SPECIAL EDITION: GETTING TO EQUAL: Justin Baldoni on The Role of Men

been more crucial. We have two amazing leaders who are guest hosting these six episodes, Carol and Tastad, Group President North America and Deiana Bass, vice President Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, both from PNG, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world. Together, Caroline and Diana have created an impressive gender equality strategy for PNG, and it's a strategy that's really breaking new ground on these issues

in the private sector. And they'll be joined by incredible guests from all walks of life. In this second episode of Getting to Equal, Carolyn and Dianna talk with actor, director, producer, and entrepreneur Justin Baldoni. They discuss why the old definitions of masculinity don't work for anyone and why men's participation is critical in achieving gender equality. Caroline Diana, thanks ver much for joining us again and for guest hosting this series.

Thanks Kim. I want to introduce our guest today, Justin Baldoni, who we all know and love from his role on Jane the Virgin. Justin is a producer, director, entrepreneur, and owns his own studio, Wayfarer Studios, an independent financial and production engine, pioneering purpose driven, multi platform film and television

productions that elevate and speak to the human spirit. He's also created a dinner conversation series called Man Enough, which ties into traditional masculinity while focusing on topics like body image, relationships, and fatherhood. Justin is and using his influence to dismantle traditional ideas of masculinity now. Justin first became known as an advocate for gender equality in two thousand seventeen when he did a TED Talk titled Why I'm Done Trying to Be Man Enough. So far that Ted Talk has

received over seventy million views globally. We're so excited to have him on our show today. Welcome Justin. It's so funny how the introductions always make you seem way cooler than you are. Grateful to be here with both of you. You're doing such great work. So you know you and

I are talking earlier. We first met back in two thousand and seventeen at that TED Women's conference, and our friend Alison Tuman campus was in the house with me, and we were sitting there watching you, and we had this realization that the things that we were trying to change in our own culture and in the world were so related to the things that you were talking about on stage about reframing masculinity. So tell us about that Ted talk and why it was so important for you

to do that. You say, Ted talking, like all that anxiety kind of comes right back. You know, that was a really bizarre time in my life. But I can't believe it's gonna be three years because I measured the Ted talk. Um my son was My son was born, like I think, maybe five days before or seven days before the talk, So he's going to be three in this October. Look, I am not an expert in a gender studies or feminism or honestly, masculinity. I am an

expert in my own masculinity. But that's it. And when they approached me about doing a TED talk around masculinity, My first response was like, Wow, I didn't feel ready imposter syndrome kicked in, which which yes, man experience too. And it was also terrified because I knew that it was coming at a time when we were just starting to become ah even more polarized as it relates to conversations around manhood and masculinity and feminism, and the words

were being weaponized. And I realized that I was so afraid because it was so important. But more than anything, I'm grateful that there was such a massive response, predominantly

by women. But the men that it did touch, the men that found it on their own, or the men that founded through the women in their lives and the women that they loved also Ted posted like a two and a half minute clip on Facebook that like had like fifteen million views in like a couple of weeks, and I remember looking through that and seeing how many men were also attacking me and hating on it. There

was nothing revolutionary about what I said. This was me just saying like, hey, guys, let's be better guys, or hey, let's not run a way from the parts of us that make us human, or hey, we can be compassionate and emotional just like the women in our lives. That doesn't mean that we're any less of a man. The bar is way too low. We could crawl over it and uh, and let's start to raise the bar a little by little. Yeah, that's so great, justin you know, early in our work, we realized that men had to

be part of the solution for us. They had to be equal partners and the work that we were doing on gender equality if we were going to make any progress at all. I mean, that's part of what we sparked to in your Ted talk. So inside PNG, we often use the word privilege, and we're really trying to normalize that word because we think it's an important conversation for us to have. But it's a really scratchy word.

So what do you think about privilege? If you don't know what it is because you're blind to seeing it, then the second you hear the word, you're only attributing it to what you're seeing politically, which means politically, I'm

being attacked. What we also know about privilege is for the people who have it, asking for equality feels like oppression because it feels like you're being you're you're having your rights or your privileges, or just simply the way you've seen the world taken from you, so suddenly you're going to have less than what you have now, right, And that's where I think it's important for the compassion

to come in. And this is where I feel a lot for these men is these are hard working men that are fighting to take care of their families, just like we all are, just like you are. And the idea that that um there that they have privilege and many of these men's minds would mean that their lives are simple or their lives are easy and they have more than and the reality is that's not the case

for a lot of these men. So I believe this is a long answer to your question, and I'm not gonna answer your whole question because we don't have enough time.

But my personal feelings as somebody who's not an expert, who doesn't have a PhD, who really doesn't even have a reason to be having this conversation except for the work that I'm doing on myself, is that if you want to bridge the gap, we have to be careful and get away from the rhetoric and the politicized language that is making a lot of these men um feel attacked, even if they are being attacked, or even if they're being overly overly sensitive, Because if you want to get

to the men, we have to which is again the very thing that women excel at far greater than men, is compassion, empathy. We have to speak to them in the language they can understand and let them know that they're not bad people. And I think this whole notion of how tough it is to have the conversation is part of what we're trying to get at. Justin, when you talk about this, you often talk about using your in fluence. What do you mean by that what you

both are doing right now? And you are saying, well, how do we use what we have to now do good? How do we use what we have? How do we use our voice? How do we use our privilege to find a way to actually bring people together and talk about things? And I'm so grateful that there are, you know, so many women at the top, especially in your organization, that are fighting for that. So Justin, in preparation for this discussion, I invested several hours of my personal time

and watching Man Enough episodes. I even, you know, recruited my sons to participate with me. They're in their twenties, so and I found the discussions intriguing and lightning. UM. And I also found myself very uncomfortable at times. And UM, I think that I, like, I had to really think about why am I uncomfortable watching this? Um. A couple

of things came to mind. One is, I have never watched men sit around a table and have meaningful conversations about life and love and women and abuse and write that whole very intimate setting that can be created in your Man Enough episodes. Then there were some I was like, I have no idea what these guys are talking about, Like, what is happening here? What is going on? I'm certain this conversation isn't about me. So I tell us about man Enough and what is it that you aspire with

this platform? Yeah? Man Enough was again all of this has just been an accidental journey, Like none of this was planned, right. I wish I wish I could say that I wrote this down and like a vision board or something in my twenties, And I was like, I'm going to build a brand for men, and no, none of this was planned. I met my wife, she opened

me up. I had a daughter. You know, I was raising the High Faith, and by faith were told that we must take ourselves to account each day and that we have to, um, we have to really look at

what brings us to loftiness or a basement. And you know, for me, I've just always been very confused about what it is to really be a man, because the world tells me one thing, and my heart tells me another, and the women in my life tell me another, and then certain other men tell me another, and then the movies I watched or the TV shows I watched tell

me what I mean. And there's so many different aspects to masculinity and manhood and so many different um, so many different ways of being a man that it's just very it's honestly, very confusing, and I don't think it's something that we as men ever stopped to question. The other thing that's very confusing is how lonely it is. Right, it's very lonely to be a man at times, because one of the greatest myths of masculinity is that we have to do it alone. Right, you're a man if

you can figure it out on your own. You're a man if you don't have to ask for help. You're a man if you don't have to asked for directions, right. You know, you're a man if you can figure out how to balance your work and your life and get your get your six pack, right, you're a man if you can figure out that project without having to like, you know, get any help. Like it's just these are the things that we are told, you know, one plus one equals to our entire life. We are the things

that this is what equals masculinity. And it's also very lowly and we were never given the emotional um language to question these um signals in these beliefs. You know, my my youngest son, Dallas, watched the several episodes and he said something that was really interesting that UM he said that for him, just using you know, saying things like toxic masculinity or hyper masculinity UM feels feminine to him, Like, uh,

talking about masculinity is not very masculine. And I think that's such a quandary that you're wrestling with in this platform. It is though, I mean, that's the very reason we started it is you bring up the word toxic masculinity and this is this is what I want to go back to earlier with the Ted Talk is I said the word toxic at one point in it, and I said, like, these things are toxic and they have to end. I

never said toxic masculinity. And what I found was that the left liberal kind of news cycle magazines took the Ted Talk and took it into Justin Baldoni fighting against toxic masculinity, right, and the right took that and they ran with it. And that is what your son is responding to. Is what's happened is the word toxic and masculinity have been put together as a liberal politicized word, right that further widens the gap between you know, on their left and the right, when this is not a

left or right issue. Right, it's unbelievable. Well, what's interesting is that somehow the conversation around masculinity has also led to being politicized, and one side uses words like that against the other and they become politicized. Right, So toxic masculinity refers to the fact that all men are toxic, and that's not going to get us anywhere, just like your son said, right, your son said, just even saying that word makes me feel feminine to me, because we're

being programmed as men. Two feel like we are traitors against our own gender, right, we're like disowning our own gender and basically becoming women by acknowledging that there are parts of ourselves or masculinity that are not good. But men, it's an all or nothing thing, and that's what we're fighting against. And so the conversations and back to the why was I had never seen this model. I had

no idea how to have conversations with other men. Boys and men are not taught how to engage with other men. We don't. We're not even comfortable looking at our other men in the eye, let alone asking calling other men when we need help. Give no idea how to reach out and talk to our guys when we're struggling, when when we're dealing with things like addiction, or when we

get our hearts broken. We just are told that to be a man, to keep our man card, to like be considered an alpha masculine, we have to figure it out. But how do you figure it out if you don't have any way to nobody's ever modeled it for you. Most men have not experienced like father is being emotionally open to them and loving We aren't really born with that language, so we're at a deficit before we even start.

So this conversation and the reason why it's uncomfortable for you and the reason why it's uncomfortable for many men, it's because we've never seen men have these conversations, and I wanted to just create something that showed women and men that there is a way to have conversation and dialogue. Um, that is maybe different, but I'm happy that you were uncomfortable because in some ways you should be good. I played my part well. It was really it's really really

fantastic work. We'll be back after this break, you know, speaking of uncomfortable. Archillette team did a campaign and the title of the campaign was We Believe. It was all about masculinity and the intention behind it, the aspiration was to show men as positive role models for young boys. It was a very honest portrayal. It contrasted the positive role model with a not so positive role model. And you know, we got a lot of feedback on that campaign. We got a lot of love and we got some hate.

But in the end, I'm really proud of the team for standing by their conviction and holding the aspiration that they had front and center, which was to show men as positive role models for young boys. I want to call it a modern sense of masculinity, if I can label it that way. Although I don't really like these labels, but it is a way of showing a broader range of behaviors that we can celebrate. Yeah, it's so important to show those positive role models, mainly because sometimes we're

unable to see our own bias. I'll give you another funny example of this. UM. I was working with one of our haircut brands, UH in North America. This was a number of years ago, and they were really excited about a new piece of advertising copy that they were developing. And they came to me and they said, I really want you to see this because I think this is going to take our brand to the next level. It's going to be great. And they said, let me just read you the concept. Let me read you what I'm

trying to do. And they started reading and they went through and at one point they got to because when she looks good, she can be her best. And I stopped them and I said, okay, I said, just let's just stop here for a minute. Let's just stop here for a minute, and this our marketing VP was a man, a wonderful person, wonderful individual. And I said, let's just back that up a bit. I want you to reread that, but I want you to reread it and substitute the word he every time you say she, and read it

again with the same enthusiasm. And he started reading through it, and he got to the point where he said, because when he looks good, and he stopped and he and he started laughing and he said, oh, my goodness, this just sounds ridiculous. And I said, if it if it sounds that ridiculous when you say he instead of she, it probably sounds a little ridiculous on the other side as well. But it became a great way and a very simple tip that we used to see bias. We

call it flipped the pronoun. Wow, Like what a Jedi way to do that, Like you just totally yo at him in such a cool way, like flip the product. But and this is what, But that's so cool because you just I love that because you're just like in a really calm way. That's like a mastery level like mind trick that you did in the middle of a meeting on the spot because you just went, Okay, this

is totally backwards, but he doesn't see it. And then you found a way to flip it and he read it and he came to the conclusion himself, which is the only way that you can get to us and to you. That's growth, right, And it's like it's just how do you see it? How do you see it? Like we again, we all have biases, right, every one of us. And so the question is how do you teach yourself to see them? How do you teach yourself to look for them so that you can become better?

It was honestly, they did you know this? This brand team has done such amazing work and and and they've completely taken taken the game up and they're doing amazing communication and I'm really proud of them. But again, it's just it's continuing to continuing to learn for all of us. Hey, Jess, and I have one other question for you here really quickly, but it goes back to what we're talking about here.

It's both you know what people see an experience and advertising what they see and experience in film and media. And you have your own studio where you're you kind of have a stated commitment to operate a little differently and maybe show humanity in different ways. I'd love to hear what you are doing with Wayfair Studios. Let me tie this back to what we talked about earlier. I have felt fairly disenfranchised and uh excluded from the Hollywood

community kind of for a while. UM, I was very much put in a box where I was only you know, I was only able to audition for certain things or was seen as a certain way, and I just found myself like feeling disenfranchised in the sense that like, nobody's gonna give me a shot. So I got to create my own and if I wanted to actually change something that I had to find that I had to find a way to bring the power UM and leverage that power to UM to kind of push things across the

finish line. So I've raised a bunch of money. I found a wonderful partner that shared the same beliefs as I do, and part of that is pushing forward new ideas of what it means to be a human and telling the stories that maybe haven't been told because they haven't made money, but they also haven't had the chance to make money. Therefore, like you know, Um, it's the same repeating cycle of why it's just only a new

Avengers movie that comes out every six months. There's room for more stories told by people that look like those stories, and we just wanted to try to build something new. So it's through that frustration and being cut out of the winds that we started this thing. And uh and the studio is really essentially a place where anything is possible. Right.

We're working with brands like you know, like you guys as as consultants and saying, hey, you know, maybe just just like the Jedi and my trick, we are helping brands figure out as well, which is like, what if you flip that on its head or what if you told the truth to your consumer? What about that? Um? And how do we do that in film and television? How do we tell people the truth? You know you said earlier, Diana, that that you took a few hours of your life to watch my content. That is the

greatest compliment that anybody could ever give me. Because the one thing we know, and the one thing we think about it wayfair, is that the most valuable asset, most valuable resource in any of our lives is our time. How are we spending that time. Right, So if you're gonna give me two hours of your day four hours, that's even right. That is a lot of time that you are choosing to give to me that you're not

choosing to give us something else. So I better respect it, and I better earn it, and I better add value to your life with the content that I'm making and also the content that we're choosing to spend time making, because as we know, it takes a long time to make good content, and all the people involved behind the scenes, they're choosing to give that their time to something, and

we want to value and honor that time UM. And so we're trying to build kind of an next generation studio around those principles, which is touch the heart first, the money will follow, because when it's we're not a nonprofit,

but we don't believe in the algorithms per se. That a lot of the traditional studios UM employee, which is like coming from the idea first, or or coming from the the star first, or the I P first, We're all about what can hit the heart and then you'll break every every law, every rule because people will naturally want to share it and give their time to it, and uh, and we're just really we're really excited to kind of go about it and disrupt for good. You know.

You know, I think you guys are doing such important work and and in essence, you're creating this your show, showing people this whole new possibility, right this all new reality that the world can be. And oftentimes when men take a look at gender equality or gender inequality, they get invested in it through the lens of their wives, their sisters, their daughters, and we think that creates empathy

and some momentum. And while it's a good start, it's it's just not enough, and there's really the risk that we continue to put the responsibility for equality on women and girls. And so what we keep talking about is the importance of encouraging parents to talk about equality gender equality not only to their daughters, but also to their sons. You have a daughter and a son. What's your perspective on this, and what do you tell your daughter and what do you tell your son? That's a great question.

I'm really thinking a lot about this right now. I just I just I'm finishing the manuscript to my book, which is about in April, and with that book comes a middle grade book for boys eleven to fourteen and a children's book. I think that equality, again, the teaching and the and the understanding and the basic like one plus one equals two version of equality needs to start

with our children, and it's rooted. I believe in in spiritual values, right, and I say spiritual, not religious values, but in the spiritual values that are the unseen things that connect us all that help us all realize we're all brothers and sisters. It's the thing that happens to us when we see something horrific happen to someone like a George Floyd. It's what happens in our solar plexus

and our bellies when we witness injustice right. And we need to develop those parts of our children, the parts that that generally understand right from wrong early, because those to strengthen the empathetic genes, right, the compassionate genes. Is then to give them a base by which when they witness things in their life, they have a clear sense of justice, of what is justin what is not, even when it applies to them right, because that's where it starts.

They're not going to understand what's right or wrong. Um for themselves if there if if if they're standing and climbing over people to to win and at the end of their life, because they're not going to realize that every person they're climbing over, every person whose opportunity they took from, you know, they took away, is just like them. So it starts early on in the spiritual development I believe of our children. Um. And in terms of what I'm talking about with my kids, it is a it's

a daily conversation and it changes all the time. You know, I have a boy and a girl, so you know, for one, making sure that I'm aware of my own biases as a parent, as a man, and my wife is as well. Right, just just being mindful about the language I use for my son, making sure I'm not only always calling him buddy or dude or you know,

hey buddy, or hey budd or you know. And I've noticed how how how the men who come around oftentimes resort to that language, you know, um and instead kind of complimenting his sweetheart, you know, using words I would want to use for my daughter with my son. Right, Um, the big thing we're doing right now is is really teaching both of them. But focusing really on him. UM

that the strongest muscle in his body's his heart. UM. And I'm trying to develop and build a language around the heart because as my feeling of masculinity is that it's it's it detaches you from that part of you, right, and masculinity as I as I've experienced it, the heart comes into play when it's broken. Um, when you get your heart broken. So we say we say something every night, The strongest muscle in my whole body is my heart. And he says, I love my body, I love my mind,

I love my heart, and I love my soul. I love myself, and I am enough. Because the thing that's also important is if you believe you are enough. Right. If my children grow up believing that they are enough as they are, then they they aren't needing to fill their gaps or their holes with the injustices or the willing bystandard to watch somebody else suffer or to succeed

at the hands of somebody else. They know that they're enough as they are, and they have more than enough that they can share, which goes back to the equality issue, right, which is why we call it man enough. It all comes down to us as human beings, feeling like we are enough as we are. And the last thing I'll say is, I think it's important to note that the work that I'm doing um right now is really about

undefining masculinity versus redefining masculinity. I want to undefine what it means to be a man, because I think it the problem lies in the definition. When we start to define something, then by nature, there was going to be somebody who's not included and that definition. And I believe as human beings, we just have to be human beings, right. We can be a man, or we can be a woman. You can be general nonconforming, you can be all those things were like. But my work is with the men

that are like me. So I want to undefine the things that I've learned to create an ever expanding definition of masculinity and the undefining of my masculinity. My heart opens and my world and my work opens, and my compassion increases, and my empathy increases, and my vocabulary changes, and I see the world different and I'm able to recognize my privilege because I really as I'm not being

attacked right, I'm being asked to open. So that's kind of and and I'm sorry, I know I'm a rambler, but that's the work that I'm doing at the moment as I'm finishing my book and trying to teach my children and understanding the cultural race um uprising that's happening, and my own whiteness and what that even means, and it's convergence with my masculinity. There's a lot, there's a it's a rich time, um. But I'm also very excited to then use that and share it with the privilege

that God gave me in a positive way. That's so amazing. Your kids are going to be lucky human beings to get you for a dad, and your wife as well. I'm sure is there anything in this conversation that you would say it's kind of a must have to show up in a in a in a conversation about women and men and intersectionality and power and privilege and all

the things that we've talked about. What I would say is making sure that the conversation, this specific conversation takes into account what we talked about earlier and paints a picture of a man rejecting this notion of whether it be feminism or or privilege as a whole human right, and not as an antagonist, because if we start to think about this fifty these men as antagonists, then we are essentially putting them in a box because you have

to open their hearts. You have to open people's hearts, and the way you do that is with love, right, You do that with compassion and with empathy. And I think it's that shift of of thinking of it in a positive way and thinking of these people in a positive way, and these men in a positive way where we on maybe we feel woke, but on our side

we have to have compassion for them. I think when you combine those two things, that's how you're going to get more receptivity and change people's hearts and advance the movement because nobody wants to have the conversation in the silo, right, you know, justin you've this has been so much fun. We could go on and on, but I think first of all, I want to say thank you so much

for spending time with us today. And I think your final comment about the importance of dialogue, the importance of um accepting a broader view, making room for that whole person, is exactly what we really advocate for well, it was started by women, and uh, it's thanks to the women in my life that I've even had the permission to even have the conversation. So thank you guys for doing all the work that you're doing, and and I hope that I can help and be helpful in some way.

And thanks for having me on your podcast. Thank you, Justin. That was so fun. It was good to see you again. So good to see you guys. For sure. What an incredible conversation. Justin has such a great outlook on how we can all work together, women and men to advance equality. Here are three takeaways I got from the conversation. First, men must play a role in creating progress for women.

We can't get too equal without them. But this can only happen when we have an open and honest dialogue about power, privilege, and influence, and when our conversations come from a place of compassion and respect. Second, as we've heard before in this series, to make progress, we need to shift the narrative to change how we talk about women, men and leadership. We need to see past the old definitions of masculinity and celebrate a broader, less confining range

of behavior. When we do that both men and women will benefit. And finally, we learned a great technique from Caroline, one that can truly reveal by us. Caroline calls it flip the pronoun. Try it when you're speaking about a woman or a man. Replace the word she with he or he with she and see how quickly bias is revealed. To learn more about Justin's work, go to man in

a dot com and join us. Next week when Caroline and Diana talked to best selling author Eve Rodsky about why getting to equal at home is also critical to getting to equal in the workplace. Have a great week.

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