Transcript: Zac Seidler

My interview with the Global Director of Men’s Health Research at Movember

In Toronto, where I live, you cannot walk a block without seeing a young man in distress — sleeping on the street, or slumped over from drug use, or shouting and screaming. It feels like something has gone very wrong for men in this country and that nobody is talking about it. My guest on the program this week has dedicated his career to men’s health, and he has some important insights to share, both from his professional life and from his personal life.

Zac Seidler is the Global Director of Men’s Health Research at Movember. He’s also an associate professor at Orygen centre for youth mental health at the University of Melbourne, and a member of the advisory council for the American Institute for Boys and Men. He recently joined Prince Harry for a Movember event in New York City.

Lean Out’s edited transcripts are for paid subscribers, but I have dropped the paywall on this one. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: It’s nice to have you on the show. It is November, and you are the Global Director of Men’s Health Research at Movember. I’ve been trying to encourage a conversation in this country on the crisis in men’s mental health. In the neighbourhood I lived in until very recently — it was right downtown — I could not walk a single block without encountering a young man in distress, sleeping on the street, slumped over from drug use, shouting or screaming. And then I know a lot of men personally who are struggling with a lack of meaning and purpose, and depression. We lost a family friend to suicide last year. I think this is something really significant going on in this country, but it feels like nobody is talking about it. So I wanted to have you on today to see if we could dig into this. I know from your recent report, The Real Face of Men’s Health, that American men aged 30 to 34 experienced an 85 percent increase in mental health problems over the past decade. Give us a snapshot. What does the research you have say on what’s happening with Canadian men?

ZS: We have a Canadian Real Face of Men’s Health report as well. We’ve done one in six countries now — no small feat for a moustache to travel around the globe and try to pin down some of these not only sobering statistics, but also really harrowing [ones] in many ways, when we start to consider the day-to-day lives of men and boys. I think that this has been a blind spot from a policy perspective, a funding perspective, a social fabric perspective.

Seemingly now — at least on my algorithm — I’m being flooded with content about the distress, the lack of role models, the addiction, that men and boys are facing. It seems to have reached this cacophony, and it seems to many people that it’s come out of nowhere. But the statistics have been stable, have been stagnant, for so long that I think enough people have been affected. We know, for instance, that when it comes to suicide, that 135 people are directly affected by a suicide. Now, when seventy-five, seventy-six percent of suicides in Canada, in Australia, in the U.S., are men, we have to start to consider the huge — it’s not a ripple effect, it’s a tidal wave — of impact that poor men’s health is having on our communities. And so for the past decade or more that I’ve been in this field, I’ve been screaming from the rooftops. I’ve been a clinician my entire career as well as a researcher. I’ve been able to see in the therapy room, and then in the bigger data, what is taking place. And it’s overwhelming.

Now people in power are realizing that their sons are going to, statistically, suffer far more than their daughters will when it comes to education, when it comes to life expectancy, when it comes to employment. We’re going, “Oh, wait a second, if boys and men don’t flourish, society doesn’t flourish.” Thriving is not a zero-sum game. Empathy is not a zero-sum game. I think we have, for far too long, done one group over the other — hierarchies. Look where that’s gotten us. I do not think that focusing on the plight of men and boys should come with shifting attention or funding away from the difficulties that women and girls and non-binary and LGBTQIA+ people face, or racial minorities. We should be able to chew gum and walk at the same time.

But this is a really dire situation. I’ve spent enough time in Canada, Tara. I have a lot of collaborators in Vancouver. We have an office in Toronto and a whole team there. The fentanyl crisis is wild, and the suicide statistics are overwhelming to consider. And nothing is moving in the direction that we had hoped. And so, front of mind for me is starting to find the antidote. We can speak about that. Because I think that there has been far too much — and I’ve done it myself, because it’s the thing that draws you in — there’s so much alarmism, there’s so much crisis, so much “everything is broken, we’re all deficient,” toxicity. This is not the way forward.

We need to realize — and this is where Movember steps in — we know, we’ve been sitting in the trenches with millions of men for twenty-three years. We know how bad things can get. But we see the power of connection. We see the ability to turn things around. We know what hope, flourishing, thriving actually looks like. We want to shift the conversation towards what men can do, what men can be, what is possible, as a means to overcome the situation that we find ourselves in.

TH: I think that is a really powerful message, and I agree that there’s a lot of alarmism going on. I do want to try to unpack some of the structural forces, though, and some of the cultural ones as well, so we can better understand what brought us to the point that we are at right now. We are seeing a decline in male educational achievement and male employment. What do we know about what is causing this?

ZS: I think at the core of all of this is disengagement. We talk about nihilism, which is thrown around a lot within the manosphere. This is the notion that there is nothing to live for, there is nothing happening. Everything dark and the world is against me, and therefore I need to somehow take back power and dominance as a means to get a sense of meaning and purpose. But I actually think that disengagement is a way better consideration here.

Men and boys are just disengaging from society. It is becoming an anti-social way of working. They are not willing to lean into new friendships — that equals disengagement. They are not willing to work in the traditional sense and they’re all trying to be entrepreneurs, and so there’s disengagement there. They are not willing to go to university because they’ve seen all of these guys who have made it without this hefty debt, so they’re disengaging there. Dating — complete and utter disengagement from engaging with the opposite sex. The thing that happens there is that the ties that bind, the things that keep us going, the life-giving and life-saving connections — as homo sapiens, we rely on this — [fade].

We are at a really unique point in time where young men especially, whether it’s fear, whether it’s a lack of motivation, whether it’s a de-prioritization of these things, they are turning away from the very aspects of life that are fulfilling, that give them purpose and meaning. They are distancing themselves from role models. They are really separating themselves into the darkness of the web that is really filled with purposelessness. It doesn’t have a sense of belonging. It is arbitrary the way in which algorithms move and shape you. It is so at odds with how you are brought up. And so, I think that really what’s happening culturally is that young men are losing a sense of self. They’re losing a sense of self. They are not cultivating identity. They are not meaning-making in the ways that you and I probably did during our teenage years and early twenties, where you push bounds, you try things, you test things, you travel, you try to work out who you are and what you want to be. And then, we have a huge media narrative saying, “Everything you touch is toxic, everything you do is bad, don’t do this, don’t be this.” So that drives and leads to more and more disengagement as well. They say, “What’s the bloody point? Why would I even try?”

TH: Toxic masculinity — I’m going to circle back to that [term], because I think that is really important. But you’ve talked about male isolation, and loneliness is a huge problem. We all deal with that now, but men especially. How much of this do you think has to do with things like the decline of unions and churches and recreational sports leagues, and then the rise of precarious work schedules? And how much of it has to do with the fact that we’re not seeing an emphasis on marriage in our culture and family formation is declining? How do we think about all these different elements at play?

ZS: My good friend Richard Reeves talks in great depth about this, and Scott Galloway has been going on every talk show, seemingly, to hit this on the head. I do think that it’s really unique. And there’s a great Gallup poll that shows that loneliness, in its purest sense, is experienced and expressed by men and women in very similar rates. Because any woman would say, “I know what loneliness feels like, I experience this.” This is not a male phenomenon, let’s be clear. It’s a relational phenomenon, such that the way in which people respond when they’re lonely becomes very gendered. And so when women experience loneliness, they go, “Oh shit, this sucks. I don’t want to feel this.” They pick up the phone. When men feel it, they go to shame, vulnerability, weakness, retreat. That is at the core of the problem here. Loneliness is a sign of the times. It is a symptom of the times. It is part of where we are right now, and suggesting that it’s just going to go away is not true. The way in which we teach young people to act in those moments when they’re feeling that [is key] …

It’s written in our DNA that we should be connecting with one another. Men are having it beaten out of them, such that it is so uncomfortable to feel that level of loneliness, to feel that isolation. It drives suicidality, it drives addiction. We know that fundamentally. And yet in the depths of their despair, that desire to reach out to others is overwhelmed by a fear of how someone else will respond to them. Whether they’ll be rejected, whether they’ll be called gay, whether that vulnerability will be thrown back in their face. That is a [social] more that we need to undo. That is not anything to do with a single young man. It’s to do with the perception of what men can and should be. So that’s really behavioural.

I do think then that what used to overcome some of those fears — because our fathers and grandfathers all had these same fears — but there were no questions asked because they went to church on the Sunday, they had Freemasons, whatever it might be, a sporting community. And now, we’ve got the rise of gaming. Which is actually really interesting, because we know, at Movember, that there is a lot of benefit to the gaming communities, the type of social-fabric creation that happens there. But lots of it happens, at least physically, without actually speaking to or sitting alongside anybody. And without Scouts … In Australia we’ve got Nippers, which is an awesome life-saving thing, going to the beach and learning how to surf and not drown, which is pretty useful in this country. These types of things are falling away. And I think that we have a duty as custodians now of culture to say, “What are we going to do? “

Australia is leading the way now with a social ban. We’re about to bring it in. Under-sixteen-year-olds will not have access to any social media as of December 12th. Sure, it’s pretty harmful, it’s not doing good things for them. But where’s the backstop? What are you going to fill that with? We’re all going to go cold turkey? They are addicted as hell to this thing. And now you start to see how thin our community-building is underneath it for these young people.

TH: I’m a feminist, but I have really come around to the idea of male-only spaces. I think it’s actually really important because it lays the foundation for that level of connection. So that you don’t need to be in crisis to seek out connection — that it’s there already. What do you think about bringing back male-only spaces?

ZS: Oh, this is a sweet spot, Tara. As a feminist myself, this is a really fraught conversation. And it says a lot that the pendulum has swung so much that everyone is like, “Oh, wait a second, we might have to do something differently.” There’s a lot of really interesting data where you ask married women how they feel about their husbands’ social lives. They are like, “I just wish he went out more, I just wish he had more social time and connections.” Because it has serious ramifications on women’s mental health. Like our Real Face of Men’s Health report — the whole thing about the real face is that the real face of men’s health is the daughter, the wife, the mother who is calling the physician, who is booking the therapist, who is getting him out of bed to go to school. They bear the brunt, they feel the responsibility. They have to do the help-seeking on behalf of many of these men. This is why men’s health is a women’s health issue.

I think that all of us, no matter how progressive our ideologies may be, are realizing that we do not exist in this vacuum and that gender politics and everything comes together. The same can be said for when we ask these women, they say, “Yeah, he wants more social connection.” Then you ask them, “What do you think about male-only spaces?” in a separate survey. They are all like, “No, I don’t want those.” That’s because of history and that is understandable. Men’s clubs — there have been horrible things that have happened. Scouts had a really horrible history as well, and is trying to turn it around. The church — it doesn’t matter where we look, institutions have been very corrupt and problematic, whether it is child sexual abuse or otherwise. And so, we have a lot of work to do. But male-only spaces can be so powerful.

I always think about my sister. She’s an entrepreneur. She has a media company here in Australia. She is invited to every roundtable, every high tea, being a young woman and being a leader. She has a co-founder who is a young man. He doesn’t have mentors. No one calls him to come to male-only events. But there’s a female breakfast. She’s flourishing and he can’t get his fingers into this stuff. And he’s at the top of the hierarchy! So, we start to go, “What happens to all of those young men who used to have [mentors]?” Even if they are apprentices, they had someone to bring them under their wing. Now it’s passé, it’s problematic, it’s toxic.

But then the conversation — in the same beat — is going, “We need more male role models. Where are the male role models?” It’s like, you can’t put these football players on a pedestal and say save young men. It’s these guys in the community who are having contact with young men every day. They don’t need to be heroes, they just need to be present. I think we can find a way to bring back healthy male-only spaces that aren’t purely kumbaya men’s circles, but do some real work.

TH: Let’s talk now about the culture. This phrase “toxic masculinity” comes up a lot. It’s one of the reasons that I am sceptical and critical of the online feminism that we see now. I do think it pathologizes what it means to be male, and looks at men as a societal risk instead of a holistic contributor to society. But in extreme circles, as I’ve said, there’s this drink-male-tears feminism that looks at masculinity as an original sin. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that at this point. But it doesn’t suggest a way forward for what healthy masculinity looks like. How do you think through that term and what its impact has been?

ZS: I think deeply about it, Tara, and I write about it a lot. I cop it all over the shop for my thoughts and feelings. But I am adamant. And I also think that I have a leg to stand on as a clinician as well. I see the ramifications; I feel them day-to-day. I go into schools and I see how young men engage. I really believe that the use of this term is directly at odds with a feminist pursuit, which is for equality. In the same way that the #MeToo movement, I think, in many ways has failed in its attempt to really shift the conversation towards one of safety and equality. Because you cannot do that without engaging with men and boys, without bringing them along on the journey and making them feel like they can be a solution, not merely the problem. When you name, shame, and distance people, you build resentment and anger. And that is within the context of the fact that men and boys are prone to leaning into anger already, as a condoned emotion in response to feeling attacked when dominance and power are taken away from them.

If we’re going to move towards a world where we are hoping that young men and young women can flourish in equal ways — when young men have been told a certain narrative about being a breadwinner, about being a provider and protector, and we pull the rug out from underneath them, it makes sense to me that they are confused. They are angry. They don’t have the same opportunities that their father did. We need to replace it. That vacuum — there has to be a new mantra, a new doctrine. So many bad actors are filling that gap with toxic shit that is not useful, that is not helpful. But if we don’t fill it, what do you expect? Someone is going to monetize it. Someone is going to commercialize it.

The term toxic masculinity had understandable roots. There are bad things associated with male socialization. Everything that is done to an extreme extent with great rigidity can be extremely harmful to both men and those they love, learn, and live with. But I do think that we’ve come to a point, as media and culture tend to do, where it’s become a placeholder.

I’m having a son in five weeks, Tara. There is no way that there is anything, as he joins this world, that is toxic about him. I don’t want him to feel that he’s inheriting a deficiency. Because, as a psychologist, that is just not the case. I know that that’s not true. I also believe that it’s essentializing. It’s suggesting that this is baked into you and there is nothing you can do about it. And that’s the worst way to create behaviour change. It’s the worst way to create culture change. I actually think it’s that — as you said — the very people who are railing against patriarchy are actually doing the worst thing to try and undo it. They are reinforcing some of these things. When instead we should be saying, “Here is an aspirational model of what we want you to achieve. Here’s what we want you to work towards.”

I actually use the term — and this has been a shift more recently — of manhood rather than masculinity. Masculinity is this idea of these traits, these norms, that you need to attain or you’ll fall off a cliff without them, these man cards that’ll be taken away from you. It’s unattainable. It’s constantly uncomfortable. It’s precarious. And it reinforces the idea that there is a perfect state that you want to be getting to. Manhood is an iterative evolution. It’s growth. It’s purpose. It’s this idea that you are constantly remaking, reimagining, yourself. Because that’s what we do as men. That’s what women do as well; they just don’t talk about it as much.

I think that manhood is a process, a lifelong process. An 80-year-old man is still working through this, in a similar vein to a 13- or 14-year-old. I think that when you ask young men, men of all ages, what their thoughts are on masculinity — and we’ve done enough research on this at Movember — they tell us that they don’t want to engage with that conversation. It feels exclusionary. It feels dangerous. And it makes them feel bad about themselves. And that’s not how we’re going to shift the conversation. Instead, you want to bring them in, you want to call them in. It’s this call-in, call-out dichotomy. You want to call them in and say, “What matters to you? What do you want to do in this conversation?” You hear women and girls talking about masculinity far more than you do men and boys. That’s a problem. We need to find a way to go to the pub and listen to men talking with one another about what type of man they want to be, what type of father they want to be. Not their wives talking about it for them.

That’s what I’m hoping for. You need to make an inclusive, meaningful conversation that they can access — they can be awkward, they can stuff it up, they can say the wrong thing here and there as they mine themselves with language that they have not had handed to them. It’s really complex for them to do that. And we should try and create all of the rope to give them some ability to do so.

TH: It’s interesting because where that conversation is happening is in the manosphere, the online world of influencers. We are of course in Canada, so we should talk about Jordan Peterson. I had Rob Henderson on the show a couple years back, who is a mentee of Peterson. He said something interesting to me. He said that everybody objects to Jordan Peterson being a role model, and then he will say to them, “Okay, who then? Who would you nominate for us all to listen to?” And there’s not an answer to that. From the outside — and I don’t spend a lot of time in the manosphere, so maybe I’m misunderstanding something — but it does look to me like people objected so much to Jordan Peterson, but the actual advice in his books doesn’t seem objectionable to me. Is it the case that the uproar just drove young men into the arms of Andrew Tate? Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

ZS: Yeah, I think that we’ve done enough research. We’ve got a great report called Young Men’s Digital Lives, really focusing on what it is about these men and masculinity influencers, as we call them. We’ve moved away from “manosphere” because the manosphere started out as really fringe — like incels and pick-up artistry. Now this is so mainstream. Jordan Peterson is in airports. So if you are going to put his book in this category, it’s not the manosphere. Joe Rogan is the most listened-to podcast in the world. If he’s the manosphere, then this isn’t fringe. This is everything; this is culture. So we’ve really shifted away from that [term].

It is men and masculinity influencers who are talking about what it means to be a man today. I think Peterson is a really interesting one. Because, in the same way with Rogan, he speaks so much. He speaks about so many things: religion, he’s now talking about climate, he talks about fathering. He talks about all different types of things. If you broad-brush stroke and you just say, “red flag, see you later”? There are plenty of things, let’s be clear, that he has said that I find heinous, that I think are directly at odds with the evidence. I think he cherry-picks, I think he straw-mans, all of those things. Nonetheless, I have seen some content that I think is really powerful, very meaningful. And also, if a client who comes in, a 19-year-old who’s reading 12 Rules For Life, says, “This book has given me purpose. I’ve turned it around, I’ve gotten a job, I’ve gotten a girlfriend. I’m feeling meaning now” — and I say, “Oh, he’s toxic. This guy is the worst. What are you talking about?” Firstly, good luck for this guy ever coming back and seeing me. And secondly, what’s the point? What’s the point in that? That’s not an open, curious conversation for connection. That’s a shutting down.

It’s the same thing when a guy goes on a date with a woman and she says, “What are your favourite podcasts?” He says Rogan, and she walks out. What are we going to get to? Suggesting that Rogan’s three-and-a-half-hour podcast is all about misogyny and homophobia and transphobia? It’s just not the case. If anything, what we found is that those who listen to Rogan have the greatest flexibility in not only political leanings, but also their ability to play around with critical insights. So I think we just need to be a bit safer when it comes to calling things out as black-and-white. And I do think that some of this uproar, as you say, has pushed young men into much darker corners of the Internet. Largely I think the algorithm has done that on its own. Because we know that they’ll start out, they’ll look at something innocuous about how to talk to a girl — which is pretty good information, it’s healthy. Within three to four videos, they’re watching some stuff that is seriously problematic. I always say, Tara, the young men that I know, the young men we’ve spoken to, do not come in seeking misogyny, they leave with it. They’re washed by it. It comes regardless of their own personal values. That’s what scares me. They are having their ideas moulded by this thing, they don’t start this way.

They are looking for excitement. They’re looking for entertainment. They’re looking for motivation and inspiration. These are all great capacities. These are all things that we should be leaning into. It just so happens that Tate is better at achieving those things than most of these other voices are, to be honest. He says crazy shit. He’s working out. He’s got Bugattis, he’s smoking cigars. They’re fourteen. They’re like, “This looks fun.” To be honest with you, that’s how it all starts. They say, “I’ll leave the other crap at the door, I don’t want to hear his misogyny.” But if you watch enough of it, it’s going to be pretty hard for you not to think this is the norm. And that’s the thing that’s really concerning.

TH: In terms of politics, I find it really interesting. I talk about this issue a lot. I did a whole series on it last year, about the crisis that men are in. When I talk about it, it is coded as right-wing. That is not how I see it at all. I think in the States, there’s more of a breadth of conversation, in part because of the excellent work of Richard Reeves. He comes from the left. He’s also been on this podcast. But in Canada, the only politicians that I have found that are talking about this are Jamil Jivani, Erin O’Toole. They are both doing great work on this. But why is this coded right-wing? As someone who I know comes from a non-partisan background, how do you attempt to combat that?

ZS: It’s really interesting how the pendulum has swung, Tara. Because most of the markets that Movember works in — being the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, U.S. — the U.S. is the only one with a right-leaning government. New Zealand as well. We went from having all pretty much right-leaning governments, except for the U.S., to all left-leaning governments. And so we’re trying to do this non-partisan work in the middle, going, “What’s the hook? How do we talk about this stuff to different audiences in different ways so that it is apolitical?” Because this is about the lives of men and boys, which is directly, as I said, related to everyone else in their world.

Really, at the core of it is health. That’s the way that we get in. I think Richard has found a great way in with education as well. Some of these things are just beyond politics. Health is the Trojan horse for us. In the same way that the moustache is a walking, talking billboard — it gets us into rooms that we probably shouldn’t be in. It gets us into conversations that you wouldn’t expect. Health is a really good way to talk about domestic and family violence. The vast majority of men who perpetrate violence have mental health difficulties, have trauma backgrounds of their own, have been victim-survivors themselves and have now been put into this pipeline because no one gave them any attention. No one actually looked after them.

And so, we end up in this world where we go, “How are we going to grapple with this really complex, constantly evolving conversation by offering it to the audience in a really meaningful way?” In Canada, the best way to do that is what we’re pushing at the moment — a men’s health strategy. We have the health minister on board talking about this, how we’re going to build this into policy within Canada, fund it, make sure that we actually have a focus. Barack Obama is talking about this. This is happening. This movement is taking place. It just needs to evolve into something a bit more mature, rather than “no one is listening to boys” or “they’re slipping through the cracks.” It’s like and what?

I have faith. Left-leaning governments — in Australia, they’re making the largest investments in men’s health that they ever have before, more than any conservative government did. Because they’re losing votes. That’s what it’s coming down to. Working-class men are saying, “Where am I here? Why are you not speaking to me?” This is an existential crisis for them, and they’re cottoning on to that if they want to survive. The Canadian government is fundamentally going to be doing the same.

We’re really excited to be able to partner with all governments, but currently the sitting prime minister and health minister, who understand this stuff. They do. It’s just about how we package it, honestly. And it’s about data. It’s about community. It’s about men’s stories and lives. And it’s about taking it away from where this story has come from, which is men’s rights activism, it’s family courts, it’s parental alienation. It’s anti-femininsm. That’s not where we need to be to make change. I think lots of men are realizing that, actually, screaming that stuff from the rooftops comes from this idea of “please, somebody listen to me.” I have empathy for where these conversations start. They’re just so antithetical to where you want to go. I’m like, “Please join a rational conversation about how to do this that respects every player in this game.”

TH: I would like to end on the personal now. I think that’s a good way to bring this home. Almost 25 years ago, when I started as a journalist, I started working in hip-hop. I was interviewing a lot of young men, for five or six years. So, I care really deeply about the struggles that young men are going through. And, as I said off the top, in my own personal life we lost a family friend. I want to ask you to speak about your background, in that respect. You wrote a really powerful essay for Richard Reeves recently about your father. He was a physician. He served troubled men, homeless men, men who were addicted to drugs. But he was also silently suffering from depression and your family did lose him in 2013. I know your brother wrote a book about this. Can you share a bit about your father and how you work through that grief?

ZS: Thanks, Tara. Yeah, it’s a great opportunity. You know, lots of people shy away from grief, and I think that the decision that I’ve made in my career to do this work speaks to the fact that each and every day I get the chance, when someone asks me, to bring him back into the room. He was an incredible, incredible man. And he’d be very jealous; he loved speaking, he loved podcasts. So, watching all the stuff that I get to do now, he would hopefully be very proud.

But it was really a very difficult time that I think set the course for me. Because I witnessed a man who, really, in the depths of his depression was unreachable. I remember going into his bedroom. All he wanted to do was work, and so when he could not get out of bed, the shame that he had was so overwhelming that it actually expanded beyond his bedroom and really took over the whole house. We all felt it, and it bred silence. And I have been working every day since to try to get rid of that fear of talking about this stuff, because that was his, and that was something that I hope no other man has.

I was 20. I don’t seek answers for what Dad did. I don’t think that that’s going to help me move through my next steps of becoming a father myself. I don’t think it helps me understand the man that he was in those final moments. That’s not where I need to go. I want to hold on to all of the beautiful things that he handed me. I want to consider his legacy and really make sure that we get to a world where other men who are in those moments, in that darkness, have lifelines, have people to call on. And most importantly, have the words. Have the words. Because Dad did not have the words. He had the words for everything, literally everything, but he did not have the words to express his inner world. And that’s really my hope.

The month of November is my favourite time because there are conversations everywhere that are taking place amongst men who are just stumbling around trying to find their feet, trying to find the words to connect with their inner selves. That’s the most beautiful thing I could ask for. And hopefully that’s the thing that Dad has given me. The loss — the momentous, huge loss of losing a father at that age — I’m trying to turn that into something meaningful.

TH: Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s end by talking about your son. I think he’s due in January. What do you most want to see change in his lifetime? What are your hopes for him and his flourishing?

ZS: This makes me emotional, Tara. I only consider that I’m having a son when someone reminds me of it. Despite my wife sitting in the other room with an expanding stomach, it still only becomes real when someone says something and I’m like, “Oh God, that’s happening.” I’m so excited for everything that I think I know to be shaken. That’s what I’m really excited for. It was always going to be a son. There was just no doubt it was going to be a son. I deserve that for all of the shit-talking I’ve done in my career about raising boys before I’ve had one. So, now I’m going to feel it. [Laughs]

But I really want that on-the-ground experience. I really want to feel the difficulties, but also the pure joy in seeing that emotional spectrum and being able to witness his development. That’s why I’m a psychologist. I’ve always loved stories and growth and potential, and being able to cultivate that in my own house is an incredible opportunity. But my hope for him, firstly, is that I can be re-parented myself. I’ve been talking to my own therapist about this, around the nature of having a son and love … I’ve got two nieces. It’s so easy for me to care, to protect, to love them. They are so cute. But that type of love for another man is not something that I have necessarily felt before. And so, to be able to have that reorientation in my mid-thirties, and to be able to have that shaken by this little person, is going to be so exciting.

My hope for him is that he has the opportunity to be his most authentic self and to find out who that is, and not to have it shaped by external forces. My wife is also a psychologist, so I wish my child well. [Laughs] But my aim really is that we find a way to give him access to his internal values, his needs, his purpose, what matters to him, what he loves, and to really turn the volume up on that. Because I think that that’s where health and happiness come from. Most importantly, it’s to build the village around him, because connection is key. I hope that we don’t watch what happens, which is that young men, as they age, their friends are de-prioritized, they drop off. I want to really make clear that the value of those connections is so life-saving for him, that he puts all of his time and energy into them. As I do.