Yeah, young men are probably in need of something like this, don't you think?
Oh, yeah. 100%. Do you have kids?
I have two daughters. Oh, okay.
You have two sons, right? Yeah. Actually, you know who wants more viable young men is women.
No kidding. What's the hardest truth about men that nobody really wants to say out loud?
That men need and benefit more from relationships than women. There's a cartoon of a woman in her 30s who never found romantic love and that it's somehow this global tragedy and that she's probably alone and depressed and sitting at home on a rainy day and taking anti-depressants. Let's call her Lisa. Lisa's just fine. Women, when they don't have a romantic relationship, usually pour that energy into their friends and into their professional lives. When men don't have the benefit, especially young men, in the guardrails of a relationship, they oftentimes pour that energy into online content, conspiracy theory, misogyny, they become much more prone to nationalistic content. So men need relationships more than women. The land acknowledgement there, the asterisk I have to put forward is that that doesn't mean men are obligate or excuse me, it doesn't mean women are obligated to service men or be in relationships with them. But the fact is men benefit more from relationships than women. A man who's married will live 4 to 7 years longer. A woman 2 years longer. Widows are happier after their husband dies. And widowers are less happy after their wife dies.
Yeah, there's some interesting statistics on all of this, isn't there? If loneliness is killing young men, why aren't we treating it like a public health emergency?
Because people of our generation, Mark, we registered men of our generation born with a white heterosexual male born in the 60s had so much unearned unfair advantage that there's a natural reaction of well, you've had a 3,000-year head start.
So, there's just a lack of empathy. I would argue that if any cohort in society was, if you walk into a morgue and there's five people died by suicide, four are men. If you walked into a morgue and there was any special interest groups killing themselves at four times the rate as the control group, there would be social programs and intervention. But the general feeling is you don't have problems, you are the problem. And again, because of the unfair advantage that we receive, there's a lack of empathy for 19-year-old males.
And this is a fairly new occurrence in our society, right?
Well, it's been gradually happening. I would say over the last 20 or 30 years, you would have a difficult time finding a cohort that has fallen further faster than young men in the West. Women are ascending and that's a wonderful thing. We should do nothing to get in the way of it. And it hasn't come at the cost of men. In some ways, it's saved our economy. If women hadn't gone into the factories in World War II, it would have taken us much longer to win World War II. We probably still would have won. If women, if we hadn't protected the rights of women in the workplace in the 70s and 80s, we'd be a second rate economy to China. So women's ascent has been an enormous afterburner for our democracy and our economy. But at the same time, there's fewer economic on-ramps to the middle class for men because of the outsourcing of manufacturing. I think the education system is biased against boys. If you're a boy, you're twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior as a girl. Five times as likely if you're a black boy. I think the mating market has become more difficult for young men. And I think probably the biggest factor or wind in their face, if you will, is the deepest pocketed, most intelligent people in the world are trying every day to convince young people to spend one more second or minute a day online and sequester them from their relationships. And I think that's been especially harmful for teen girls and young adult men as they begin to sequester from their relationships.
Is this your latest book, Notes on Being a Man?
It's really incredible and probably very needed, I think. Do you mind if I read just some little clips or notes that you wrote in this book that I think might open up some interesting conversations? As you get older, the relationship you have with people you love and who love you matter more than everything else in your life.
Yeah. We have to, if you think about what we focus on and talk about on whether it's on CNBC or in the news every day or even CNN, we're constantly talking about GDP, AI, shareholder growth, the SpaceX IPO, inflation. Economic security and shareholder value is really important in a capitalist society. I think people need to figure out a way to become economically viable. But that's the means. The ends is such that you can have at least enough economic security such that you can have an absence of anxiety, such that you can focus on what's really important in life and that is establishing deep and meaningful relationships. There's been a ton of studies on happiness and I wrote a book on happiness because I struggle with it. But almost every study that's been done, every longitudinal study by ethnicity, geography, income level, society, everything comes back to one thing on happiness and that is the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. And I think as you get older and you start to sense your own mortality, hopefully you have some economic security, it frees you up to recognize that the biggest source of reward in your life are your relationships. In other words, that's the ends. That's the shooting match. And the risk or the fear for successful people sometimes is you get so caught up in being on that hamster wheel that you never get off and register what the whole point was. And that is having the time and the absence of anxiety so you can focus on your relationships. But the people who are most happy are the people who should be least happy. And that's old people because they're the least healthy. And it's because they have finally figured out that it's about the relationships. We are a social species. We're meant to be around each other. And when you talk to people at the end, that's all it comes down to. That it distills down to their relationships.
You have a chapter on sex, love, and marriage, which I thought was really great. One of the suggestions you make is don't keep score.
Yeah. This is more, the book is really more learnings from where I screwed up. I approached relationships from a, I'll call it a capitalist transactional standpoint, that if I had a friend I registered how much I was getting from it. If I had a girlfriend, I wanted more from her than I was giving. If I had an employee, it's like how do I pay them less than they're worth? It was like how do I get a positive ROI on all my relationships? And what you realize is that that's exactly the wrong way to look at it. That as you get older, the opportunity to invest more in a relationship and occasionally be on the wrong end of the ledger is actually quite rewarding. You have two daughters, I have two sons. I have determined I will never get a positive ROI on most traditional metrics with my sons. It's unlikely they're going to be up at 2 a.m. worrying about me. It's unlikely they will ever spend as much money as I've spent on them. I just think about my boys all the time. And even when I'm older, I'd like to think they'll think about me, but on traditional metrics I'll never get a return. But that's the point. And when people talk about finding their purpose, the way you find your purpose is you wake up one day and realize that you have invested so much in something you won't get a traditional return back and you still get reward from doing it. That's your purpose. You might decide, I've given so much time to a no-kill animal shelter, there's no way I can really ever be recognized. If they build a statue out front, it's still not going to compensate for the amount of time I spent trying to find a home for these dogs. That means you found your purpose. And the first time I kind of opened up to recognizing the reward from not keeping score is I always kept score with my father. My father wasn't very involved in my life. And when I got older and he was enjoying my success and wanted to be closer, I didn't want to be closer because I didn't feel like he deserved it. And what I realized is that's the wrong approach. You should decide what kind of dad, what kind of husband, what kind of friend do you want to be, what kind of employer do you want to be and then hold yourself to that standard and just stop keeping score. And once I did that with my dad, I just had a wonderful relationship with him. I don't, quite frankly this is going to sound terrible, I've been a better son to my father than he's been a father to me. And that's okay. It's nice. There's no way I'll ever be able to give back what my mom gave to me. But I think that's okay for her. I think I was her purpose. So, I think not keeping score is one of the keys to a happy relationship. It's kind of the same toast I've given at weddings when I've been a best man, and that is put away the scorecard because you'll naturally inflate your own contribution to the relationship and you'll minimize theirs. And if you're keeping score, you're on a regular basis going to feel like you're on the wrong end of it and you're going to be unhappy. The whole point of those deep and meaningful relationships is to be on the positive side as often as possible.
Last year, the Palisades fire tore through Los Angeles. Most people saw that story. What fewer people saw is that 2026 is shaping up to be the worst wildfire year on record globally. The total area burned worldwide is already more than 20% higher than any year since 2012. That story is out there. It's just being told differently depending on where you look. Left-leaning outlets are focused on the US response, what the government is doing, and who's affected locally. Right-leaning outlets are covering the global scale, the scope, the numbers, what's happening in other countries. It's the same crisis, but with two completely different lenses. Neither version is lying. But if you're only reading sources on one side, you're only getting half the picture. That's something I think a lot about doing what I do. The people I sit down with, their stories get filtered the same way, shaped by who's telling it and who they're telling it to. That's why I use Ground News. It's an app that shows you how any story is being covered across the political spectrum, side by side. You can see each outlet's bias, how reliable they are, and who owns them. You can actually compare instead of just getting handed one version of the news. Check it out at ground.news/swu. You'll get 40% off their Vantage plan. And by subscribing or gifting it, you're directly supporting this channel, too. That's ground.news/swu. Now, back to the video.
In other little parts of your chapter on this, you say, "Don't ever let your wife go cold or hungry."
Yeah. I was being somewhat snarky, but I'm convinced that the majority of the real big blowups I've had with my partners have been when they're cold or hungry and so I would say power bars and pajamas and I get some pushback there, but I'll stick to it. I just don't think you should ever let your partner be cold or hungry.
That's great. Express affection and desire as often as possible.
I think sex and affection say I choose you. And I think it's really important. And one of the reasons I think that, one of the least studied things in society that's having the biggest impact is porn because there's very little peer-reviewed research because there aren't a lot of academics who want to be known as the porn professor. And yet three of the 10 most trafficked websites in the world are porn sites. It's probably the second biggest activity online. But we know very little about it. But what I'm comfortable recommending for people, for men in relationships, is to modulate the use because you want to save some of that fire and that what I'll call sexual energy and drive for your partner. And this is going to sound, I think women in general and all of us want to feel desired. And I think expressing affection and sexual desire is key to a healthy relationship. It says, "I choose you." And I think it's connective and I think it's really important, but it takes effort and I think men need to, I just think it's nice to say our relationship is unique and private and special and this is ours. So I think it's really important and I think that people have to, when you're in a partnership, just expressing desire is wonderful for both of you. And I wonder, I think sometimes as the relationship becomes a little bit more mundane or routine, we don't make those efforts. So I think like if you think your partner's hot and you want them, express that verbally and physically. I just think that's a wonderful thing. Going back to young people or young men, I think we have incorrectly and unproductively demonized horniness. I think wanting to have a relationship, wanting to have sex with a woman makes young men better men. And when they give up on that and embrace this terrible movement called the incel movement, they give themselves a hall pass. Not to be fit, not to make money, not to be a good person, not to be a kind person, not to think about their appearance, not to be a positive citizen in society, not to be an artisan, not to be really into something, not to be kind. All of these things women find attractive. So I think we need to embrace young men's desire to want to have relationships and sex and not think of them as being predatory because the vast majority of young men who really want to have relationships and ultimately sex, it turns them into better men. So I think that further down the road, being in a relationship and expressing desire is really important in terms of connective tissue in the relationship. And I think young men need to embrace their horniness, if you will, or their desire for relationship and sex and do what most men do and that is channel it into productive things that make them more attractive to the opposite sex. Women are very good at putting forward criteria that will make you a better man. Women are attracted to three things. The first thing is, and it's difficult to talk about, is signaling resources. You don't have to be rich now, but you have to have your act together. The guy who doesn't stay out late, who goes home early because he's got things to do the next day, that is fit, that looks good, that is on time, that is thinking about graduate school, that is smart with his money, that person is signaling resources in the future, and that is attractive. Number two is intellect. People who make good decisions for the tribe, generally the tribe lasts longer, so anthropologically, we're drawn to smart people. The fastest way to communicate intellect is humor. And this is snarky, but I'll say it. This is my impersonation of a woman. I'm laughing. I'm laughing. I'm naked. I think if you can make a woman laugh, she will grab coffee with you. Now, you can't force yourself to be funny, but you can have a good sense of humor. Laugh at yourself. Have a good sense of humor. Laugh out loud. And if you're blessed with humor, that's an incredible asset in terms of the mating market. And the third thing, and this is all backed by research, the third thing is the secret weapon for men in terms of finding a mate or a romantic partner. They know the resources are important. It's a capitalist society. I'm not saying that's the way the world should be, but that's the way the world is. Intellect, humor, okay, that makes sense. The secret weapon that men don't realize how powerful it is in terms of attracting a mate is kindness. And again, it's anthropological because most women sense at some point they will be vulnerable during gestation and they want someone who is kind, who helps other people without any obvious connection to some sort of reciprocal return. And that's the underleveraged asset that I think men need to display. And there's a difference between being nice and kind. People are smart enough to figure out is this person being nice to me because they want something or they want to have sex with me and being kind. And that is they notice over time if you're good to people who can't help you, you have basic manners. You take some blows. You don't feel a need to get back into someone's face if they don't show you, quote unquote, the respect you think you deserve. I think this is also, I don't think it's necessarily something you need to be born with. Some people are born kind, some people are born psychopathic, but I think the majority of people it's a learned practice. And so what I suggest to every young man is that they develop a kindness practice such that it becomes just second nature. And again, this is based on a failing of mine. I used to be that guy that if someone honked at me, I felt a need to speed up and honk back at them to restore balance in the universe. That if I was at the Delta ticket counter and they didn't treat me with the respect I think I deserve because I travel 200,000 miles a year, I was in their face. No, that's the whole point I think of being an adult and being a man is occasionally you take blows and you realize, okay, I don't know what's going on with this person's kid. I don't know if they're struggling with diabetes. I don't know that they've had just such a difficult day. So, I think kindness is the underleveraged superpower in the mating market for men, demonstrating kindness.
Here's another of your notes. New fathers almost always feel unprepared for being dads, and that's normal.
It's really unusual where people just say, "This is the perfect time to have kids." And I don't know, I mean, the Hallmark Channel and Life Insurance commercials will create this expectation that when your son or your daughter is born that it's bright lights and angels singing. I felt nauseous and shamed because it was the great, my oldest son had the poor judgment to come marching out of my girlfriend when the great financial recession hit and I was literally broke and I felt a lot of shame and anxiety because it was no longer, I'm talented, I work hard, I've always been able to make a living, but now it wasn't about me and I had failed him. And that was the first thing I felt and I realized not every dad feels this way was shame and anxiety. And also I didn't love having babies at home. I didn't, you know, I felt like my job was to keep it away from bodies of water and make sure the mom was happy. But I think that the whole notion that you're supposed to feel this immense sense of love immediately, for me it was falling in love with the kid. So if you feel stressed, if you're worried about money, if you're not entirely sure what your role is in the first few months, I think that's natural and you should be, you know, forgive yourself. I think your job is to keep the kid away from bodies of water and make sure that mom feels secure and loved and well resourced. I think mothers are elemental the first couple months. I think men or fathers are supplemental. And that's not to say that, you know, I'd like to see everyone have parental leave, but I know with my situation, my partner wanted me back at work 'cause she was more worried about our financial situation than night feedings. And I did those things. But I look, I think having kids is stressful and most of the really rewarding things in life are really stressful. But this Hallmark Channel Lifetime vision of this is the most amazing thing ever. I hope that happens for you. It didn't happen for me. And that's okay if it doesn't happen for you right away. There's a lot of stress involved.
In your book, you have this little graph, the arc of happiness, which is high in the 20s and then has this gradual dip throughout your life and then comes back high again in the 60s.
Yeah. So happiness y-axis, time.
So your 20s and your 60s are the happiest moments or early like even late teens it seems.
Yeah. So if you look at, if you graph happiness, and again this is almost every piece of research shows this and it's really elegant because usually almost every study in peer-reviewed research has a tendency to contradict the study before it. This is really clean research and that is on the y-axis you have happiness, on the x-axis you have your age or lifespan. Happiness is a smile. 0 to 25 are pretty happy. Star Wars, prom, making out, you know, summer camp. And then 25 to 45 are what I call the shit gets real years. You have economic stress. You find out the distinct of what your parents and your university told you. You're not going to be a senator or have a fragrance named after you. You have economic stress. Relationships are hard. Kids are hard. Someone you love a great deal and who loves you a great deal gets sick and dies. Like the harshness of life finds you in those years. And then something wonderful happens in your kind of 40s or 50s depending on kind of how soulful and how blessed you are. Maybe a little bit of economic security. Maybe okay, you're not going to be quarterback of the Jets, but you find something that you think you're fairly good at and you can make a living. These little things you have are growing up and becoming less awful, called kids. You recognize the beauty of your friendships. You start to find joy in weird things. I find joy in bougainvillea. I never, I will stop and marvel at flora and fauna. I just never, I remember going to Junior's Deli. We're here in LA on Westwood Boulevard every Sunday night with my mom and they would bring out this bad salad, this green salad with ranch dressing on it. And she would stop and reach across and hold my hand and say, "Look at how beautiful this salad is." She really believed that this salad was extraordinary. And I remember thinking, you know, what the fuck? And as you get older, you start finding joy in weird things, right? You start just really just finding sunsets like incredible. You start really appreciating friends. You start, you know, I'm looking around. I just saw the great photography you had. I'm not sure that 20 years ago I would have wanted to just stop and stare at it. Right? So, you find all these wonderful things happen to you as you get into your 40s and 50s and the lesson is the following. If you're in your 20s, 30s, and 40s and you're thinking like, fuck, this is hard. This is just not this is not the way the movie was scripted in my mind. That likely means you're exactly where you're supposed to be and you should keep on keeping on because happiness waits for you.
Having kids will be the best thing you can do to ruin your life.
Yeah. Look, it's, I've never had this much stress and anxiety from anything. I've started businesses that have failed. I had a parent who got very sick and died. But the amount of stress and worry and anxiety I have for my children during different points when my children aren't doing well or sometimes when they are doing well and just giving me a hard time dwarfs everything. But at the same time, and I'm not saying everyone's like this, that I found my purpose later in life. My purpose is to raise loving, patriotic men. I know that's what I'm here for. And if I can get them launched when I'm at the end, I'm going to feel a certain comfort. I think that I accomplish those things. So, yeah, I don't think on a day-to-day basis, it's very, you know, there's a difference between happiness and reward. I can get happiness in a few hours with Netflix and THC. That's a sensation. I'll get happy. But reward and purpose are more difficult. And the most patriotic Americans are veterans because they've invested so much in their country. They feel so invested in it. They're the most patriotic. Anyone who has kids knows that usually this is the thing you're most loyal to because you've invested so much. So I think it's really difficult. There's some studies showing that people without kids in their childbearing years are actually happier on a day-to-day basis than people with kids. But I think most people as they get older do look at the experience with their children and think that's a box that I couldn't have checked anywhere else, that maybe I am here for a reason. So yeah, best thing you'll ever do that kind of ruins your life. I used to have these wonderful weekends that involved brunch and friends and fabulous things and now you know it's kind of little league and trying to keep my kid off of TikTok.
What's one statistic that keeps you awake at night?
That when a boy in a household loses a male role model through death, divorce or abandonment, at that moment that boy becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. What's interesting is girls in single parent homes have similar outcomes of college attendance and self harm. It ends up that while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls. So the fact that the die are cast in a very negative way when a boy is in a home of which we have the most of anywhere in the world, single parent homes, that to me is frightening. And then the stat I just saw that I found really upsetting, 42% of men 18 to 24 have never asked a woman out in person. Jesus.
They've never actually gone up to a woman and taken the risk of expressing romantic interest and asking her out.
That's incredible, right?
Can a boy who's being raised without a father kind of replace that male role model with another male father figure or a neighbor or a coach?
Yeah. I think teacher, anything like that? I think I'm evidence of that. My dad left when I was eight. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died as a secretary. Light of my life, but she immediately got men involved in my life. I had a neighbor who used to take me horseback riding. When I was in 8th grade, I met this stockbroker, Cicero, at Dean Witter in Westwood and I used to go to his office after school every day or call him and ask about my stocks and he was a good man to me. My mom dated a man, and this isn't an elegant story, for five years, who also had his own family. My mom was his mistress and but he was really good to me. I mean, life is complicated. You think, well, he must have been an awful person. No, he was very nice to me and he was a good, he was in a weird way, he was a good role model for me. I had a lot of sports coaches in junior high and high school that stayed involved in my life. So I think one, the single mother has to make a real effort to move in, but also I think there has to be a zeitgeist where boys in single parent households immediately the community rallies around them and gets men involved in their lives. And the unfortunate thing is that men of our generation aren't stepping up. There are three times as many women applying to be Big Sisters of Los Angeles and New York as there are men applying to be Big Brothers. So there's a waiting list of 700,000 boys waiting for a mentor or a big brother. So, you know, we talk, I talk a lot about masculinity and the different rings of masculinity. I don't think you can really say you're a successful man until you have decided to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. And even if the dad is present, it's really good to get other men involved in the kids' life because what's interesting, and you have girls, not boys, but what you discover, and it's sort of upsetting, but you recognize there's a reason for it. Kids as they get into their teen years have this natural hormone where in order to make leaving the pack not as upsetting or difficult, they start to think their parents are just idiots. So my kids' sons, my friends' sons are more likely to listen to me when they're teenagers than their dads. And my sons are more likely to listen to my friends, right, my male friends than they are to me. So just having a lot of male role models and mentors involved in a boy's life is just elemental. It's if you were to reverse engineer to the single point of failure for when a boy comes off the tracks as a man, it's losing a male. It's an absence of male role models.
And I think it's important to understand that a father isn't necessarily the best role model for a kid, for a boy.
Like let's say your mom and dad divorce when you're four years old.
The next man to come into your life could be head and shoulders better than your actual dad.
Yeah. So, the assumption in all of this is this is a person who's a good man. But what is disappointing in what I'll call the big brother ecosystem is there's a ton of men out there who are good men in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s who may not have families of their own. And I think they're under the impression, I think the thing that gets in the way of them getting involved in a boy's life is one, they're worried they're going to be suspected of something, right? Michael Jackson and the Catholic Church have kind of fucked it up for all of us because there's this unhealthy and quite frankly not factual notion that any man who wants to be involved and thinks he can help out a 15-year-old boy and be a good mentor to him, there's something wrong with him. That's not true at all. A lot of men have really wonderful paternal and fraternal love to give and don't know where to put it and are scared to express a desire to mentor, be a friend to a boy.
Yeah. Pedophilia has really ruined it for a lot of men.
Yeah. Right. And here's the thing. I think they also believe that I'm not CEO of Goldman Sachs or I don't have a degree in adolescent psychiatry, so I can't add value. I, as someone who mentors young men, it's literally one of the easiest jobs in the world. Just being there, just showing that they're worthwhile, answering some basic questions, asking them some basic questions. This is a question I, no joke, that I received from one of the kids I was mentoring. Can I survive on pineapple juice and creatine? I just saw that on TikTok. No, I'm thinking of moving to Alaska. Well, you live in Maryland. Your mom's sick. You have a really good job there. Why are you thinking of moving to Alaska? I saw a documentary on it. It just looks amazing. You know, I want to be an explorer. I'm like, no, let's think this through. Right? It is so easy to add value because I don't know about you, when you were 19 or 20 or 21, there's something fairly common amongst young men at that age, and that is we're fucking idiots. And we need someone occasionally to serve as our prefrontal cortex, which doesn't catch up to a girl's or a woman's until they're 25, to help us make decisions. And it is very difficult to read the label from inside of the bottle. And the reality is young men oftentimes screen out their mother's voice and female voices, which I'm not saying is the right thing to do, but I think it's pretty easy. I think a lot of these men have so much value they could add if they got involved. And it's super easy, too. If you're at your workplace, find a single mother. Would your son be interested in coming to the game with me and my daughter? Would your son like to come over and wash my car? I'm hanging out this weekend. Does your son want to come over and watch the game with me? The answer is an automatic yes. Because single mothers, they perceive this. They know that they perceive that the boy needs a man or men in his life. But yeah, the key is it needs to be a good man. But there's just, I think there's a ton of good men out there that really would enjoy helping to mentor a young man or a boy.
Yeah. Hanging out with a man, a dude that you look up to is such an important part of a young man's life.
Yeah. I mean, look what you've built here, right? There's a lot of young men here who probably, a lot of young men who probably thinking, "I'm not cut out for college, but I like photography." Like how did you do this right? What did you do? Like how do you equate yourself with your own relationships? Like what are your struggles? Like how do you stay in great shape? There's just so, you know, we're talking like an hour a week. And I think a lot of it is just young men feeling like they have value because an impressive man who's, you know, supporting himself and not living with his parents like finds value in this young man, right? A lot of times in lower-income neighborhoods, the first male role model a kid has is a prison guard. This is the other than a parent's income, this is the primary predictor of a boy's outcome. And what's interesting is that girls are more resilient. And they don't know if it's because women have had to endure childbirth or they start menstruating earlier. But the reality is men are just, boys. While a girl has stronger fine motor skills, a boy has stronger gross motor skills, but boys are much more quite frankly just weaker. There's a scary stat that I read that two 15-year-olds, a boy and a girl, both sexually molested. Neither crime is any less or more heinous than the other. The 15-year-old boy who's sexually molested is 10 times more likely to kill himself later in life. It ends up that boys are just weaker and really need men in their lives. And just saying that five years ago was triggering. Scott, you don't think women can raise men? Yeah. Again, see above. Single immigrant mother lived and died as secretary, a lot of my life, but she recognized immediately I needed male role models in my life. Women have kind of incorporated a lot of male strengths into their lives in the last 10, 20 years, right? What do you think of the feminization of men that's happened in the last 10, 20 years?
I think most of it is good. And by the way, I don't think masculinity or femininity, these are social constructs that we get to fill and decide what it means. And I don't think you have to be born a man or as a woman to demonstrate wonderful femininity or masculinity. I'm actually drawn, my closest male friends are more feminine in nature because I like men who are nurturing. I think a lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculinity. But at the same time, we could acknowledge that the majority of people born male or female are more predisposed to certain types of behavior. And we've celebrated femininity, but I think to a certain extent, we've demonized masculinity. There's a very healthy form of masculinity and the combination of female and masculine energy I still think is a fantastic combination. That doesn't mean two men can't bring that combination. That doesn't mean two women can't bring that combination. But it feels as if we've been very remiss to in any way laud or celebrate masculinity. You know, you don't hear the term toxic femininity a lot. You hear the term toxic masculinity an awful lot. So the feminization of certain professions or of men, I think that's probably some of it's a good thing. For example, Gen Z fathers are spending more time with their kids than women did when they were working 40 years ago. Gen Z dads are spending on average twice as much time with their kids as their dads did. Now, you could say that's not necessarily feminization, but I think there's wonderful attributes that we can both borrow from each other in whatever kind of feels right. So, I don't, you know, I get a little weirded out when people start gendering the workplace. So, I think the defeminization of health care would help men. I think there's a lot of men who would be wonderful nurses, which is the fastest growing profession, right? At the same time, we've done a pretty good job of demasculinizing or debrowing the C-suite. The number of women who have been promoted into C-suite has grown 28% in the last 10 years, right? It's gone from 17 Fortune 100 CEOs to I think it's now somewhere between 20 and 30. We still have progress to make or still have, you know, room for improvement, but it has headed in the right direction. So, I think there's upsides and downsides, but generally speaking, I don't have a problem. The right says the feminization of the workplace has been bad. I don't think that's true.
What are your thoughts on modern dating?
I think it's really difficult because, so first off, the number of high schoolers that date has been cut in half since our generation. And I think that they're up against some pretty challenging things. The first is the number. The amount of time that the average male is spending outdoors between the ages of 20 and 30 is less time outdoors than prison inmates.
Yeah, it is. It's really wild.
I was outdoors all the time.
All the time. But if we wanted to have a good time, if we wanted a dopamine hit, if we wanted to have a good time, we had to go outside.
