JCIP #356 - David Maywald

In episode 356 of The Just Checking In Podcast we checked in with David Maywald. 

Born and raised in Australia where he resides today, David has worked in finance for over two decades as an investment professional, holding roles of Research Analyst and is a top-quartile Portfolio Manager.

He currently works as a governance specialist and holds a portfolio of board roles across the fields of health, education, families, active lifestyles, infrastructure, investment, and sustainability. 

He is also a father and the author of the book ‘The Relentless War on Masculinity: Does It Ever End?’.

In this episode, we do a deep dive into the book, the themes he explores, who is waging this war on masculinity and why.

We also talk about the process of publishing the book, which he had to do self-published, why his financial situation allowed him the freedom of expression to write without fear of cancellation, and the reception of the book. 

For David’s mental health journey, we discuss fatherhood and a couple of periods where he has been depressed in his life, due to his employment situation and being isolated from his social networks. 

As always, #itsokaytovent

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hi Venters, welcome back to another episode of the Just Checking In Podcast. I'm your host, Braddy Cocker, and this podcast is brought to you by Vent, a place where everyone, but especially men and boys, can open up about their mental health issues, break down stigmas, and start conversations. In each episode, I check in with a special guest. We have a natter and a chat about all things mental health, as well as anything and everything else they are passionate about. If it helps that person with their mental health, we discuss it. My special guest for this episode is David Maywald. Born and raised in Australia where he resides today, David has worked in finance for over two decades as an investment professional, holding roles of research analyst and is a top quartile portfolio manager. He currently works as a governance specialist and holds a portfolio of board roles across the fields of health, education, families, active lifestyles, infrastructure, investment and sustainability. He is also father and a published author of the book The Relentless War on Masculinity, Does It Ever End? Which is how I came across him. In this episode, we do a deep dive into the book, the themes he explores, who is waging this war on masculinity and why, in his opinion, the protest of publishing the book, which he had to do self-publish because of the spiciness of the book's content, why his financial situation allowed him the freedom of expression to write without fear of cancellation, and the reception of the book more widely. For David's mental health journey, we discussed fatherhood and a couple of periods in his life where he has been depressed due to either his employment situation and being isolated from his social networks. So this is how my conversation with the brilliant David Mayward went. David, welcome to the Just Checking In Pod. Thank you for checking in with me all the way from Australia. You are probably the last great guest I will come across on the Eternal Binfire that is X, fully known as Twitter. So if that is the case, I'm very happy with that as the legacy. I absolutely love the book. Spicy throughout. How are you on this? Well, it's Sunday morning here, it's probably Sunday evening where you are. And how has the reception been to it, mate? It's been mixed, as you'd expect.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

And Freddie, it's great to be here chatting with you. I have been looking forward to this for a very long time. And it's fantastic that we can connect literally across the oceans, around the world, that we can share and be here together. And hello to everyone out there who's listening. I did put out a pretty, maybe some people thought provocative or controversial book. And it's challenging for a lot of people. So as you'd expect, it's been polarized. I've had, you know, mums with sons who love that I've written it. I've had younger, left-leaning women who vehemently detest it and want to like burn me, burn every single copy of it, that sort of thing. So I've seen the whole spectrum. But uh I've had some very good, you know, responses, some good reviews. I've had some fantastic conversations with people. Every conversation's been different. So that's why looking forward to chatting with you today.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Real change never happens in comfort zones, does it? So that's a testament to you, mate. We have got so much to talk about. I've got so many notes. So we'll see how much we get through. I'll be asking my own spicy questions to you throughout the pod. So without further ado, are you ready to start the show and talk all about the book and your wonderful journey as well? Let's do it. Let's have fun. We're going to start your pod, mate, by talking about your professional journey first, as you've had a very successful career in finance prior to writing the book. So, very briefly, how did you build your career here and why did you also start becoming passionate about the issue of boys and men?

SPEAKER_02 3:57

I have been passionate about boys' education for 30 years, going right back to when I finished high school and started university. Mate, I sort of fell into finance. When I was at university, I was very fortunate to pick up a scholarship. I moved states to take that. So I moved away from my family and friends. And I started off and I'd probably made a bad choice or was really hampered by that lack of support network. So I switched degrees, you know, after having failed a subject and gone through a very, you know, challenging time. And then I switched degrees again. And I was very fortunate to hold on to the scholarship and had a supportive mentor who stuck by me through that whole way. And I was very, you know, lucky actually just to land in commerce. And the first subject I did there, I got 100%. I completely aced it. And I hadn't expected that, but I realized after that unit that I was good at it and it was pretty easy for me, and it was something that I could probably make a career out of. So I continued with that and moved into investment management in the finance sector. I moved states again. So this was the second interstate move. Again, moving, you know, away from friends, away from those established support networks. But the job I fell into was pretty good because there was a huge team there, and I learnt a ton. I learnt a shitload from a big team of professionals of different ages, all different backgrounds. There were like 40 core people in that team, and a couple of good mentors came out of it. That company ended up being taken over and we were all made redundant. So, you know, two and a half years into that graduate role, I experienced a savage, brutal commercial reality, which is sometimes things change that are nothing to do with you, and you're just this little cork bobbing up and down, you know, on the ocean. And I had a bit of a rough ride for six, nine months or so. I had took a couple of short-term roles for three months, learnt a lot again, built my network and expanded my network. One of those didn't turn out well. Uh I failed my probation after being a bit too honest about some feedback. No. That's a uh uh a hint.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

There's a foreshadowing there.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, it's it's something of probably a tip that I'd share with uh, you know, early starters is sometimes you don't need to be too honest, but I was and I suffered because you've been there as well. And then I had another short-term role seeing stockbroking, which it was okay, but it wasn't really my thing. And I met these two guys who started a fund. They were investment bankers outside of the sector. You know, they weren't fund managers, they were bankers who were very good at pitching, building products, convincing people to come on board. And I had a great 10-year ride with them. I saw them both as fada figures and mentors, and I genuinely respected and appreciated that opportunity to work together. And together in a small team, we built a company from nothing to well over $10 billion in funds under management within a decade, and then that got sold to an American, a large American asset manager within 10 years. So I saw the whole startup journey like almost perfect execution through that period. And I had worked for two startups, one was a bomb, one was a success. And so I sort of was just blessed to have very good odds because the chances of having a success like that are way less than 50%. So that business was sold, and as a founding employee, I was very fortunate to share in some of the equity value that was created during that time. And I learned a tremendous amount about research and analysis and about reading between the lines, and my emotional intelligence just continued to grow enormously through that period. So that was really my professional journey. After the sale, I stayed for another three or four years to take the final money off the table. But by that stage, the successes of that firm had been announced, and it wasn't me, which I mean was a shock to the ego, but these things happened. And that was a really tough time. There was three years or so there where I was going into work, not feeling satisfied, knowing that it wasn't a long-term thing, the purpose was gone from it because we'd sold it, right? We had new owners, we'd sort of achieved, and we'd climbed to the top of that mountain, which was a fantastic journey. But there was a real lull there, and it was really a dissatisfying period. And after that, I was just looking for something different. And the kids came along, my son and daughter, I cut my hours, I went to three days a week. So I was the only guy in that team who was on very flexible arrangements. And I loved it. It was fantastic because I had a lot of time with the kids compared to other dads, and I was very actively involved and also was making this space to do whatever was next. And that has morphed into advocacy for boys and men, and in the last 12 months to writing this book, to doing all these podcasts, to doing interviews, to getting out a whole bunch of really fascinating engagement about these topics.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

That's an incredible whistle stop tour, mate. And we'll dive a little bit more into that professional journey later in the pod when it comes to resilience and what Nassi Nicholas Talib calls anti-fragility, which you definitely exhibited. Let's talk about the book now. Brilliant book. It's called The Relentless War on Masculinity. Does it ever end? Question mark. First of all, how did the book come about and why, for the listeners, did you have to self-publish it as opposed to a publisher commissioning it?

SPEAKER_02 9:29

So this topic is very controversial in Australia because essentially we have feminism has been hugely successful over the last six decades or so. And we've got to a position now where the positions of power, you know, the majority of the cabinet federally, the majority of the Senate federally is female. You've got a very entrenched position there of preference for females, affirmative action of what I call cultural and institutional gynocentrism, which is favoring females in their traits and preferences and their interests. So two or three years ago, I was having a lot of coffee meetings and you know, one-on-one catch-ups with men and women, mums of sons, younger guys, older, retired guys, younger women, the other parents from our school, just a lot of diverse conversations. And a common theme that came out of those was we all have concern for our kids, regardless of whether the boys or girls, and for the next generation. We all care about them. We want them to have opportunities, right? But say the mums of sons, they certainly were aware of the educational disparities of the difficulties of dating, the challenges of breaking into the workforce for males in particular, but they weren't advocating. None of those people were willing to get up on stage with a microphone and say, this is how I really feel. These are my unfiltered thoughts. They were massively self-censoring. I got this sense after dozens and dozens and dozens of conversations, like I said, with men and women of lots of different ages and different backgrounds and life situations. I got this consistent pattern of one-on-one and in private, I'm willing to talk about all of these things. But they were self-censoring because they were worried about the backlash. Even the women, for heaven's sake, were worried about the backlash. But particularly the men, hugely sensitive, really worried about am I going to lose my job? Are my clients going to be targeted? All different situations. It was coming up. And I was having these conversations and finding them really enlightening. And my personal situation was I wasn't employed, I didn't have clients, and so I just wasn't worried about being cancelled. And there was an epiphany at one point where I realized that I was like the one in a thousand people who could actually say these things in an unfiltered way and not have any retribution that was really damaging. Of course, my personal reputation's been smeared, and some people have personally attacked me and all that garbage, attempted cancellations. You know, I'll give you an example. Some complaints went to my boards about have you seen what David has posted on Facebook or LinkedIn? He's such a sexist and he's such a misogynist. They were trying to strip me of a voluntary role with a non-profit organization, for heaven's sakes. That's how low some of these people will go when others say things that they don't like. So I was, I guess, willing to take some of those hits because I passionately believed that these things needed to be said and discussed. And I was so confident that hundreds of other people in my community also believed them passionately because I'd heard them say that. I didn't breach any confidences, I didn't repeat anything verbatim. I was just putting together from the public record and from statistics and media and other sources this story that I'd heard consistently from many people.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Let's define the book title for the readers too here, because it's provocative, certainly grabs the reader's attention. So, what is the war on masculinity? Who started it? Who's waging it? What examples can you give? And also, was there ever a part of you that worried that it would come off as potentially conspiratorial or it would maybe put some people off that might be more receptive to your view than if it was a different title, or not? Did you just completely go fuck them?

SPEAKER_02 13:45

That's the Aussie way. So using war in the title has been controversial. I don't think a publisher would probably have endorsed that for a first-time author. But mate, there were three female authors who really spoke to me.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Christina Hoff Summers in I was about to say that was the first person on my lips. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

So 26 years ago, Christina Hoff Summers wrote The War Against Boys.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Way ahead of his time, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Way ahead of his time. Wow. I was about to pick the book up, you know, recently, and I thought I thought it was a recent book. And I looked at the publisher today, I was like, oh my god, this was the 90s.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Yeah. Yeah. So that's been there for 26 years. And certainly the war against boys and the bias in schools and education has hardened and become much, much, much worse in those 26 years. There's another one by Suzanne Bencker called The War on Men, which is from 2013. And three years ago now, Nancy Pearcy wrote the Toxic War on Masculinity. But there are a number of others out there that have used similar language. Now, I could have written a book that said the bias against males or you know the double standards or whatever, which it'd be pretty blah, right? Like it's a good thing. It would fall into the sort of malaise of other books, yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't pin your colours to the mask. I think there's been a concerted effort which has built up to this war over the last six decades or so, from the early sixties, from the second wave of feminism. And the way I articulate it in a contemporary sense is that the war on masculinity is a cultural, rhetorical, chemical, legal, and institutional assault on all males. So it's systematic, it's across many different vectors and planes and modes of prosecuting those actions, but they are consistently biased in being anti-male, pushing against men and boys. And I specifically use the war on masculinity. It's not women against men. Because in many cases it's some men who are prosecuting this against other men, often men at the top who are actually taking opportunities away from men at the bottom. And you get that from Isn't the Lost Generation by Jacob Sabaj, the December article that was in Concept magazine, where he, as a millennial man, he actually points to the older Gen X and boomers and says to those men, you sold us out. You protected your own. You pulled up the ladder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You pulled the ladder up from younger men to protect your own jobs because you weren't willing to step out of them for a woman. You wanted to stay in that cozy corporate, you know, executive high role, but you cut off these opportunities for a whole generation of young men. I think this is a very perceptive analysis because I'm not saying anything about women persecuting men. What I'm saying is when you put all of these pieces together, what it constitutes is, like I said, an assault on all males and a diminution of masculinity. I'll give you one example of why I've used the word war. If you take the annual suicide, the losses of lives across the five English-speaking countries, the larger ones, US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia, that's 50,000 men and boys each year. Well, that's certainly commensurate with a wartime effort, with wartime losses. You know, two years of that, that's I think close to the Vietnam losses of the US. So 50,000 souls being lost to families and communities every year. That's huge. And it's three to four times higher in terms of rate for males than it is for females.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

And more all the families affected, mate, hundreds of thousands more affected by the grief. Yeah. There would be some of the casualties of what are termed as a war. In the book, you paint the 1980s as this equality utopia. However, despite not being alive in this era, I know that sexism was still rife, commonplace in those decades in the institutions and outside of it. So, as a counter-argument, is your view not slightly rose-tinted about that era?

SPEAKER_02 18:00

Well, you missed out, mate, because it was the best decade. It had the best movies, it had the best music. I'll go with you for movies.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Maybe not music, but I'll go with you for movies, mate.

SPEAKER_02 18:12

They were some of the best. They were some of the best times. And it was really chilled. You know, of course, in some areas men had better outcomes, in some areas, women had better outcomes. But they kept it pretty real. Like they didn't go bananas about stuff. They didn't try to cancel someone because of something they said. Like there was a tolerance. You know, there was actually legalized pay equality. Civil rights had been washing through. I cite in the book in 1982, females overtook males in American colleges. And then five years later in 1987 in Australia, females overtook males in universities. So there was this somewhat rough equality. I don't call it a utopia. What I talk about is trade-offs. Like, of course, there were some pluses and minuses, but in my sense, as Gen X, and I've talked to a lot of other, you know, obviously Gen X's, because that's my tribe or my cohort. Like, they look back and they are nostalgic about it because it was bloody awesome. It was so good. There were opportunities for men and for women. You could be pretty much anything. Like where we've gone to in the last three or four decades, we've gone from this rough balance or this pretty good situation just to an extreme. You know, the pendulum, a lot of people recognize this mythical, intangible pendulum is now at a stupidly unbalanced situation. That has happened in the last three or four decades. I want to just mention something which overlaps with The Four Horsewoman, which I'm sure we'll get to a bit later. In terms of misindry, so there's a very prescient book called Spreading Misery, which is from 2001. It was written by Nathan and Young. And what they did in 2001 was published, but the sources they had been looking at were in the 1990s. And what they found was in entertainment and media in particular, there were these very prevalent, very common, very highly repeated patterns of stereotypes, which were anti-male. I'll give you the four examples that they mentioned. Dominant myths, they call them, or reinforcing frames. The bad husband, the deadbeat dad, the violent male, and the stupid male in the 1990s. This is in media and entertainment, right? So that was the difference from say the 70s and the 80s through the 90s.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Because what we've had worse, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

It has it's gotten a lot worse since.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Because at least there was Uncle Phil in the 1990s, at least there was my wife and kids, you know, really kind of strong father figures like that. We've had a real decrease in men like that.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

So culturally, what was happening was like from the 80s, there was still a balance and there were lots of positive heroes and male role models during that time. But what happened was there were fewer and fewer in the 90s, but there were more of these critical deconstructing aspects of males and masculinity and men, particularly white men and fathers. Fatherhood was deconstructed, and a big step down in that deconstructing was in the 90s and the noughties, and then it's just gotten worse and worse.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

We could do a whole podcast on that, to be fair, maybe. There's so much to get through. I want to move on to something which you cite early in the book, which is the revival of Christianity, right? It's currently taking place across Gen Z in the West. This is manifested, I believe, in the explosion in popularity of sort of modern gospel artists, including one of my favourite artists, Forrest Frank, formerly of Surfaces, and now doing his own thing in gospel. You've got kind of people in this scene like Connor Price, Holvey, Caleb Gordon, Liszt goes on. I'm not Christian, but I love the music, right? I think it's amazing. I've always been a fan of Gospel House, for example, as well. And they're making gospel accessible for converts, believers, non believers. A critique of it is kind of been like this rise of it in the online right and not always authentic. I think some people on the online Right, genuinely that I think some people are using it as a bit of a cudgel or a bit of a grift, but at its core, this part of the Christianity revival I think is generally a positive, right? Why is it a positive for you?

SPEAKER_02 22:12

I find a spiritual depth, I find a positive vision, I find complementarity of male and female, honouring of male and female, I find really strong roles for mothers and fathers, an absolute foundation for morality, like a centering and stability for how you go about living your life, and also decent principles for treating other people with respect and dignity. There's a valuing of every single person, a sanctity of life, in a way that we've moved away from that real honouring and dignity of everyone. We move towards this overt lifting up of some groups and diminishing of other groups, and you know, including through identity politics. And I think when you look at the outcomes of dismantling marriage, moving from, say, the covenant of Christian marriage to secular legal marriage, which it doesn't have any obligations whatsoever, there's no expectations in there. It's like uh, you know, you can just walk away at any time. When you look at the outcomes of fatherlessness, when you look at the disengagement and the isolation, the mental health, on so many aspects, our Anglo English speaking countries have actually lost from moving a long way towards secularism away from faith and religious belief. So personally, I find it a positive spiritual, emotional experience. Mate, I love the music too. I love singing with others in worship. I w grew up in a Pacific Island and they had beautiful music and singing. I can tell you one of the most emotional times I've had in religion was at a um men's leadership summit, surrounded by a hundred men singing evangelical hymns. Mate, I was crying within minutes, and they were terrible singers, mate. Shocking, rough as guts. Like it wasn't musical at all. But I was just moved that a hundred men would sing together in worship and be united and be focused on something so positive, so uplifting. And that has really encouraged me to lean in quite heavily. And I've I've found brotherhood, fellowship, beautiful role models, beautiful examples of other people raising kids and older people willing to contribute to their community. I'm really heartened. And I've seen, for example, in the Catholic churches here in Australia, they have an annual intake, so they have a program of bringing people into the Catholic Church. It's pretty much doubled in the space of three years. So twice as many people are doing those programs to come into the Catholic Church. So we're seeing a number of strong signals about people of all ages and all backgrounds taking interest. But I'm really heartened that young men are seeing religious faith and Christianity in particular as a positive for their lives.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Well, there's a wider issue about class here, mate, because especially for working class men, there is a stigma of singing in public. And the two areas of life which they, or I like to hope they don't feel stigma in is church and live sport. You know, football, for example, here in the UK, soccer in Australia. You know, when do you see a group of working class men sing like that? Or Aussie Rules or NRL or whatever it is. So there's a really powerful bonding moment of there and a complete zero-shame culture, which is great. And there's a whole other podcast on that.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

The artist Dax, because I love your suggestion and the the artist you mentioned in terms of gospel. Dax, I think he's 32 years old. He's a Canadian-born migrant of Nigerian parents. 32? That guy understands men and masculinity like a seven-year-old guy who's lives through basically everything. I hope he comes to Australia. I love almost every single song. To be a man, that mega remix that he did with 10 other artists, mate, that really moves people. They get empathy and they understand what it's like actually to be inside a man's life and a man's head. So we have to reach people through music. I love all of your suggestions in terms of gospel. I'm going to look some of them up.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Amazing, mate. There's a lot of discussion at the moment, mate, about quote unquote redefining masculinity, right? And I sometimes find it a little bit uncomfortable, depending on the person speaking about it, to be honest, whether I feel they have good intentions. And you give a great definition of what, in your opinion, healthy masculinity is, right? You say, quote, healthy masculinity is about strength with responsibility, courage tempered by compassion, ambition guided by ethics. And this is something that I'll refer back to and reference a lot of pods in the future, so thank you for that. I'm going to note this one down. How did you come to that definition, mate?

SPEAKER_02 27:06

A lot of thought, reflection, different reading, you know, seeing different definitions. But also, I did want to respond to the critics and, you know, the academics, to the feminists. I think one of the aspects of the war on masculinity is men have have stepped back. We've been pushed back. We've been told not to speak, not to mansplain, you know, just to get out of the public square. What you think and what you say doesn't matter. That has really hurt boys and young men. And what it's also done is, in a way, emasculate men of all ages. But it's also given up the language. We've seeded what it means in modern society to be a man and what masculinity is. And that's really tragic socially. And I'm encouraging men and women to lean in and have these conversations because there's no program to be a good man or to transition to manhood or of what healthy masculinity is. Say we took all these books and all this content and we just dumped it into an AI large language model. Is that going to be an example of healthy masculinity? Or will that AI model transition to manhood? No, of course not. Because a key to understanding masculinity is that the individual proponent has to modulate those things. When do you display strength? When do you display compassion? And this is why Jesus Christ is such a powerful role model, the servant leader who washes the feet of his worshippers, of his disciples. It's not a dominant, scary, overly powerful role model of masculinity. Jesus has amazing emotional intelligence, amazing ability to communicate, amazing ability to interact and lead and inspire other people. And that really did help me to understand more about unpacking masculinity. I think now modern men need to lean in, and we've got to retake ownership of what manhood is, what healthy masculinity is. We've got to stop listening to all these bullshit academics tell us that toxic masculinity is the main thing we need to be aware of, and that all men are violent and you know tell teenagers that boys are innately damaged and harmful under the girls of precious. It is a psyop, right? But men have allowed that to happen because we stepped backwards. Instead of leaning in and having these uncomfortable conversations, instead of being asserted and exercising healthy masculinity, we leaned out. And that's been tragic for boys and young men.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

What you said there, you know, I'm not I'm not a Christian, but what Bible story did come to mind was that there actually is a story in the Bible from memory where Jesus does show anger when he's in the church, and I think there's market sellers or someone exchanging money and he gets angry at them and tries to chuck them out of the church from memory. So I think we've also, in a way, through the last kind of 20 years, we've also demonised anger because anger is an emotion which can be used negatively and it can also be used positively, right? I use this quote quite a lot, and it's by a guy, a comedian who ended up getting cancelled quite a few years ago, and he said, when you see a man angry, he's crying. And that really spoke to me. What does that speak to you, mate? Hmm.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But um yeah, it does make me reflect. I think there's some truth in it. I think unfortunately, some leftists and male feminists will basically say you can never be angry. Any expression of anger is toxic, it's negative, it's antisocial, it's harmful to females. That's bullshit. Anger's necessary, it's a part of the human condition, and particularly for males, because we have different physiology, we have different hormones. Like we are primed to protect, and there are times when you need to display that. So I've been in men's groups where some men have said any example of anger is unacceptable, it's uh a detriment individually and to all males. No, it's not. Anger's a a normal expression, a human expression, and it's very common, and well, we need to modulate it, right? What we need to do as men is that we need to navigate those situations. There are some times when it's healthy and needed to express that. There are other times when we need to take a few seconds and a big breath and redirect and think about what the options are in this situation.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

What was really refreshing and lovely when I read through the book, mate, was you referenced so many books I've read as well, or podcast guests I've interviewed. So for the latter, the likes of Stephen J. Shaw, George from the Tin Men, Freddie Debore, Dr. James Nuzo, who I'm having on the podcast very soon. Well, I say very soon, I've done the podcast, it'll be out very soon, as well as, you know, other women like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, who I don't always agree with, but they do make some good points here and there in their books. What did you take from all of these very briefly that shaped your perspective in the book more widely?

SPEAKER_02 32:29

They just fill out all those perspectives. They give you different things. I guess I haven't drawn on a lot of strongly leftist or pro-feminist manifestos. I've taken more of a critical view to those things. And that's, to be honest, because I haven't seen that. I haven't seen many books or many articles or many mainstream media coverage which actually honours more traditionalist conservative perspectives, which which really honours innate masculinity as I see it. I've seen a lot of stuff which tells men to change that what you are isn't good. That's what I've taken from a lot of those thought leaders and speakers, and I love that many of them do podcasts. Jim's a good friend of mine, a good mate. We support each other. So I'll look forward to when uh that conversation actually drops. It'll be great.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

I'll send it over to you, mate. I want to ask these next two questions in two parts because I'll provide a counter-argument in one and I'll support your argument in another. And I want to provide the counter-argument first because there's one part of the book where you reference a host of different influencers, content creators you believe are helping the conversation. Now, there's some people there who are doing a lot of good stuff. For example, I think it was Amala Ek Penobi, Sidney Watson. Obviously, I don't agree with everything they say, but I think they're by and large on the money. But you also reference some pretty controversial ones. For example, like Hannah Pell Davis, who started doing some really good conversations about men and women on her podcast and YouTube channel, then she kind of went completely left and started saying women shouldn't have the vote. You referenced Candy Sowings. I mean, that's a whole fucking other dumpster fire, to be honest. Do you regret including those latter two in the list? How do you reflect on that?

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Well, just because you mentioned someone doesn't mean that you agree with every single thing they've said at every life. So I listed what was it, over a dozen? Was it 15? Something like that. And the point I was making was there are a lot of conservative young female influencers, and they are honouring masculinity in males in a way that we weren't seeing in say mainstream media now or even on the internet a few years ago. So it's fascinating that there's like a cluster, uh quite a large group of them there. So, mate, I mean, it doesn't trouble me. It doesn't keep me up at night. I don't lose sleep over it. You think it would? And and actually, you know, you might know that Candace was blocked from coming to Australia because she was just too spicy. Yeah. It's too dangerous to let Candace Owen into the country because what she might say something that would offend, or she might say something that's not true. That we're so fragile here that we can't listen to that and push back, or we can't debate that, or we can't be provoked by that. Our ears are just too tender and too, you know, too pure to hear what Candace Owen has to say, which is absolutely nuts because the internet has no borders, right? And this is the thing with younger people. Like, they're not consuming mainstream media. So YouTube, for example, borderless. Once you start consuming content, it has no real, you know, drawback to geography. I haven't lost sleep, mate.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Not on that one. You also critique some pretty bonkers arguments on another side of the debate, mate. For example, in April 2025, the War on Beauty YouTube channel, run by a woman called Julia James Davis, published a video called Why We Need the Patriarchy. Now, I'm sure the women of Iran and Afghanistan would have a lot to say about that video. And this argument feels just as equally dumb, in my opinion, as those arguing that patriarchy in the West specifically is this octopus-like theory which permeates and controls everything, subjugates, oppresses women, despite all the statistics and facts that you've pointed out so far. Would you agree with that or am I wrong?

SPEAKER_02 36:22

It's completely different which country you're looking at. So, say for example, in Afghanistan, well, of course I'm a proponent for girls' education in Afghanistan, because there are real disparities and there are real barriers, right? If I had a daughter in Afghanistan, I'd be aghast. I probably would be looking to get out of there. I'd probably be looking to move to the West, because in the West, we have this amazing abundance and choices and freedom. But it's completely different, right? So in Australia, there are 64% more female graduates from university than male graduates from university. But those numbers in Afghanistan are going to be completely in the opposite direction. And this is what gets missed. Say when we look at the Global Gender Gap Report, which is a real interesting report, because every country's, you know, like not at parity, but they only have a one-sided view of that. So the only way to get to parity with the global gender gap report is to have on every single metric women doing better than men. That would be 1.00, and which is their perfect, no disparities. It's parity in terms of the global gender gap report. But in the West, women live a lot longer, they get better education, they have better health outcomes. They don't die from suicide. Like they have one-twentieth of the workplace deaths and a whole range of other things which are in their favour. So what you've got in the West is gynocentrism, but in some of these other developing countries or underdeveloped countries, you do have patriarchy. So it's not horses for courses. And you might have picked up, but early in the book, I mentioned that really I'm writing about the five English-speaking countries. And I'm not, I mean, I don't live in Afghanistan. I don't have the depth of understanding about many of those countries. What I do have is familiarity with what's going on in the English-speaking world. And so I did very narrowly sort of speak to that. But mate, in the sense of being a second-wave feminist, in those countries like Afghanistan, well, absolutely I support equality because they don't have it. But that's not the case in the West.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

And I think it's testament to you, mate, that you accept what you don't know and accept what you do know, and you write about what you do know. And that's just as important, actually, in this space as writing eloquently and providing evidence-based arguments. Because as I read through Adam Grant's book, amazing book, people have this misconception that if you say, I don't know, you're somehow saying you're dumb or you're uninformed. You're actually saying, no, I don't know about this. So therefore, I'm not going to speak about it. I might go away and read about it and then I might come back to it. But there's a self-awareness there, which I think people are sadly lacking in these sort of debates. Is that something you'd agree with?

SPEAKER_02 39:08

Doesn't make good content, does it? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'll have to go look that up. It's not very doesn't get good engagement. Doesn't get lots of clicks and shares. You're much better off to be like overly bold and overly confident and just spit out some bullshit that sounds good. That'll get you more clicks on TikTok or on Insta.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

You mentioned it earlier in the book, so we'll come to it now. And one of the core tenets of the book is something you call the four horse women of modern feminism. So, first of all, what is it for the listeners? And second of all, when you characterize them, I know you probably answered this question, but were you ever worried that you'd be falling into the exact same trap many of the this is the only time I'm going to use this fucking phrase now because I fucking hate how much it's been profaged recently. The Manosphere have done with just blaming women for all of men's problems?

SPEAKER_02 40:01

Well, a careful reading of the book would show that I'm not blaming women. Of course. And so I wasn't, you know, so worried. I mean, of course I get called misogynist and sexist and all that sort of stuff. And that's by strangers who have no idea who I am or how I go about my life. They don't understand how I, you know, am a father to my son and my daughter, my marriage, my sister, my mum, and all those other things. But the book's not really about that personal journey. It's about much higher level social political issues and patterns. So the most talked about chapter in the book is chapter three, which is the four horsewomen of modern feminism. So it's clearly a spin there on the four horsemen. And it particularly personifies it. What it does, it takes these four tactics and it really brings them to life with modern-day examples. And you know, most of the examples I cite are 2025. They're very recent examples. I'm not going back to the 1990s like that misunder book did. So the four horsewomen, the first one is misundery, which is the open hatred and contempt for men. The second one is gamma bias. And this is a more modern concept, which comes from England, from John Barry and Martin Seeger. And essentially, it's a deep double standard that praises women for the exact same behavior that is condemned in men. So it's a real deep asymmetry of minimizing and maximizing of pro-female interpretations. And you can measure it. It's helpful to be able to measure these things. The third one is gynocentrism, which is at the social or the country level. So gynocentrism is about overall systems and it's about cultural habits of prioritizing women's needs and interests and perspectives above those of men, even to the extent of being more morally important. So a really pervasive, deeply felt, consistent bias towards females over males. And then fourthly, gaslighting, which most people would be familiar with, but maybe they haven't thought about it in the terms of male-female relations. And that's gaslighting psychological manipulation. It can even make people doubt their own experiences. So it's quite consistently concerted propaganda in one direction that's really trying to shape the way that people think and feel about their own world. And I take each of these individually and I give a whole bunch of examples about how they are exercised and used negatively, not just by women. I explicitly mention that these four tactics are used by men and women, and they are used against men and boys of all ages. And I also talk about how they can be used together. So just think about, you know, say I go into a group of men and women and I talk about male suicide. Well, you know, you could have the response of, oh, who cares? Like it's a pity that more men didn't die from COVID or who needs men? That's like misundery, right? Then you get gamma bias, which is the differentiation. So it might be a woman says, you know, what about all those attempted suicides? They are just, you know, more important, or there are there are more of them in volume. And she's trying to emphasize, you know, a moral superiority of harm to females in comparison to harm to males. Men complete more, but women attempt more, that would be the argument, right? Yeah. Yeah. Then you'd have, you know, people who make sweeping statements about empathy being more important for women and children, or that you need to protect women, but we don't need to protect men, even if there are more male victims in various categories, and overall there are domestic abuse. That's a prime example. So, mate, what I've done is is explain how each of these tactics has been used against males, and then I've talked about how they can reinforce each other. It's like a full court press. Like all these things are being used by unhearned. Extreme feminists to try and bombard with propaganda and through concerted manipulation to try and get money for their pet projects to keep their livelihoods to keep their academic roles. For example, UN Women is one of the worst proponents of propaganda.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

I was going to come to that.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Like constantly dripping out this stuff. And Jim Nootzo has done a fantastic analysis of 500 tweets from UN Women, and he draws some of these same themes out.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

For the listeners as well, so Gamma Bias, if we were to give an example of it, it would be say there's a news article that is a negative piece about men, it would explicitly say men or male or man in the headline. But if it was a negative article about women, it would say people, it would desect the article, so to speak. So that's the practical example of it. And there's loads of examples that you've given in the book, and there's other people who speak brilliantly about it, Dr. John Barr, for example, Martin Seeger. When it comes to gaslighting, there was an example that you gave from former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and she was talking about war victims. Can you just tell the listeners what she said and why, in your view, I'm obviously politically impartial here, why in your view it was so offensive?

SPEAKER_02 45:16

I do have to footnote, this was a comment made some years ago. But you remember she was on the public stage, you know, years, but over the decades. So she once told a conference, Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes that they have ever known. Interesting comment, isn't it? That you know, you've had all these young men, older men, boys sometimes killed, like extinguished in combat. But women are the primary victims. What's the intellectual and moral case and the framework and the thinking that gets to that point where you can say that? That shows how unhinged we are, how detached we are from a balanced perspective around males and females, that you can say something like that. And I'm guessing that she probably got cheered after she said that. But there's so much evidence which shows that men are by far the I hate to use the word dictum, but by far the casualties, and most of the harm was done to males.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Well, even if they don't die, they're coming back with potential post-traumatic stress injuries, they could be maimed, they could be permanently disabled for life, all that sort of stuff. And you know, just if I flipped the situation here, it would kind of be like saying, well, all these women who suffer from endometriosis or adenomyosis or the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, do you know who the real victims are in them? The men. And everyone would go, well, nah. I mean, obviously, if children are kidnapped, then the fathers are obviously hugely traumatized, but it's the children who are the victims first here. It's the women who are suffering from menstrual health issues that are the victims first here, not the men, not their partners. Come on, guys.

SPEAKER_02 47:03

And this shows how deep the empathy gap is between when you've got a male or female proponent. The key aspect of gamma bias is can you work out if you condemn or criticize the subject without knowing their biological sex? So if there's a victim of domestic violence, say we give you a case study, we talk about the situation, what's happened, you know, how they've been impacted, all those sort of things, but we don't reveal the sex until the very last line. And we ask for your compassion before you hear the sex. But can you actually respond before you know if it's a male or a female? Because if you can't, then it's indicative that there's a very deep bias. And then we can measure after you know. So we give the case study and we ask for the response. Do you feel empathy and compassion? Are you supportive? What do you think the right response is? And that's where we see this deep, deep, you know, dispersion of divergence. Yeah, divergence of the empathy gap showing itself in real life. It's measurable. There are lots of studies that have shown this. In fact, there are studies of bias that show the anti-male bias is much worse than the racial and um lower class, upper class, and other aspects of bias. So this has become entrenched, and it's particularly visible in left-leaning younger women. There's a very strong bias there, an anti-male bias. And that's deeply troubling for relationship formation, for both sides. I was going to say for the sustainability of our societies. And also about the gap that's opened up between young men and young women.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

And that's a whole other podcast as well, and what loads of people are talking about right now. I want to move on to something which you've spoken about earlier, mate, which is about this idea of kind of men stepping back, maybe fear of cancellation, like not worth the risk and all that sort of stuff, right? I'm a big believer and advocate in brotherhood on this podcast. Every man who comes on this podcast is my brother. How do we get better as men to support each other, fight back against this war on men, in your opinion, especially when we see our fellow man struggling?

SPEAKER_02 49:18

It's really hard because men are different to women. And in understanding that, people like John Barry, Martin Seeger, and Tom Golden, I'd highly recommend men are good for anyone who really wants to go deep on this stuff because he's got four decades of experience and he really understands the differences. So we're not going to do this by copying, you know, the copybook of feminism. It won't work. Because women have different ways of communicating and different ways of interacting. You try and get 20 guys to turn up to protest whatever it is, like boys' education.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

Mate, try to get him turned up to the pub, mate. He's hurting cats.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

Yeah. Whereas all you need to do is say, you know, International Women's Day function, and you'll get like 200 bookings, you know, within 10 minutes. And that's why there are so many of those functions. So what we need to do is we have to accept those differences. What we need to accept is that men are going to engage in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

Meet them where they are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:12

For example, that's why the manosphere is so important and why it's been there for decades. Because it's one of the few spaces where men can safely engage with other men without being judged and without being humiliated and stigmatized, where they can actually swap stories, where they can learn from other life experience, where they can find groups of people who have similar, you know, situations or outlooks or interests where they can engage. And also because you can connect to that when you're working, you know, 60 hours a week, or you're working away from home or on an oil rig, or, you know, when you're outside on the construction side or whatever, you can engage through your phone wherever you are, and you can dip in and you can watch stuff and you can share comments and things like that. So the online engagement is very important. And I think it's going to be predominant. We're always going to struggle to get those in-person groups. But there is a role for in-person or male groups. We have to proudly establish and foster and continue those. There are secular groups, there are religious groups, there are others, and there's coffees, there's dinners, there's once a month. It doesn't have to be onerous, right? A dinner once a month, pretty much everyone can commit to that. And your quality of life, your social connection is important enough to catch up with a bunch of guys once a month. And that space of being able to talk just with other men, not being judged by the female ear or the female gaze or whatever. Being able to open up and share and learn with humility from other males, that's super important. The advocacy's going to be different. We need to recruit and bring quite a lot of women in to prosecuting the case for bullshit men. And what that means is sometimes you're going to get blocked or cut off from the extreme men, the ones who are just so committed and passionate and just have a one-eyed view of the world.

SPEAKER_01 52:09

I've lost friends to it, mate. I've lost male and female friends doing this because I've gone to uncomfortable issues which some people don't want to touch. That's why I do it.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

Like to talk about this stuff, you have to be open to holding lots of different perspectives in your head at the same time. Brotherhood's a great concept. I I fully do engage with that. I think it's really valuable. The other one is elder males mentoring and sharing with younger guys, young men.

SPEAKER_01 52:35

I'm doing that a lot more now. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

I'll give you an example. For a boy to transition through adolescence into being a young man and eventually into manhood, that's going to take at least several loving older men who care about him, who love him, right? It might be six, it might be eight, I don't know. I don't know how many men. It's more than just his own biological father. He needs a number of other men out there to help him on that really challenging journey. So say he needs eight men at some time to help him through that. Well, that means as an older guy, a middle-aged guy or a you know a senior or retired man, well, we should be helping at least eight boys and young men and guys, you know, in their early 20s or teens or whatever. We should be helping at least that many, whether it's as a coach, whether it's as a formal mentor, whether it's as a sounding board, like as an uncle, or just to turn up, or just to give them a call when we know that things have been a bit hard and say, how are you going? Do you want to talk? Do you want to hang out? Do you want to do something together? Do you want to go fishing? Do you want to build something or fix something, like repair your bike or go ahead and go for a run? We should be doing that for at least six or eight or ten younger males at different times.

SPEAKER_01 53:52

This is a problem, mate, that I've talked about a lot on this podcast. Comes back to education, comes back to family breakdown. And I've spoken about this recently with Dr. Ashley Frawley on her part two podcast, which is the lack of male primary school teachers in the UK is massive. It's getting worse for secondary school teachers, although the problem's not as stark. And if you haven't got a strong male figure in the home or they're not present or whatever the situation is, you need it somewhere else, right? It might be a brother, but at the same time, it might need to be a teacher. It might need to be a sports coach. But if you're not into sports as a lad, that then becomes an issue. And when you've got a lack of strong male figures in a man in a boy's life, I should say, what then happens? They turn to negative male figures, or they don't have any and they're not able to, as you say, find that transition through adolescence, into manhood, into adulthood, and get that self-acceptance, get that suit of armor, and get that healthy version of their own masculinity because it comes in different forms and shapes and thrive as a person, as a man.

SPEAKER_02 54:56

Well, the loss. Socially, we have failed many boys and young men because that journey's fraught. That bridge across adolescence and you need getting checked.

SPEAKER_01 55:08

Yeah. You need getting checked, and these boys aren't getting checked. I see them in the gym all the time. I've got to check them. Why am I having to do it? I do it. But like, why do I have to do it?

SPEAKER_02 55:17

And they're not mature at 18 or 22. They still need those loving elder male influences around them at the right times when they need them. Masculinity is so complex. You can't just do the half an hour download and you've graduated to manhood. That's just not what it's like. You see it through how other people respond in situations. You learn it through trying things yourself and failing, and sometimes, you know, picking it up from others. So we've really failed those boys. I think there's a University of Warwick study, about a third of English schools not having male teachers. I'm not sure if it was primary schools or not, but there are cases here in Australia too. You know, we've got 18% of primary school teachers are male, and that's been falling. It's way too low. This is like psychology, where 80%, sometimes 90% of the students coming out of psychology are female. Well, how does that match up to your clients, to your beneficiaries, to the people in need? We're not meeting the needs of those groups of students and patients. So in education and health, in particular, you've got frontline engagements with lots of men and women and boys and girls. Surely, at that stage of service delivery and meeting the needs and understanding all of those different types of beneficiaries, surely you've got to have more men in that mix.

SPEAKER_01 56:41

And I've spoken a lot on this podcast as well, mate, about the importance of a male primary school teacher. I had when I was in primary school, I won't go into the story, but a very dark story, and he was a big reason why I was able to survive in that school and ensure that the incident was treated with and dealt with. And I hear anecdotally time and time again that when a lot of primary school kids in the UK see a male teacher step through the door, and this is boys and girls, by the way, their eyes sort of light up in a way that they sadly don't for some female teachers because they're just not used to it. They're just not used to it. And that's really sad. We need a mix, don't we?

SPEAKER_02 57:22

Of course. Because, for example, I never had an inspiring English teacher. All of primary school and all of secondary school. I never had an English teacher who lit that flame and really resonated with me. I I had a good female chemistry teacher, but all of the other inspiring teachers I had were male. And a couple of administrators as well were male. All of them. So, you know, we're not meeting those needs. We need a mix. You need a mix through primary school and through secondary school. You know, you need some male and female English teachers, you need some male and female math teachers, you need some male and female across all those areas, especially humanities and those areas that typically cluster around being female. Also in terms of behaviour management and the playground. With our own kids, what I've found really valuable is often it's been a male and female staff member who've been navigating those challenging situations. And what that brings is say you've got, you know, like a deputy principal and a class teacher, one's male, one's female, and then you've got a mother and a father. So you've got sitting around the table there, two men and two women, two parents and two teachers. You've got a lot of different perspectives there that can appreciate what boys are like, the testosterone and the energy and the way that they like rough housing, the normal behaviors of boys and girls, you know, the emotional abuse that girls dish out to each other and say girl bullying and boy bullying.

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:50

And that's what's needed to navigate these really challenging behaviour issues. It can't just be between a female class teacher and a mother dealing with the boy. What chance have they got to understand what he's going through? And I'm not sure it's talking about feelings, because we over-emphasize feelings in males, because that's the language that females use. That's what they relate to. To have that holistic conversation, it needs male perspectives in there. That's like primary teachers, administrators, whether it's across the whole year level or the top of the primary school or whatever, you've got to have male and female influences in there. That's the only healthy thing that will meet the needs of our children.

SPEAKER_01 59:38

This brings us nicely into my final section, mate, before we reflect, which is about solutions. We spoke for this entire pod about problems and this relentless war on masculinity. And I'm a big believer in providing solutions on this podcast. And you're doing it yourself, by the way, not just in the book, but some of the other things we'll get into. So, one of them you've taken further action with is founding the award for men in leadership in 2023. How did that come about and what qualities in men does it reward?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:03

Probably like everyone else, I had seen hundreds of scholarships and awards and conferences and celebrations of, you know, women in leadership. And when I went looking for what's there for male graduates, what's there for mid-career, you know, male professionals, for male managers, aspiring male leaders, it was bugger all. That's an Australian term. I don't know how it translates across, but it's it'll be the same. It's it's this one. It's the big donor. So I was looking at and going, whoa, that's really unbalanced. And I did want to put something out there in the market that was gonna get a bit of attention and be notable because it was so absent prior to stepping into that space. And I had a fantastic response to it. Of course, I got a bit of criticism about patriarchy or why do you need to or male CEOs or whatever. But actually, when you look in in Canberra, the city that I live in, it's pretty much a female-dominated labour market. It's public service. Every level of the public service has female majority. So it's not as if there's much support there. I heard stories, for example, about men joining the public service and having zero mentors and having being so ignored or not catered to that they were leaving in a short space of time. So you go through all this effort of recruiting people, and they do it sometimes just for numbers, and that they felt so disheartened and dissatisfied with that work environment. It was overt to them that the FEMA graduates were getting the opportunities, the mentorships, the acting roles and promotions and other things. So I put this out and I had a fantastic response. Like dozens of young guys reaching out and wanting to be part of it. And the four award recipients so far, incredible men of different ages from their 20s through to their 50s, really deeply involved in their communities and their families, making a massive contribution. And I've been celebrating them. And I've been telling people that these men are doing great things, that they deserve recognition, and it has helped to like change the conversation, make people think in a more balanced way about how we support everyone in the workforce. I think it's been a modest success.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:29

Well, here's the many more years of success for it, mate. You've also started a new project recently called the Celebrating Masculinity Project. So tell me more about that, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:38

So that was last year in the lead up to releasing the book. And what I realized was that to get engagement, you do need positive content. If you want to bring in a lot of centrist women and mothers of boys and grandmums and that sort of thing, you've got to have positive, uplifting content. And actually, one of the interesting things about older women, they freaking love masculinity. They love men who are men shock. Like they absolutely lap this stuff up. And so, you know, for example, when I shared um that Dax, the extended remix, I shared that the biggest cohort that warmed to that, older women, their 50s and 60s. Like that emotionally connected to a lot of women, younger women not, men of most ages, but particularly older women listened to that and it really touched them deeply in their heart. So the celebrating masculinity, you can find it on Substack and Facebook's pretty big, LinkedIn and X as well. And it's about pushing out positive content about boys, young men, men. It's about really celebrating the great things about what men contribute to our societies. And that's likable, shareable content that you can actually safely click on that when you're at work and you can forward and amplify that. And one of the fantastic elements which has helped to push that along, one of the quite prominent female leaders in Australia is a lady called Kelly Sloan. She's in the most popular state of Australia, New South Wales, and Sydney is the capital city of New South Wales. Kelly Sloan is the leader of the opposition, so she's quite high up in the parliament of New South Wales. She's got three sons of her own. So she's got super skin in this game. She really deeply cares. And she's been willing to talk about how challenging it is for young guys to navigate education and get into work and relationships and all that sort of stuff. Because she understands it as a mother. And she loves her sons and she cares about it deeply. She named a parliamentary secretary for men's health. When she went on radio to talk about that, she actually said that we should be celebrating masculinity. And I was like, yes, it's getting through. It's gone mainstream. You're an influencer now. People are talking about it. Instead of denigrating, let's celebrate masculinity. I was punching the air when I heard that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

It was like a rain dance on the Ashes test, mate. Too much of the mainstream conversation, in my opinion, mate, talked about men and male suicide from a crisis intervention perspective, not prevention. And you reference a quote often attributed to South African Anglican Archbishop and East London Cockney rhyming slang legend Desmond Tutu. And he says, quote, there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. How do we go about doing this, in your opinion, mate?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:50

The first step is to have empathy. It's actually to deeply care about boys and men in the same way. That we care about girls and women. As a parent, care loves equally their son and their daughter. And it's not just this cerebral thing about it. We have to demonstrate that and exercise that. And that's what's so powerful about the Finnish case study, where they spent a whole year looking at every single instance of suicide in a year, male and female. And they put together these really thick dossiers. They went out and actually interviewed people and gathered that information. That's empathy in action.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:35

Yes. I didn't just tell them to do more saunas because they love that and they could have easily gone to a platitude, but no, they took action in a different way.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

And what that helped them to understand was where are the clusters, where are the pockets? What are the repeating cases that come up here? And it led a unique response, which was really grassroots and community level. You know, it was actually going to particular industries and employers, out to the regions, out to the countryside, to churches, to civic organizations, and to other nonprofits. And it was about building awareness, getting people on site. It was about very granular responses. It's not just like you pay for some social media ads and then you're done. It was actually several levels below that and really nuanced. So, you know, in Australia, for example, the Bureau of Statistics collects the drivers and factors that they try to ascertain for each case of suicide. These are enlightening, right? They show up the differences between male suicide and female suicide. They've they've got a pretty good understanding by age and cohorts. And so that's really the first step. But it's crucial, like you say, to go earlier. So if we're only trying to catch this at a doctor or GP or at the emergency department, clearly that's way, way too late. That's downstream. It's after the bodies are floating or they're going downstream. So we need to catch them before they leap into the water. And if you think that's really challenging with men, you might only get one chance. Like one serious comment or conversation. We have to pick it up at that stage and wrap our arms around and triage and divert at that point. And that's where brotherhood's so important because who is likely to be aware of this? Your best mates, old friends, high school, you know, pretty open, you know, sharing. Maybe you exercise with them, maybe you catch up for a beer or something like that. We need to care about our mates and look out. There are times when we need to be particularly aware, lose a job, business failure, relationship breakdown, separation from your children, all that sort of stuff. So there's a lot of awareness and education, you know, which I think is great. The conversations have opened up about this. There's some really fantastic intersectional work being done about the particular risk factors and the males who are most at risk. So we're getting there, but a lot more work is needed.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:13

100%, mate. And just for the listeners as well, those Finnish prevention methods resulted in their suicide mail rate cut by 60%. So proofs in the pudding. I want to finish on a question, mate, before we reflect on my favourite quote from the book, which was this To rebuild a healthy society, we must recognise that men and women are not enemies. Our futures are intertwined. Policies must be designed to strengthen families, encourage stable relationships, and support both sexes, not pit them against each other. The goal isn't to recreate the past, but to move towards a future of genuine partnership. Are you still hopeful for that future, mate? You have to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:55

I have to be as a parent, as a husband. That's what we're here for. To sustain and nourish the next generation. I was profoundly changed becoming a father to a son and a daughter. My outlook shifted from short-term consumption, selfish, to the future decades down the track. Like, what's the world going to be like for my kids? How are they going to get along? What's the quality of life going to be for them? And we need to be honest too. What was sold as progress over the last few decades? Some of those things were not progress. Some of them were regressive. Some of those things have been super harmful to women as well. They've cut off opportunities for women and girls. And, you know, for example, there are some women who waited too long and who missed out on the chance to be mothers. And there's a window there. There's a good window in your 20s to do that. If we indoctrinate people and we push them away from what's biologically healthy and has worked for thousands of years, is that a service or a disservice? So the honesty about what's in your long-term interest of the whole society, that's the crucial thing. And you can only have that with a mindset of collaboration, of building and being positive and working together.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:23

Yeah, Lisa Britton, our mutual uh connection, she's talking a lot about this right now, and good honor. It's a very brave thing to do, and she's challenging a lot of established standpoints on it. I want to reflect now, mate. It's been a brilliant conversation so far. What's been your proudest achievement on this professional journey? That's really tough.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:42

It's really hard. I'm not sure. I think what I'm most proud of is that I've opened up thousands of conversations that needed to be had.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:53

And as a final question before we move on, what has this wider journey also taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:02

Well, humility. I mean, I've read a lot of books, but after actually writing a book, you put yourself out there in a way that it's in black and white and you can't retract it. So I really appreciate the authors, the writers, the thought leaders who've come before me to stand on their shoulders and to keep pushing forwards. Don't take it for granted. It might take you three hours to read a book, but it probably took 3,000 hours to put that down and to get it out there. There's a lot of work that goes into it. So yeah, I guess in the past, I've sometimes been a bit flippant or a bit critical about authors and what they've done. But uh, this is like your own parents, you know. You only really have deep gratitude and respect for your parents after you have your own kids and you get the bap chat and lacks discipline and all that sort of stuff. And I'll tell you one of the worst things is when you see your worst traits played out in your own children, that's humbling. And that's when I have reflected back on my mum and my own dad, and I think I'm so grateful for how much effort and love and care and nurturing and kicking me up and all that stuff that they put in.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:27

We've talked all about your professional journey and your incredible book, mate. Let's go deeper and talk about your own mental health journey. And you've covered it a little bit of it already, but I ask all my special guests on this topic this question first. Take it back to early life in Australia, teenagers, and looking back, were there any early mental health experiences? If any, who's the David we meet here?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:49

I had a pretty good childhood, very fortunate, stable family, had a sister, very supportive parents, all that sort of stuff. And it was really, you know, after leaving Adelaide, moving interstate and going to Canberra and taking up that scholarship, that was the biggest challenge. Because I sort of got by. I got okay grades, played a bit of sport, you know, done all those things, pretty normal stuff. And I'd always done okay. But when I moved across to Canberra, it was the first year of uni. I was 17 and a half when I started university, so I actually wasn't supposed to be drinking on O-Week. And there's actually quite a cold winter here. And what I struggled with was it was dark really early, it was cold. I had like 36 contact hours, I was away from family and friends and all that sort of stuff. And I failed a subject, and it was the first subject I'd ever failed in school. My sort of ego, my worth was wrapped up in academics because I'd done really well in school. I'd got this scholarship, I was like going there, I was on a path to somewhere. And that was a real massive hit to me emotionally, to my ego, to my, I guess, my identity as a student. And it massively knocked me around. And I didn't have the support networks there to help me at that time. And so there's a lot of rumination. I felt a bit of shame about it, like I was letting my parents down, you know, like I wasn't, you know, the good scholarship student that they had expected to come on and just sort of ace everything and just not have any problems. So it really hit me and it coincided with that winter when you you get things like seasonal affective disorder. It's it's a real thing. And it just sort of all came together, probably into my depression. It was never diagnosed. I didn't really even understand it at the time because I was 18. You know, it was just too young. I wasn't emotionally literate enough and socially mature enough to really know how to respond to that. And it took like a decade to fully comprehend what had happened and to reflect back on it.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:57

I just want to go a step back, mate, and come back to your parents there, because you spoke about them earlier in the pod. And you said to me off air you had a strong sense of social justice instilled in you as a value, the old school definition of it, maybe not the bartardized term now. How did that manifest in the values you hold now and your behaviors shaped by your parents?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:18

Well, I grew up in a Christian family, but also my parents were missionaries. So there was an aspect of this mission of going overseas, living your values, you know, not just sort of donations at church and platitudes and virtue signaling, but sort of deep exercising those.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:38

As to practice what you preach, no pun intended. It is, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:41

It was. It was both in the church and in the community and doing good service, you know, in a range of different ways. And it was about responding to the vulnerable, to the weak, to the disadvantaged. It was all that sort of stuff. And in particular, you know, coming out of second-wave feminism, strong feminist themes in our family about uplifting women in education and work and all that sort of stuff. But also how you prosecute that case, what you need to do, how you need to lift girls and women up. And so I had a really strong concept about how you could practice social justice in your life. And it was before the bonkers crazy social justice activism. This was sort of like well-intentioned and from the heart and actively practiced. So I was aware of all those things. But like I said, I started taking a strong interest in boys' education 30 years ago. And what I gradually became aware of was these huge disparities for boys and men: the longevity, the health, the mortality, the suicide, the lack of follow-through to universities and disengagement and addiction and risk. So I use those tools and those approaches, the social justice toolkit, for men and boys, for a different target audience. So that's essentially what I've done, is it's not complicated. It's just I've seen those things. It's a different time now. It's not 1960s anymore. A lot of stuff has changed.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:20

Coming back to that period where you were depressed, and like you said, it took you a good decade to really fully realize what had happened to you and the feelings you had gone through. You said to me on fair, it was the most empty three years of my life in that period. So, A, what got you through it? And B, what did you learn about yourself after coming out of it?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:43

So that empty three years was a little bit later. We'll come back to that. That period at university, it was very empty, maybe I don't know, a year or two. And I really fell back, you know, on re-engaging with my parents from a distance and also the trying to build those friendships, the people that I knew and trusted who were around me. And like I said, I was I was very fortunate that there was a a very stable influence that was managing that scholarship program who really stuck with me. And I knew she believed in me. I knew that she was there for me whenever I needed to chat. I knew I could be honest with her and didn't need to hide anything. So events, yeah. I was just fortunate to have those things there, and it was enough. And I guess in retrospect, I wouldn't be so hard on myself because what I recognize now is you know, teenage boys, young men, often it takes longer to mature. And you can measure this in terms of prefrontal cortex. So cognitive ability and those connections just aren't there for a lot of guys. And so I wouldn't be as harsh on myself. I'd really just sort of step back and go, okay, maybe this is telling you something. Maybe this particular path isn't the right one now. What else is out there? Where can you find something you're good at or you want to do, or where you can recover that confidence and get back on track again? And like I said, I changed course a couple of times. It was a good two and a half years or so from starting university to really getting back on track. And yeah, would it be good to have more family and more closer friends and support networks around at that time?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:24

Well, you corrected me there brilliantly because uh I read my own notes wrong on that question. So the period post-graduation was when you actually had that really empty period of your life, mate. So again, same question as before. I'll ask it right this time. How did you get through it? And what did you learn about yourself after that period too?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:42

So one thing I'd just mention, you know, I left uni in 99 and started full-time work. I had had a whole bunch of jobs before then, but but sort of my first graduate role was in the year 2000. And there wasn't a lot of focus on mental health and psychosocial, you know, risks and that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:01

Different universe, mate.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:03

In fact, it was quite an alpha, sort of highly competitive environment. There were women in that team of 40 people. There were some exceptional women in that team, but it was pretty much a blokey culture that you would expect from financial services 25 years ago. So there wasn't a lot of empathy there. It was really about you've got to perform, you've got to work hard, you paid a salary, you just got to work the hours you need to work. So I quite happily did the all-nighters and the weekends and lots of hours as a young person being single and without kids. Didn't bother me at all. So I found my way through there. But like I said, there were some obstacles in the way, like getting made redundant and getting ditched a day before my probation came up and stuff like that. I mean, somehow I was able to navigate that because I was a bit older and a bit more sensible. And I knew that, you know, I had the confidence. I I knew that I could find a job. I knew that if one avenue ended, that there'd be some other things out there. I had had that life experience and that resilience by that stage. And that did help me land on my feet. And, you know, when I was working for that second startup, it was a fantastic journey. It was almost as good as you could hope for. Like six people in a room with a plan and no money. And we made it work. And actually, there was this unity, like everyone was on the same piece of paper. We all knew what we had to do, and we just did it. We didn't question it. But then once the business sale went through, there was a real anti-climax because you know, everything we'd been working for, we'd achieved. We'd done funny Nemo. Now what? Yeah, yeah. Now what? And it's quite a difference. Like when you're on this upward trajectory, you're getting promotions, more money, bonuses, you know, more status and accolades and all this sort of stuff. So you're going up here, you're floating. It's fantastic, it feels really good. When you start to plateau, or in fact, you know, what happened with us was after the sale, we lost a couple of clients. So the revenue actually went down after the sale. And so things went from being fantastic to actually being in the shitter. And like I said, a couple of my colleagues got essentially promoted upwards and they got designated as the future leaders of the organization. And, you know, other people, some of them left, some of them quit straight away, others stayed, some of them left over time. I hung it out, I kept going because I wanted to, you know, fulfill that, I wanted to get to the end, I wanted to serve out that period when I was on a retainer and I had a payout at the end of it. But the money wasn't enough by that stage. Like, if you don't have purpose and meaning in what you're doing for your work, money alone isn't enough. And a funny thing happened during that time. I was disengaging from work. So first I went to four days per week and then three days per week, and I was finding these other things that were sustaining me. So that was part of my response. You know, I was a lot more mature by that stage. I was realizing that if work wasn't meeting my needs, I had to find that in my kids, or I had to find that in the bike club. And what I did find it in was in advocacy. And I realized after a few weeks of doing this, I was setting my alarm for like five o'clock and four o'clock in the morning. And I was getting up and I was doing this advocacy for road safety because it's quite dangerous to ride a bike in Sydney with millions of cars and narrow roads and all that sort of stuff. And I was in this bike club, and a lot of my mates were having incidents where cars and trucks were going very close to them. There was one club member who passed away. There were others who'd had accidents and been hospitalized. And so I was highly aligned around helping my mates, men and women, because particularly women were scared of riding on the roads in Sydney. So I found myself setting the alarm for like five o'clock and doing two hours of road safety advocacy before the kids woke up, and then going into work and working a normal day, and then coming home and mostly just thinking about how could I progress this advocacy? How could I do that? And the weird thing I realized was there was no money in it. Zero money. In fact, I was putting some money into it at the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:23

I was the money's meant to help either, mate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:26

But you're passionate about something. That's when you realize that the money's not motivating you anymore. And I I really found conviction at that point and found the confidence to walk away from financial services completely and to lean heavily into nonprofits and governance and advocating and passion projects, stuff that sustains your spirit, your soul, your heart, you know, stuff that drives you. And so many people in this space of men and boys are passionate, both men and women.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:03

And as boxing promoter Eddie Hearn famously says, no passion, no point. Love it. Let's reflect on your mental health journey now, mate. So, similar question as before. What has this mental health journey taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:18

Well, I've been able to read between the lines with me and with other people. So I'm a lot more aware now of why I might be experiencing some fleeting emotion or why I'm a bit nonplussed, why I'm a bit bored of something, you know, why other people might argue or promote or emphasize particular things in their interactions. And it's filled out that whole picture about people. Like I'm a lot more accepting now, even with my own kids. I thought I'd be a target dad, but actually, if they can find some things that they enjoy and they're good at, if they can find a couple of things they excel at, I think that'll be a win. Like I'm not hung up about you've got to play in the top cricket team or get straight A's or whatever, or even about university, really. I mean, you can have a fantastic life and be a decent person as a tradee, as you know, as a mum. Motherhood's one of the most crucial things you can ever do with your life and a father. So I accept myself, I'm much more aware, and I'm able to interact with other people with that bigger picture of lots of different things being normal.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:34

And as a final question before we move on to our quick fire mental health chat, if you could go back and talk to that 18 or 19 or even 17 and a half year old David who was struggling with homesickness, missed his friends, missed his support network, the 21 year old David who was wondering what to do with his life, feeling a bit empty, feeling like he didn't have meaning, or the David wondering whether to take that leap and write the book, what would you say to him? Knowing what you do now, if anything at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:04

It's okay. You're a good person. Keep having a go. Go have a bike ride. Do something you enjoy. It'll all work out.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:18

Our final topic of conversation, David, and it's one I try and have with all of my special guests, if we have time. It is a general Natter and quick vi chat about our mental health. So, firstly, how is your mental health out of ten?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:30

Six or seven. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:34

And what would it need to be to be an eight?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:38

I've got to lift the exercise and the healthy habits. Yeah, that's a big one. And rebalance a bit. I've been a bit leaning into some things and it's been taking away from other parts of my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:51

What age were you when you became self-aware of your mental health for the first time and you realized that the feelings you were having weren't physical and they were actually in your mind?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:01

It started in my late 20s, but it was really going through my 30s when it got better and better.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:07

Well, there's no right or wrong age. So was it a eureka moment or a gradual process?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:12

It was a gradual process over time. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:15

Can you also remember the first or most important conversation you ever had with someone about your mental health? So if you can remember, who was it with? What did you say? And how do you look back on it? Did it feel like the stereotypical big weight had been lifted? Or on the other, something quite easy, natural, and normal to do?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:34

There are a lot of conversations, but the one I want to mention actually is when my kids were young, I was in a bike club in Sydney, and we used to ride up to the national park, like beautiful scenery, and often with other guys similar age, also with young kids. And I have to say, they were some of the best conversations for mental health I've ever had. When you're just looking down at the road or up at the horizon, no eye contact, shoulder to shoulder. Yeah. Half an hour. You got common interests and experiences, and you're like, no one else is going to listen to us. We're just two blokes out here in the national park at dawn, and we've got time to talk. And I gotta say, I got more value from those than I could possibly have had from any type of counselling or psychologist or any sort of formal services, dad groups or libraries or anything like that. They were gold, and I really treasure those conversations.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:31

And that, in a nutshell, mate, is why something like the walk and talk is so important for men and why I've had so many walk and talk organizations on the podcast because that is just, in essence, a brilliant part of it. Physical activity, goal in mind, no pressure, shoulder to shoulder, no eye contact. It's the best. What triggers, if any, mate, do you find that trigger your mental health? So it could be things people say to you, smell, sound, taste, sensation, or have you not figured all of them out yet?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:02

The one that really gets to me is negative mindsets. Like when people come to relationships and issues with a negative mindset, I find it really hard. I push back against it. I don't like it.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:18

Conversely, what positive tools and methods do you use to improve your mental health or help you feel better? Which ones have you found that have worked for you? And maybe which ones that you've tried but haven't worked?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:29

Yeah, I sort of alluded to this earlier. It's sort of like for me, it's a toolkit of knowing what your options are at that time. And it helps to have had a bit of age and a bit of humility because you've had the knocks and the ups and downs and learning from other people and seeing what's worked for them. But it's just being aware of, you know, at this time, I need to take a rank check. I'll have to come back to you later. I need to go out and have a walk. I need to sleep on this. That's just helped me in terms of maturity of. I guess when I was younger, I wasn't aware of just how big a toolkit there is. And yeah, I needed to learn what those things are, how to use them, when it's appropriate to bring a particular approach out.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:17

What is the best book, or as I call it, mental health Bible you've read for your mental health? Now it can be mental health or self-help related. It doesn't exclusively have to be, and it can also be fiction, anything you want.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:29

The two that come to mind, I mentioned mindsets and mindset by Carol Dwerk, I think. That's a fantastic book. Incredible book, really powerful. The other one is Flow by Mihali Sixent, I think is a Czech or somewhere from the Eastern Europe. It's got one of those long names with too many. Lots of Z and C's. Yeah, yeah. I can never pronounce it properly. But those two, Mindset and Flow, I resonated with those two, and I was like, yes, that works. I understand it. I've been there. It's super powerful.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:01

Mate, you give me a lot of books to add to my growing TBR. My TBR is normally about 50 books long at the moment. I tried to get it down to like 30, and every time I had about six more, got to say. If there was a mantra in life that summed up your mental health, mate, what would it be and why? Oh man. That is tough.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:22

Um let's continue on that same theme. Be the positive mindset. Be the constructive person.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:32

What do you love about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:37

Curious. I like learning. I like growing. I get bored super easily. It keeps life interesting. It's boring when you just keep thinking and saying the same thing. Shake yourself out of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:54

Yeah. Very much so. And as a final question, mate, in this brilliant conversation and podcast, I've absolutely loved every minute of it. What more do you think we have to do to ensure men from all backgrounds, all social classes, all walks of life feel comfortable and safe in opening up about the mental health issues or just their general mental health, if most importantly they want to do it?

SPEAKER_02 1:34:18

I love what you say, Freddie, about brothers. Brothers, we're in this together. Let's help each other. And we understand each other. We know how men think and can be supportive. And then working from that, men and women, we're in this together. We can't live separately. We are dependent. No one is independent in this world. We're all on the same journey. We're only going to get a good outcome of thriving and flourishing by working together.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:51

Well, that unifying message is a brilliant way to end this podcast, mate. David, it has been an absolute pleasure, privilege, and an honor. Thank you so much for coming on the Just Check In podcast and talking to me, mate. I've loved it too. It's been fantastic, Freddie. Well, that's all we've got time for on this episode of the Just Check In pod. A big thank you to David for being my special guest, for telling me all about his book and for letting me check in with him. I'll put some links to where you can purchase a copy of that book and follow him on social media in the show notes. As always, thank you to all the Ventors who've tuned into this episode. Remember, if you've liked what you've heard, give it a share on the usual social media channels by tagging us at VentHelpUK. Tell your friends, family or work colleagues about us. If you're feeling generous, write us a review and give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also support us further by going to patreon.com slash venthelpuk or make a one-off donation to our PayPal. All of those links are also on our link tree. That's linktr.ee slash venthelpuk. We hope to check in with you again very soon. And remember guys, it is always okay to venture.