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Episode 506: Where Have All The Men Gone? · Words & Numbers

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  Coming up next on words and numbers, gas taxes.
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  The 25th Amendment. Age verification.
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  And Max Borders joins us to talk about what's up with boys and
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  men. Hi, I'm James.
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  And I'm Anthony. And this is words and numbers.
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  So, Aunt, besides boys and men, what's new and exciting in your
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  world this week? Someone sent me an article from
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  Politico and this article is the author is John Fierick.
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  Fierick was he says here in the bio he assisted in crafting the
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  25th amendment. He's Dean emeritus at Fordham.
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  He worked in, I guess this would have been the 19 late 1960s, on
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  crafting what today is the 25th Amendment.
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  And the point of his article is to say that our contemporary
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  debate over it misses the point. He says that the point of the
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  25th Amendment was to fix a problem that the founders did
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  not address. Well, which is what do you do if
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  a president is incapable of of executing duties of the office?
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  But he's not dead, right? And this was the result.
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  This was the result, just pure and simple, of John F John F
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  Kennedy taking a bullet to the brain.
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  Right, Yes, yes. And so Furyk says look, there
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  are 4 sections in the in the 25th amendment and sections 1-2
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  and three are straightforward. Nobody disagrees with them.
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  He he takes issue with Section 4, which is the section that
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  we've been talking about of late where the vice president with
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  the cabinet can vote to in effect remove the president.
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  And he says, he says, look, the intent was never for this to be
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  used as a political tool that you don't like what the
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  president's doing or even that, you know, he says even it's not
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  intended to be used in place of impeachment.
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  So if if the president is is abusing his authority, this is
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  not a matter, according to Ferric, for the 25th Amendment.
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  But I would say that's neither here nor there because it
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  doesn't matter what you intended.
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  What matters is what does it say?
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  But here in lies something interesting that I wasn't aware
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  of that apparently 25th Amendment does say, I thought
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  that it was a vote of the vice president with the cabinet.
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  And apparently the president can challenge, if indeed the vice
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  president of the cabinet vote, you know, we're going to remove
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  the president. The President can challenge this
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  and it goes before Congress where it requires a 2/3 vote of
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  both houses then to remove the president.
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  Yep, all correct. So that would be what is that
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  about the same lift in terms of difficulty of an as impeachment?
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  Does impeachment require 2/3 of the house?
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  2/3 Yep, 2/3. And 2/3 of the Senate also?
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  Or is it just unanimous? 2/3.
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  Huh. So, yeah, I mean, look, there's
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  a the president would clearly, and the word they use in the
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  amendment is incapacitated, right?
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  We, we would have to have somebody.
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  I mean, if, if you wanted to call Trump incapacitated right
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  now, as so many people seem to want to do, you, you would have
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  to literally make the case that he has taken leave of his senses
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  and he's a raving lunatic. And there is evidence to the
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  contrary everywhere you look. He gets up every morning, he
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  puts on his clothes. He doesn't show up to meetings
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  in his pajamas, Right? Well, yeah, yeah, I'm, yeah, I I
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  don't disagree with you, but I can see enough fuzziness around
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  that that someone could make the.
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  Argument. But the the much more obvious
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  example was Joe Biden. It was clearly incapacitated.
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  He was completely incapacitated. I mean, he, he may have had his
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  lucid moments, but they were few and far between.
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  And you know, you, you, you never heard anybody talking
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  about the 25th Amendment with Uncle Joe because, well, the
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  media was covering for him, frankly.
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  Yeah. And, and I think I have to, in
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  light of all of this, I have to take a step back from things I
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  have said about Kamala Harris. My my argument has been for a
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  long time that she missed an opportunity, that her one job as
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  vice president was to be there if in case the president
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  couldn't fulfill his duties. And by not calling the cabinet
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  together and invoking the 25th Amendment I claimed she was, she
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  was doing a disservice to her position.
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  Now, having read this and realizing it would have taken a
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  2/3 vote in both houses to remove the president and that
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  wasn't going to happen, I could make the argument in her defense
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  that it would have. She may have known that there
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  was no way this would be held up. 20 invoking 25th amendment
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  would not be held up by Congress.
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  Therefore, she may be doing a greater disservice to the
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  country by invoking it then by just letting things ride.
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  Yeah, I I'm going to take the opposite approach on this.
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  I think she had a duty to the country to make it clear that
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  she knew for a fact that Joe Biden was unfit to be president.
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  Then what? Chips fall where they fall,
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  right? Can you get 2/3 on either side
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  of Congress? Maybe, maybe not.
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  But Joe Biden would have to make the case publicly that no, no,
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  no, I'm actually fine. And if you want that debate, you
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  knew he wasn't fine. Right, right.
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  So, you know, I'm happy to leave it at that and, and we can come
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  back to it later because I, I think we will actually, I think
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  the 25th Amendment sooner or later is going to play in a
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  meaningful way. So we'll we'll have to.
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  Wait, as I'm, as I'm making this argument to you, I have in the
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  back of my head Ford and Nixon. You know, Ford got a lot of a
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  lot of guff for pardoning Nixon, but his argument at the time was
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  that it it would be it would do more damage to the presidency to
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  not pardon him. His argument at the time was
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  also, I'm spending 80% of my time on one human being.
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  I have a nation that I have to govern.
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  And he knew pardoning Nixon was probably going to cost him the
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  White House, and he did it anyway 'cause he thought he had
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  to. Like Gerald Ford was elected
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  president by a Congressional District in in Michigan, right?
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  It's the only, the only time we can say such a thing.
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  And he was such a good and decent man.
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  And people lose sight of that. They say things like I should
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  never pardon Nixon. I had to pardon Nixon in a
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  nanosecond if I were in that position.
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  I don't want to spend one second of my time thinking about this.
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  I want to spend less time thinking about this than I think
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  about what I'm going to wear today.
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  And as long term knowers of me do know, I don't think at all
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  about what I'm going to wear today.
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  And for, for people who may not be aware, I think it's a
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  fascinating factoid. You said that Ford was elected
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  by 1 Congressional District in Michigan.
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  He was the representative. He was elected by the
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  Congressional District to the House of Representatives.
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  Spiro. Spiro Agnew was, I don't know if
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  he resigned or he was impeached, but he's no longer vice
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  president. Nixon appoints Ford vice
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  president, so Ford was never elected to the position.
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  Then Ford the Nixon resigns, so Ford ascends to the presidency
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  again, never having been elected.
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  Yeah, it's it's one of the bigger curiosities of American
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  electoral politics. But it it worked out quite well.
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  He was really the man for the job at that moment.
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  I have, I have nothing but admiration and respect for Joe
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  Ford, his falling down all the time notwithstanding.
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  I fall down all the time, too. I'm willing to give people the
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  benefit of that doubt any day of the week.
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  And I want to talk about gasoline.
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  Do you remember? Do you remember when Donald
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  Trump came on TV and he said, I'm such a successful president
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  and you know this because gas is only $3 a gallon again?
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  Yeah. Yeah, I said.
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  That was just a few months ago. What do we now like 480?
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  Four, I just looked it up, it's 452 nationwide.
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  So in some places much, much higher, looking at you
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  California, other places considerably lower.
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  We're paying about 4/24/30 a gallon here in Tucson, AZ as of
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  my ride home last night. But you know, Trump often said
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  when other people were president that, hey, if you if prices go
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  up like that, you should just resign you.
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  And remember, he would also say, well, if you had the biggest one
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  day drop in the stock market, you shouldn't be president
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  anymore. Well, he doesn't really mean
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  these things, as we all knew. But we knew that going back to
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  his first statement, that he'd pay off the debt in eight years.
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  Eight years, that's right, deficits growing every single
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  year. So bully on him for that.
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  He does have a bright idea, though.
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  Speaking of the debt and the deficit.
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  He wants now, very predictably, and I hope it actually works, to
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  suspend excise taxes on gasoline, which would be an 18.4
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  cent per gallon decrease in the cost of unleaded gas and 24.4
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  cents a gallon on diesel. Oh, OK.
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  But I mean, all that means is we're going to have a bigger
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  federal deficit, which means we're just borrowing the money.
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  I'm, I'm reading from the CBS News and they always, all these
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  major news sources always view the issue the same way.
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  They say that this would cost the government.
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  And you see where I get pissed off with that?
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  This isn't going to tax, Tax reductions don't cost the
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  government. Taxes cost us, right?
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  That's the, that's the direction these work.
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  But CBS News tells us that it would cost the federal
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  government about 1/2 a billion dollars a week to a week lower
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  these taxes, which is almost nothing in the scheme of things
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  for the federal government. But you know which.
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  Yeah. But this would be an interesting
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  discussion to have as a country if they weren't going to borrow
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  the money, if, if they were going to say, OK, well, we're
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  going to lose half a billion or $500 billion, whatever it is per
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  week, we'll cut somewhere else to balance, right?
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  But that's not so. So really what we're asking,
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  what we're presenting, being presented with is the option of
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  paying a higher price for gas now or paying for it later in
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  the form of higher taxes on a larger debt.
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  And we're always going to choose later because the people who get
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  to make the choices are really worried about what's going to
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  happen right now. And right now is actually
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  November when the midterm elections happened, which is not
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  far away. And that, of course, aunt,
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  brings us to the foolishness of the week.
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  We've talked about age verification online more more
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  than once, I believe. And I've I've told you that the
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  the great state of Arizona has declared that porn shall no
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  longer be looked at by young people.
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  And as a result, anybody who wants to look at, I'm just going
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  to say naked ladies because that's what I look at, has to go
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  through a, a, a rather vigorous age verification process.
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  You've heard about this, apparently.
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  That's a tax for not knowing how to work AVPN.
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  Well, that's right, the the the good people in the Arizona
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  legislature. I also know this to be true.
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  Where the hell was it in Louisiana where a friend of mine
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  told me his legislature just did the same damn thing.
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  And that's right. Every young person, every post
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  pubescent boy, let's just say it that way, knows full well how to
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  fire up AVPN and get around your your little age problem thing
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  that you put right in his way. But as it turns out, the young
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  people aunt are far, far more in in inventive than that.
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  Because. Because one of the ways that you
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  can have your age verified is to have your webcam take a picture
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  of you which you know, you might think.
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  I'm remembering now. I knew this sounded familiar.
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  Yeah. And and and some some sharp
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  knife somewhere decided to make a mustache out of black
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  cardboard black construction paper, taped it on his face and
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  got through the age verification process.
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  Other young people simply hold up magazine pictures of older
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  men and and that seems to work too.
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  So score one for the kids and the government not quite getting
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  it done. Oh, that is beautiful.
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  And we've, we've got to give credit, if I'm remembering
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  correctly, one of our listeners sent that in.
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  That is correct. This was sent in by a very kind
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  listener who thought for for a second that this might not be
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  the foolishness of the week. Right?
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  You're going to read the guy's name.
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  Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, Jeffrey Stewart.
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  So, Jeffrey? Thank you kindly for sending
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  this beautiful and just keep them coming.
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  If this is the quality that that that that you are capable of.
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  We want to have more more Jeffrey in our lives.
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  So. Paper mustache that is just
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  superb. Yeah, I wonder if I like a bulb
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  cap would work as well. I wonder if it goes the other
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  way, like if you shave off your mustache beard, would you then
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  failed to show up as an adult? Yeah, then you got it.
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  Then you got to have a picture of your driver's license taken.
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  And you know, frankly, I don't want pornographers having access
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  to anything of mine or right, you know, they have a slimy
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  reputation for a reason. Right.
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  Of all the people online, you don't want to have your ID.
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  That's exactly, but one's top of the list.
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  Kind of the one. And, and if the government is
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  the intermediary, they're not really, they're just hiring it
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  out to somebody else. And you can bet that sooner or
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  later, that database of your personal information, like every
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  other database of your personal information, will be made public
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  in a leak, and it will cause you all kinds of trouble.
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  Right. So there we go.
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  Max Borders joins us this week. Max is author of The Social
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  Singularity and The Decentralist.
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  His most recent book, Under Throw, is also the title of his
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  popular Sub Stack and Web Show. Max is also the director of
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  Human Respect Labs, an incubator dedicated to supporting projects
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  with liberatory promise in creativity, entrepreneurship and
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  innovation. His latest project is a
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  brotherhood dedicated to virtue, excellence and freedom called
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  The Chrysalis Project. Max, welcome to Words and
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  Numbers. Thanks for having me.
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  I got to I got to preface this, usually when we have guests on,
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  we ask the guests to send us some bio that I then read as an
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  introduction. And yours is the first to
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  contain the word I didn't know. Liberatory.
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  You know, I probably should have changed that so that it could be
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  easier to read, but nevertheless, there it is.
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  It just means, I guess it's attaches to the word innovation,
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  and it's innovation that tends to liberate.
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  So that's what I'm going for there.
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  Nice and depending one wants to check it out.
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  It turns out it is a word. I googled it.
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  Anthony is a curious fellow by nature.
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  He can't help himself. Yeah, Max.
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  Then I fun of me when I raised the question earlier.
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  You should have listened. But anyway, you know, when I hit
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  that word that I don't know in a book, I just keep right on
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  going. I figure I'll figure it out
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  later, but Aunt stops and lets his curiosity get the best of
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  him, which I think is probably the better approach.
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  I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a typo.
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  Yeah. But Max, thanks for being here.
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  Thanks again. Thank you for being here and and
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  by way of introduction, I should say that Max and I have known
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  each other for so long that I can't remember how we met.
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  Yeah, it's been, it's been more than 10 years, I would say.
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  And I can't remember how we met either, although I.
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  Remember the first day we met, I immediately bitched at you for
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  having gotten a job that I applied for, and you turned
• 18:07
  right around and did the exact same thing to me, which I
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  thought was hilarious. You don't remember any of this?
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  I could tell by the look on your face.
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  So we're just been, we're going to move happily along.
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  Max is here today to talk about what I think of as a burgeoning
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  crisis in the young male world. So Max, do you have some initial
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  thoughts or would you like to hear mine?
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  Well, I'm I'm happy to start, please.
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  I think. I think it's great to get
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  different perspectives. It also happens that we all are
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  male, so that's good. It's not to say that.
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  A lot of people would stop you right there with a lot of
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  complaining, Max. Well, that's equal.
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  That's certainly been the problem, I think for, you know,
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  for more than a decade is in in order, you know, part of it.
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  I think it's a problem with multiple factors, but the
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  condition or the situation among young men in the West,
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  particularly in the United States, is such that they grew
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  up on a steady diet of messages that were more empowering to
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  girls and young women. And were everything from casting
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  them as the dumb, as the dummy in in the sitcom or the cartoon,
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  all the way up to, you know, toxic masculinity as as this,
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  this kind of this sort of original sin of being male.
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  And these messages were, you know, happened over and over
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  again among among young men. I also think that there was, you
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  know, a lot of this hit around the time that smartphones hit.
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  And so the, the, the, the steady sort of commodification of image
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  with respect to young men and young women sort of created
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  different pathologies, two different pathologies, certainly
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  a pathology for women as well. But the one that we are equipped
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  to talk about is among young men.
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  And after receiving a steady diet of those messages, there's
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  been a backlash. And that backlash is caused, I
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  guess what you might want to call the manosphere.
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  That's the term that's being bandied about for it.
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  And I don't see that as a particularly healthy alternative
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  to the kind of narratives that were being spun about men in
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  general, and particularly young men growing up in terms of how
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  they develop and grow. So that's, that's a that's a
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  start. But we can also, we can, we can
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  go further. But I'm curious to hear your
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  perspective on it. Well.
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  You know, I'm, I'm old enough to remember when Christina Hoff
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  Sommers took this up years and years and years ago with a book
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  that I'm almost positive was called The War Against Boys,
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  where where she took the task, how people were educating young
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  boys and, and how the rules and order and for lack of a better
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  term, feminization of young boys.
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  Would she, she complained, have long term effects.
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  And lo and behold, we're here a generation or two later and
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  those long term effects are in full bloom.
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  But you know, I want to get she couldn't have seen the
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  manosphere from where she was writing, right?
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  We can see it now and this idea that influencers are really what
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  we need. And I, I think that is the
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  implicit idea underlying the manosphere, right?
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  That there are these influencers and they'll show me how to live
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  is exactly incorrect. What we need are role models,
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  mentors. Yeah, that that's right.
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  But things, things like this, I think things that people took
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  for granted 40, a hundred, 200 years ago that we now think are
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  are passe. Yeah.
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  And you know, with this, the great lateralization of digital
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  technologies, what used to be, I guess you could say, you know,
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  what's the opposite of lateral going this way, OK, which is
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  passed down from say father to son or someone who is a helpful
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  mentor or teacher that, as you said, is a role model who passes
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  along wisdom, passes along even skills.
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  But along with that, a presence or way of being, a mean of
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  self-control. All of those things are, as the
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  world is digitized, you don't really get through social media.
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  Social media lateralizes but emphasizes qualities, traits and
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  sources of character that are not especially conducive to the
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  full development of what we might think of as the gentleman
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  of the 21st century. And that's really a shame.
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  And I think, I think a big project now is trying to play
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  catch up on that score. Yeah, it it's hard to imagine
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  what a 21st century gentleman would even look like.
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  I mean, it's really difficult. Yeah.
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  Max, are you, are you familiar with Richard Rohr in this Center
• 23:49
  for Action and Contemplation? I believe he's located out in
• 23:53
  Arizona. OK, vaguely.
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  He's familiar with the name, Yeah.
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  I've been involved with with his group and the offshoots.
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  The name is illumin for Oh good Lord, almost as long as I've
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  been doing words and numbers and what what interested me is you
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  said you know a burgeoning problem with young men were in
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  his group illumin address this and he's focusing he's saying
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  that the the problem saying much of what you're saying there, but
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  the problem isn't just with young men.
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  It's with older men that that we have, we've gone back and forth
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  in this extreme of, of the old styled.
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  And I think there's a lot to be said for, for the in, in terms
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  of them being correct and categorizing as toxic
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  masculinity. Those who do.
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  I think there there was a time when we were far too in that far
• 24:50
  too far in that direction, but now we've come too far in the
• 24:52
  other direction with almost a masculinization and and worst
• 24:59
  group is looking to to work with men to find this balance that
• 25:03
  yeah, there's a feminine archetype, there's a masculine
• 25:05
  archetype and both need to be nurtured.
• 25:07
  But it sounds very much like what you're talking about now
• 25:09
  with young men. Yeah, it's almost as if that
• 25:15
  there has been these two competing as as the male
• 25:18
  archetype and female archetype have become creasingly
• 25:20
  unhealthy. You've gotten, on the one hand,
• 25:24
  what one might call, in Jungian terms, the tyrannical father,
• 25:29
  right? That needed to be suppressed a
• 25:31
  little. Or at least that was the thought
• 25:33
  we. Got the devouring mother.
• 25:36
  Exactly. We got the.
• 25:37
  Devouring mother in exchange and the devouring mother is
• 25:43
  expresses itself in terms of things like helicopter
• 25:46
  parenting, smothering, you know, trying to keep, you know what,
• 25:52
  what are you know, the nature of a boy, the nature of kids for
• 25:56
  that matter. But certainly boys is to be
• 26:00
  super kinetic in their play. And you know, there was people
• 26:06
  too readily during the 90s and two early 2000s turning to
• 26:10
  Ritalin, for example, to try to make these compliant, sort of
• 26:15
  dutiful sit in your seat without any other real expressions of
• 26:20
  play and that kinetic stuff that boys needed.
• 26:24
  But also it was a stripping away of what I think are masculine
• 26:29
  virtues and values, not entirely, but masculine flavored
• 26:36
  virtues and values. And this and it certainly
• 26:43
  suppressed this kind of call to excellence.
• 26:46
  You know, the idea of virtue and excellence.
• 26:49
  These, this, this couplet is very Greek almost in its
• 26:52
  orientation. Or you can imagine in, you know,
• 26:56
  any of the ancient civilizations of Persia or of Greece, Rome,
• 27:01
  you know, the, the ideal man was one of both virtue and
• 27:05
  excellence. If you had, if you could add a
• 27:08
  third, it would be ambition. But ambition even was had begun
• 27:13
  to be suppressed. Where this call to excellence is
• 27:17
  is conceived of is is excess ambition.
• 27:20
  So, you know, how do we suppress the, the, the, these are the
• 27:27
  nature of a boy to be ambitious or to be this or to be more
• 27:32
  excellent and also to be virtuous, where virtue was
• 27:37
  recast as feminine virtues and values.
• 27:40
  And I think that was, as you said, a huge mistake.
• 27:43
  Before our our listeners start losing their minds, I want to
• 27:47
  underline that when we talk about masculine, feminine here,
• 27:50
  it's in terms of the archetypes. It's not necessarily male,
• 27:55
  female. Exactly, exactly.
• 27:59
  And it and there's a there's a good dose of this if you want to
• 28:03
  think of it and not in the archetypal form, but just in
• 28:07
  what is the relative doses that are suitable for your average
• 28:10
  boy and your average girl. They're obviously masculine
• 28:14
  virtues are are good and healthy doses for developing young,
• 28:18
  young women and girls, right. The idea that, you know, you
• 28:23
  know, a sort of sort of legalistic rules orientation,
• 28:29
  conceptions of justice that are about, you know,
• 28:33
  proportionality, like what you take out is it should be
• 28:37
  proportional to what you put in. You know, these are the kind of
• 28:40
  notions that I think have been suppressed or thinned,
• 28:44
  attenuated in some way. There's a great piece by Helen
• 28:47
  Andrews that came out a while ago, and it's also
• 28:50
  controversial. That speaks to the great
• 28:54
  feminization and it really unpacks this idea of imbalance.
• 29:00
  And really that's what we want to see is a restoration of
• 29:03
  balance in these, because there's a part of this equation
• 29:08
  that sort of sounds like we're victim blaming.
• 29:10
  It's like what's wrong with the kids today?
• 29:13
  But you were right in the beginning of this to say what is
• 29:16
  wrong with the parents? What is wrong with the elders?
• 29:19
  Something happened that caused a disconnect in that
• 29:23
  intergenerational torch passing of virtue and excellence in
• 29:28
  those healthy masculine virtues and values.
• 29:31
  And that's not to say that we should suppress or otherwise
• 29:34
  diminish the feminine ones. It's about the balance.
• 29:38
  And and Max, it's interesting, right?
• 29:40
  Because I do want to lay the blame where it's always
• 29:44
  appropriately laid right at the feet of the people who are
• 29:48
  responsible for introducing fresh new ideas in terms of of
• 29:54
  child rearing. Now, look, there have been fresh
• 29:57
  new ideas in terms of child rearing for as long as there
• 30:01
  have been children and parents, And many of them, if not most of
• 30:05
  the ones that survived were, were quite good.
• 30:08
  They wouldn't have survived if they didn't, if they if they
• 30:11
  weren't. But we're at a place now where
• 30:15
  it's almost impossible to find a grown man who is willing to
• 30:22
  stand up and say what you are espousing is a bunch of nonsense
• 30:26
  and you have to stop. And and I just explained why one
• 30:33
  man, a Canadian psychologist, became world famous Jordan
• 30:39
  Peterson, because he just said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do
• 30:44
  that. It just whatever they wanted him
• 30:46
  to do, it was a pronounced thing.
• 30:48
  And and then he said, why is everybody rolling over on this?
• 30:55
  And before long, he's not a professor anymore.
• 30:58
  He's a world famous author and lecturer.
• 31:02
  And people are gobbling up what he says, but they're not
• 31:05
  internalizing it and then externalizing it.
• 31:09
  He's basically speaking it into a void.
• 31:13
  And, and, and then you look at the influencer movement and who
• 31:17
  do you see? Andrew Tate, who will tell you
• 31:22
  women are there to be used go do that.
• 31:25
  And and that that my friend, is not correct.
• 31:30
  It just simply isn't. And you know, it's it's high
• 31:33
  time people stood up to people like that.
• 31:37
  And the only people who can do that are men.
• 31:41
  Men have to stand up and speak against so-called men like that.
• 31:46
  Right, exactly. And and it's in and not in and
• 31:50
  not in this sort of the screeching harpies or or the the
• 31:56
  Sibilian lynch mob kind of way, right.
• 31:58
  It's more it needs to be, it needs to be a kind of a
• 32:06
  confident, self possessed look him in the eyes and say no,
• 32:10
  that's not cool either. It's really about and, and, and
• 32:14
  it's honestly, it's a less about tell then show, but the
• 32:19
  influencers have a strong, strong influence because they
• 32:23
  just put this stuff in their ears and we're parenting through
• 32:27
  the devices in a lot of ways. I know because I've done it and
• 32:30
  I have to admit it. You know, I've let my kids, I
• 32:32
  got it. I got a cut.
• 32:33
  I got a few great kids. Well, I got 3 great kids coming
• 32:37
  up and I'm very happy about that.
• 32:39
  But I'm also lucky because two of my kids have gotten ears full
• 32:44
  of some of that garbage and they came through it unscathed.
• 32:48
  I'm, I'm happy to report, but not everyone has.
• 32:52
  So yeah, you have to, you have to speak out against it, but in
• 32:58
  a characteristically masculine way.
• 33:01
  Not in, not in a judgmental kind of not in the devouring mother
• 33:07
  way, right. It's it's.
• 33:10
  And, and look, let's get back to that for a second because if
• 33:13
  we're going to say anything controversial here, this is it.
• 33:17
  And I'm about to say it. We have multiple generations of
• 33:23
  men who have become, I don't think they were born.
• 33:27
  I know they weren't Born This Way, but they have become
• 33:30
  unwilling to behave as men because they are terrified of
• 33:36
  what they will be accused of by the women in their lives.
• 33:39
  They just don't want to cure it. And if if you don't believe me,
• 33:44
  take a look at the current generation of young men and ask
• 33:48
  why not only do they not get married, they don't even date in
• 33:53
  large number. They stay home playing Xbox.
• 33:56
  Why? Because it's just easier.
• 34:00
  Yeah, they don't. They don't want to deal with it
• 34:02
  either. Right.
• 34:05
  Well and that goes to you know some of the dynamics that are
• 34:10
  really quite difficult to lay at the feet of any given person,
• 34:17
  group, political movement and so on.
• 34:19
  All those are factors. Certainly some of this is what
• 34:26
  is interaction like now with between young men and young
• 34:33
  women. We see a demographic crisis
• 34:36
  going on right now where let's just say the people you want
• 34:42
  having more kids are not especially in the West.
• 34:46
  And this is a, this has been going on for a while to the
• 34:50
  point where now have to worry, a worry, but not about
• 34:52
  overpopulation, but about demographic decline, even
• 34:55
  collapse. And so, you know, we want young
• 35:00
  people to meet, fall in love, get married.
• 35:03
  We want them to date. We want them to break up.
• 35:05
  And we don't go through all that stuff.
• 35:07
  But they're not even having a chance.
• 35:09
  I mean, they're all, they're practically getting married to
• 35:11
  Call of Duty. And at least on the part of
• 35:14
  young men and young women have been sufficiently trained by the
• 35:19
  last 10-15 years to become boss babes and to become this.
• 35:23
  And I'm not saying that they should become breeders either.
• 35:26
  But what I am saying is that there is like everything else,
• 35:31
  happy medium and a healthy balance and the the young people
• 35:35
  on men and women are just not finding that.
• 35:38
  And the, the expression of that unhealthy or unhealthy direction
• 35:45
  or imbalance on the part of young men is, is a withdrawal
• 35:51
  into the digital and, and with that, a kind of, I guess you
• 35:59
  could call it failure to fully develop into a man with presence
• 36:06
  and emotional control and confidence, which is, which is
• 36:10
  the kind of man at some level, young men, women want to meet.
• 36:15
  And as young women have created avatars of themselves with which
• 36:22
  they seek to commodify or, or they seek to commodify
• 36:27
  themselves or that avatar, that image of themselves, there's
• 36:30
  this sort of, they, the young women are getting lost behind
• 36:36
  that image thing. So they're looking for young men
• 36:41
  who are 6 feet 6 figures and the, and the rest of it, which
• 36:46
  I'm sure you've heard the third part of that.
• 36:50
  And that is what what is that's creating is just an unhealthy
• 36:55
  dynamic between young men and young women that is not
• 36:59
  generating any kind of posterity, frankly, for for
• 37:06
  human beings, at least not in the West.
• 37:08
  It's really sad, Max, because women, young women have been
• 37:13
  instructed, educated, urged, encouraged, whatever verb you
• 37:19
  want to use there to be so demanding that 64300 thousand a
• 37:26
  year with this kind of nonsense that you hear coming out of
• 37:29
  their mouths when the man on the street interviews happened.
• 37:32
  They're describing .001% of the male population and and those
• 37:39
  guys, let's just be blunt, can pick anybody they want because
• 37:44
  they are .001% at the very top of the population.
• 37:49
  Men on the other hand are just giving up.
• 37:54
  So women have crazy expectations and men are being taught by male
• 38:00
  influencers to just use them and be done with them and walk away.
• 38:05
  Which they can't, and unless they're in the top 5%, in which
• 38:09
  case they're running harems. It's it's, it's profoundly
• 38:14
  unhealthy all the way around. Yeah, all the way.
• 38:17
  So the, the top five 10% of, of young men on the dating apps are
• 38:24
  playing the the top 20% of the women against each other and
• 38:31
  sort of keeping them. This is harem dynamics.
• 38:34
  This is what we solved for in the in the West by creating
• 38:37
  monogamous marriage as an institution.
• 38:40
  And look, I don't want to sound like a crazy conservative, but
• 38:44
  there are certain things that work and we understand why they
• 38:47
  work and and this ain't working. But I, I wondered to what extent
• 38:53
  the, the dating apps are encouraging this because I'm,
• 38:58
  I've got a couple of kids who are that age and they're on the
• 39:01
  gaps. And if you're a woman, what is,
• 39:05
  what is the first thing that's being sent out of the first
• 39:08
  thing that a man would see? It's your picture.
• 39:11
  If you're a guy, what is the woman seeing?
• 39:13
  OK, she's seen your picture, but also the vitals that you're
• 39:16
  talking about, you know, income, height, all this stuff.
• 39:20
  It it's as if the dating apps are, are bringing to the fore
• 39:24
  those superfluous things and you're, you're just going
• 39:29
  through swiping looking for the guy who, or the woman who
• 39:31
  matches what you're looking for at a surface level.
• 39:34
  And nobody's getting into the into the deep.
• 39:37
  Or if you're getting to the deep, it's after you've gone
• 39:40
  through the filter of here's the perfect looking woman.
• 39:42
  Here's the guy with the perfect income, whatever it is.
• 39:45
  Well, aunt, let me let me jump on to that because after high
• 39:49
  school, so we'll, we'll put the, you know, prior to the 19 year
• 39:54
  old Harrigan on the shelf and not talk about him.
• 39:58
  But post high school, every woman who I ever dated I met at
• 40:04
  work, right? Which is which is primarily
• 40:07
  where adults meet each other. If you even ask a woman out at
• 40:13
  work you've got an HR meeting in your immediate future at at this
• 40:16
  point. So the the biggest place that
• 40:19
  people met their future mates is now off limits.
• 40:24
  Church attendance way down. That was another place people
• 40:28
  used to meet potential mates and everywhere you look, the old
• 40:33
  ways of of meeting somebody and getting to know that person,
• 40:37
  thinking I might be willing to spend the rest of my life with
• 40:41
  that person, which is a very big decision.
• 40:45
  Every way we had to have a long term introduction to another
• 40:51
  human being is gone or dying. So what do we get?
• 40:55
  We get short term, we get billboards of of human beings
• 40:59
  like what you see swipe this way or that way.
• 41:04
  Here here's interestingly, and I, I don't want to get too far
• 41:08
  on this, this point because it's perhaps leading us astray from
• 41:13
  the the the main subject, which is the healthy development of
• 41:17
  young men. But in terms of the dating apps,
• 41:20
  I I thought it would be interesting to develop one where
• 41:24
  that had, I don't know if you remember, like the early, early
• 41:28
  days of the Internet, maybe like 2000.
• 41:30
  It was this thing called hot or not.
• 41:33
  You remember that it's just a stupid thing.
• 41:35
  And you could, you could rate people by their looks, right.
• 41:39
  And and so you just say, you know, it's, it was binary.
• 41:43
  You could make it a little more granular if you, if you wanted
• 41:46
  to, but you could keep the binary.
• 41:47
  It's like hot or not. But if you, if you had something
• 41:52
  like that, where part of the fun of being on the dating lap was
• 41:56
  everybody rating everybody else's looks, you could then
• 42:00
  have, I don't know, quintiles or deciles would probably be the
• 42:06
  best. So your top, your top 10% could
• 42:11
  date only your top 10% and so on, on down.
• 42:14
  And they would only be matched by looks of people who were
• 42:17
  roughly in their their department.
• 42:19
  So then you're starting you, yes, you want to look at looks.
• 42:22
  Everybody wants to see that, but I don't know, go make a billion
• 42:27
  dollars somebody and fix. And this ain't going to fix
• 42:30
  everything, but maybe it's a start.
• 42:33
  It's been said correctly for years that 1010s marry 10's and
• 42:37
  twos marry twos and that's just how life is right and
• 42:41
  superficial. You bet it is.
• 42:44
  Are there counter examples? No question, but is that largely
• 42:48
  speaking the case? It is all right, but but let's
• 42:52
  get back to young men because that is really why we're here.
• 42:56
  There is right now and and Anthony and I saw the the
• 43:01
  beginnings of the end at the college level.
• 43:04
  We both stopped teaching at roughly the same time, but by
• 43:08
  the time we stopped, young women were outperforming young men
• 43:13
  without question. Right now, the very top students
• 43:17
  I I had were in, in almost every instance.
• 43:21
  Men like the singular man, almost always the best in the
• 43:25
  class, and then almost all the women outperformed almost all
• 43:30
  the men as a rule and then. This sounds like some women
• 43:36
  Larry Summers thing that you're describing here were the long
• 43:39
  tail. Yeah, or men, but yes, that's
• 43:42
  tends to be the. But here's the thing, they can't
• 43:45
  come and with me like they did with Larry, I'll say what I
• 43:48
  want. I'm I don't, I'm not worried
• 43:50
  about it. But, but, but here's the thing.
• 43:55
  More women are now graduating from college than men.
• 44:00
  Yeah. And it's not it's not a tiny
• 44:02
  margin anymore. Now that's from a place.
• 44:06
  And that's from a place Max, that started with no women going
• 44:09
  to college at all. Well, and there's a I'm I'm I
• 44:17
  wonder what the causal factors around that are right, Because
• 44:21
  on the one hand, I I bet Richard Reeves knows.
• 44:26
  OK, so to bookend what you were saying about Christina Hoff
• 44:30
  Sommers with her War on boys or whatever that book was, that was
• 44:35
  early 2000s, maybe even late. 90s.
• 44:40
  Yeah, that it was. That's a while.
• 44:42
  Then you have what he didn't. I think it was 2022-2023, which
• 44:47
  was about about the the status of young men and excellent.
• 44:51
  He's a Brookings guy and just did a phenomenal job really
• 44:58
  putting together all the data about how young men are falling
• 45:01
  behind. So if you couple that with
• 45:04
  Jonathan Height and Greg Luciano's book, The Coddling of
• 45:07
  the American Mind. So you get this Reese data on
• 45:10
  young men in his book. And you couple that with the
• 45:13
  Coddling of the American Mind for a sort of a a broader
• 45:16
  dynamic of how just sort of in general young people are
• 45:19
  suffering. Add to that Jonathan Heights
• 45:22
  research on, you know, the sort of the kids being raised in the
• 45:26
  digital age on smartphones, you start to get a really
• 45:29
  interesting picture and the multiple factors start to
• 45:33
  surface. Of course, this is this is all
• 45:37
  inferential. It's sort of like Bayesian
• 45:39
  analysis from, from my perspective, it's not, it's not,
• 45:43
  you know, it's not rigorous science, but we can start to get
• 45:46
  a, get a picture of this. So one of the things I think we
• 45:49
  have to do is insist that young men do more things that are not
• 45:54
  online, period paragraph. You know, if you've got kids,
• 45:58
  it's really easy to plug them in, but you got to unplug them
• 46:01
  too. And you got to make sure they're
• 46:02
  in in environments where they have a greater opportunity to
• 46:07
  exercise what Thomas Jefferson's called virtues and talents.
• 46:13
  I think the second thing is, is that role model piece, James,
• 46:19
  that you mentioned and figuring out how to connect with them
• 46:24
  again as role models? And it's so important and so
• 46:30
  obvious, but I'm going to take heat for saying it and I I don't
• 46:34
  care. In the in the meantime, I looked
• 46:37
  up Christina Hoff Sommers book. It was indeed published in the
• 46:40
  year 2000, so roughly a generation ago.
• 46:46
  She predicted all kinds of things that we are now bearing
• 46:51
  the weight of. You know, in.
• 46:52
  In a lot of ways, I think it's going to end up being young men
• 46:59
  from rural areas who pick up the slack first because they learn
• 47:04
  things like how to be self-sufficient, right?
• 47:08
  Because your nearest neighbor might be a mile and a half away.
• 47:11
  When I, when I visited a friend in Wyoming, there was a shotgun
• 47:16
  by the door. And that seems a little odd to
• 47:20
  me, right? Usually in the places I have
• 47:22
  lived, you put your guns in a cabinet or a closet or whatever.
• 47:26
  And I said, what's that doing near the door?
• 47:28
  And she said, well, we only have one sheriff.
• 47:30
  I said, yeah, he could be 8 1/2 hours away, right?
• 47:35
  That was literally true. The only law in the entire area
• 47:40
  could literally be 8 1/2 hours away.
• 47:43
  They were on their own and everybody knew it.
• 47:47
  And aunt speaks to this a little bit when he talks about rural
• 47:50
  community. And I think his points are well
• 47:52
  taken, right. You, you build up a certain
• 47:56
  strength of character when you live in certain ways and you
• 48:00
  build up or you fail to build a certain strength of character.
• 48:05
  Not notice, I'm not saying character writ large, but a
• 48:09
  certain set of characteristics. Maybe we'd be better way to put
• 48:13
  it when you grow up in an urban environment, right?
• 48:16
  When you live in the suburbs where everything is easy, where
• 48:19
  there's really never been much of a problem.
• 48:22
  We don't need heroic men in the suburbs all that often.
• 48:27
  Well, and I think there's something to what you're saying
• 48:30
  that has to do with a failure to develop on along certain
• 48:36
  dimensions is proportional to what it is we have outsourced,
• 48:44
  OK. So to the extent that we are
• 48:48
  able to outsource security and protection to some either body
• 48:54
  or like a like a policing body or just a general expectation
• 49:00
  that there's not going to be much action behind here, behind
• 49:04
  the gated, the gates of the gated community, we are going to
• 49:09
  soften. And so there we need to find
• 49:14
  ways that we can enter into apprenticeship arrangements
• 49:18
  again and maybe even simulate a little bit of pain.
• 49:24
  You know, it's one of the one of the damnedest things I heard the
• 49:28
  other day. And I was so happy to hear it
• 49:29
  was something that there been all these parenting movements
• 49:33
  that, you know, as, gosh, throughout the 2000s, really
• 49:39
  like gentle parenting. And you know, whatever it is, it
• 49:44
  seems to turn on this idea that we don't want our kids to ever
• 49:48
  have to experience pain or discomfort.
• 49:51
  And if you don't experience pain or discomfort, you're never
• 49:54
  going to develop any scars. You're just going to be the
• 49:57
  therapist forever, just airing your traumas.
• 50:01
  And I think this whole therapeutic turn, this rise of
• 50:06
  the therapy state, if you like, has really, really been a
• 50:10
  detriment to everything where where the ideal male is is one
• 50:15
  who is can be vulnerable. Well, it's sometimes but like.
• 50:20
  It it's astonishing because we have a bunch of people in
• 50:23
  therapy who have never actually suffered trauma.
• 50:27
  Right. Right.
• 50:29
  You know, let's be realistic. A couple of generations ago, 18
• 50:34
  year old boys stormed the beach at Normandy.
• 50:37
  They suffered trauma. Your daddy yelled at you when he
• 50:41
  got home late from work. Not a trauma.
• 50:46
  Not a trauma, exactly. And, and it's a little deeper,
• 50:51
  right, because you took it one way and I want to take take it
• 50:55
  another. When, when young men are raised
• 50:57
  this way, they end up not having discipline.
• 51:02
  And when they have no discipline, they never learn to
• 51:04
  have self-discipline. And when they never learn to
• 51:07
  have self-discipline, their lives fall apart The minute they
• 51:10
  get to be about 24, which is I'm on long, I'm long on record as
• 51:15
  saying that is the age when nobody will put up with your
• 51:17
  shit anymore. Or you get to be 24 if it's on
• 51:21
  you. And if you haven't decided how
• 51:23
  to fly on your own by then, you're in probably not going to
• 51:28
  ever fly. I, you know what, I was really
• 51:31
  happy when I, when my oldest son, who's now 19, was a kid, he
• 51:37
  was a little, he was a little boy, you know, maybe 18 months,
• 51:41
  something like that. And he hit his mother and I
• 51:44
  called up my mom and said, mom, what should I do?
• 51:49
  And she didn't say to whip him. Whip, you know, as we say in the
• 51:54
  South, whip his butt. But she did say, Max, you're a
• 51:59
  mammal. Sometimes you have to bury your
• 52:02
  teeth. And if we don't bear our teeth
• 52:06
  as parents, we're that. And everything is about putting
• 52:10
  them in the cottony confines of protection with a device inside
• 52:16
  that they're not going to flourish.
• 52:20
  They're not going to develop that.
• 52:24
  And emotional control, self possession, confidence,
• 52:30
  resilience that comes from having to experience and
• 52:34
  overcome pain and obstacles. It's just something that you we
• 52:39
  have to introduce if it's not already naturally a part of it.
• 52:43
  We don't, and we've been complaining about all the kids
• 52:48
  getting trophies now for a long time.
• 52:50
  But sometimes your team has to lose.
• 52:53
  Sometimes you have to come in last and.
• 52:56
  The way you deal with it. Exactly.
• 53:00
  That's really where we've got to re engage kids a lot more and we
• 53:05
  have to let them. We have to allow them to suffer,
• 53:08
  but not not merely suffer. Work through the suffering and
• 53:13
  equip them with the tools of and this is what I saw the other day
• 53:18
  that was I was happy to see a master class on authoritative
• 53:21
  parenting. And one of the things in the ad
• 53:24
  was your kids have to learn. Your kids have to be able to
• 53:28
  experience pain sometimes will the shocker.
• 53:33
  It's like we've gone without that for 20 years and we've
• 53:36
  raised a generation of weak men and a generation of weak men is
• 53:42
  giving rise to is is extremely not only disorienting to women,
• 53:49
  but it is society, civilization even is at risk for it.
• 53:56
  It throws off the natural order of things.
• 53:59
  Yeah. And I think it's I, I'm
• 54:01
  listening to what you're saying and in realizing that it, our
• 54:05
  problems here may go deeper than we're even talking about here in
• 54:10
  that I think it's not just what you're describing is not just
• 54:15
  come to impact our relationships amongst each other, but it's
• 54:18
  also come to impact and shape our very government.
• 54:23
  You talked about outsourcing things.
• 54:26
  We outsource stuff now and you, you hinted at it when you talked
• 54:30
  about people in the city and they, you know, they don't have
• 54:33
  to deal with the things that the rural people do because you can
• 54:36
  outsource stuff and it goes all the way down to a James loves to
• 54:40
  yell about Hoas that you've got a problem with your neighbor.
• 54:44
  We don't anymore go and knock on the neighbor's door and say, OK,
• 54:49
  there's a problem. Let's work it through.
• 54:50
  We outsource that to the authority, the HOA or, or
• 54:55
  whatever it is. And so we've, it seems that that
• 55:00
  this, where we have ended is, is a place where we're actually
• 55:04
  outsourcing character, the character traits that we should
• 55:08
  be internalizing. We're just letting government
• 55:11
  handle that stuff. Either that or even private.
• 55:15
  I mean, you know, to to the extent that a therapist is
• 55:19
  private anymore, I think a lot of people just get that with
• 55:22
  their insurance now thanks to Obamacare.
• 55:25
  But what this has created is as an kind of iatrogenesis among
• 55:31
  therapists, where they they encourage you to reopen your
• 55:34
  wounds and air your traumas all the time without equipping you
• 55:37
  with the tools to to deal with it, to deal with stuff, to deal
• 55:43
  with life as it comes. You know, that kind of breaks
• 55:46
  that, that weekly paycheck that it's in their interest to keep
• 55:53
  you coming back until you die right there.
• 55:56
  That's right. They're not there to, they're
• 55:57
  not there to cure you. They're there to tell you how
• 56:01
  terrible your life is. They're there to agree with you.
• 56:05
  You get a temporary salve, a feeling like you've aired
• 56:10
  something 'cause that's the narrative.
• 56:13
  But I don't think I think you know, you know, I think about
• 56:20
  therapeutic practices that came from the likes of of Viktor
• 56:24
  Frankel or Carl Rogers, you know, the logo therapists or the
• 56:28
  OR the. You could have stopped it.
• 56:31
  Viktor Franklin had me on the hook.
• 56:33
  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's like therapeutic techniques where
• 56:38
  you, you know, you, you, you accept or embrace the fact of
• 56:46
  the challenge. But if you're in a depressive or
• 56:50
  anxious episode, you essentially have to talk yourself out of it,
• 56:55
  fake it till you make it. There are other kinds of tools.
• 56:58
  I hate to say fake it till you make it 'cause I don't want to
• 57:00
  trivialize it, but it's like you put 1 foot in front of the other
• 57:03
  and you do what you got to do to come out of it and you will.
• 57:06
  Life is a series of crests and troughs.
• 57:09
  So if you're in the through, know that the Crest is coming
• 57:11
  soon. Know that a return normalcy is
• 57:14
  coming soon, but the the the the sort of outsourcing your
• 57:19
  problems to someone else creates this weekly pattern, perhaps
• 57:24
  weekly. I think most therapists are
• 57:25
  weekly, a weekly pattern of, you know, I guess I feel like I need
• 57:30
  to go, you know, figure out people to blame, to externalize
• 57:37
  the problem that is often a result of a failure of an
• 57:41
  internal locus of control. And that's really, I think a
• 57:45
  problem with a lot of the young men too, is this internal locus
• 57:48
  of control is being just stripped of them by these
• 57:52
  cultural messages, by the digital environments and so on.
• 57:56
  And it's strange, you know, Anthony and I made a a career
• 57:59
  out of going to visit high schools for years and years.
• 58:02
  We've been to hundreds of high schools.
• 58:05
  And there were a few things that shocked us.
• 58:09
  Me especially. I think me more than Aunt, Aunt
• 58:12
  Ants, more involved with his large family and with his
• 58:15
  church. So he's got more experience with
• 58:17
  this group that than I ever did. But I was shocked at how kind
• 58:23
  young people are compared to when I was a young person.
• 58:28
  The level of kindness that the present generation shows is
• 58:33
  uplifting. It's really something.
• 58:35
  But I was equally struck by how soft they are and how the first
• 58:41
  bit of trouble that they encounter without all these
• 58:45
  backstops that they've got built into their lives, they're just
• 58:49
  going to fall apart. And you know, the lesson is you
• 58:53
  have to be strong enough to fall apart, recollect yourself, put
• 58:55
  yourself back together again and keep moving.
• 58:59
  And that's that's a lesson that's not being taught.
• 59:03
  Kindness was taught for years and they learned it.
• 59:07
  Hardness is not being taught at all.
• 59:11
  Well, and it's not, you know, it's no wonder the manosphere
• 59:13
  has emerged. I'm not saying it's healthy and
• 59:17
  I'm not saying it's good, but it's no wonder that it emerged.
• 59:20
  Well, let's at least admit I have a very low opinion of these
• 59:26
  men in the, in the so-called manosphere have a very, very low
• 59:30
  opinion of them. And I'm willing to give them
• 59:33
  credit where it's due. At least they're talking to
• 59:37
  young men, right? Right.
• 59:39
  They're doing it for their own purposes.
• 59:41
  They're doing it to monetize an audience.
• 59:44
  Like. God, who else is even talking to
• 59:46
  these people? Right, because everybody else
• 59:49
  who's talked to these young men has been a scold.
• 59:52
  That's right to the extent, yeah, to the extent that they
• 59:54
  have talked to them and no one. And and so they've in an in an
• 1:00:00
  effort to avoid being scolded and of course the parents look
• 1:00:05
  at the scolds and go, oh, I'm doing something wrong.
• 1:00:09
  And so that that intergenerational torch passing
• 1:00:14
  that linkage between the generations of men and boys,
• 1:00:20
  let's call it the what's the, the, the poor, the the hero and
• 1:00:26
  the cynics that. You know, down through the
• 1:00:31
  generation, stuff that needed to happen has just been sandbagged
• 1:00:35
  by all these forces from from the side, I guess you could say.
• 1:00:41
  And we got to restore that, that intergenerational linkage.
• 1:00:45
  We have to do it with confidence and never mind the scolds.
• 1:00:50
  To hell with them. And and let let me underline
• 1:00:53
  something James said. And I agree with you entirely.
• 1:00:55
  We have we have to re establish that.
• 1:00:57
  But in so doing, let's not lose the wonderful things that we
• 1:01:02
  have gained, for example, how kind kids are to each other.
• 1:01:07
  Yeah, that's. Really good.
• 1:01:08
  There must be a night. There's a balance to be had, and
• 1:01:12
  I think the manosphere goes too far in One Direction, but it's
• 1:01:14
  coming off of us being too far in the other.
• 1:01:18
  Well, I would want to ask you guys a question and I know you
• 1:01:20
  guys are running this interview, but I would want to know what
• 1:01:23
  you think are the attributes of a gentleman of the 21st century
• 1:01:30
  controlled strength. Yeah, I, I would, I would start
• 1:01:34
  there, but but I would continue fostered intelligence, being
• 1:01:41
  well read, being able to fix things, being able to impose
• 1:01:47
  order on chaos, knowing when to let people be free, encouraging
• 1:01:55
  oneself to be as fully free as one can be, Right.
• 1:01:58
  The list is endless, but the list is really no different from
• 1:02:04
  one that you would have gotten breeding Plato.
• 1:02:07
  So the list is endless, but it's pretty ancient.
• 1:02:10
  And we or if you prefer the Bible, or if you prefer ancient
• 1:02:15
  Chinese texts, it doesn't. Nobody really had the one right
• 1:02:21
  answer. There's just a raft of
• 1:02:24
  characteristics that center around maleness.
• 1:02:29
  And we should. And we've been doing this for
• 1:02:31
  millennia. This is not a new thing.
• 1:02:34
  We can look at ancient texts and learn a lot from them.
• 1:02:39
  And I'll I'll throw it as part part of part of the answer to
• 1:02:42
  your question. Richard Rohr says something who
• 1:02:45
  who I mentioned earlier says something that that I just love
• 1:02:48
  and I apply it constantly when I think of politicians, when I
• 1:02:51
  think of managers in business and and also as I think to
• 1:02:55
  parents. And that is no one should be in
• 1:02:59
  a position of power who has not experienced powerlessness.
• 1:03:04
  And that go, that goes to my my answer to you of controlled
• 1:03:09
  strength that I would. If you're going to submit that
• 1:03:13
  exercising power, you must first understand powerlessness.
• 1:03:17
  I I would submit that everybody who has ever lived understands
• 1:03:22
  powerlessness 'cause we were all children.
• 1:03:25
  Yeah, I don't know that that's the case.
• 1:03:27
  I mean, to understand as a child is one thing.
• 1:03:28
  To understand it as a as an adult is something very
• 1:03:31
  different, I think. I, I don't know that I, I don't
• 1:03:35
  know that I agree with war here. I, I think think we found yet
• 1:03:39
  another thing you and I probably are going to disagree on.
• 1:03:42
  But let's hold that for a different episode 'cause that's
• 1:03:44
  really, actually quite interesting.
• 1:03:47
  Max, we're coming to the end of our time here and you know,
• 1:03:51
  usually we just say goodbye and ask people if they've got
• 1:03:55
  something they want to plug. But I'll ask you a slightly
• 1:03:58
  different question for my own reasons.
• 1:04:02
  So, Max, what the hell are we going to do about this?
• 1:04:06
  Well, James, you and I have a little project we've been
• 1:04:10
  playing with and it needs little young little do the.
• 1:04:13
  People know that this has been an infomercial.
• 1:04:16
  This has been an infomercial. Yeah.
• 1:04:18
  So the The upshot to this conversation is that we are
• 1:04:23
  trying to develop a young men's program, I guess you could say,
• 1:04:29
  called the Chrysalis Project. And the Chrysalis Project really
• 1:04:35
  is a way for young men not only to bond with each other, but
• 1:04:41
  with mentors that we have, including James and me.
• 1:04:45
  But we have teachers, military veterans, psychotherapists all
• 1:04:51
  in there. And they're not psychotherapists
• 1:04:53
  who are going to get them to come back and air their traumas.
• 1:04:57
  They're, they're the kind of mentors who are going to who,
• 1:05:00
  you know, rather along the lines of what Jordan Peterson did when
• 1:05:07
  he first got started, you know, which is to tell you to get out
• 1:05:11
  of bed and throw your shoulders back and that that kind of
• 1:05:14
  thing, so to speak. But the idea is these are people
• 1:05:19
  who are going to who are going to help you cultivate what
• 1:05:23
  Anthony called controlled strength and exercise your
• 1:05:30
  virtues and your talents. So you're maximizing along the
• 1:05:36
  virtues dimension and the excellence dimension while
• 1:05:38
  bonding with other young men and really having that sense of
• 1:05:42
  brotherhood. We are unapologetic about the
• 1:05:45
  fact that young men need spaces for themselves.
• 1:05:50
  And to the extent that this has to be digital for now is, you
• 1:05:55
  know, we have to accept that. But if we grow it and it it gets
• 1:06:01
  bigger and better, we could start having some in person
• 1:06:03
  things too. Now.
• 1:06:05
  Chrysalis dot courses is what it's called.
• 1:06:10
  And definitely encourage any listeners who think they they
• 1:06:14
  have a young person in their life who they could sponsor to
• 1:06:18
  join the program. It is and it and look, it's not
• 1:06:22
  expensive at all. It's peanuts for for a grown up
• 1:06:25
  to sponsor a young man. So, and even if you're, if you
• 1:06:30
  know, you have financial hardship, we can, we can look at
• 1:06:33
  ways of, you know, having a fee waiver or something to get your
• 1:06:38
  young man into the program. The thing we want to do is pilot
• 1:06:42
  this thing so that we can, you know, do our best to restore the
• 1:06:47
  linkages between these guys with the silver hair.
• 1:06:52
  The little bit of experience, the little bit of wisdom that
• 1:06:55
  we've managed to gain over the years and have that
• 1:06:59
  intergenerational torch passing that's supposed to happen, we
• 1:07:02
  can have it again. We can't have it again, and it's
• 1:07:06
  a good idea and I'm proud to be on board with it.
• 1:07:09
  And I would, I would only add one thing to what you said.
• 1:07:12
  Of course we want to address the virtues, but we also want to
• 1:07:17
  address in no uncertain terms the vices.
• 1:07:21
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 1:07:24
  There are two sides to this coin and, and you need to address
• 1:07:28
  both. So we're cautiously optimistic
• 1:07:33
  that we can offer young men something that will, you
• 1:07:38
  hesitate to say, be life changing, but will be life
• 1:07:42
  altering, right to to change the trajectory of a life a little
• 1:07:46
  bit. And I always, when I, when I
• 1:07:49
  talk to people about ideas, I always use the shooting range as
• 1:07:53
  a metaphor. If you're off in your aim by a
• 1:07:56
  millimeter, by the time you get down range, you've missed the
• 1:08:00
  target entirely. You haven't missed the bullseye,
• 1:08:02
  you've missed the whole damn thing.
• 1:08:05
  So really the important part is the aim.
• 1:08:10
  That's what gets you where you need to be.
• 1:08:14
  And I think our aim is true. I'm willing to be wrong about
• 1:08:19
  that and retool along the way if we find out we've missed
• 1:08:22
  something, but this is something that I'm proud enough of that I
• 1:08:26
  should. I would say to anybody who's
• 1:08:27
  listening, if you have a young man and what ages are we looking
• 1:08:32
  for, Max? You know, ideally, but under 30,
• 1:08:36
  between 18 and 30, you know, they should be men.
• 1:08:40
  You know, we would, we probably look at a 17 year old.
• 1:08:44
  But if if a cuss word or something flies out there, we
• 1:08:47
  don't want parents getting upset as young men have foul mouths.
• 1:08:52
  That's. Just a little fact of life.
• 1:08:53
  Young men have foul mouths. Have we met?
• 1:08:58
  Good God, Max, look, man, I'm the barrier here of a parent
• 1:09:05
  needs to be able to withstand my influence, right?
• 1:09:10
  And and there's what you have to know.
• 1:09:12
  You have to know that we just told you not to outsource, and
• 1:09:16
  now we're telling you to outsource.
• 1:09:19
  Well, and you and I have we've made we have a lifelong stories
• 1:09:27
  of mistakes that we've made yes or as my dad used to say in his
• 1:09:31
  way, how all the myriad ways he used to shoot and fall back in
• 1:09:35
  it right. That's you know, we have those
• 1:09:39
  stories that we can tell and we will.
• 1:09:42
  But the ultimate goal is to equip young men with with
• 1:09:47
  everything they need to expand what?
• 1:09:50
  And this is kind of a, it's kind of a big verbose term, but
• 1:09:54
  radiative self sovereignty. OK.
• 1:09:57
  And what I mean by that is you start with the self, you get it
• 1:10:01
  together from that. Once you've got it together,
• 1:10:04
  once you're practiced at having it together, then you radiate
• 1:10:08
  outward in concentric circles, right?
• 1:10:11
  Your family and friends, are you managing those relationships
• 1:10:14
  well? Are you learning to control your
• 1:10:17
  emotions and have interpersonal dynamics with confidence where
• 1:10:22
  you're developing friendships in reciprocity and and practicing
• 1:10:28
  the virtues, becoming more excellent at managing those
• 1:10:31
  relationships and then that those that that sovereignty goes
• 1:10:35
  outward to your your career, your community and on outward.
• 1:10:41
  If you can get even beyond that, most people can't.
• 1:10:46
  It might be that you change your region or change the world, but
• 1:10:51
  at the end of the day, we want to give you the tools to expand
• 1:10:55
  yourself sovereignty. And that means you know what it
• 1:11:00
  means to be a free person, a gentleman of the 21st century.
• 1:11:06
  Thanks for coming Max. This has really been great look.
• 1:11:08
  Forward to working Max. I really appreciate it guys.
• 1:11:12
  Thank you so much for having me. And in in these dark times, and
• 1:11:16
  indeed they are darker than they have ever been, these are the
• 1:11:19
  worst times ever, right, Aunt? It's.
• 1:11:22
  Not that bad, James. No, it's really not.
• 1:11:24
  I mean, human beings have it easier right now than they have
• 1:11:27
  ever had it in all of human history, but still, we are
• 1:11:32
  apparently congenitally unable to see the bright side of
• 1:11:38
  things. So I'll just remind people
• 1:11:40
  you've got it pretty soft. Life is pretty good and you
• 1:11:43
  don't have nearly as much to complain about as you think.
• 1:11:47
  And if those things are all true and Anton, I have dug through
• 1:11:50
  the data and those things are all true, at least in the
• 1:11:54
  aggregate. Think about that next time you
• 1:11:59
  decide not to be nice to someone, because not being nice
• 1:12:02
  is a decision to and and. Think it twice, then three
• 1:12:07
  times, and then just be nice to each other.
• 1:12:11
  It takes nothing. Just one Dee breath.
• 1:12:14
  Be nice to each other, it'll be OK.