Name: Richard Reeves | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #562
Uploaded: 2025-02-14T13:55:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Richard Reeves | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #562' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Richard Reeves | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #562' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-14. Transcript available.

Richard Reeves | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #562

Today's guest is a writer and a social scientist. He's also a dual citizen. He's
the president of
the American Institute for Boys and Men. I'm grateful that he's here today.
Today's guest
is Richard Reeds.
Richard Reeds, thanks for joining us today, brother.
Yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here.
Yeah, we appreciate it, man. You want to move that in a little bit for me if
you don't mind?
Yeah, sure.
And you are British.
By birth, I'm American now.
Okay, you're American now.
Yeah, I became a U.S. citizen in 2016, so I'm very, very proud of this country.
Oh, welcome. Nice.
Thank you.
And you're the president for the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Yeah, new think tank. Like, God knows we need more think tanks, right? That's
what America's
really clamoring for. It's like more scholars sitting in think tanks, producing
charts.
Right.
Honestly, I was in another think tank for 10 years before that, the Brookings
Institution.
Huge think tank in Washington, D.C. Great job. And I got to tell you, it was
not in my life plan.
To be in a think tank?
To create another one. No, actually, being in a think tank is great.
Yeah.
But what that means is you basically just get paid good money to write stuff
and say stuff that you're
interested in.
And what happens to a lot of that information from think tanks?
Well, that depends who you ask.
If you ask the critics, they say it just gathers dust on people's shelves.
Yeah.
Right. Maybe like two people in Congress read it. One New York Times journalist
reads it.
And so there is this whole thing now that think tanks used to like produce
policy papers
and then grateful legislators, members of Congress would say, thank you. We'll
go and turn that
into a law. And ta-da. Right.
That's not how it works anymore. And so the whole question of how do you
influence
law? Like how do you influence policy? I think is a really big question now.
And so there's a big
question mark against this whole idea about quotes think tank. I certainly didn't
plan to start a new
one. But it seems like this one is important. That's one of the reasons, yeah,
that I wanted
to get to talk to you today. Because, you know, a lot of our listeners are men
and boys.
Right.
I know Scott Galloway was on and he had mentioned that you were kind of his godfather
of information
or somebody that he really looked up to, you know. And I did also see you're
born on the 4th of July.
Is that right? Correct.
Do they kick you out of Britain if you're on the one?
That would be great. I think it's just have a rule, right? Everyone who's born
on the 4th of July
gets automatic US citizenship, but then gets deported from from the UK. Right.
But it's so it's kind of
weird that because I've always had that. And then I actually came to the US in
the 90s to for the
Guardian newspaper. I was a journalist for quite a few years. I just always
loved America, ended up
marrying an American. Do you think it was because of your birthday at all or no?
You know, because it's just interesting. It would sound weird to say yes,
wouldn't it?
But if you think there's no such thing as a coincidence, I've always loved the
fact
that I was born on the 4th of July and now I'm here. It's great. Everyone has a
big party for
my birthday. And actually, one of the things that I've really thought about as
as an immigrant,
right? And I don't when you say immigrant, you probably don't think of someone
like me,
but I'm a proud immigrant is that people who are born here don't actually
appreciate
what it means sometimes to be a citizen and my citizenship ceremony, which I
did in a hurry,
actually, because I wanted to be able to vote and wanted to get into the, you
know,
get into the whole civic life. I was surrounded by people in tears, but really,
yeah, there's people
from Iran, there's people from Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever, refugees, a whole
bunch of different
people, some people from Mexico, and they're waving their flags and saying the
pledge of allegiance.
You're welcomed by the president. And there was there wasn't really a dry eye
laugh by the end of it.
And so I actually now think that every high schooler in the US
should go to a citizenship ceremony. That's a great idea.
Just experience it because I don't think if you're like if you're born here,
like you can take it a bit for granted what it means to be a citizen, but to go
and experience
what it's like for people to become a citizen, I expected it to be more. I had
a green card and I
thought, yeah, but I need it. I want to be a citizen as well. I actually was
incredibly moved
by the whole experience.
Wow. Yeah. You don't think about the gift of your own citizenship, right? And
you don't think
about what others go through to get it. Yeah.
And that, yeah, they used to have, I know whenever I was growing up, you had
the pledge of allegiance,
there was definitely a lot more, even though the pledge of allegiance was like
a small thing,
it's one of the like those traditional things that made you feel like a part of
something,
right? It was like a traditional practice that, that created a commonality
between,
you know, between kids. We kind of thought it was lame sometimes, but sometimes
you didn't,
you know, like at certain points of the year, if certain things were going on
in the culture,
it meant more to you, but yeah, that's just, that's also just a ritual. Yeah.
And I,
we've come to undervalue ritual. Oh, we're starting to, they erode from our
society.
The point of a ritual, right? It's not just like, you can overthink what the
words mean. You can
overthink exactly what it means, but there's something about just the ritual of
it. So, um, my,
my son is at the university of Tennessee and he, he explains, yeah. Um, but
actually when his friends
come down to a Tennessee game, what's, and they're say a Northeastern college
or a small
liberal arts college, what really strikes them is less the game. And it's more
the fact that there's
the pledge of allegiance, that there's a prayer, that the jets go over, that
there's fireworks,
that they come out through the tea. There's a whole bunch of ritual around it,
which is
actually really beautiful. And I think sometimes we overthink the content of
the ritual and don't
actually just recognize it's the fact of the ritual that really, really matters.
Yeah. It's like,
yeah, people start looking at, well, what are the words of the pledge of
allegiance? It didn't
matter. It was just that we got up. Do I mean every word of this? Right. We got
up and we did it together.
And I don't think there's anything wrong if you live in a country and you're a
member of it
to pledge allegiance to that country. I feel like, um, yeah, correct. You know,
like, because otherwise
then what are you? You're just, you're just a passerby. Are you like working
for another country?
Like what's your real modus operandi then I guess? Um, I have one friend
actually, who's from Israel.
And when he came, he gave up his Israeli citizenship because he believes that
you cannot have more than one
citizenship. You cannot have dual citizenship is a contradiction because you
can only be pledging
your allegiance to one sovereign nation. I love that. I love that too. And I
will confess that
I have kept my British passport. Oh, you have that. Yeah. So if you had to
choose, what do you do then?
Oh, U S no question. Wow. Yeah, I get it. I mean, there's a reason why everyone
really wants to come here.
Yeah. Dude, the rock lives here, right? You know? Yes. I mean, that's, is that
the main reason people
come here? No, I don't think so, but that would be a great idea if every class
had to go watch that,
had to go watch that ceremony. They always need volunteers of them as well to
like help
out with the paperwork and stuff like that. And so you could just have like
some going every time.
Like, I just think it'd be really nice before you graduate high school, like,
and I would just say,
anyone who's listening, right? If you're thinking about a good, cool thing to
do,
like volunteer at your local citizenship center and watch the people go through
the process of
becoming a U S citizen. And that might make you appreciate it. I can't believe
that it's not
mandatory. Um, like in classes or in school that you have to go see that maybe
that's something that
one of these think tanks could change, you know? Well, I proposed it, but let's
see if it'll change,
but, but we can do it ourselves as well. Yeah, we could. There's nothing
stopping us. Um,
you're the president for the American Institute for men and boys. So what is
that Institute?
So it's a research and advocacy organization. So what we're trying to do is the
basic premise here
is there are a lot of ways in which boys and men are struggling in our country
right now. And there
are no institutions. There's no organizations whose job it is to basically wake
up every, every day
and draw attention to that with data, with facts in a way that will hopefully
raise awareness of it.
It's this is this huge asymmetry. I, I, I really noticed it in the pandemic. So
when the pandemic
hit, there were a lot of reports about how it was going to affect women and
girls. There was a lot of
concern about employment, domestic violence, a whole bunch of real, real
concerns. Yeah. And a lot of
press coverage for that. And those were perfectly legitimate coming from women's
think tanks, from
the UN, from the white house, et cetera. But I noticed that actually the
college enrollment for men had
dropped seven times more than for women in the first year of the pandemic,
seven times difference in the
drop. Is that true?
It is true. And then the numbers got a little bit revised and it's partly
because the men were more
likely to be going to like trade school and stuff, which you just couldn't do
online. But it wasn't
just that it was just, it just, it hit male education harder than female
education. Number one, number two,
men were dying a lot more from COVID. Yeah. COVID was killing a lot more men.
You mean the actual disease or just the, like the loneliness or the,
the disconnection? Oh, the disease. Men were much more vulnerable to COVID.
Last time I checked, we'd lost at least a hundred thousand more men than women.
And that's not to be expected because actually it affected older people, right?
COVID killed older
people a lot more and there are more older women. So if anything, you think you
go the other way,
right? But it didn't because actually men were much, much more vulnerable to
the disease. And no one was
really researching that. No one was producing reports on that. No one was
writing articles
about that. And it really occurred to me that that was because it was no one's
job. Right. Right.
There wasn't an American Institute for Boys and Men, but I can assure you that
if we'd existed then,
we'd have been pushing out lots of information about how COVID was affecting
boys' education and men's
education and also killing men in massively higher numbers. Well, for sure.
Because I think also you,
you, um, I don't know if ever in my life, there's been like a, like a lot of
organizations where it's
like, Hey, men need help. You know, it's like, everything is that women need
help with this children,
you know, and it's certainly, that makes sense. Um, I always think back to like
women and children
first, like when the Titanic was sinking or something, or, you know, when
something like that,
it's like women and children first. Right. And that's probably what most men
would want as well,
but at a certain point you're like, Hey, uh, we exist. What are we doing here?
You know?
Yeah. Um, what was your, like, what was your first relationship like, like with
your dad or
something? Like when you were like, how did you like, just so we have a, some
personal, uh,
attachment to this conversation as well. What was it like with your dad when
you were a kid?
Cause that's usually your people's first male role model. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My
dad was amazing.
Oh, wow. Just amazing. Uh, a