00:00:00.000Hi, everyone. So we have a quick list of the episodes we're working on so that you can submit your questions.
00:00:05.840We have two different episodes about influencers, but they're going to be pretty different.
00:00:10.480One is about influencer culture in general, like what have you noticed? What's confusing you? How is the industry shifting?
00:00:19.280And then the other one is specifically about journo influencers.
00:00:22.720So this is the self-styled, independent creators delivering news on social media with or without traditional journalism training or any journalism training.
00:06:00.220And my response was, I am one of those people. I wouldn't want to read that book. But this is a million miles away from this book. This is a thriller. It's a mystery story. So I had to put the word adventure in there. And I thought unravelling felt about right. So you asked me before, what was the moment when I thought this is a book?
00:06:20.660I have to say, when they started telling me this story, my first thought was, this is the start of a book. I had no idea where it would go. And then I think two things happened. Firstly, when I first thought about the castle owner, what I was told from some of the other women who'd been to the castle, was that this was a man who tried to be Hugh Hefner during what must be the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner.
00:06:50.300you can't lord it over your princesses in your castle anymore those days are unless you're the
00:06:56.780creme de la creme of the manosphere you can't do that anymore right so i did think that was very
00:07:01.580funny actually uh that he was trying to do this i was looking for sort of absurd comedy in dark
00:07:08.700and serious places and that felt like it fitted the bill and i think so i thought okay i'll write
00:07:13.340a book about all these other things that men can't do while continuing to investigate the
00:07:17.380castle. And half the book is me investigating the castle and finding out increasingly crazy things.
00:07:23.320But I think the other moment was the fact that this happened to coincide with me just coming
00:07:27.840out of hospital. For the first time in my life, I'd spent a night in a hospital. I'd had a foot
00:07:34.320of my colon removed due to diverticulitis. And so I was feeling a little cut adrift myself.
00:07:42.400life was passing me by there's this moment when i was in the hospital when i i overheard
00:07:50.220a nurse say to the man in the room next to me this old man what did you used to do back when
00:07:58.500you used to work right and the man yelled out irrelevant and i thought i don't want to be that
00:08:06.760man. Work is the most relevant thing about me, purpose and work. And so all of those things
00:08:14.120coalesced. And I thought, here's this guy in this castle who's desperately trying to find purpose in
00:08:19.440his life by having this Hugh Hefner-style fantasy bubble. He thinks life's passing him by, and he's
00:08:25.760trying to have purpose. I think my life's passing me by, and I'm trying to have purpose. And that's
00:08:31.100why I want to investigate this guy. So these two men who have a dysfunctional relationship with
00:08:35.480purpose are suddenly colliding and that felt like the start of the book and it takes you on all
00:08:41.360sorts of side quests like you know some of those side quests are to talk with some names in like
00:08:47.360masculinity research uh richard reeves like someone whose work i've read a lot of and sometimes agree
00:08:53.140with and sometimes i'm like oh poor men but also points out the fact that like we are in this like
00:08:59.240fundamental point, things are shifting for men. And the way that they are reacting to the way that
00:09:05.660things are shifting for a patriarchal power, sometimes it's like retrenchment and trying
00:09:11.760to consolidate that power. And sometimes it's unraveling, as you point out.
00:09:16.160Yes, absolutely. Some of them, Richard Reeves said to me, everybody focuses on the men who
00:09:21.180are lashing out, but I'm much more interested in the men who are sort of withdrawing from society,
00:09:25.420bowing out. That's a much bigger problem. So some are responding by bowing out,
00:09:31.160folding in on themselves. Some are lashing out into disinhibited behavior. And some are creating
00:09:36.880these bizarre fantasy worlds for themselves, like my castle owner. And so I thought that was very
00:09:42.580interesting. And by the way, I feel the same way as you. I felt like this isn't a book that I would
00:09:48.720want to read. But that was what motivated me to write the book, because I thought, this is really
00:09:53.740interesting many times over the years many many times throughout my entire career i've told stories
00:09:59.500about how things change up there at the top of society and it ripples down and impacts the inner
00:10:08.040lives of those of us walking around down here right so and then it was you know it was it was
00:10:13.160extremists and conspiracy theorists were the people who were walking around and then and so
00:10:17.120you'd be publicly shamed it's these private individuals getting torn apart for some uh for
00:10:22.280a minor transgression. And so that's something that's always interested me. And I thought
00:10:26.300the same thing you thought, which is that, look, I wouldn't want to read a book about this,
00:10:31.220but this is a really interesting subject. So surely I'm the person to write this book in
00:10:35.840the way that I write books, which basically brings this stuff alive in a more page-turnery,
00:10:41.880propulsive, beach-read type way that other people can do it. So basically, the pitfalls
00:11:02.180One of the things I love the most about it, this is weird, but it has like a magnet snap-on thing.
00:11:09.560Wait, hold on. I have mine right here. Listen.
00:11:13.880The lid snaps on. It's so tactilely pleasing.
00:11:18.500in a way. And the lid is not going to fall off in your bag and you're not going to get
00:11:22.020foundation smeared all over everything. My nightmare. And so I'm so excited about this.
00:11:27.180It's going to have a regular spot in my travel bag. It's so easy to put on. It's not cakey.
00:11:32.140I don't feel like I have to put on a billion lotions in order for it to look like it's
00:11:37.940smooth on my skin. It's just it's the perfect texture. And, you know, I did the quiz online
00:11:42.480to match with my skin tone and it actually worked really well. They have so many skin tones.
00:11:47.100The other thing that I like about it is it has all kinds, I can't pronounce any of the words, but all kinds of nourishing ingredients. So it's actually skin care along with makeup.
00:11:58.940Which is very different from a lot of the makeups that I've used in the past that often feel like you are counteracting every piece of like, I don't know, skin care that you've done before. You're like, let me cleanse my skin and then make it filthy.
00:16:11.740I think there is some newness occurring. So because I am so work obsessed and all of my
00:16:20.820self-esteem is wrapped up in having purpose, and my purpose is about telling stories well,
00:16:27.360that's one of the kind of comic themes of the book. This sort of sense of purposelessness that
00:16:33.900comes from the collapse of structures and institutions and all of these people
00:16:41.540segueing into becoming content creators. And by the way, I'm focusing on men in this book,
00:16:47.060but so much of this applies to women too. I think that's new. I heard this statistic the
00:16:52.800other day that 39% of Americans now identify as content creators. There was this really funny
00:17:01.180moment actually i went to the cage fight at the white house last month i've done it for gq but
00:17:07.040there was this really funny moment when i got access to the south lawn i got to watch the cage
00:17:12.120fight at sort of blood spatter distance uh but most people didn't so for all the journalists
00:17:18.480who weren't allowed access they got to see the cage a couple of days earlier so i went along
00:17:23.040for the ride i thought i'll hang out with the with the shutouts for a minute and so there's
00:17:28.000like 100 journalists standing on the steps of the Eisenhower building. And this UFC guy comes over
00:17:33.080and sort of yells, okay, content creators and videographers to the left, print journalists to
00:17:38.760the right. There was a vast exodus to the left, like 98% of the people there were content creators.
00:17:46.460The print line was like me, the Toronto star and business insider.
00:17:53.660Such a redundant dinosaur. So that's the kind of thing that's new, right?
00:17:57.640everybody's now being encouraged as the structures collapse everybody's being encouraged to be
00:18:02.600institutions of one personal brands content creators and i was very interested in what
00:18:08.020that was doing to people psychologically maybe another thing that's new i mean that really
00:18:14.980appeals to me because of my obsession with work what other people have told me that they feel is
00:18:19.180new is that men feel kind of tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies as to what being a
00:18:25.420actually means. Be more vulnerable. Men's health influencers are saying, this is how to reattach
00:18:32.800yourself to a society that's growing more, quote unquote, feminized. Be more vulnerable. Rip off
00:18:38.040your manly mask and allow your vulnerabilities. And then all of these men, and Brene Brown herself,
00:18:43.580will report that when men do try that out on dates, be more vulnerable, women recoil in disgust
00:18:52.560and horror. So I thought that was, again, interesting and funny, this sort of conflicting
00:18:56.860ideologies about what people... That appeals to me less personally, because I don't really
00:19:02.080care about masculinity, but I think that does impact some men. So I thought that would be
00:19:06.160another interesting thing to explore. Yeah. And, you know, you engage in the
00:19:09.680research around deaths of despair and like how people are reacting to... I like that you use
00:19:14.640purposelessness, because I think that's different than like, oh, the jobs that we did are gone.
00:19:21.340And like that sort of like nostalgia, right? It gets to a more fundamental thing that I do think is very human, which is this feeling of rootedness, of groundedness. I also in my own work, I've seen so much in terms of like the structures that used to give men community, whether that was religious organizations or civic organizations.
00:19:41.280So, you know, stuff like Rotary or the Elks, like those things have loosened so much.
00:19:48.340And men oftentimes didn't develop the skills to make the connections outside of those structures.
00:19:55.020And so there's this isolation that happens.
00:19:58.140And then you also have all of the tech stuff that not only encourages us to become content creators,
00:20:03.840but a certain type of, like, chasing the lowest common denominator of content creation,
00:20:10.440which might not actually be in line with your actual personal beliefs.
00:20:14.620Yes. Everything you just said is entirely true.
00:20:16.960For some reason, men aren't as good at, you know, my wife's off with some friends in Massachusetts with the puppy right now.
00:20:30.920She's good at, you know, I think women, I don't quite know why this is, but I think women are
00:20:35.920better at forming communities than men. Men are more prone to isolating. And maybe that's why,
00:20:41.820you know, many of the things in this book, I think, appeal equally to men and women. But
00:20:45.740the idea of like bowing out of society, something clicking, that's, I think, possibly more a male
00:20:53.840trait. And yeah, and then you've got these tech gurus and these AI people who are trying to fill
00:20:59.840the gap with illusionary, you know, ChatGPT will trawl the internet looking for purposeless people
00:21:07.960and telling them, no, no, no, come to us. You are purposeless. You're the greatest mathematician
00:21:12.160on the planet. You have an intellect bigger than Einstein's. You've just come up with the best
00:21:16.360reality TV show in history. And those are the actual examples of people I've spoken to.
00:21:22.720So yeah, so AI companies are offering this like illusory solution. Platforms like YouTube are offering a solution that's illusory to most people. YouTube has kind of gained the reputation of being this wide open country where hitherto previously left behind man can thrive through grit and perseverance as a content creator.
00:21:48.860But then what happens is, as my book shows in this especially extraordinary story about this guy, Greg Chisholm, is that when you cede your will to the algorithm and to what you think the viewers want, it can take you to some very bizarre and terrible places.
00:22:04.900Yes, which does feel somewhat new to me. You referenced my partner, Charlie. So his work shows up a couple of times in the book, which is interesting to me because I was with him reporting those stories. And you two have been acquaintances for a long time. And I remember him reporting this one about this YouTuber, Greg.
00:22:26.840He was like, oh, my God, there's this fucked up story of like how YouTube is not regulating like these weird videos of like adult men acting like babies going after little kids.0.91
00:22:42.480Right. And I was like, what the fuck?1.00
00:22:54.920yes the lawn care influencer so can you walk through like his pathway to get to this moment
00:23:02.200of like yeah of ridiculousness i mean this is what a story this is i could never do it full
00:23:08.740justice in this conversation because because i i give about 8 000 words to this story and every
00:23:14.040detail is is important so you know forgive me for doing a more uh truncated version but yeah
00:23:20.360Greg is exactly the kind of man who's most likely, this isn't a classy way to introduce him, but he's exactly the kind of man most likely to die a death of despair.
00:23:31.620He grew up in a rust-mount town, Granite City, Illinois, destined to be in a factory, but the factory's all closed down.
00:23:41.040So he's let down by that kind of institution because the factory's all moved to Mexico.
00:23:45.640So then he's let down by another institution, the healthcare industry, because at the age of 18,
00:23:51.480he has a terrible heart condition, collapses unconscious, has multiple open heart surgeries,
00:23:58.140ends up owing the health insurance companies $200,000. So a kid with no prospects, owing
00:24:04.440$200,000. Then he gets married, and then they split up, and she leaves him a single father
00:24:11.680of two children under the age of two. Like this could not be worse, all of those things piling on
00:24:18.000top of each other. So then he gives YouTube a try. He sees a YouTuber who's saying,
00:24:25.140you've got a story, tell me your story. So his story is that he has overlapping teeth. He could
00:24:30.240never afford to get his teeth fixed when he was a kid. So he does his adult braces journey.
00:24:34.680and that does well for him then he moves into lawn care influencing and he becomes
00:24:41.200huge in the lawn care influencing world the lawn care goat yes he'll do these videos where he jumps
00:24:49.560out of his car and like a good samaritan lawn care man who will like fix somebody's lawn and
00:24:55.360then vanish away again like the zorro of lawn care chores uh and then he and he does uh lawn
00:25:02.020care ASMR. He'll mow up and down. He's getting 100,000 views a week. But then, through various
00:25:09.620circumstances, he realises that his children are becoming very popular on YouTube. He does an
00:25:16.540unboxing video on his children, and he gets 10 million views. His kids opening up a Barbie
00:25:24.720cruise ship and playing in the box gets 10 million views. So now he's doing children's stuff
00:25:32.300and it gets worse and worse and worse, not through any bad heart on his part. I think Greg is a really
00:25:40.460good person, but he starts to listen too much to the algorithms, too much to what his viewers seem
00:25:46.140to want. And by the end of it, to cut a long story short, family services are called, the FBI surrounds
00:25:52.720his home. He's being accused all over the internet of being, at worst, a pedophile. At best,
00:25:59.860somebody's just making some extremely poor choices. And his life completely unravels in
00:26:05.640the most extraordinary way. His trajectory is incredible. Now, Charlie, your partner came at
00:26:10.900this story at the end when you're seeing him just as a baby crawling around on the floor with his
00:26:15.820two children just as babies. No wonder you're going to think, what the fuck? But for this1.00
00:26:21.940story's kind of like the frog in slowly boiling water like if you're with him from the beginning
00:26:26.940each one of his choices makes sense yes so that's why i love the story so much yeah yes it makes
00:26:33.980sense and also like the detail that youtube university or whatever they call it like they
00:26:39.520they were like you're really popular let's give you some tips like here's what we think you should
00:26:44.460do like the it's not just the algorithm that was encouraging him it was the actual institution of
00:26:49.820youtube that was saying like follow this wormhole essentially absolutely yeah and that's actually
00:26:56.720the part of the story i didn't quite realize until now until i'm speaking about the book
00:27:01.280how extraordinary that detail is for people um that yet as soon as he got one video that had
00:27:08.00010 million views youtube contact him they they assign him a teacher to teach him how to continue
00:27:13.800to be successful on YouTube. He has his own bespoke advisor. And eventually, they hung him
00:27:21.080out to dry for the very videos that they were encouraging him to make. It's funny, you know,
00:27:28.740once the shit hits the fan, once people actually discover the story and the shit hits the fan,1.00
00:27:33.640they just hang him out to dry. It makes me smile ruefully that YouTube presented itself as a1.00
00:27:40.280hierarchy-free utopia, where there's no gatekeepers. But as soon as trouble starts,
00:27:46.620a hierarchy suddenly magically manifests and kicks it out.
00:27:51.100We should also note here that this is not the first time that there has been a
00:27:54.940quote-unquote crisis of masculinity or unraveling men. And I think a lot of it happens when there
00:28:01.020are structures under threat. And this goes back to the part of the question that says there are
00:28:06.520Just people who are not, what did she say, male, pale and stale, who are, you know, taking power, wielding power, all of that.
00:28:16.080And can you just tell, like, I think of the 1920s as a really interesting time for masculinity in America because with what's happening with movie stars and with masculinity on screen, this is just in my own research.
00:28:31.220Also, post-World War II, 60s and 70s, what is it? Can you have a beard in public? Just those
00:28:40.380sorts of questions. What do you think of? Yeah, well, actually, one thing I discovered,
00:28:46.980so my castle owner, I wanted to tell the story of deindustrialization and how to tell that story,
00:28:52.360but it turns out that my castle owner, Chris Mark, his money came from the fact that his
00:28:57.380great-grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon. It's so perfect.
00:29:03.060I know, right? As I say in the book there, the Mark dynasty has gone from, just like America,0.99
00:29:10.340the Mark family has gone from creating about the most tangible product imaginable,
00:29:14.860steel, to the least tangible products imaginable, a reality show that's very unlikely to get picked
00:29:21.000up by Netflix. So that's the trajectory of both this great country and also the Mark family.
00:29:32.480But it turns out that Chris Mark's great-grandfather had built a utopian theme
00:29:37.820town for his steelworkers to live in. And now it's a completely crumbling town where the only
00:29:46.620people left, or most, many of the only people left are recluses and hoarders, and it's just0.89
00:29:51.580this broken place. So I do a chapter where I tell the story of Marktown, which both teaches me more0.99
00:29:57.560about the castle owner, but also about what's happening to men when the structures collapse.
00:30:03.900Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that Marktown was based on these English villages,
00:30:10.300these utopian English towns. One was called Letchworth Garden City, one was called Welling
00:30:15.260Garden City. And they came up because of a whole different crisis of masculinity at the turn of
00:30:21.640the century, like 1900 in Great Britain. It wasn't that men were too violent. It was that men weren't
00:30:28.260violent enough because Britain was fighting the Boer War in South Africa and the British soldiers
00:30:34.600were getting trunced. The men in Britain at the time were just incredibly unhealthy. They didn't
00:30:40.880have any teeth. They had varicose veins and little tooth decay and so on. And so that was
00:30:48.580a crisis of masculinity that created all of these utopian theme towns was that men are unhealthy and
00:30:56.020just falling apart. So there's been a mutation. Crisis of masculinity has mutated in many different
00:31:02.340ways over the years. That's such a great way of putting it. And I love too that it's useful
00:31:07.780journalistically to to tie the story together but it's also just useful like when we're thinking
00:31:12.720about how society ideologies all these things work is that nothing is isolated this is all
00:31:19.720working both like the vertical way like through time and then also like contextually what's
00:31:25.540happening in society at the moment um we have a question now from adib which also i think is
00:31:30.940going to help us with some language uh here we go 10 years ago it seemed like toxic masculinity
00:31:36.660was the phrase we used to describe the problems associated with the performance of masculinity,
00:31:42.140but that fell out of favor to not stigmatize being a man.
00:31:45.560Then came terms like red-pilled and manosphere.
00:31:48.240Are these terms necessary to describe the problem, or are there better alternatives?
00:31:53.380What do you think about those words, red-pilled and manosphere?
00:31:57.320Well, I, okay, so I have much to say about that question.0.98
00:32:01.000firstly um i hate the word manosphere and red pills is just like a stupid i don't know i don't
00:32:07.700particularly like that either uh my very first thought whenever i set off on a big project i0.91
00:32:14.340always think what's the worst version of this project because then you know which pitfalls to
00:32:19.320to uh avoid and for me the two things i wanted to avoid more than anything else in this book
00:38:29.240the like facial lotion it's the thing that i always recommend to people who are like ah i don't
00:38:35.040know where to start with skincare an everyday facial lotion to give your your face just like
00:38:40.680much more moisture than it needs that's the key at least at my age i'm like more lotion more and
00:38:46.840then i also use the under eye cream i love it it just gives you like a little bit of like
00:38:52.320brightening. And then I am obsessed with the tinted moisturizer. That's also a sunscreen.
00:38:59.400The tinted moisturizer sunscreen. That is the last thing on my routine. It never looks cakey.
00:39:05.260It's not too shiny. I wear it every single day. I put it all over my face and then down into my
00:39:11.460neck area because you're also supposed to put your skincare on your neck. Also,
00:39:16.440do you know that you're supposed to put it on your hands? There is an OS1 body moisturizer.
00:39:21.000So if you are noticing a loss of elasticity in the backs of your hands, which I sure am, and I've got the sun damage, so yeah, I've been wanting to try the body moisturizer.
00:39:34.280One Skin, send us this product. We love it. I give it to so many different people in my life. I recommend it all over Culture Study. We actually use these products every day.
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00:40:06.180okay we're going to talk about fatherhood now and i i saw this you know obviously in the fact
00:40:16.680that like it starts with you responding to a text from your son but there are other ways that like
00:40:21.380performing fatherhood and the right way to perform fatherhood is really interwoven in the text so i'm
00:40:27.260curious about your thoughts on this one it comes from madeline sad dads pretty much 100 of the
00:40:33.320dads I know, I'm 44, are sad. I really don't think it is that they aren't getting the masculine
00:40:40.180family role that they expected. They embrace the idea of partnership and parenting and household
00:40:45.960labor. What is causing this rash of sadness? Or are they just as sad as sad moms, but we were
00:40:53.880socialized to have more ways of processing our emotions and feeding our emotional needs, i.e.
00:41:03.660i see a fork between sad dads and then like hyper optimized dads who are like training for
00:41:12.160an iron man you know what i mean like they either they have to throw themselves into something and
00:41:16.380maybe it's just midlife crisis right so it's a sad dad like someone good like i was a dad
00:41:22.180I remain a dad, I guess. So what does that dad actually mean? Does it mean like, you know,
00:41:30.440you just see these guys and they're with their kids, but they're not having a good time?
00:41:36.800Okay. I mean, look, I've been to Six Flags with my son, so I've been that sad dad.
00:41:46.460I think I think it's also referring to as someone who's 45. I think that it is referring to someone who is having somewhat of like the traditional midlife crisis in so much as they're like, oh, wait, I got the things that I thought I wanted and I'm still kind of unhappy or unactualized or I'm stuck.
00:42:06.020Like, I'm moderately successful in my career, but it doesn't feel like much.
00:42:11.840Like, this to me seems very like man in the gray flannel suit.
00:42:17.680And do you think that's more male than female?
00:42:20.960And in fact, before you answer that, let me just caveat it with a moment.
00:42:24.160And then I want to get back to talking about my own parenting skills.
00:42:27.960I want to finish with that, with this question.
00:42:31.180But my, so Greg Chisholm, my bad baby guy, there's a moment in his story where everything has gone completely wrong.
00:42:42.420The FBI have turned up to investigate him.
00:42:45.460And he's become so, you know, miserable that he, he's a single father.
00:42:52.320He'll wake up, he'll drive his kids to school, he'll go home, fall asleep, sleep all day, wake up, pick his kids up and bring them home.
00:43:00.460And that's such a kind of tragic image. But my publicist Anna in London brought that up to me and said, so the only time he went out was when he was doing his parenting duties. Maybe this is why women don't fall into this quite as much is because they can't.
00:43:24.880they can't yeah what i see with women is like oh must be nice to have a midlife crisis like1.00
00:43:31.220must be nice to have that luxury of being able to basically like let take your foot off the gas1.00
00:43:38.040and i think that's some of the like frustration with the unravelingness or like the statistic
00:43:43.620that's in your book that like the percentage of men who are just unemployed who just decided to
00:43:50.740have dropped out of the workforce, essentially.
00:43:53.860It's actually gone up since I put the figure in the book.
00:43:57.420I put the figure, so the figure I put is 6.7 million American men
00:44:03.060who aren't only unemployed, they aren't even looking for jobs.
00:44:17.460Well, and you look at the job creation numbers for the last two years,
00:44:20.520And there are jobs being created. They're just in so-called feminized positions, right? So things like in health care, in nursing, like in child care. So these jobs exist. It's just that men, like they're just not interested in them for whatever reason, right? Like they just see this as something that is not an option for them to move forward. But then I also wonder, how are they surviving if these men don't have jobs?0.82
00:44:44.600I asked labor economists that question, how are they surviving?
00:45:11.480I just had this kind of memory from when my son was four. So my father was like the typical father
00:45:17.240of the 1970s and 80s, where he was like a little enchanting at the bridge club, a little enchanting
00:45:24.340at the golf club, and then slightly enchanting, but not that enchanting at home. Basically,
00:45:31.840Mondays and Thursdays, he played bridge. I think he'd watch TV, Tuesdays, Wednesdays,
00:45:37.400Fridays and on Saturday he played golf. So I barely saw him. But I, as a parent, decided I'm
00:45:46.480going to do better. I'm going to focus the entirety of my enchantment on my son, on Joel.
00:45:53.500And that didn't go well. I wrote a long time ago, I wrote this. There was a moment when I decided
00:46:01.280to dress up as santa to enchant him so i come into the room you know he's 17 no kidding he's like four
00:46:09.480i come into the room and i go ho ho ho and he says santa stay with me forever never leave me
00:46:17.980santa santa promise me you'll never leave me so i said i'll never leave you i'm going to stay with
00:46:23.620you forever doing a santa voice forever and ever and ever and then like cut to like three hours
00:46:29.260later and i'm like i'm getting hives because the beard's so itchy and i'm like you know i think i
00:46:36.460need to take the beard off i'm still like doing a santa voice he's going no santa no and then
00:46:41.400finally i'm like i've done a joe i've got to stop now and i burst into tears like so that's an
00:46:48.060example of me trying to be too good at that and then that that totally falls apart no it also
00:46:55.320Like in a roundabout way, it makes me think of this question just in terms of like, OK, so the women maybe can't show that they're suffering as much or that they're sad as much.
00:47:05.120But if everyone's sad, like, is it that we're sad under our current way of organizing life, especially in the U.S.?
00:47:29.640He came up with this phrase called anime, which is that in times of abrupt societal change, even if it's positive, interestingly, even if it's a positive change, people go crazy.
00:52:30.300And it's a strange time to be a man, too.
00:52:32.720Yeah. You know, I'm focusing on men in this book, but I honestly feel that almost everything in this book applies to women as much as it does to men.
00:52:41.900I thought because of, I guess, men and their sort of adherence to structure and the old institutions, it felt right to think of it in terms of men. But honestly, this book could be just as much about women.
00:52:53.980Can you talk briefly about the guy who became the actor, like the doofy husband, the doofy husband role? And that to me, like, it's just, it's kind of a little side quest, but it becomes like representative in some ways of like the way that men have seen themselves, like their self-representation has changed even.
00:53:18.580Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I did think this was very funny. I don't need to tell you, you turn on the TV these days, turn on the ads, and it's an orgy of male buffoonery.
00:53:32.180men falling off lawnmowers, driving off cliffs, leaving their babies on restaurant conveyor
00:53:39.320belts, sobbing because they're not allowed Doritos before dinner. And the women, of course,0.59
00:53:48.680in these ads, it's just as bad for the women because, you know, the men get to be these idiot1.00
00:53:52.220doofuses, but all of the women get to do is slap their foreheads and roll their eyes. They're like1.00
00:53:57.280straight men. So it's bad for everyone. And of course, in the past, women were the idiots and
00:54:02.160ads and now it's men. If you look in the 40s, it's like, don't worry, darling, you didn't burn1.00
00:54:08.220the beer. But now that's become passé and now men are the idiots in the ads. So yes, I wanted1.00
00:54:13.360to interview a man who plays doofuses in ads. So I met this man called Ed, who's a doofus in
00:54:19.920several ads. And he told me he did an ad for Shoal, the insoles, where he's walking down the street0.93
00:54:26.160and he puts on a pair of comfortable insoles and starts galloping like a horse down the street.
00:54:31.800And he had to look pretty do-for-see for that. So I said to him, like, 50 years ago, you had the
00:54:36.780Marlboro Man being stoical and masculine on a horse, and now you have to be the horse?
00:54:48.160Well, and this is where we get to the point where, and we got a lot of questions about this,
00:54:52.160and I just wanted to, like, bring it up instead of doing a specific question, where it's like,
00:54:55.980oh so men are just like now understanding the way that women have been treated for a really long
00:55:01.700time and this is how like the whole looks maxine supplement like guys have to look a certain way
00:55:08.440but also look like oh look there's two ideologies conflicting and it's really hard to parse which
00:55:13.000one you should be i'm like welcome to femininity right um do you think about that like how do you0.93
00:55:18.920how do you put your head around that yeah well actually uh dolly alderton who's a great feminist1.00
00:55:24.820author, she sent me a Zadie Smith clip. A lot of times, I don't know Zadie Smith, I've met her1.00
00:55:32.520once, I had dinner with her once, like 20 years ago. But very, very often, I think my thoughts
00:55:40.560and her thoughts seem quite aligned. She says things where I think that's exactly what I was
00:55:45.040thinking. That included the clip that Dolly Alderson sent me, where she said, I think it's
00:55:50.920quite a famous clip. She's on stage somewhere, and she said that her husband, who's white,
00:55:57.160was complaining to her, suddenly I'm a white man. I've never been a white man, but suddenly I'm a
00:56:03.960white man. And Zadie Smith went, see? And the audience applauds, but then Zadie Smith shushes
00:56:12.160them and says, no, no, no, I think it's bad. I just thought that was a very clever, very wise
00:56:19.460and thoughtful way of putting it right like instead of because this is like a lot of what's
00:56:24.940called whiteness studies is trying to show the ways in which like whiteness is erased as a race
00:56:31.000and people never like it's just the norm right and every other race is race and whiteness is just
00:56:35.800just is but wouldn't it be nice actually instead of being like oh well white people need to pay
00:56:41.020attention to their race all the time like everyone should be paying attention to their race all the
00:56:44.880time. Wouldn't it also be nice if we didn't have systemic racism that made it so that everyone had
00:56:50.060to pay attention to their race all the time? Yes, absolutely. 100%. That's obviously the
00:56:55.800point that Zadie Smith was making as well. But I can't lie. I felt the same way. I could have
00:57:03.820been Zadie Smith's husband saying, suddenly I'm a white man. Like around 2017, 2018. I had those
00:57:11.020thoughts, no question. And it was irritating, but it was also a defensive posture of my part.
00:57:19.260It's taken me a few years to seeing the world from Zadie Smith's husband's perspective,
00:57:26.740to seeing the world from Zadie Smith's perspective, actually. I'm there now,
00:57:31.140but I wouldn't say I'm not so smart that it didn't take me a few years to get there.
00:57:38.000we're gonna end on a question that asks a little bit of advice so you know this is as you said
00:57:45.300your this book is not prescriptive it's not like explicitly ideological right but i do think you
00:57:52.700know especially as a dad this is an interesting question so this comes from katie this winter
00:57:57.360during one of those long mom text conversations with my best friend where we were both bemoaning
00:58:02.180the state of the world while trying to manage stir crazy kids i said to her i'm just over here1.00
00:58:07.400trying to make a plaster volcano and not raise an asshole. This has become my ethos, so to speak,0.99
00:58:13.220for parenting in this moment. How do I raise my eight-year-old son to understand the diversity
00:58:17.940of the world, be respectful of people, but particularly women, be kind and thoughtful,
00:58:23.260and not get caught in this moment men are in? We are white, middle class, and from the Midwest,
00:58:29.000and I know that comes with particular challenges. I also wonder how parents of other backgrounds are
00:58:34.180working to help their sons understand the world around them and not be assholes yeah i mean these
00:58:40.660these are all great questions and quite challenging questions too um every time i've had a positive0.73
00:58:48.040prognosis for the future yeah i've always been wrong like every time i think oh so uh so let
00:58:57.060me caveat that but when i was at the cage fight at the white house i noticed three separate and i
00:59:04.860write about this i noticed three separate occasions when a man was no longer able to basically
00:59:14.200my way or the highway you know this this idea of men creating these bubbles for themselves like
00:59:19.780i'm sick of cancel culture i'm just gonna do whatever i want i'm just gonna like you know1.00
00:59:24.120And if you don't like it, fuck off. I think that's dying. Okay, so I say I think that's dying, but I hope it's dying. And I saw seven occasions during my week at the White House. Well, I could give you just one example just to show you what I mean.1.00
00:59:40.100um uh i was talking to this fighter sean o'malley who always who often boasts he's a bit of a ufc
00:59:47.380heartthrob he kind of boasts about his open on podcasts about his open marriage but it's a0.78
00:59:52.220one-sided open marriage he's allowed to have sex with other women but his wife dania isn't allowed0.92
00:59:56.740to have sex with other men um he said um andrew tate explains it well i have status so i said to0.55
01:00:05.140him, you have an open marriage, surely that doesn't work. And he said, well, it worked until it
01:00:13.220didn't. And he admitted to me that his wife has put her foot down and he's no longer. She says,
01:00:18.700no, no more. And he looked so baffled at this sudden change in his fortunes. He has to have
01:00:26.480a closed marriage now. And I wonder, you know, this idea of this whole, okay, look, this is me
01:00:35.480moving out of my comfortable position as an immersive journalist who only writes about what
01:00:40.400I've personally experienced into the world of being a kind of commentator, where that's my
01:00:46.640Achilles heel, and I'm quite often wrong. So I'm a very good storyteller, and I'm less good as being
01:00:52.460a polemicist. So forgive me if what I'm about to say is stupid. But a little bit of me thinks that0.99
01:00:57.720that whole Andrew Tate thing is so ridiculous. It's so not how society works that it's surely0.86
01:01:08.680untenable and won't last. And so my hope is that the kind of thing that happened in Sean O'Malley's
01:01:17.300marriage, that he's not allowed to have a one-sided open marriage anymore, is just going
01:01:22.060to become more the norm like maybe the pendulum is going to swing back to the middle again on my
01:01:26.940most hopeful days i see what is happening now as this last regressive gasp of like trying to
01:01:35.560restore like an order that never was but like a feeling of an order right like just a you know
01:01:41.480responding to this feeling of enemy as you as you pointed out with regression and that maybe
01:01:47.220maybe we'll get this out of our system right i i sort of think so you know i think when something
01:01:54.780becomes so bizarre and extreme and obviously all of those kids pretending to be andrew tate at
01:02:00.540school you heard you know that rush of stories that is so bizarre and extreme it's the kind of
01:02:08.200thing that historically doesn't last and so that is my home so i guess the answer to that to the
01:02:15.780to the questioner is just be a i always say that you know humanity is more important than ideology
01:02:23.200be curious instead of prescriptive yeah um listen to people just you know be be curious instead of
01:02:31.640judgmental just empathetic kind human and that's just the best way to to be you know this person
01:02:39.500also said like i'm we're from the midwest as if that was like a negative component right and i
01:02:45.440actually think in some ways the midwest is a really good place to be curious right that there
01:02:50.840are ways like that you can explore and encounter people who aren't exactly like you can live less
01:02:58.060in the bubble that the first question asked her on the show was referencing absolutely yeah right
01:03:03.320well i don't live in the midwest but i live in the hudson valley so i live in a very mixed
01:03:07.960community it's a politically mixed community i've got somebody down there has a sign saying
01:03:13.000something along the lines of, you are entering armed response country. And then up there is a
01:03:18.260sign, just over there is a sign that says, this house believes Black Lives Matter. We believe in
01:03:23.240science. So, you know, my road is America. And I've got to say, beyond the lawn signs,
01:03:30.080everybody gets on very well. I chat to the man with the armed response sign. He's got a lovely
01:03:34.380dog called Daisy. We always have a nice chat. So, you know, I agree with you. I think it's like,
01:05:40.420Thanks for listening to the Culture Study podcast.
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