RICHARD REEVES: One of the things I've noticed is that people are quite quick to blame if young men are struggling, if they're not in the labor market. There's the eye roll and there's the, "Well, if they could just get off the sofa and stop smoking so much weed and playing video games all day, maybe they'd make something of themselves." It's interesting that that instinct to blame is really not as common for other groups as it is for young men. It is not that these young men just lack responsibility. They don't care anymore. They're just feckless, to use that great old word. There's this kind of general sense of a lot of young men feeling a bit caught in the a pinball machine, almost. Like being told you're too masculine on Tuesdays and that you're not masculine enough on Wednesdays. The best way I think to think about some of these men is lost. And so this sense of, "What's my place in the world, why am I needed, what's my role going to be going forward?" that's a very real question that many men and boys are genuinely struggling with. It's made a lot of people realize there are a lot of young men out there who are up for grabs, and that should send some alarm bells ringing. I'm Richard Reeves. I'm president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I'm also the author of the book "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why That Matters, and What To Do About It." It's certainly clear that the issues of boys and men haven't gone away in the last few years. If anything, they're getting even more attention, which is good when it's the right kind of attention. That doesn't mean that it isn't still a difficult conversation. I think that a conversation about the challenges of boys and men should be difficult. And so when we get into questions around differences in learning style or risk taking, risk of addiction, competitiveness, emotional vocabulary, et cetera, we shouldn't immediately assume that we are stereotyping every man and woman into that role. I get why people are worried about it because there are always going to be people on the other end of the distribution, but it does mean that we should respect and acknowledge where there are these differences on average between the two. As far as mental health is concerned, I'm really troubled by a lot of the trends we see for both men and women, boys and girls. I think it's true to say that a lot more attention is being paid particularly to the mental health of teen girls and young women than is often the case for teen boys and young men. And so the mental health crisis is playing out differently, and that's very often I think lost in the general debate. One of the things that I've discovered recently is the huge rise in deaths from drug poisoning among men, that has increased sixfold since 2001. We've lost an additional 400,000 men. That's the difference, the increase is 400,000. 400,000 men is exactly the same number that we lost in World War II. Drug poisoning deaths are up. It is already the case that men account for the majority of those deaths. So men account for 70% of drug poisoning deaths. They account for 80% of suicides in the US. And one of the most troubling things that we found in our work is that, since 2010, the rise in suicide has been almost entirely driven among young men. So among young men below the age of about 30, the increase in suicides has been almost a third. Whereas up until 2010, this was the period of Great Recession, huge economic problems, we saw a really big increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men. But since 2010, something's happened. The nature of the suicide crisis among men has shifted and we don't really know why. We see a lot of attention going to the issues of teen girls in particular, but less attention being paid to the huge rise in suicide rates, for example, among teen boys and young men. We see a huge decline in the share of male therapists and counselors. Only one in five psychologists, one in five social workers and lower numbers of counselors are men. And all of those numbers have more than halved just in the last few decades. And that matters because for many men, boys, depending on the nature of their issue, they may well find it easier to talk to a male therapist. And it's already difficult to get many men to come forward and get help for mental health problems. They are much less likely to do so than women. In 1971, men accounted for slightly more than half, 56% of people doing a psychology undergraduate degree. Now it's 20% and falling. In the space of a really short period of time, we've taken an area like psychology, which used to be pretty gender balanced, it was neither a male nor a female profession, and now it's becoming a female profession. And I'm gonna risk saying that the psychology profession cratering the share of men is as big a problem as the lack of women in, say, areas like tech or engineering, where we're working very hard and we have to make more progress. And maybe it's even more important, maybe that some of these professions like teaching, like mental health, maybe those are professions where representation matters even more, representation of all kinds. And so the alarm bells should be ringing very loudly when critical professions like teaching, psychology and social work are becoming gendered right in front of us. And we're not doing anything about that. So we should be redoubling our efforts to reach those men and make it easier for them to come through the door, easier for them to put their hands up and say that they're struggling. One of the most important things for anybody is to be connected and have purpose, to be, you know, doing something that they value and other people value with their lives. And what we've seen is a decline in the share of men in the labor force. The decline has been perhaps most worrying among young men. Now you might say, "Well, fewer men are in the workforce doing the kind of traditional male thing, which has been the breadwinner." But that's great because they're now raising the kids and maybe their partners or their wives or girlfriends are in the labor force and it's been a swap. But that's not what we see. We're not just talking about non-employment. We're talking about a break from society more generally. And we see that in all kinds of other areas too. So if you think about men without a college degree, for example, their wages are no higher today than they were in 1979. That's almost half a century of stagnant wages for most men. And men who are born into lower income families are worse off on most measures than men who are born just 15 years earlier into those families. For men at the top of the distribution, men who've got college degrees, who are in the labor market, you know, they're doing better. You continue to see their wages rising. And it doesn't mean that there aren't still challenges for those men, but the sharp edge of the issues facing boys and men is absolutely being felt by the men with the least economic power. And of course there's so much more to do for women at the top of the distribution. Now, there aren't enough women CEOs, there aren't enough women politicians. We still don't have enough female representation in those senior positions that you can very often just be looking up and seeing the lack of women. But if you just pause for a moment and look down, look at those who are in less fortunate economic circumstances than you, that's when you really see the struggles of men becoming most acute. There are tens of millions of working class men and women struggling to figure out this new labor market, this new economy, and the changes in the economy have been particularly brutal for working class men. And so it's really important to be able to hold both of these thoughts in our head, which is that of course it matters that we need to do more for women, close the gender pay gap, more representation of women in those senior positions. But I think it's a general point that it's been a problem for too many people that they focused almost exclusively on the kind of elite part of the problem, the apex of our society. And that has meant that there has been a really dangerous neglect of many of the problems of people who are not worrying about who's gonna be CEO. They're worried about who's gonna bring home enough money to feed the kids this week.

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- There's something else going on here too, which is the get-rich-quick thing. Online, there's a bit of a culture around like men need to get wealthy, they need to do it quickly. They don't wanna work for like corporates. They don't wanna climb their upper labor market. They don't wanna start in an entry-level job and work their way up, not when there are these sort of very shiny objects online, especially that could make you rich quickly. And of course there are examples online of men who've done that and who've managed to get a lot of wealth very quickly. They are the exception that proves the rule.

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- And I worry a lot actually that we have overdone the importance of entrepreneurship in recent debates. We've got entrepreneurship, we need more entrepreneurs. And that's how you get out of poverty if you're a young man. And that is almost certainly not true. And those algorithms and those online platforms are just very good at playing into that higher risk appetite among young men especially. And it is a little bit like a fish hook. It's a shiny object kind of in the water and you go, "Oh, oh, and that's gonna make me wealthy, that's gonna solve my problem." And you grab it and then, and then you are hooked. In states where you see sports betting online going legal, an increase in bankruptcies, reduction in credit score and general economic difficulties, especially for young men and especially for the lower income young men. Men are much more likely to become addicted to most things actually, but especially to things like online gambling. And there are all kinds of reasons for that about the dopamine system, especially among young men, et cetera and this kind of high that you get from the reward of kind of a bet paying off, et cetera. There's a reason why this is predominantly a problem among men, which is men are more vulnerable to that particular kind of risk, that particular kind of addiction. If we're not careful, these conversations can shut the conversation down with boys and young men rather than opening it up. Sometimes parents sort of react to discovering that their son, for example, is consuming video content from somebody like Andrew Tate, pretty well known misogynist influencer. It's almost like they're watching hardcore porn. You know, they're sort of, they slam the laptop with the same kind of moral fervor, and that's the wrong response. It's a natural response, it's the wrong response. Instead, you've gotta have curiosity. You've gotta figure out like, "Well, why are you interested in this?" Let's have the argument. Because one of the things that the most successful reactionary online figures say is nobody will want you to talk about watching my stuff or listening to my stuff. If you even mention to somebody that you are interested in this, watch how they react. You've just proved the point that the reactionary was making. And this is one of those moments where it's hard, but I'm speaking here as a parent as much as a policy wonk, is that you take some deep breaths, you try to be open-minded, and you try to become an ally and a partner to your son as they navigate this difficult online world and offline world. So what does non-toxic masculinity look like? Being not toxic is not a hugely aspirational goal for many of us. Like I didn't raise my sons and say, "Just think boys one day, you might not be poisonous." I honestly believe that the way to beat the online world is offline, is in real life, by having male teachers, male coaches, fathers, uncles, neighbors, et cetera, just being a living and breathing version of what it means to be a man. I continue to believe that in the long run, boys, young men will believe their eyes more than their ears. And so if there isn't enough of a sense of what does it mean to be a man in my community, in my home, in my school, et cetera, if there's a lack of real life men showing what it means to be a man rather than telling you how to be a man, then I think that creates a vacuum which then gets filled by online figures. Well, what should we do about it? You're starting to see people wanting to govern around this issue, wanting to make policy around this issue. And some of the things they're looking at are things like increasing the share of men in their mental health workforce, having more targeted outreach programs to do suicide prevention, very specifically targeted, are men who are at four times of risk of losing their life to suicide, especially young men, and a big push around getting more male teachers into our classrooms. There is something very important about boys and girls seeing education as something that both men and women value and do. Men actually make up the minority of teachers in basically every subject now, including career and technical education. It was 33% in the early 80s. It's now 23% and falling. There are many fewer men in teaching now than there are women in the stem professions. Also, I think that the presence of men in schools and in classrooms acts as a way to have some actual role models that are good alternative to the ones online perhaps, especially for boys who don't have a father figure in their lives or a good relationship with their fathers. One of the wonderful things about male teachers is that they're also coaches. So about a third of the men who are teaching K-12 are also coaching. So the school bell rings, they keep working, they keep doing coaching, and that's a great additional benefit we get from getting those men into teaching. I also think that coaches are mental health professionals in disguise. They're sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench or in a group, they're working with boys or with young men. And they're very often noticing that they're struggling, and they can, in a very, very safe way, in a non-threatening way, they can open up a conversation with them. And there's a reason I think why so many men will say that a coach played an hugely important part in their role, especially if they didn't have a strong relationship with their father. It's a trope at this point to say that coaches are father figures, but it's also a truth, that for many boys they absolutely do play that role. One of the things we know is that men communicate more comfortably with each other shoulder to shoulder as opposed to face to face. When men are face to face with each other, that's quite a threatening position. Now, if I tell you this, you won't be able to unsee it. Where every time you go to a social event, if you want to communicate with young men, go fishing, go for a drive, go for a hike. A lot of psychologists now will do the walk and talk therapy. And so there's something also about those activities, whatever the activity is, you're doing something together shoulder to shoulder, what you're actually doing then is communicating. I have a friend that volunteers in a school, and he goes into the school, and he says, "Which boy are you having the most trouble with?" They identify the boy and he just takes him for a walk. He doesn't sit down with him, he doesn't pull up a chair in the classroom. He certainly doesn't sit opposite him. He finds that they're much more likely to open up, say, "Oh, let's just take a walk and then talk." You could roll your eyes at that and just say, "Oh, what's wrong with men?" But we have to be really careful generally not to treat men like defective women, or vice versa. It's just that there are some of these differences between us that we don't really think about until it becomes an issue, and which should just be part of just a natural difference between us that doesn't in any way trap anybody. I've asked a lot of men and boys, "What do you like about being a boy or a man?" And it's really interesting how hard it is to get people to answer that question. What's happened is that a straightforward acknowledgement of the ways in which men can be good runs the risk of somehow being seen as a claim that they are therefore better than women. But let's be specific. It is true that men take more risks than women on average. Distributions overlap, but men have a higher risk appetite. Is that a good or a bad thing about men? And the answer is yes, it is a good and a bad thing about men. It is good when it leads men to take risks to save the lives of others. It is bad if it means that they blow all their money gambling, or they take crazy risks and end up drowning or dying or ending up taking drugs in a certain way. And so is it better to have a more stereotypically female approach to risk or male? And the answer is neither. We need both. We need a society that actually recognizes and honors both. I have this very vivid memory of walking with one of my sons into schools, and we're walking down this kinda long hallway, and one side of the hallway is the place where they had all the notice boards for the things they were doing for the girls in the school. So there were girls on the run, girls who code, there was a women's scholarship night coming up. And the opposite wall was, as it happened, completely empty. And it just had this real moment of trying to see this through his eyes and realizing that there is an implicit message here, which is we need to do all this stuff for girls. "The future is female," was one of the signs on that wall. And we don't need to do anything for boys because the world is made for boys. Men are gonna be fine. And I really think that's out of date. We've created a culture in our schools where we are so concerned rightly in many ways about the prospects of women and girls that we haven't allowed the data to catch up with that and say, "Yeah, but boys are now way behind girls in school." If you take something like GPA, which is a pretty good measure of overall high school achievement, if you take the top 10% of students, two thirds of them are girls. And if you take the bottom 10% of students, two thirds of them are boys. Pretty straight line relationship between them. In the average school district in the US, the girls are almost a grade level ahead in English. There's no gap in math. In the poorest school districts, the boys are behind in both English and math. And so we just have to be careful not to inadvertently send the message to boys that they're kind of just not as seen or they're not as heard or they're not as valued in the school setting. How do we maintain this really wonderful idea of the empowering and uplifting atmosphere that I think we've had around women and girls in schools, but do the same for boys and try and create this sense of it being uplifting for both. I didn't think about this at all when I was younger myself. Like, "The future is female" is probably something I would've gone along with, like as a good male feminist or whatever. But actually that's a terrible phrase. Like, the future can't be female or male. It has to be for everybody. We have got to update the way we talk about this. We have got to update the way we think about this and to do so in a way that in no way puts the brakes on girls and women, but which doesn't inadvertently, in our efforts to promote women and girls, send this message to boys and men either that they don't matter as much or that they don't need as much. And neither of those things are true.