Beyond the manosphere: Supporting boys and men in the real world

This message comes from Avalara. What's it like running a business with Avalara? No thinking about tax and compliance. It's handled. Calculating, filing, validating, accurately, and audit defensively. Avalara, agentic tax and compliance with confidence. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show, what does it mean to be a man today? And turning now to an issue our next guest has been sounding the alarm on for years. The current crisis facing boys and young men in this country. Our boys are in a crisis. Yes. This debate has been raging for a while. But since the twenty twenty four presidential election, it has intensified. Do you want men to be better, or do you want Phrases like toxic masculinity, the manosphere, or the male loneliness epidemic. They pepper conversations used to blame some and to rally others. It may start with simple ideas about being an alpha male or Toxic masculinity doesn't even exist. The only thing that is is that across a man or a bear. And the women, like, unanimously said, I'd rather come across a And men There are those who want to shout about these issues, but there are also people who would rather not talk about them at all. Honestly, I'm just sick of hearing about it. Why are men like this? Why is this the reason for the male loneliness epidemic. There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is a loser epidemic. Richard Reeves thinks there's a better way. Keep it boring. And as my son said to me one day, he said, well, if that's your motto, dad, you are definitely the man for that job. Burn. Exactly. I mean but it's but the point is actually by being quite dispassionate about it and just saying, look, these are facts and hopefully reasonably even handed. I think what it did was create a space for a conversation that was already there. It just didn't quite know how to break into the open. Richard is the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's also the author of the book, Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It. His interest in understanding what was happening to half the population started a decade ago. As a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, he noticed some troubling trends and a warning we do …