in our deep evolutionary past.
Yes, occasionally you do have a world war or something where you have to conscript hundreds of thousands of young people and they generally have a very hard time dealing with all of the horrible violence.
But you can argue, yes, look, it's needed then.
But in general, these things are kind of frowned upon because in normal everyday life, those traits tend to get expressed in ways that are deeply unhealthy and dangerous, right?
It gets expressed in terms of having bar fights, you know, outside a pub.
It gets expressed by being sexually aggressive and stuff like that towards women.
It gets expressed, the risk-taking gets expressed by much higher rates of car accidents and stuff like that among men in bullying and stuff like that in the workplace.
So there are reasons why some of those traits are not kind of celebrated and lauded universally, I think.
Yeah.
Although, again, I think it all comes down to what you're looking at because like there's plenty of action films with plenty of like muscly man.
True, true.
Beating people up and stuff.
Like I didn't have any issue finding when I was growing up like videos of tieboxers and MMA guys beating each other up.
But Chris, I think that's kind of the flip side of it, right?
The vast majority of people are not doing that in their day-to-day work and their day-to-day life, hopefully, right?
Like people like Mike Tyson, if everyone was like that in their day-to-day life, right?
It could be a problem.
So I think the movie, I think you're right about the movies and you're right about like worldwide wrestling and so on.
But actually, it's the flip side of the same thing.
Like there's a fantasy.
There is still the kind of delight in it, right?
There is still kind of the, like people like to fantasize and watch, you know, violence.
Violence.
Right.
Right.
So it, so it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a safe escape hatch for that kind of thing because there really isn't much of a place for it in day-to-day life.
I mean, there's sports and there's like, you know, whatever, computer games.
Yeah, I mean, again, these are, these are like sublimated, these are recreation, I mean, recreational activities and heavily sublimated, right?
Like they're not.
Yeah, yeah, but that, so that's kind of like, I, I think the thing with combat sports or any of those kind of things is like there is, uh, there are Mike Tyson figures, but there were also people like George Simpierre who were just like, you know, very polite and very like effective sports people.
So I don't think it's all like that that energy translates into but I mean yeah, but sports is not necessarily violence and risk-taking, right?
No, but I mean, you said when I say boxing or tie boxing, you point to Mike Tyson.
He's not representative, I think, of that's like a particularly violent rapist person.
Okay.
I mean, maybe that's a bad example.
My point is, is that the activity, right, of boxing, right?
Yeah.
Like I understand like people like that kind of thing, especially like to watch it because it's quite quite painful to actually participate.
But by watching, you could kind of participate as a vicariously.
Right.
No, no doubt, right?
We've got evolved predispositions that mean that we like that kind of thing.
But the whole reason those things exist as entertainment sports are because they don't exist in our day-to-day life.
Well, you know, one of the things that they're arguing, though, wouldn't that be in support of their position, which is, as you noted, those are things which people like to see and which men in general, you know, more aggression, more rough play, all that kind of stuff.
But if you're saying society in general offers less outlets for it, then that supports their position, doesn't it?
That like, well, that's a problem because people, it's not like people don't have those urges anymore.
I don't think I think it's a very good thing about modern society that actually you do not need to be boxing people, punching people in the face day to day, right?
I mean, that's, that's what the, that's what, that's what, that's what modernity is, really.
But their argument isn't that that's bad.
Their argument is that doesn't change the underlying aggressive urges and whatnot that are in people.
So like if you act like people don't have them, then or that they're negative.
I was responding to the point, which is that their contention would be it's so terrible that we don't celebrate the stereotypically male attributes, right?
Of violence and of status-seeking risk-taking.
And I'm just making the point that violent, status-seeking, risk-taking behavior in the modern world, the vast majority of the time is translated into dangerous, unhealthy, antisocial behavior.
That's just a fact.
Facts are facts.
It is a fact.
Don't make me get out of the statistics.
I'd have to then you'd fact check me.
But you know, a lot of the things that males tend to do, young males in particular, which is gambling, of course, which I know about, violent crime, sexual assault, dangerous driving, leading to death, a whole bunch of things, right?
But there are stereotypical, violent, status-seeking, risk-taking behaviors.
they're generally not good, right?
They're not perceived as good because they- Outside of particular arenas.
That's right.
And yes, you can find particular situations.
Like if you are a professional kickboxer or you are a Marine or a Navy SEAL, then sure.
Okay, great.
That's good.
You've got a pro-social outlet.
Or play rugby, rugby or soccer, any sport really that has a competitive team.
So there are outlets sublimated to various degrees for those things.
But my point is, is that our modern technocratic kind of society actually genuinely requires people to sit down at a desk, to pay attention, to actually, if somebody annoys you at a meeting, to not just punch them right.
You can't just punch them, right?
Self-control, in other words, right?
Cooperation, right?
All of these things.
And like that is the modern world.
And if we love the Kona and the barbarian stuff in real life, well, maybe it's because we don't want Kona and the barbarian at work.
Yeah.
Well, look, you know, we might be somewhat completing Scott and Chris's worldview because like, listen to this.
And by the way, that masculine energy can be brought by two women.
And that feminine energy can be brought by two men.
I tend to, my male friends tend to be actually quite feminine.
I'm drawn to men that take care of me.
I'm their asshole fraternity friend who says inappropriate things.
What do you think that says about you?
I don't know that I was, you know, born and raised in a fraternity environment.
I don't know what the fuck it says.
I watched I Dream a Genie for two hours a day when I was a kid.
That's literally my training.
And Charlie's Angels, you know.
Anyways, hello, Angels.
Genie, get in your bottle.
That's literally what I was raised on.
But a recognition that male and fascinating, masculine energy is a great combination doesn't take from the fact that there are some people who are non-binary.
And so Democrats, I think, in an effort to be sensitive, to be thoughtful, to help lift up people who need a lift, now it's just gone too far.
DEI on campus.
There's 200 people in the DEI department, University of Michigan, and 55% of the freshman class identifies as non-white.
I think there's good illustration that Scott is a liberal, not a progressive, right?
You can hear he doesn't like the identity politics type stuff.
And he's got issues.
He's a fraternity.
He was raised in a fraternity.
Look, I will hand it to him and to Chris Williamson in a sense, which is that they are correct, right?
In that in very progressive or leftist culture, I guess sexual dimorphism or whatever you want to call it that is controversial.
Yeah, it's not perceived as a good thing.
Or even true.
Or even true.
Well, that's right.
I mean, that's the main thing, that it is attributed to entirely cultural conditioning that leads to any kind of sex differences rather than any biological basis.
And I don't agree with that.
And I would agree with these two gentlemen on that score.
Yeah.
And similarly, the notion that like, you know, modern universities have a little bit too much of the managerial class and the like blowing with the wind in terms of like whatever the current progressive opinion is, that is the one that we should instantiate into university policy.
I think that that does happen.
I think it's more pronounced in the U.S. than in most places.
But yeah, but like the point that I liked there was, you know, Scott is acknowledging that he's, you know, from a particular time and a particular era.
And, you know, that has certain biases, but he's not arguing that, you know, you have to have a man and a woman in the house and that's going to make everything right.
That's a nice thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I think Galloway there is this, you know, he's, I think he's taking, he's taking care to differentiate what he's saying from the more bullet-headed paleo-manosphere type of thing, which is men should be real men and women should be real women.
End of story.
He's trying to segue to a slightly more subtle point, which is that there is feminine energy in his words, masculine energy.
Both could be good in different ways.
And I think, and he says in any kind of social situation, maybe people will naturally take one or the other.
And they don't necessarily have to be the man and the woman conforming to the things, which is all very liberal and very fine.
Yeah.
And just to put a pin on that.
Diversity has never been diversity of class.
And this is something that's being in the UK, I'm sure that you feel more closely.
100%.
We need affirmative action.
I'm a beneficiary of affirmative action.
It should be based on color, but that color's green.
The academic gap between black and white used to be double what it was between rich and poor.
Now it's flipped.
It's double between rich and poor as it is between non-white and white.
So if we really want to help society and help lift up people, Trevor Noah's kids aren't going to have any problem getting into college.
They're not going to have any problem.
There you go.
You know, that's the, as I say, that's the more liberal side of like approach to those topics, right?
It should be about income.
Yes, we can address race and gender and these kind of things as well, but we shouldn't make everything about that.
And if we focus on income, which most people agree that we should focus on, then we'll be able to lift the books which are disproportionately less well off.
That's Scott Galloway's position, right?
Yeah, you're pretty standard liberal fare.
It is pretty standard.
It's not controversial here in Australia, really, because these things are obviously confounded to a large degree.
Like to the extent when there are racial discrepancies, it's often because of a socioeconomic discrepancy that is strongly correlated with race, right?
So, you know, but there are obviously exceptions, like super rich people of a minority or very poor people of the majority.
And, you know, if the underlying mechanism is socioeconomic deprivation, then you address that.
And this is just kind of, I think, standard Australia policy.
And, you know, I kind of agree with that idea of, you know, it is actually more of the kind of, you know, what's the word, economic leftist point of view rather than the cultural leftist, which is actually thinking more about the economics of things more than identity.
I think there's some merit to that.
I mean, living here in the countryside in one of the poorer areas of Australia, I have seen an awful lot of, I guess, you know, various forms of marginalization.
And it's definitely got nothing to do with the ethnic identity of anybody.
It is absolutely this sort of divide between a poorer country town and class, basically.
And it gets manifested in so many different ways.
And they feel it.
You know what I mean?
So I do get a little bit irritated with my, I guess, more right-on colleagues who tend to be, you know, very much right on when it comes to gender and race and whatever the political thing of the moment is.
But they can actually be quite snobbish.
Like in many respects, they're incredibly middle class.
Like they take care to send their kids to a private school.
They take care to live in the most expensive suburb on the good street they can.
And they only mix with other people who are in their kind of professional class.
So it's like, well, you're clearly like, how are you different from a right-wing middle-class person?
I know you've got right-on opinions, but in terms of what you do, you act exactly the same as a right-wing thing.
So I don't really care.
Yeah.
So I think, yeah, I guess I'm sympathetic to the socioeconomic focus.
Yeah, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me on the fierce of it, but you'll hear like a slightly, well, whenever they're discussing the Democrats in America, you hear like the difference in a framing.
So this is Chris Williamson.
So on that point there, have liberals and progressives started to pay attention to the man problem or is it still just a cursory glance?
How much do they actually start?
Just started.
I went to the Democratic National Convention.
It was a parade of special interest groups.
The struggles of women, the struggles of non-whites, the struggle of the gay community, the struggle of immigrants.
The only group that wasn't mentioned is the group that on any metric has fallen further faster relative to any other group, and that is young men.
And if you go to the DNC website, and this has changed since I did the podcast with Michael Smirghanish, it used to be they listed 16 demographic groups under a section called Who We Serve.
This is who the Democratic Party is here for.
Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Black Americans, veterans, the disabled, seniors.
I added it up.
It was 74% of the population.
The only 26% they didn't name was young men.
And when you say you're advantaging, purposely advantaging 74% of the population, you're not advantaging 74% of the population.
You're discriminating against the 26%.
Well, they did have free vasectomies outside of the DNC.
Don't forget about that.
I don't remember that.
I missed that one.
The most behaviorally genetic sepu coup.
Maybe that's what happened.
So, I mean, for me there, one thing is that, you know, kind of anecdote that Scott has about, you know, the modern Democratic Party in America, that it focuses more on like various other interest groups and doesn't place a big emphasis on young men.
Okay, that sounds possible, right?
Like, because that's a common critique, right, around the Democratic Party is that it's somewhat alienating of that.
Though I think it's worth considering that in a lot of the groups that he's mentioning, like Native Americans or, you know, or black people or whatever, there's a lot of young men that fall into one of those identity categories as well.
But nonetheless, I think that point about their messaging often excluding that seems likely.
But the thing that I just noted, Matt, was so Scott Galloway is like, look, I saw this and they weren't focusing on this group, right?
And I think that's a problem.
And Chris Williamson's response is, yeah.
And did you see they were offering free vasectomies outside of like the guy?
This is something I did fact check to Chris, actually.
I did look that up.
So are they?
Are they indeed?
I did.
Yeah, it came back with like partially true.
There was like a van around the corner.
There was some event that was some tangentially connected.
Yeah, planned parents' thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there was a event where a organization that offers contraceptive and whatnot services was there.
Yeah.
Right.
And a very small number of vasectomies were performed.
yeah but i mean it's just the kind of i mean we're basically actually performed I don't think they were done on this one.
I don't know.
I can't forgot anything.
It was a couple of weeks ago that I did the fact check and I straight away forgot about it.
But I mean, yes, it was a thing that happened.
But I mean, it's just the, yeah, it's just.
Yeah.
It happened once.
Yeah.
Where it's like the way that Chris kind of presents it is, you know, well, this is what they want, right?
They want all men sterilized.
And you're like, no, it's a part.
They want to cut our dicks off, Chris.
They do.
Don't pretend they don't.
That's what they want to do.
I know.
So that's, that's, it's just a difference, rather significant difference, right?
In creaming.
I can't really comment on Scott Galloway's issue with the Democratic Party in the United States because I don't really know what their platforms and stuff are.
But I think it goes to your point, Chris, which is a lot of this is like very specific to the United States.
I mean, even though it's presented as like a universal stuff, evolutionary psychology, fundamental differences between men and women or whatever.
But actually, a lot of the stuff that they're railing against is often a very small segment of American society.
Progressivism.
Yeah.
And I went and had a look at the Labour Party platform to see if it had that same kind of intersectional bingo thing going on.
And, you know, by the way, the Australian Labour Party is far more left-wing than the US Democratic Party.
You have to scroll down a long way before you even get to any kind of thing that might even fall into that category.
Like the first few chapters, the first one's all about the economy and trade.
And the second one is about safe workplaces and full employment.
And the third one's about climate and the environment and energy security.
And then the fourth one's about health.
And then it's not until you get to chapter five, where it does talk about stuff that's like, you know, about identities, for want of a better word.
But, you know, it's all phrased as equality for First Nations people, gender equality and women's rights, equality for LGBTQ plus and so on.
Equality for people with a disability, a multicultural, multi-phased nation and so on.
So, you know, I guess for me, it's like, I signed on to all of that.
That's all great stuff.
You know, and I think it's framed in a way that Scott Galloway would be very happy with, right?
The Labour Party isn't saying we're just here for Indigenous people, for women, for LGBTQ plus and so on.
No, not at all.
Yeah.
They're there for everyone.
And of course, this is aspirational.
This is their platform as opposed to what they do.
Of course, their platform is going to sound good.
I'm not saying everyone has to vote Labour, but I think everyone can sign up to all of that stuff.
It's fine.
Well, the UK Labour website, just for example, if you click around, I can't find anything that's obvious on the website for the groups that we serve.
Instead, it's about their mission and Labour's five missions to rebuild Britain.
Here's what they are.
Kickstart economic growth.
Make Britain a clean energy superpower.
Take back our streets.
Break down barriers to opportunity.
Build an NHS fit for the future.
And the breakdown barriers to opportunity.
I was like, oh, maybe that is the one.
But what that is about is recruit 6,500 new expert key teachers and key subjects.
3,000 new primary school-based nurseries, free breakfast clubs in every primary school.
So, like, again, it's just that thing that it's presented as if all of left-wing culture wants to, like, neuter males and you're not allowed to be, like, a masculine man and be left-wing.
And you're just like...
And progressive policy is only about serving special interest groups of particular identity.
Minority groups in America.
Yeah.
Clearly, that's not the case in the UK and Australia, right?
That's not their platforms.
It's not the focus.
It is actually what I said was my preference, which is a focus on socioeconomic fundamentals.
I know.
That's not what the culture war focuses on.
So yes, agreed.
But, you know, so again, this thing, the way Scott approaches things throughout this just strikes me as like, you know, a left-wing person, but one that isn't on board with the, you know, the strongest forms of progressivism.
And you can hear in this little bit where he talks first about the rights answer to this issue and then goes on to what women really want.
I think it reflects both sides of Scott Galloway.
So listen to this.
Hello, Chris here.
Sansmat, just bumping in because I think that's a lot of talk that people have had to listen to about men's issues, men's problems, manly stuff, you know?
And it might be good here to just take a little pause, give people time to process what you've learned about masculinity, femininity, and citing of statistics and so on.
So we'll take a break there for part one.
Part two will be coming shortly.
Many more topics to cover, but you've got, you know, three hours of manly stuff there.