Richard Reeves on Why Men Are Being Set Up To Fail (PT. 2)

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1:22Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I was talking about how I have two young boys in the last episode, two sons. and uh you know it's hard to be a person in the world it's hard to be a kid i was thinking you know we do love to kick around young men we do love to kick around the patriarchy and the people who won't get out of the way the people who historically have been not so great to other people it reminds me of that scene did you guys see white lotus there's a scene where the whole family is sitting together and one of the what's her name um whatever sweeney that girl you know who we're talking about.

2:48She has this great scene where she, she's talking about how, you know, sort of men are all the problems just going on and on. I'll play that real fast. Mom, good news. I've been looking around the hotel and it seems like all of the white straight men are doing just fine. They're still thriving. And then the mom's like, you're talking about your brother. You're talking about your dad. These are human beings. These are and can be very good people. And those are the people that I'm trying to speak to with the Daily Stoic. Those are the boys I'm trying to raise. That is not problematic people, but good people.

3:23I want to raise good young men. I'm trying to be a good young-ish man. I guess I can't say I'm a young man anymore. I've got gray hair. But I came to Stoicism as a young man because I was lacking in guidance. I was lacking good examples. I was lacking structure. I was advantaged in many ways. but I needed more. And that's what the Stoics did for me. And what I'm trying to do for my boys, I really liked my guest today's amazing book of boys and men, why the modern male is struggling, why it matters and what to do about it by Richard Reeves. He also wrote a great book called Dream Hoarders. We have signed copies of both of them in the painted porch.

4:03These are things we've been talking about at the Daily Stoic for a while now. We've been talking about them at the Daily dad for a while now. And I think they've become even more salient and important now that, you know, we saw that voting block of young men, disaffected, angry, misunderstood men move during the election. And if we don't speak to those men, if we don't provide them a better path forward, I don't think we're going to like where we're going to end up in society. And we've certainly seen more extreme versions of this, of other society. When you leave men without purpose, without structure, without guidance, without good role models, they become radicalized, they become angry, they act out, they become a liability to society instead of the positive contributors and stability and wisdom that a society can have, that the best societies have.

4:54And so I think about that a lot with my young boys. And that's why I wanted to have Richard Reeves on the podcast. We split this episode up into two parts. These are some similar themes that I talked about in my episode with Scott Galloway and many other guests over the years. So I'll leave you this wonderful episode and check out Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why It Matters and What You Can Do About It at the Painted Porch or anywhere books are sold. And don't forget to listen to part one of this episode also.

5:26It's a hard thing as a parent to protect their innocence and to not make them cynical before they should be cynical in some ways. But I do think there is generational. Like if you went from 2000 to 2024, there is, I think, a general observable trend of what we were talking about with the delayed gratification of here, let me bring you some new pencils and then not bringing the new pencils. Yeah. You know, so I get I get that sort of sense as someone who feels like the exception to a lot of that. Like I got lucky. I left college without debt and I left early. So right before the financial crisis, I moved to Austin 10 years ago before the housing market.

6:00I feel like I like either walked through raindrops or snuck under the wire on a bunch of things. So like I have a house, I have a career I like. I'm not saddled with a bunch of things where I could see how if it had gone in just a slightly different direction, I'd be pretty upset. And I think understanding that energy, like you can't just gaslight a generation about that. I think you have to really show... It's funny to me. I'll give you an example. I think coming out of COVID, we should have an increased sense of our capacity and our ability to solve really tough, complex problems. But instead, we've taken the, especially young men, taken the exact opposite lesson.

6:38Why do you think that is? Why has that happened? Well, I was going to ask you about that. I think a big part of it is because a bunch of online grifters have decided that that is a much more salient message to send. Like, I think it's easier to be a demagogue than it is to be someone who appeals to reason and a population's better angels. Yeah. Plus, I guess you could layer onto that social media, which thrives a bit more on the kind of conflict. I mean, I think there's a very controversial figure, Andrew Tate, who's the misogynist online influencer. It was very interesting. You look at his business model.

7:13He was incentivizing people to comment on and clip from him. But he was incentivizing them every bit as much if they were attacking him as if they were supporting him. So that was someone who he understood the algorithm of short form video content very quickly and understood that fighting is the point. And therefore extremism is the point. And so clearly you get led in those directions. It's interesting. I mean, partly I think it's this trust in institutions thing. It's like, are the institutions working for me? and maybe it's also simply that particularly for young men this question about their role this question about how to be in the world is relatively new like i think that the script used to be pretty clear yeah that was the the good thing if i can risk saying this about the old model of you know my parents model of the kind of provider breadwinner provider husband for the husband father provider all bundled together and then the kind of homemaker child ring kind of right that was it It was not just clear, but it was centuries of stasis about that clarity.

8:13It wasn't even a question. Yeah. And so when my own dad lost, he was the main breadwinner. They had a very equal marriage. They still have a very equal marriage, even when they were raising us, but still now. But when he lost his job, when he was unemployed, it was a question. He said to me once, he said, well, my job is to get another job now to look after you. Because I asked him why he was still shaving and putting a shirt on. And he's like, well, because I have to get another job. now i'm not saying that wasn't without its stresses and strains it certainly was but it but it did have the advantage of clarity and what we've done i think we've torn up those old scripts and replaced the one for women with a quite a positive script about empowerment and autonomy you go girl etc which is fantastic yeah we've torn up the old male script about well you're going to be the provider you know you're going to protect your own provider so we've torn that up and we've replaced it with nothing and that is the space that a lot of the online influence would come in and what they'll say is and that's why we have to go back yeah right because and that's an appealing idea for men who are like i am completely lost i don't know what to do i know i know what i'm supposed to not do yeah i know what i'm supposed to not say yeah but i'm not quite clear what i am supposed to do or why society or family whatever actually needs me specifically and that sense of feeling unneeded i think is driving a lot of this male malaise i think it's making a lot of men dislocated.

9:33I think there's a lot of retreat going on because of that scriptlessness, right? They're improvising and it's really, really hard to improvise a self. And it's an also, and it's easy for those who are fortunate enough maybe to have education and economic resources to just say, well, just get with the program. Right. Right. Well, you know, I'm sure that you and I could agree that we're like total gender egalitarians and we've got these modern marriages and we're figuring it out and we're in touch with our emotions and like, what's wrong with you? Right. And it's much easier for people who are in positions of economic, high economic resource to do that.

10:06And I've come to believe that this lack of empathy for the real problems of many men, especially those with the least economic power, has created a massive vacuum in our culture and in our politics. And that that has been exploited. But that's our fault. for not, I mean, Jordan Peterson's, the Canadian psychologist, I know you know who he is, but I found it extraordinary his success. Yes. Despite his brilliance on many kind of fronts, and I have strong disagreements with him about certain things, because if you read his book, 12 Rules for Life, which kicked around our house for a bit, like most kind of sons raised in most liberal households, my boys obviously went through a slightly countercultural phase.

10:48It's anodyne in its advice. Why was he so successful? because he just made these young men feel someone had seen and heard them. That's literally all he did. He just communicated empathy. And it turned out there's this massive reservoir of men. The question to me is not why is Jordan Peterson so popular? It's why are there not more Jordan Petersons? Like, what is he doing? He's charismatic. He's not condescending. He is taking great cultural myths, stories, and ideas and making them accessible. He's using the tools. He's meeting people where they are. All that's wonderful. I think he's also a fascinating arc in how you can be eaten by the algorithm and fame is a toxic drug.

11:27You get pulled one. Yeah, I think watching his descent into what I don't think it's an exaggeration to say is essentially madness at this point. I think he's lost his mind. But the playbook there, I think it's not something that should be mocked or criticized. It's something that should be emulated by people who want to integrate these people into society. society and and yeah it's it's easy if you get it to be like these are the assumptions these are the personality traits these are things you need to be successful in this sort of new modern world and you can almost go like but but if what if that doesn't occur to you naturally what if you didn't have parents that modeled some of these things for you what if you have kind of a like a cultural dyslexia or a learning disability it's hard for you to go oh in a world where women are equal or in some cases the predominant, like in publishing where I operate in U2.

12:23Publishing is one of those industries where women are vastly overrepresented in a way that I don't think is positive or negative, it just is. But so if you can't understand the culture that it's going to create in that industry and figure out how to work in it, you're not going to succeed, right? So how do you teach people to adjust and operate in environments that are maybe different than the one they grew up in. That's a hard thing to do. And yeah, I think empathy is a key thing, but then also understanding that your lack of empathy is creating a market for someone who has a more exploitative form of empathy to play to those grievances or that disorientation.

13:02Yeah, I think that's right. I think that a slightly more maybe self-critical way to think about this too is how anybody that does start to talk about these issues kind of facing boys and men, runs the risk potentially of being thrown under that under that bus. And it's why everyone lined up to tell me not to write this book. Yes. Right. And why I couldn't get a publisher. Because like, this is just people are going to think you're some red pill, some men's rights activist, right? Which is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if I said to people, if the only people allowed to write and talk about this are the people like that, then we shouldn't be surprised if the only people talking about this are the people like that.

13:37So maybe boring centrist people like me with charts. One of the mottos of my new think tank is keep it boring. And my son overheard - As opposed to polemical? Yeah. My son overheard that and said, what's your motto? I said, keep it boring. And he said, well, you're the man for that job, dad. Ha ha. See, they're funny, aren't they? It's great. It's great. But what's interesting is that it's a bit self-fulfilling. So what can happen is if somebody who does start to raise awareness of these issues is almost kind of instantly castigated as being reactionary. And then they find more audiences among reactionaries and they find themselves pilloried maybe on the left.

14:15And the way to make a living and build an audience is among the people who think, who are more reactionary. Then you've just created the very situation which you're claiming to lament. And so the space that I think we have to fill here is to be able to have an empathetic, data-based conversation about the real problems of boys and men and not allow the algorithm or the disagreements or the fringe people to push you one way or the other. Because what happens, I've really noticed a lot of men, and I'll give you one specific example, which is they start off working on these issues in good faith. And they're pretty calm and they've got the data and they point out things like the suicide rate among men is four times higher and it's gone up by a third among young men since 2010 and et cetera.

15:04And then they repeat that message over and over again, and they never get anywhere. And everyone just keeps telling them they're wrong, or you would say, or eye rolling. And they get, essentially, they get radicalized, and then they get angry. And then they start to express themselves with a really angry affect. In fact, Ezra Klein had this line about Jordan Peterson where he said, his affect is that of a clenched fist. And I don't think it was, but you do see that happening. And you see it, especially on the right kind of reactionary figures, there's this kind of very clenched fist, kind of reactionary kind of fighter mentality around it.

15:33But to some extent, we create that by not having these alternatives, which are more about a helping hand, or by just empathetically saying, yes, these problems are real and we should be addressing them. And so to some extent, the ecosystem, it's very easy to say, oh, these guys, they all go to the right and then they get the reactionary. But maybe to some extent we push them to the right by not acknowledging some of what they're saying being true and saying, oh, interesting. Why are so many young men flocking to Jordan Peterson? And it might not be that they're all misogynists who want women to be barefoot and in the kitchen.

16:09There might be something else going on here. And this unwillingness to look in the mirror and say, maybe something's going wrong in our culture here that is allowing that opportunity. And so maybe we need to do something differently rather than just blaming him and or blaming the men who are attracted to him. Well, I think you need a strong sense of self and a comfort with oneself and also a strong sense of focus. These are, to me, all very important, I think, traits that would go into what the Stoics would call sort of command of the self. And so I remember you and I did, we were on that interview with the Free Press.

16:41And we're all in agreement and then someone's like, and then, you know, they're giving transgender surgery to prisoners or something. And you and I both said, you know, we don't actually need to talk about that at all. Let's just talk about this. And there is this, I think, in a world of so much information where you can always find something objectionable or weird or extreme, if you are easily kind of provoked or distracted, you're always going to find something to be outraged about, right? And there's always going to be someone who understands that that content is easier to monetize and succeed with.

17:15And so you need kind of a calm demeanor and a strong sense of self and purpose, I think, as a person, but then definitely as someone who's trying to talk about sensitive or difficult issues. So you're not just constantly getting sucked into stuff. You need that. Or I think this information ecosystem that we live in, it will eat you alive. Yeah. Your easy pickings. Yeah, that's interesting. I think about that quite a bit in my own work and how I present around it and how I talk about it. And one of the things that I have come to believe very strongly is that unless this feels uncomfortable, probably not doing it right.

17:55And if there are people who come into this conversation with skepticism, particularly women, if there's not a degree of skepticism with which you're approaching this whole conversation about why it's time to pay more attention to boys and men, I don't trust you quite as much. Because it should be a difficult conversation. And I not only acknowledge the difficulty with it, I honor that difficulty. And I actually trust someone a lot more who says, you know what, I was really skeptical about this. Yeah. and I've still got some issues around it. But you know what? Actually, there is some stuff here.

18:29And although this is difficult, I actually do think we need to do more here. And how do we do that without leaving women behind? And this is really hard. Anybody that thinks this is easy is not doing it properly because they're either like, I roll tiny violin. Are you kidding me? I'm out of here. Or they're like, hell yeah, men are struggling because those feminists have taken over. So join me on the barricades of the reactionary. Anybody that thinks this is easy is not serious. Yes. Because this is difficult culturally. It's difficult in terms of language. It's difficult in terms of issue selection.

19:02Doing non-zero-sum thinking is really hard. And so anybody that's finding this easy, I probably don't want you in the room. Yeah. All right. You're probably on one side or the other because especially at this moment in history where we've still got so much more to do and many cases for women and girls. And so many women have had to face so much discrimination. Sure. In my lifetime. to get here that asking them to just go, oh yeah, sorry, do you mind doing Boys and Men now? You've had your three seconds of attention. Can we go back to our 10 ,000 years of worrying about men again, right? That should be hard.

19:36I find it a little bit hard. Yeah.

19:45Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

20:30We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

21:11Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

21:53My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

22:30Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

22:49I mean, I've been saying that the main challenge of our time is to not let the crazy people turn you into a crazy person. How do you not get sucked in on either side? How do you not become cynical? How do you not become angry? How do you not become radicalized? And it's really hard because algorithms are working on radicalizing you. Political movements are working on radicalizing you. The shittiness of the world is also working on radicalizing you. And so to sort of stick with like first principles, to stick with what's true, to stick with a kind of an open heartedness is a feat of strength, you know, like focusing on and not being pulled in this direction.

23:32I think this is a skill we have to work on and cultivate as a society, both as like, as I think people who make stuff, like the idea of not falling prey to audience capture is important, but that's kind of inside baseball. I think most people have to worry about not getting sort of captured or radicalized by whatever, you know, they randomly click on or, or also whatever they're naturally predisposed to go to just kind of staying in your. Yeah. And it's just a way of, and this is a very stoic thought too, I think, is in the thick of daily life. It's in that interaction. It's in the conversation.

24:10It's obviously an intellectual challenge, but it becomes a physical challenge. So if you're with somebody who strongly disagrees with you and is kind of arguing very strongly against you and you find their views like absurd or they're very emotional and so on, your cortisol starts to spike. Your body's reacting kind of differently and then that affects your brain. And I have these heuristics that I try and use, some of which I've learned from my intellectual hero is John Stuart Mill, the 19th century liberal philosopher who I wrote a book about. And he had this lovely line that he used in a letter that I try and keep in my mind, especially in those moments where you're having a difficult conversation with someone or someone's really coming at you.

24:49He had this line where he said, like, if someone's strongly disagreeing with you about something, they're almost certainly trying to get to the same mountaintop as you. They've just chosen a different path. And I have that image in my mind and I try and keep it in my mind, which is like, it's very unlikely this person I'm arguing with doesn't want similar things in the long run, right? Very unlikely, possibly, but let's assume that, let's just say we're arguing about like boys and men or kind of whatever, right? They probably want to reduce rates of male suicide, increase men's economic outcomes, help men be more engaged fathers.

25:21They probably want that, right? I doubt they want the opposite of any of those things, right? But they think the way to do that is by giving more economic power to women or bringing back marriage or whatever it is I'm disagreeing with. Some of them I'm going to disagree with more than others. And I just try and think, hmm, that's a different path. And maybe I can learn something from that. Because it's almost never the case that you're 100 % right and I'm 0 % right, or vice versa. It's almost always going to be the case that you're 97 % right, I'm 3 % or whatever it is. And so your job is to try and get that 3%.

25:57Yeah. Not to ram the 97 % down my throat. It's like, okay, fine. I think this person, and I have really noticed this with my, even in family relationships is we have a very politically diverse family, especially on the American side of my family. And what I've kind of discovered is that some of the stuff that a relative might say to me is wrapped in all kinds of rhetoric. It would be more sort of from the right. It's wrapped up in rhetoric and it's massively, and my initial reaction is like, yeah, that's completely untrue. Yeah. And then I go and look at it and say, huh, it's not completely untrue.

26:27It's just been so distorted along the way that when I go and look at it, I guess, you know what? There actually is something to that. And I wouldn't have known that otherwise. And it's made me think a little bit differently about that IRS reform was the one that came up recently, which is so boring. I won't get into it. But the point it holds, which is that you might learn something from this. John Stuart Mill is fascinating because he's kind of obviously feels like this figure from a long time ago. But here you have a guy who's promising. He's brilliant. He's on this path. and then it kind of all falls apart.

26:57He has this mental breakdown. If that happened in 2018 or 2020, you could see, and that's when John Stuart Mill became red-pilled and went extreme in one direction. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think what's fascinating, he has this grievous and this painful childhood. The thing, it's not working for him. And he sort of actually ends up emerging from it more open-hearted, more kind, more patient. All these, I think, generally positive traits he takes out of this very painful experience. But you could easily imagine it going the exact opposite direction. The other way. Yeah. So in his case, he was raised red pill as a utilitarian by his father, who was a massive utilitarian.

27:39He was the, quote, godson of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. So he was raised. And his breakdown, it was a complete loss of faith. Yeah. Right? So he's raised with this incredibly clear philosophy. It answers all the questions. Yeah. It gives you a very clear agenda. And then it just blew up for him. And then suddenly he's in this new place where he's questioning and opening and essentially realizing that there are no easy answers. There is no political philosophy or religion or anything that answers all the questions for your life's journey. And it's a painful one and it's a learning one and it's a development.

28:12And so what happens is that if you even look at the metaphors that he uses before and after this, and he was very young. But before, it's like the metaphors were much more about machines. Yeah. They were very mechanical. Our society works as a machine and a great utility. And after that, almost all of his metaphors are organic. Yes. He falls in love with nature. He spends time outside. This is like poetry. He becomes a part of his life. It's that poetry thing, but it's about growth. And if you kind of look, he uses plants. He uses growth. He talks about being stunted. He talks about sunlight. And so he uses his botanical interest.

28:45But it becomes his political philosophy too, which is intrinsically developmental. mental and intrinsically about different individuals need different circumstances in which to thrive but it's all about growth yeah and so becomes it it's not a small shift because it's going from basically treating individuals as like cogs in a machine to be made as happy as possible right here we go like jeremy bentham famously said i don't care if you're a soldier or a slave or whatever it is i just care how happy you are yeah right and was like yeah i'm not cool with that and instead Yeah, it's this really incredibly, I would say, although he remained very non-believing in his own life, it has almost a theological feel to it, which is this ultimate dignity of the human individual and the developmental potential of each individual requiring a society that will recognize it in all its diversity.

29:34Men and women. Men and women. Oh, I mean, he's the father of British feminism. Yeah. He introduced a one-word change to the 1867 reform bill. Yes. To change man to person. And overnight, it would have enfranchised women half a century before they actually did. And when they actually did in 1928, past the giving women full equality, the women's rights campaigners who were in the gallery of parliament when the bill was passed, they left parliament, got armfuls of flowers and went down the embankment to Mill's statue and laid flowers in his honour for the work that he had done for women. And it's entirely consistent with this idea that back to where we were a while ago, back in individual flourishing.

30:18And even if there are some differences on group averages, what matters is the dignity of the individual. Yeah. I sort of take it that his early, his upbringing was so, he was like an athlete. It was like all about him. It was about personal optimization. He was this, he was the machine. Yes. You know, his dad was Earl Woods or, you know, like was trying to create this superhuman and it all falls apart. And he remakes himself as this much more, what's that quote about happiness is a door that opened outwards. He becomes an outward focused individual in a totally different way. And yeah, to me, that's a recipe for sort of human flourishing and a sense of gender.

30:56I mean, he's clearly a man. He's married to a woman. But he just has this much more expansive definition of like, yeah, he doesn't try to change that to say men and women. He tries to change that law to say person. Like it's just this sort of removal of the distinction and just whatever you are, whoever you are, you deserve these natural rights as a person. Yeah, that's exactly right. And also, perhaps the most inspiring thing about people like him is what you were saying a moment ago is almost just the way of being in the world and the way of interacting with other people. And this idea of learning from each other and openness.

31:33That's the real change. And so I think you're right that the challenge in many ways of the current era is to avoid these different gravitational pulls. There's the audience one, there's a political one, there's the polarization one. It almost feels like you're trying to navigate between these gravity wells, all of which are trying to pull you one direction and incentivizing you and rewarding you in short case. That's difficult. It's how you do it right now. It's how you do it in each conversation. And that's very, very million. In the end, that's what Mill was about. It was about how do we, as individuals, develop those virtues to be able to engage in the world in that way.

32:11And so I think that in that sense, liberalism in the million sense of the term is a way of living and a way of being in the world rather than a construct, rather than a societal construct. Somebody asked Gandhi what worried him the most, and he said hardness of the heart of the educated or hardness of heart in the educated. And so I think it's, yeah, that we could today, we might say polarization or whatever, but it's the idea of like losing that openness and that connectiveness to each other that I think is, to me, the idea of virtue is so important, especially in these divisive times, because virtue is secular and non-gendered.

32:53So one of the Stoic teachers, his name is Musonius Rufus, he writes this essay on how, he says, should women be taught philosophy? And he says, yes, they should, because he's like, virtue is virtue. Excellence doesn't know gender. He said it might be different for different, you know, the roles in society might be different. But he goes, you don't care what gender your hunting dog is. And I just, right, you care that it can do the thing it's supposed to do. And that can change what the Romans thought the role of a man and woman is obviously very different than what we think of it as today. But if you go, yeah, excellence are these virtues, these traits, you know, courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

33:31Like if we can all agree that those things are good, they're going to manifest themselves differently and in different roles. But they're not hyper-gendered, I don't think. And so I think if we think about it as, yeah, how do we get people to flourish and fulfill their potential as individuals? That to me is virtue is a thing we can hold up as a way to do that, as long as we don't give in to the sort of very religious definition of virtue, which I think some people like, you know, Josh Hawley's or whatever, they're trying to make virtue partisan and not accessible. Yeah. And then it's like virtue is closer in that framing, in his framing, to being like a list of proper opinions rather than a kind of way of being, a way of being open.

34:15And I'd be interested to get your reaction to this challenge that I have, which is that I agree with everything you've just said about virtues, like beyond gender, pre-gender, whatever. And in the end, personhood is what matters. And one of the things I struggle with is in writing this book and in creating a whole think tank around boys and men, am I making the problem worse by making more salient these differences, which in the long run, I think shouldn't be that important. In other words, am I adding to this over-identification around gender as opposed to just drawing attention to the fact that there are some problems facing boys and men that aren't getting enough attention in policy circles?

34:57So I don't, I just, it's one of the, it's one of the criticisms I have of my work. I find it hardest to answer, honestly, which is you're basically putting fuel on the fire of this identity politics problem by establishing this whole thing about boys and men. And my answer for what it's worth, which I don't feel very satisfied with is like, like there's this huge number of people doing great work on behalf of women and girls. Yeah. And they're not going to, in fact, they're growing as more. And so like, I'm just trying to have a little bit of stuff on boys and men. And on average, it's okay, but I'm not satisfied.

35:26make the same argument about historically black colleges, you know, or is that creating? No, like there should be spaces for different people to thrive in. And look, it's a problem if you have HBCUs, because that's the only place that a young black man or woman can go. But if it's a place that you feel attracted to going, it's a wonderful thing. And by the way, anyone should be able to go there, right? Like, but the idea of having those spaces, I think is important. And I don't think pretending that gender doesn't exist is helpful to anyone or that people might be drawn to do different things.

36:02Just like, look, if you're born tall, it presents certain options. You don't have to pursue those options, but it would be weird to pretend that there aren't certain athletic pursuits that are more possible to you as a result of this. You know what I mean? So I think if you're doing it in a thoughtful way, it's additive. And then I think if you're doing it in an identity politics, sort of divisive us versus them way, then it is a problem. But I don't think that's what you're doing at all. And I think as a person with two boys, I'm like, hey, they have a unique set of challenges. And my job and my wife's job is to help them be successful as people, which happens to include them being boys, or at least at this moment.

36:44You know what I mean? I think that's helpful. Thank you. But it is a reminder of like where, what's the right space to be doing the work in. It is much more around these real problems, these practical, more practical issues and not into this whole identity stuff, like not into the, what is a woman? What is a man stuff, right? I'm just like, can we talk about high school graduation rates? Right. And so one of the deals I've made with people sometimes is like, can we talk about the Barbie movie? I was like, okay, only if we can then talk about high school graduation rates in Michigan. yeah right or technical high schools can we can we have that deal because of course those more cultural elements especially right now are just they're just sexier right they're just like and they're very lived and everyone's into them and what i've what i've really admired about what a lot of the women's groups do the kind of less the identity ones is that they'll do really good analysis of like what's driving the gender pay gap uh what what happened to women's promotion chances during COVID.

37:39What's the pipeline issue there? How do we construct cultures and systems that are a bit more female friendly? And they just do that well. And there's just really good research on that. And if something happens that seems to threaten the progress of women on any of those fronts, they're on it. And they're saying, hang on, the gender pay gap just got worse. Huh, what's happening there? Let's dig in and try and figure out what's happening and see if that's a problem. And I think that's great. They're not saying women versus men, women good. It's not a Hollywood movie. It's a policy paper. And unfortunately, the latter is quite boring.

38:17The decision to say like, hey, I'm going to say what I think is true, as opposed to what I think people want to hear is a tough decision. I mean, I definitely know, like with what I talk about with stoicism, that if I just stuck with the self-improvement, like if I just stuck with courage and discipline, it would do, I would, I'd have a bigger audience. I'd have less disagreement, less contention than if I went to the other, the wisdom and justice side of things, right? Like there's the, where you talk about what stoicism offers is attractive, where you talk about what stoicism asks or obligates, but you can't just pick and choose.

38:59You can't just take the stuff you like or the stuff that's salient or the stuff that gets people excited. You have, I think, the idea of taking your profession seriously and your obligations to the truth, to me, that's a part of kind of just having a code and being a person of honor or virtue. And there's going to be costs to doing that.

39:31Do you notice that in your own metrics and then worry about audience capture? Do you see that if you lean hard into how to be courageous, that suddenly you triple your male leadership and you're suddenly being quoted everywhere and you're getting invited to other stuff and you're monetizing? Do you see that? And if so, how do you psychologically defend against those? I try to ignore the metrics for the most part. I think there's an unhelpful amount of data available. And then I'm asking myself always, am I being a good steward of these ideas? Or am I being a good business person? And like I did this series, I'm doing this series on the Cardinal Virtues, I'm doing the Wisdom book now.

40:06But I went into the Justice book going, this is the most important book to me personally, but probably going to sell the worst. But I didn't get into writing about an obscure school of ancient philosophy because I wanted to maximize sales. Rich and famous. Yeah, there's other things to focus on. So the decision to like sort of do what you think is important and to, you know, obviously I try to optimize for the world that we're into, but I want to make sure that's not like leading. but I wonder if you've experienced this I definitely felt especially when the stoicism stuff started to take off I felt like in a way that it isn't true so much on the left-leaning stuff I was fascinated I was kind of peek behind the curtain watching this sort of right-wing conservative ecosystem sort of once you get like I could feel a gravitational pull of contacts contacts, conferences, funding, sort of there for the take.

41:04So I think J.D. Vance is a fascinating person. And watching that's captured in a different sense, where who he was in 2016 versus who he is in 2024 is a fascinating evolution to me. And I think it's part and parcel of this system that looks to sort of co-opt and bring people in. And I imagine you felt some of that gravitational pull on your work a little bit? A little bit, but it's very odd, actually. Not perhaps in the way you might expect. I feel like I'm probably right now between these different gravitational pulls. And I use the sort of fringe attacks as a useful data point, right? So I did a panel with UN women and we had some kind of funding from Melinda French Gates.

41:47And so Q attacks from right, right? Oh yeah, fine. He's become a lefty. He just thinks men should deconstruct themselves to be better feminists, right? And then I'll do some, I'll publish something that's more around marriage or something like that, or very critical of the current administration's failure to acknowledge this. And then you'll get the same from the left. He just doesn't want men to have to compete. Okay, good. Probably about right. So I actually think right now I feel pretty well balanced between the two. But I don't have the same issue that the podcasters have or that people who are in that space have.

42:22And I'm interested to know your view about this because I've noticed that when I'm doing this work, when I think about the podcasts that I'm going to go on and talk about, men quite often, they tend to be a little bit more center right, probably. Whereas a lot of the broadcast stuff I do, more kind of NPR stuff, NBC is more women and more kind of probably kind of center left. And I do think that if you're in this podcast space, and a couple of the guys who are in this space have said this to me, it's like, if you just talk about stuff straightforwardly about men, male issues, you get attacked from the left.

42:55Yeah. Right? And you get applauded on the right. You get exactly. And so the gravity. You go towards the people that like you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know whether you've got any observations on that, but it is, I think I can detect even in some of the podcasts that I'm kind of aware of, like either a little bit of a pull. Or them having to kind of lean very intentionally against it. And of course, they want the numbers. They want an audience. That's how they make their living. And so it feels like it's almost this dynamic that sets in where you get attacked and then you get defensive. You pull that way.

43:29You get applauded. You get audience. I actually think like, again, this is probably getting inside baseball, so I'll make it less inside baseball. I was thinking about this for my kids. So like when I was a kid, I don't know, I would hear about something. I'd watch something on TV. I'd read an article about something. All these things existed independently. There was no enormous Borg putting these bits of data together and coming up with a profile of what it thought I was and then serving me more and more of that. So, like, I don't know. My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh, so then I could listen to Rush Limbaugh, and then that could be a phase in my life.

44:07Or I could be into this band and then not be into that band. As opposed, there was nothing trying to make me more of that thing, to serve me more unlimited amounts of that thing. And so now I think about it as my kids get older and they watch a YouTube video, that can't exist in isolation. It's a potentially lucrative rabbit hole to pull them down. So instead of just something for them to explore, there's an incentive to draw them deeper and deeper into things. And the perilousness of that kind of keeps me up a little bit. Yeah. Although I'll try and make you feel a bit better about it, which is just observing my own.

44:43My boys are in their 20s now. And just young people more generally, there's this line. I can't know if it may have been Zeynep Tufekci. Someone said, you either live above or below the algorithm. Yeah. In other words, you either see it or you don't. And I've noticed that actually it's the older generations in our family that they're not aware of it. Interesting. Whereas my kids and their friends, they're totally aware of it. And they actually help me sometimes. And like my sons, I get this thing and they're like, well, it's because you watch that thing. Yes. And look where it comes from, dad. And it's got terrible provenance and it's awful and like, right.

45:17Sure. And so, and they go through phases, et cetera. But to some extent, the more that you can train your kids about algorithmic sophistication, sophistication, just to understand the algorithm. And then they're able to control it a little bit more. They see it. And so I think my generation is stuck in the middle a little bit where I'm like, I think it's the algorithm, but I don't know how does the algorithm work again? And I'm like, why am I seeing that? And like, I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in that, but it thinks that whereas they're like, here's why dad, right? And here's what you need to do to control it.

45:50And so I'm pretty hopeful. Also my youngest son and his friends, they all just deleted TikTok from their phones because they're like, this is stupid. This is a waste of our time. And so that kind of learning is happening, I think. And so like, it's not, the algorithms are not going to go away. And so what we've got to do is like, we have to figure it out. Yeah. Make sure our kids are above it and they can kind of see it coming. No, that's a great way. You're either above or you're below. You're either using it or it is using you and you got to be conscious of that. It was easier to have passing fads or phases in a world where this wasn't being tracked and recorded because you could just, you could be into something for six weeks and then change your personality in a way that you have the same, you know, like I've had the same email address for 20 plus years now.

46:34Right. And so that's connected to all these different things. And that affects what I see and don't see in a way that if I didn't have that, or if I started, like, I wonder what would happen if I started over with everything tomorrow. I just created new accounts on everything. Declare email bankruptcy or reinvent. cookie bankruptcy, right? And then what would I discover about myself? What patterns had I been stuck in that I didn't realize? And so that's a lot to put on a 15 year old that, Hey, the, the phase you went through three years ago is still informing what you see and think now in ways that you're not conscious.

47:11Yeah. Although I've, I've seen my, my sons definitely go through different phases and come out of them and they, they seem to be able to just croft the algorithms in various ways. But it is an interesting thought that for all the discussion of more choice and identity and fluidity and so on, maybe we had more options to be more fluid in that broader sense, right? In the past, because we were less hostage to our own previous selves. Yeah. I was talking to this woman and she was telling me that her daughter cut off all her hair and that it caused this whole problem at school in a way that was like funny, but also you could see like everyone was like, oh, are you, they were like being too supportive of it instead of just being like, you're a teenage girl who's cutting off your hair because you're being a teenage girl, not you're a teenage girl who's not sure if you're a teenage girl.

48:00Yeah, yeah. You know, and just the inability to just do that thing in a, and look, I'm sure it's always been a problem, but it was funny to see, oh, people's sort of political algorithm is acting on her in positive and negative ways, as opposed to just seeing this as what it was, which is a bit of isolated teenage behavior. Yeah, there's a real danger of over-interpretation there, for sure. And I kind of look back and think, I'm kind of glad that some of my periods and some of the things that I did were not over-interpreted. There's a willingness to kind of pounce a little bit, go, ah, this. My parents were of the generation of more benign neglect, which I'm very grateful for.

48:39and I remember trying to explain to my father what the word parenting meant because I was going to some parenting he said what's that word parenting parenting I said yeah that's a verb yeah exactly when did that he said when did that become a verb and I looked it up and it was in the late early 80s it wasn't a verb I said well didn't you did parenting he's like no we didn't maybe it's supervision so so he said we just had kids yeah and did all these things but I actually one of my theories is that the turning of parent into a verb, parenting, may have been a bad turn because most more generally that degree of surveillance and over-interpretation has become a bit of an issue.

49:16The space to just be like, I did my hair and it's a weird braid thing down there. I remember my parents just being like, fuck. They weren't like... You want to check out some books? I'll show you the books, sir. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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