Latest / Color Commentary / Ep 29 | Inside the Manosphere — What It Means for Black Boys, ft. Chris Stewart

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Ep 29 | Inside the Manosphere — What It Means for Black Boys, ft. Chris Stewart · Color Commentary

• Charles Cole: Hey everybody, today is a special episode of Color Commentary. My brother, Chris Stewart, is joining us today and we just finished that interview and it was really interesting. think, you I had my script and my questions mapped out about where I wanted to go and instantly threw that out because ⁓ as we talked about, you know, Thoreau's documentary on the Manosphere, it's something that we had been talking about for a long time, this issue ⁓ of men and boys and is it really an issue and where is it? I always felt Chris had interesting takes on it. Him and my other friend, Torrin, who slightly disagree on this stuff. I wish I could have got both of them, but we'll make that happen. But yeah, you got to see, you know, over a decade of friendship just kind of on display today and just, you know, I like the best episodes of when we forget that the cameras are there and just talk shit the way that we talk shit. you know, this is an issue in America right now. It's something that is... facing a lot of people ⁓ of different races and creeds. Now we do touch on some of the color issues in there and I think it's some astute observations. But before me on opinion, I think neither one of us have tried to make these definite claims and maybe it comes off like that at times, but it's really something that I'm curious about and I'm curious ⁓ what you all think. So give it a watch and then come back and leave your thoughts and comments. As you all see, I've been engaging more and more with the comments and ⁓ people telling us how they feel about the stuff, good or bad. And so that's what we're here to do, right? Have conversations. So with no further ado, enjoy this next conversation with myself and my good friend, the one and only Christopher Stewart. So enjoy. This is Color Commentary with Dr. Cole. day honor being here with my brother, man. ⁓ I love this dude. We fight like brothers, man, but ⁓ as somebody who grew up as the oldest, it's just really good having him and Sharif and, you know, there's other people that have played that role, man. My brother, Chris Stewart, he is an educator. He is an activist. is the CEO of Brightbeam. is the co-founder and co-host of when we built 8 Black Hands, which we have both probably been getting asked a lot more about as of late. And he's someone that's just been in the trenches fighting for black kids for decades. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Chris Stewart to the show. How you doing there, Chris? Appreciate y'all. I'm good, man. Thank you for having me here. This is cool. This is cool. All right, so I'm gonna set us up, Chris. ⁓ So there was a documentary ⁓ that came out on March 11th, and it went straight to number one. And I instantly thought about my two brothers, Chris and Torrin. ⁓ Now, Torn ⁓ hit me back today after I'd already wrote the show, but I wanted to have all three of us here, but we've talked about this and Chris, to his credit, has been really pushing on the Manosphere. So then this documentary came out and ⁓ I thought it was a really interesting thing and I instantly thought about those two. So for the people that are watching, let me give you some insight, okay? It's called Louis Thoreau Inside the Manosphere. And if you got a son, you got a nephew, you got a student, or you just a man trying to make sense of what it means to be one right now, or you got some thoughts about it, the documentary may be interesting viewing. ⁓ We're gonna break it down today like the way that we always do. We're gonna do facts first, then full color. So Chris, I know you've been on with us a few times. I have to do my black and white section. This is where I'm just giving facts, nothing. And then you and I will come in after this with our own color commentary. For you all watching, let me give you the context. On March 11th, 2026, Netflix released Louis Thoreau Inside the Manosphere, a feature-length documentary from veteran British-American filmmaker Louis Thoreau. The film debuted at number one on Netflix, marking Thoreau's first project for the streaming platform after a decades-long career with the BBC. The Manosphere, as Thoreau defines it in the film, is a loose network of almost exclusively male internet influencers podcasters and content creators who promote highly traditional or extremist views about masculinity, gender roles and relationships. Many present themselves as coaches and mentors on topics like dating, fitness, financial success and personal status. Now we got to talk about who's in this thing. It gets very interesting. First is Harrison Sullivan, HS Tiki Taki. It's wild. ⁓ But he is a biracial content creator with a white mother and a black father who opens the film by referring to a woman in his living room as his dishwasher. preaches, I gotta get through the black and white y'all. I'm gonna ⁓ do this with a straight face. Sullivan preaches traditional values for women while simultaneously running an adult content agency. He publicly warns that young teenage boys shouldn't watch his content. Then seconds later, it's photographed taking pictures with underage fans. It's Chef's Kiss. ⁓ Everybody's favorite, Myron Gaines, real name, Amru Foodie, or Foodo. He is the co-founder of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a Sudanese-American former special agent with the Department of Homeland Security who left his federal career in 2020 to go full-time on a podcast built around misogynistic dating advice. He is also the author of a book titled, Why Women Deserve Less. In the documentary, Thoreau films him alongside his then girlfriend, Angie, and probes him on his practices of one-way monogamy, where Gaines maintains a rotation of other women while expecting Angie's full commitment. After the film dropped, Angie broke up with Gaines and publicly thanked Thoreau for making her question their relationship. Gaines responded by accusing Thoreau of deceptive editing and releasing private audio from their interviews. Then we have Justin Waller, a colleague of the Tate brothers. who openly describes his marriage as one-way monogamy, meaning he maintains multiple relationships while expecting his wife to remain exclusively devoted to him. His wife describes the arrangement as separate lanes. Waller has been photographed at Mar-a-Lago multiple times alongside both Donald and Barron Trump. And then finally we have Nicholas Kinde Balanthesi, better known as Sneako. He is a content creator who has publicly stated that women should not be allowed to vote and promote Conspiracy theory is about a satanic cabal controlling Western society. He attended Trump's 2025 inauguration and said that Barron Trump watches his content. So just the last bit for the audience before we jump into conversation, a central theme of the documentary is how these influencers make money. They attract attention through provocative or extreme statements which spread widely on social media. Once they build a following, they monetize through courses, private coaching programs, supplement sales, and lifestyle brands that promise financial success or improve relationships. The real product, critics note, is not the courses, it is the influencer himself selling an aspirational identity. This thing has reached though. I know I laughed a little bit through it, but let me be professional because they are having a huge reach. The documentary highlights the reach of these voices, particularly among Gen Z males. One young fan of Justin Waller tells the camera that he learned from the Manosphere content that life as a man, you're born without value. A recent survey cited in coverage of the film found that Gen Z men are twice as likely as baby boomers to believe that a wife should defer to her husband. The documentary also draws a direct line between Manosphere content and political mainstream. Note in the documented relationship between these influencers and the Trump family. The reception has been kind of through the roof. It has broken our kind of records. And now we are here to discuss. Chris Stewart, you have been somebody that has been talking about this for a while, long before this documentary came out or saw the light of day. How did you feel once it came out and after you watched it, give me, just give me your main high level just reaction before we get into some deeper questions on it. You know, high level, would just say that the first thing that I thought about it was one of its main kind of selling points is that it's just so gossipy. It's like, know, these names, you know, these people. So one of the things that is selling is inside look like you don't often get to hear the behind the scenes conversations with folks and you don't get to see them when they're not in their character. Right. So a lot of what you might take away from this is that a lot of them are playing a character like an actor. Like it's a business. It's not necessarily like some deep ideological movement. It is not some deep premise. The deepest premise of it is this is the new crack. They are selling self-esteem to losers. And it turns out that there's more losers than we thought that there might be there. We are a nation of, of losers for some. And I just want to point this out because there's a sense when you watch this stuff around the Manosphere that it's ascendant. Like it's what everybody's doing and that it's reaching all the kids and all the men and all the boys know it's reaching the losers. right? In Maine, it's reaching the losers because not in this atmosphere are a whole bunch of non-broken men who are still running the world and still going to Ivy League schools and still coming out and running businesses and starting businesses that don't have to rely on selling self-esteem to broken people, to people who don't have anything. And I think that the clearest picture you get is how much of a business it is, right? They will say to you all the contradictory stuff, well, you know, I'm not really like saying X or Y. It's just a business. It's what gets clicks. It's what gets more people. Oh, you know, I'm not trying to sell to kids kind of like the tobacco companies. No, no, we're not trying to sell to kids. We just put our stuff in cartoons though. Right. So I'm not trying to sell the kids. We're selling the kids. just made a blueberry. We're making fruit loops. vaping products or whatnot. My mom was a smoker and I know you used to smoke. Were you looking for the blueberry Newport? No, I'm not. When I was first started, you might have caught me. But I mean, that's the takeaway for me is it exposes how much of this is actually a business model that is selling self-esteem to a nation or a market of people that feel left out and broken, whatever. So I got one more two thoughts, just one more thought. You you you you want to toss actually, you know when you come here brother my me causes sookas. Go ahead So here's here's another thought another thought is is just like ⁓ You think about the fact that so many of these cats themselves are broken or were broken So many of them are racially ambiguous Selling kind of like self-hate right the tape brothers for instance biracial put out a whole bunch of anti-black stuff right? And their white fans eat it up. Eat it up, right? You should see some of what they've said about themselves and said about their own, like about black people and about how they don't want to be black. And you just named several people and they didn't hit me until you were naming them. They're all biracial. They're all like, there's Myron Gaines has one dude who's with him who's dark black, a dark black man. And he's like the, he's like the step and fetch it of the crew or whatnot. But it's amazing how you have these cats that are racially ambiguous, have broken families, come from both broken backgrounds themselves, never fit in and didn't like their hair, didn't like their skin, didn't like any of that because they were in very white environments and they found a way to survive. And a way to survive was to become alpha in the white category of alpha, right? Like alpha jockey to these guys, right? And that became a business model work for them. I don't see very many dark skinned black folks doing it for instance. And I didn't think about that till you started naming them off. Sneak I was like, one of the most famous streamers that many boomers have never heard of. But he's like globally famous, ⁓ Millions of followers or whatnot. And you could see that he has gone through several iterations of himself, right? You watch where he started, he was just a kid doing streaming stuff, right? And slowly got more racial, his guests and friends got weirder. He's like convorted with white supremacists and... you know, throwing up Nazi salutes and all that type of stuff. So anyways, just a couple observations. It's a business. Many of them are broken themselves and most of their audiences are broken. Oh yeah. Here's the last point that I wanted to make. It reminds me of crack and fentanyl, right? So for years, crack was a problem. And what we said was, let's just throw the book at him. Let's just throw no mercy. Let's throw them all in jail. No mercy. They're not human beings. Let's just blah, blah, blah, blah. Then it came to fentanyl. It was like, Oh, you poor baby. You're on drugs. Oh my God, we should get you some help. First is our precious opioids first. was this. Yeah. Took those away. No more. Oh God, you poor baby. Let's let's do, you know, well, well, well, the world had been alienating the black male for years. And what the world was saying to them when they, when they would say you guys are alienating us, you're, you're, we feel left out. Well, tough toughen up, buttercup, whatever. Right. It was kind of like go to book at them too. But then when white boys started saying, no, we feel alienated too. We feel dispossessed. We can't get dates. No girls want to like us. Oh, you poor baby. Let's talk about what we can do to save the boys now. All of a sudden we want to save boys. Right? Where was saving the boys during the crack epidemic? Where was the saving the boys when the white boys were doing better than they're doing right now? Right? It wasn't until they started losing. that we started developing think pieces and books and podcasts about what we need to do for them or else their dispossession is gonna create a danger. I'm sorry, there you go. There's my full sentence. My thoughts aren't very different. I think you already know how feel about the crack thing. think that's something I've talked about a long time, right? You just found compassion when opioids hate to sing because a senator's nephew is impacted by opioids. ⁓ It looks like them. And the same way with this, this Manosphere thing, it is hitting closer to home for people. is, it is, you're a Senator, but your son is like making this content or, and it's interesting. And then it's kind of the weird storm of like the grift involved in it. Like there's so much money being made. And I do, agree with you. I think the thing that I would make a distinction on was that it's, it's, it's, it's losers that's doing it. And I think that the adults in it, sure. Like I don't have any like a 25 year old that's following that. Yeah. You can call it exactly. I'm not, I don't have no issue with that. But what was fascinating about it for me, just in the type of work that I do and the type of work that I've always done and who I work with was the amount of boys. And it was like, these are young boys. These are 14, 15, 16 year olds, right? They don't know who they are yet. And it's like, this is the stuff that's cutting through from them for them. And it's kind of scary in a way, right? Like I felt, you know, like I laughed. I laughed even when I did the intro, but there were parts of it where it kind of sobered me and I'm like, ⁓ damn, that's a kid, yo. Like when there was a part where they were breaking down all this stuff and Thoreau did a really good job of pointing out just the lack of common sense, the lack of logic there. And these kids heard. And then they did not care. They didn't care that it was a take down documentary. They just was like, hey y'all, Y'all just the evil liberal media, bro. Like, nah, these people see us. And I think that somewhere, you know, we did lose sight of what was happening. But again, it happened first with those black boys, but nobody was really concerned in that way, right? It was just more of a, we talk about the adultification of black people in a lot of different ways. So a 14, 15 year old during the crack epidemic is seen as an adult, is seen as a grown man. And I think the difference between that issue and where we are now is I can still see the humanity and childhood in these kids, whether they black, white and everything in between. That's the part, you know, like when you thought, when you talked about biracial, not having a sense of who they are, you know, then I think about the Stuart household. The Stuart household has something very different. They have a father. They have a father. This shit can't live. It can't exist if there is a father doing his job on the scene. I just believe that I could be wrong. I'm not trying to be flipping Chris and please correct me because you are the father here and I'm not. You are the father that's raising kids that this stuff is kind of targeting in certain ways that would fall into this age gap. So I just wanted to get some insight from you that I can't build myself because I'm not a father. I just wonder from your parent lens how you watched that movie. Well, I just, know, a couple of things. Number one, first of all, it didn't resonate with me because it's not my kids. Got you. My kids are losers. So I'm looking at these kids and I'm like, you know, it's kind of like a Jay-Z type of thing. If that's a problem for you, I feel bad for you, son. You know, I'm sorry if that's what your boys are doing. I'm sorry if your boys are eating that up. Like, you know, I see, I see. got nine hours of problems, but the man is fear ain't one? Isn't that you're saying? It's not my problem right now. It's like, it's not a problem I'm dealing with. So I feel sorry. have empathy for people that are dealing with it. So a couple of things I'll push back on. The first thing I'll push back on is not push back, but when you say that- that conversation, let's do it. men and boys had this happening to them first. And what I will say about that is the only way I would change that a little bit is to say it has been, it has not stopped happening to them and people still don't care about it happening to them. All the concern we're having right now for boys and men or whatnot is not for the consistent problem that has been taking place for the way that we marginalize and alienate black boys specifically, black boys specifically, right? And that is a different ball game than your white suburban kids that are feeling like they can't get a date and they're alienated and they're spending too much time playing games. We got black boys that can't afford games, that don't have internet connections in a lot of cases or whatnot. They're not gaming 24 seven and drinking monster drinks, you know, all day long. They're not like hyped up on Red Bull and not able to talk to women because they don't know how to talk to a girl. That's not, that's not the same type of alien male alienation, right? They're dealing with the same male alienation that has always existed for black men and boys in this country. And that is its own animal. It's his own lane, its own species. So all this concern that I'm seeing right now feels a lot like the opioid version of concern for drug abuse. Right? There's still no love for crack. And I've told you a lot of times, I think crack gets a bad rep. It absolutely doesn't, but ruin my life, but continue. A very difficult childhood because of crack, but continue. I'm only joking, but you know, so anyways, you you say as a father, you know, how do I look at this in order? My first answer is flippin'. That's not my problem. That's not what I'm dealing with, but I am dealing with the same problems that a lot of fathers are. It takes work to develop, you know, your kids. It takes work to let them become who they're supposed to become and not impose on them some sort of idea that you have of what they're supposed to be. That's a lot of work. That's even harder work. But the second thing I'll say is there's a lot of great fathers out here in your life and in my life who we know who didn't have great fathers. So it's not just the like, ⁓ know, ⁓ what was me? I didn't have this type of influence in my life. So therefore I'm going to turn to something super negative and go bad because our lives are populated with great male fathers who themselves didn't grow up with some like rosy pictures themselves, right? Grew up in some tough times in a lot of cases, ⁓ you know, and not their own fault. mean, do you know the rate of when we talk about black fathers and you know, who's around or whatnot or whatever, the rate of the number of them that died on the job is higher. The number of them that actually died in Vietnam is higher. The number of them that had PTSD, not none of this is self-imposed stuff, right? And still out of that came a lot of black men that you know, personally yourself that are actually better fathers than experience would tell them to be. Right? So it's possible to raise non-loser boys in a world, right? Now you have talked a lot about some things that I think make a difference, right? Here's some things that I think make a difference. Sports. Taking sports out of schools or, or, you know, making it harder for people to play or making it impossible for some people to play or whatnot is a problem. Church attendance, right? Where do people learn how to talk and how to articulate and conceptualize things, right? Sunday school. Wednesday school for, depending if you're Baptist or not, right? Wednesday and Sunday, everyday mass if you're Catholic, right? These are things that make a difference. Boys and girls clubs where the doors aren't shut, right? Sports, activities, you know, you have white kids that actually aren't being alienated and disconnected. You know what they're in? They're in a Boy Scouts, right? They're getting badges for making fire and, you know, knowing how to cook a bear in the woods, right? There's a whole... ⁓ There's a, have you heard of FFA? Do know what that is? No, what is it? Future Farmers of America. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I have. I've been to, I was in Indianapolis when they had a conference and it was huge. It was huge. They are so huge and they are everywhere. And the kids that you meet that are in FFA, they are some of the most well adjusted on track kids you're ever going to Humble, capable. And I you always talk about, they have lots of agency. You don't have to. They're the future food source of this country. That's the other thing. They're gonna harvest eggs and food and blah, blah, whatever. And the Boy Scouts, know, whatever. I don't know if you ever participated in that, all the eagle badges and all that type of stuff, what not. I'm only pointing that out to say that we do still have a whole bunch of connected youth that we never talk about. Yeah, and I talk about what's keeping them connected. Go ahead. I ain't gonna cut you off because I do agree. think, I think- You know, one, mean, mine's going to sound flippin, but, you know, my parents kicked me out of the house every day, especially in the summer. Like you got to go outside. Go outside. Go take what you do when you get out there. But, you know, go, go outside. You can't come back until like six o'clock. Like go, go touch. Like people say it flippantly, but there's something to go touch grass. If you if all of your stuff is coming from, like you said, monster drinks and on video. And I love I'm a gamer. I love video games. I love them. But like I also went outside and I played and I. had fights and dust ups and had to make up and had to deal with the social strata that kind of comes with that. I play sports where you lose and you have to learn how to lose and you gotta then learn how to overcome and win, right? you know, and I think that's a lot of the stuff that's really missing is I think there is this overcorrection from kids that grew up in the eighties and you could talk about the sixties, I mean, about the seventies, I ain't gonna put the sixties on you, but you can talk about the seventies where it's like. And now there's this overcorrection because it was like we was running free and rampant and in cars with no seatbelt and the old push in. I'm definitely the stupid kid that did the push in lighter and touched it and the shit boils up and your grandmama is just like, is you stupid? Like you're dumb, but will you do it again? No, right? And we're not allowing these kids to touch the proverbial cigarette lighter and learn in a safe way where the consequences are a little different now. You have these kids are in a room locked up with no development, but they got access to millions of people and millions of things coming in and you can't regulate it. You can put whatever up that you want, but you can't stop it. And I think that it was just interesting. I, know, you said something about religion. I grew up Baptist. I had to go to church. I went to church a lot with my grandma. Like there was something at that church almost every day that I had to go there with. And, and, and and I give a lot of credit. you know, to Muslims. I really do. Like in my neighborhood, in my community, the nation and other people, like they kept our streets safe. And to be fair, that group, and I used to push my own church and my Our Baptist, like they go out seeking these lost boys. They go out seeking people who are wayward and like might be lost, whether it's in jails, whether it's on the street. And they give them some purpose. I think that's one of the biggest things is lacking is agency and purpose. And you see, And then when you add in the fuel of Instagram and social media and everything you see is curated in these people's lives and you know, there's a reason why most of these influences live in Miami. I spend time in Miami. I enjoy Miami, but I'm an adult that manages my bank account and I understand what's real and what's fake. And so you might see somebody that go on and take all the money out. They save his account to rent a Bugatti for a weekend and you think that that's life and it's just not. ⁓ And just to bring it back to this, I, you know, cause I want to hear more from you, cause they hear from me all the time. I did think it was very interesting how simpish all of them was with they ladies when like they was in the cameras. just didn't, it's, it, these two things can't live here. Like even the dude who with the wife and his wife was like, even with her answers, I was like, I think she runs more of this than, than, than what it sounds like. think. think he got some making up to do, or even the little mix, the mix boy that we were talking about, when you saw the interaction with him and his mom, and then you like, this is a weird interaction. Like, like if you were to see that interaction, do you know the one I'm talking about when they, mom, they came into the house and they got some film earlier? If a father is around, like if a Christoid is around and gets wind of that, you're gonna be like, what the fuck is you? Why are you talking to him like that? Like what, hey man. What are you doing? And I think something has to interrupt it. And what we're seeing is uninterrupted things run amok with a booster on top of it of social media and money and influence. ⁓ It's just, it was fascinating to me, man. But this is something that you've talked about and cared about a lot now. What do you think, what do you want to come out of this documentary? you, like, you know, first, did you even like it? I don't know. I don't even know how you felt if you felt Thoreau did a good job. Cause he's been getting some criticism from some. that he didn't go hard enough. But others like me, I actually think that he let the documentary breathe. I don't think he was forcing them into things, even though he got accused of it. But I want to know what you think. Well, I mean, first of all, with the documentary, you're documenting. You're not actually trying to make it a thing. It is what it is. Right. Right. And I watch it in the same way that I would watch a documentary about the Amish or a documentary about Haitians. You know, I'm watching a documentary about people that live outside of what I live in. They're not in my reality. I don't live in their reality. So in some ways it's like a fishbowl. And I told you, I feel like it's a, it's like gamer gate and all that type of stuff. is a toxic culture that is not mine. I don't think they're ascendant. I don't think that they're prevalent. I think that it should be watched with a great deal of kind of adult maturity. This is a group of people that You engage, you could have wrote that about people that are into weird sexual lifestyles. You could have done a documentary on people that are into bondage and whatever. You could have done ⁓ one on people that are like the fentanyl kind of zombies in Detroit. each one of those things, I would have been saying, well, I'm sympathetic to it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that that's happening for you. And I'm sorry that you are broken in the way that you are broken. And I'm sorry that ⁓ in your life, the conditions. have created like you were like a mushroom. grew up in a bunch of shit, right? In the dark. And I'm sorry for that. You could have been a flower, but instead you're a mushroom, right? But it's not my problem and it's not a societal problem, right? I just want to be very clear about this. We talk about this like all of society, all of the boys, all of, no, no, no, I'm sorry. There's still boys that are waking up every day that are running the world that are actually going to be on track to run the world. that are going to employ or fire all of these people that we are watching in these type of documentaries, that we make too much of it, I think in some ways. And this is just, I know what I'm saying right now, is not everybody's feeling because there's a crisis language that is used to this. It's a crisis. It's a boys crisis, all boys. And it's kind of like maybe, you know, I like to be a contrarian. So maybe it's a crisis, maybe it's not. Maybe you are looking at a specific group of people. who all share a certain aim in life. For instance, right? When I looked at all of them, all of them are so compensating, overcompensating, their physicality, their materialism, all of that. It's just all looks like, you know, LD energy, right? It looks like LD energy to me, right? All of it does. ⁓ my God, look at my five cards. know, Little PP energy is what he is saying. It's minor PP energy to me. Look at my watch, look at my car, look at my house, look at my wife. And it's like, you know what? There's a difference between people who get money or have money and they have a label on everything that they wear. They got big LV, Louis Vuitton, they got all this type of stuff on them. And the other people who t-shirts cost a thousand dollars and you wouldn't know it because there's no labels on them. Right. You would know it if you know it. You would look at them and go, ⁓ yeah, I know what that shirt costs, right? I know what that is and whatnot. But it's the difference between a poor guy's rich guy or a dumb guy's smart guy or a guy who doesn't understand reason, his philosopher. That's what this looks like to me. It looks like losers, winners to me. you know, I do think, I think here's what I think. I'm so glad we have this conversation because we can actually add some nuance to it. I've missed that word with you, brother. I've missed that word with you. Don't be doing no nuance, Because I do think that it's stemming from a larger problem. I mean, I work in education and one of the hardest things, I have all these resources, all this money that I want to give a side and these opportunities to, and I have to go and overdrive over time to get boys and to get black boys involved and engaged. And I've made these comments before. And I've worked in education. started my career as a social worker, but there's this over feminization of education. And there's this kind of where you start to get these messages as a male that education is not for you or that is somehow not a place in there for you. And everything about you is toxic. Everything about you, there's something wrong. And there was no healthy counter narrative to kind of come like everybody everywhere don't have a Sharif everywhere doesn't have a a Baba Greg or one of these people that have these skill sets. Like I love, you might know his name, the brother, the karate dude, right? The dojo guy who runs the karate stuff and he does the videos, but he's really opening these boys up or doing stuff with boys and their fathers. And it's really like good, it's great work. And we just don't have a lot of that. And I just felt like there was this vacuum and people went in and filled it. Grifters will fill anything. Me and my brother were talking about it and we had to, were kind of, was critical of the people in the thing, right, how we were talking. But he was also like, but bro, he's just the niggas that was selling dope when we was younger. These are friends that started selling dope. Like we had friends that we was playing ball with and then they had these other things missing and lacking. And in our community, it was easy to get a bomb. It was easy to get a little bit of crack or sell some weed. And that's the road they went on and it gave them purpose. And it had the same thing. had the bravado and it had these other things. Now, the consequences were much more dire. I lost a lot of my friends to that stuff. And we were just kind of breaking that down. It's like, is this like the Kanyefication of like dope dealing? And what we meant was like when Kanye West came out and Kanye West was one of the first, not the first, but he was one of the best where he wasn't a gangster when he was rapping. He was talking differently. He was wearing polo shirts. He was talking about Benz's in backpacks as opposed to I'm about to shoot you in the face. And it spoke to this new generation of like, it spoke to a young Tyler the creator, where it's like, I can do something different. Like I can actually, I don't have to be this thug. And overnight, hip hop opened up to this other group. And I think on the white side or non-black side of it, there's this part of the internet, there was a space that it opened up for some of these people. When you see, there's nothing about Sneak-O that is appealing to me. There is nothing about Myron that is appealing to me. But again, I had different things in my life. I played basketball. I had friends. I had a father. had, you know, I don't know if you're in that room. I know I'm being long-winded. Let me give you an example from my actual brother. And I feel like he was born in the wrong era. My brother lived in Oakland and loved anime. He loved manga, like he loved all this super nerd culture, but he was doing it for the love of the game, because it wasn't cool then. Like this is shit that gets you stuffed in the lockers. Now in 2010, 2020, you're the coolest thing in the world if you know anime. Michael B. Jordan loves anime now, but he didn't, I was watching this and my brother's not in that world, but I felt so much empathy for him because I'm like, damn, like he didn't play ball like I did. He did shit that was like not cool and having to endure that. And I think that I think he would have fallen into this if he would have been going through the type of depression I watched him go through as a kid growing up. And then you see this. And that's why that's where that's why I said what I said about the kids of it. Adults brought me and you can have jokes on them all day. And I ain't even mad at what you said about the kids. Right. But I can see it. I can see it happening. You can watch it happen to a child. And that's my question is from that. What if let's say you had a friend and he came back And he saw that he found out his son was involved and engaged in this and took you out for drinks and was like, Chris, I don't know where I went wrong, but what advice do you have for me? Because I've been out working and I haven't been paying attention. And now I don't, I don't call. I thought I was going to catch the boy looking at porn. The boy is over here looking at Sneco. The boy is over here is spending our money on supplements. that he don't know nothing about. He don't know what's in it. He ain't lifted a weight in his life and thinking chasing it down with a monster drink is going to make him look like these people. I mean, I don't know what would, and I'm saying if this somebody that's a friend that you care about, and this is like a nephew to you, how would you counsel him? I mean, that's a tough one. Cause I feel like there's no easy answer. And that's what parenting is about. There are no easy answers. That's what it's about. That's what a parenting is like. No one gives you a book that has you straight. when you have a kid, there's no book that you get. It's just better be what you better be is adaptable. Like, ⁓ this is what we're dealing with today. I didn't see this one coming. Right. Parents do what all kinds of things, eating disorders, bad gradings, ⁓ you know, cutting and ⁓ chronic class cutters, you know, cutting class constantly or whatever. And no matter what you try, no matter what you do, it's not working or whatever. Parents could give you a litany of things that have no easy answers. ⁓ That's what parenting is. Parenting is kind of like, okay, well, we're going to figure this one out. We're going to roll with this, ⁓ this one. And when I say, you know, this is not something I'm dealing with necessarily, I want to be too flippant about that because it is something that I think will touch our household. Cause these are like media is media. It, you know, all your kids are getting media. In my mind, if you, happened to you and you had a kid and it happened to me, we might have different ways that we would address it and talk about it. and diagnose it, right? So one of the things when I hear you say about the feminization of schooling or whatnot, my response to that would be at some point, men and males are going to take responsibility for the fact that the fact of the matter is you can't blame everything on women and a feminine energy in the world and a feminine existence in the world. Mothering is feminized and households are feminized and domestication is feminized. Boys grow up in positive maternalism in a lot of cases where it's all feminine energy, right? But it isn't a mark on them. It isn't like you're bad for participating in this. There was also this thing you've talked about, kind of like with the Ogbooth stuff, doing well in school, that whole acting white phenomenon. I don't know where the research landed on that, because I always hated that as a claim, a claim that, black kids think that doing well in school is acting white. But you you've read some research about it. You know what the, what the stuff says about that. Ogblu argues that black people and immigrants should assimilate to the dominant white culture. And when they do, it's seen as white and it, and it dispels them. That was basically- by black folks. Right. Like if you're in a school and you're doing well in school, you might get criticized for being white, acting white. In the same way that if you were doing well in school, you might be criticized for being too girly or too feminine. ⁓ well, you're doing well. You're getting good grades. You're raising your hand when you're supposed to. You're sitting, sitting still or whatnot. You must be a girl, right? That's toxic masculinity. And it's not something that happens in every environment because in some environments, your academics are as competitive as your sports are. Right. You're not trying to be the lowest of the low in AP classes. You're trying to actually be the top in the AP classes, not because it's feminine. But because you are a competitive thinking person and all the males around you are trying to get into West Point, right? All the males around you are trying to beef up their Stanford applications and whatnot. And there is no world in which you're thinking that that's feminine at all. It's the broken men and boys who think that everything that doesn't feel like muscle and strong and overpowering is feminine, right? No, I love this and don't lose your point because I want to. That is my whole point. And my apologies if it came off like I wasn't. not. I have no. I'm not putting an aspersion on the feminization of education. It's something that we've talked about. It's something that one of our best friends solves for. Right. He's like that. I'm saying that there is a balance needed. We have both acknowledged how difficult it is when you get that one potential black male educator and then you're sending them into this school. where he's the only male and the only black male. And then he gets all these other things heaped on him. And when he asserts himself in a masculine way, it's seen as a threat, it's seen as certain or something or whatever. You know what I'm saying? And it's just hard to, we don't want to send them in there alone. It's like, well, you need some other people and some backup. I'm not, I was raised, listen, people talk about this stuff. I was in a pretty much matriarchal family. My grandmother was like, That's that's that she was, you know, the man that I grew up around more had to take on the working stoic man type like the grandfather that's he's in his chair. He's going to provide he's going to do stuff. But my grandmother is the one that's directing traffic and saying where things are going to go or whatever the case is. Directed traffic. Because let me just say this one thing about grandmothers and it may resonate with you or not. Right. A lot of times with that black male teacher that goes in, reason that the toxic masculinity that happens to him is that all of sudden everybody wants him to be the warden, the heavy, the guy that comes in. And you know why it is? Is it because we think that black boys and boys just in general just need a male influence, not to nurture and not to coach and to foster, but to whoop and to set in the straight. And if you don't have an attitude, you need a dad to come in and slap you around and talk you down and blah, blah, I don't know where these people have been, but grandmothers will make you go get a switch to whip your own ass with too. It's like anybody else. You don't need a dad to get your ass whooped. Right? I don't know what part people forgot about that. Like, oh, you need an ass so you can get an ass whooping every now and then. Whoever's swinging it. You know what I'm saying? So listen, listen, I don't know what type of families they had, but you're not walking around disrespecting your grandmother and not expecting a switch to come off a tree. Right? ⁓ you need a male in your life so you can be disciplined and punished. Really? Well, okay. I don't know. Y'all grew up in a different part of the country than I grew up in, because you don't mess with Southern grandmothers when you have trees around. Yeah. And more and more of what I was saying, though, is like, just think you need a balance. Right. I think is a and unless it's like an all girl or all boys school, like if there's a coed school, I just think there needs to be a better balance. There has to be a mix of the energies, I think. And I think that's But and again, we we've heard when all this stuff was happening about black boys ain't in college and black males ain't in college and a boy, a black boy gave one of the most impassioned reasons around it, right? And kind of broke down his it was so sad and beautiful at the same time, but it was like, damn, it sucks that you went through that. your ability to articulate it is like we're failing you. Like and I think that that's where a lot of this stuff is kind of happening. Now, I think I think this menace for shit is just run amok. I think it's I think when you start to, the gasoline is money. The gasoline is the internet. Like these are issues that are persisted, right? Like it only becomes a loneliness epidemic when it's white boys are affected. But like for a long time, you don't think little black boys without their fathers because their fathers are in jail was not facing a loneliness epidemic in 1989? You don't think I enjoyed visiting both my parents in prison? Like in jail, they ain't go to prison with the jail. so it's, didn't, I didn't enjoy that, right? Like I didn't enjoy having to, you know, be, but, it's not an epidemic in that way. And in that situation is look at the niggas, look at what they deserve. Look at that. got, this is, they need to be in jail. They need to be off the street. There was no compassion there for those people. You know, I, I rose as a social worker, Chris, I think you knew this. I think I told you this, but around the teaching thing that you talked about, the way that I grew to be such a high, like, I rose in the ranks of social work very early because it's mostly women and the cases that I took on were violent cases. That mean that I was working with a kid with special needs, he was a male, he probably hit somebody and so they can't give those cases to the ladies. So I had so many cases and I did so well in my reunification stuff that I'm a 23 year old, 22 year old like. I got some status as a social worker. And again, that's not how you want it. I took advantage of it. I didn't break down the numbers, but in social work and education, I think that's the places where you're looking for this regulation. You're looking for places. Look, man, we got to stop. There's a lot of things that we've had to protect girls from and we need to continue to do that. Shout out to Monique Morris and her book. And there's some things in the same token we got to protect boys from. It's not a crime for boys to have a lot of energy. Like they have energy. That's that's that's a part of their makeup. But if we're not prepared to take that and we don't have the right recourse, like this is what you end up getting is just that we notice it more when the demographic changes. I just think is I just thought it was interesting. I don't don't I don't have the answer for it. Right. And I won't just keep lauding on you as the father thing. I just know that you take a lot of pride in being a dad. I think you're very good at it. First off, Chris is a softy. He is a is a huge, huge softy. You think he's the. put lay down the law. Chris is baby girl, you want that jacket? Come on, everybody get in the jacket. You know what? And I'll say this too much about like, everybody, I like to talk to men. When I find out that they're becoming a dad or they've been a dad for a long time, it's one of my favorite things to ask them, where'd you get your style from? Like when you knew you were going to become a dad, what were you drawing on? Like, cause some, some folks have to invent their fatherhood style. They got to it whole cloth cause they don't have one, right? Or they don't have a positive one. ⁓ so to me, it's an interesting, interesting conversation. And a lot of fathers that, ⁓ that I talked to actually start with the right thing, which is, is my motive is to produce a well adjusted kid that, ⁓ that doesn't need me at some point, like is going to be independent in life or whatever. but all the other stuff I have to invent, I'm making it up on the spot. Like I got to really just like be in tune with my kids or whatever. One of my things you've heard me say this a lot of times is I'm not trying to raise slaves. I'm trying to raise free people. So if I'm walking around telling them, do this, do that, shut up, sit down because I said so blah, blah, blah. Then now I'm raising a slave, right? Now I'm raising a slave. Um, but some people might think, well, I'm too libertarian, right? Too licentious. What is licentious or whatever, uh, with my kids because they get to do a lot of things that I don't agree with. Right. If I was trying to control them, I would control them to not do some of the things that they do. And one of them, I mean, we've touched on it in this conversation. Gaming is important to a lot of kids, right? Now, I know what I grew up with. You had time limits on things, right? You couldn't just sit around a whole Saturday and play games, right? As a father, right? I have to be like, am I trying to raise myself again? Or am I trying to raise these kids? Because I don't live in their world. I don't know how long it takes to play Halo. I don't know, like, like, you know, know, I don't even know what the game is, but I do know, like the games I used to play. they would end at some point. And at some point the newer games don't have an end. they just, you if you tell a kid, you got to get off now. They'd be like, ⁓ my God, I'm in the middle of something like really important. I'm taking over a planet. Can I have a nerd moment? Can I have a nerd moment with you? I thought I thought to you about it, but maybe somebody else. Now there was a study, right? They studied the games and the games have changed, right? So when we were playing, like when you were playing Super Mario, you had three lives and you had to... learn pattern recognition. And then when you die in the game would end like you'd have to start over. So it developed patience and it, you know, now the games they date, like you said, they don't end you, you, just immediately respond. You continue to keep going. And there's these sub messaging that kind of happens, you know, as opposed to, damn, I got one life left in super Mario. And I'm at the, I'm going up against the, you know, it's shit. I got a, I got Bowser's going to kill me and I'm have to do this again. I just had to have that nerve moment because I didn't even, when I heard that, I was like, ⁓ shit, like I didn't even, I guess that is like a thing, right? Like. And like, think about that though. If it doesn't end and you can do a whole weekend of it and you could do all night of it, you could stay up until four in the morning. Now you've got kids that have bad nutrition, bad sleeping patterns, bad socialization skills. They are learning to socialize virtually, but they're not socializing ⁓ in person. Half of them don't have any game with dating anymore. Half of them don't have the same interest that they have. Many of them are pale and sitting in basements doing this thing for a long time. And then we wonder why they can't get a date and be normal, productive citizens of the world or whatnot. Well, it's kind of like you allowed a lifestyle to continue that not everybody has. Now, a lot of them, the Manosphere, attractive thing about the Manosphere is you're going to get a tan and we're going to give you some supplements. and you are going to become muscular and strong and alpha and blah, blah. And that's very attractive and appealing to these, know, waif then, you know, kind of basement dwellers, whatnot. ⁓ I'm going to be muscular and yeah, but the only catch is you gotta take a lot of the supplements I'm selling you and you gotta hate women, but you want to attract women on the same, you know, on the same token. And the best way to attract them is to hate them. Right. was a, it's some weird logic, but I get it. I understand the sales pitch because then everybody wants to be strong. You will be stronger after you do this. You will have nice cars. You will have nice houses. You will live in Miami, right? The Sodom of the world. And you will be both. The Sodom of the world? You will both be ironically ⁓ moral and upstanding in a Jordan Peterson fashion, but also primal and immoral in your behavior with women. It's weird. It's a weird sales pitch. I don't get it 100%. I don't know. ⁓ I hear you. mean, I would say, I mean, and here's, and that's the interesting thing about the Manosphere. It's just extreme in everything because here's the thing, by itself, fitness is not a bad thing. Cool. Discipline that goes with it. Great. Having self-esteem, right? And being confident about yourself and going and talking to a girl on is not a bad thing. You can, you're supposed to get rejected. It's okay. It's a part of life. It's the thing of it. You know, like being, ⁓ caring about yourself and doing these things and making sure your money is right and being, you know, trying to be a titan of industry. But it's when it's just there's no check, there's no balance. There's nobody to kind of like is one thing to have confidence is another thing to think that you're superior to another gender is one thing to want to go. And it's the other thing most of the I don't think most of the actual people in the atmosphere that that are the consumers of it, the majority of them are not in shape. The majority of them are not these things, right? It's aspirational. the first thing, this is why I keep bringing it back to drug dealing. Because the first, you will never get that high again, bruh. Like it's never gonna happen and you're gonna chase it and chase it. And then the Manosphere has a built-in mechanism that will allow itself to regenerate. Cause it'll say, well, you not doing well cause of you. You didn't do the shit I said. You gotta buy this other thing then, bruh. You gotta buy this. And that's the thing like, That's why I think the road spends so much time on the economics of it. And just like, let's get under this male shit and let's get underneath like all these things you say a males need. You trying to sell some products. You trying to sell some snake oil. You trying to sell some nootropics. You trying to, all this is something that you can sell or let me get more classes. You reached this place that's unattainable. And then here's the other thing that they really cheat you on. They not actually even showing you the hard work that they doing. Like if they actually showed you the hard work it was to get to that place, to get to that weight, to do those things, the discipline that it takes, it's not as appealing because then it becomes real for these people. It becomes real. I'm in Chicago. I watched Brian Erlacher. played for the, he's one of the best linebackers of all time. And one day he showed his workout routine. Like people had a lot to say. He showed out his workout routine. And then it was just like, ⁓ bro, I don't want no problems with you. this is. You earned every dollar that you earn, bro, because this is a different type of sacrifice. Yeah, man, I eat chicken and rice every day. How long? The last 25 years. God damn. No cake? Maybe once every three months. And it's like, the fantasy shatters, right? And when you don't have somebody that's there to kind of check that, that's what happens. The other thing I would say about what you talked about in the house, this is where you do got to give some smoke to parents. Because if you 12 or 13 and you ain't paying no light bill and I gotta buy you the games, I gotta buy you the stuff and you don't say, hey man, cut this shit off and we going outside. it's, I'm never fat shaming or anything like that, but when you, it breaks my heart when I see like a seven year old super obese kid and you see that parent just continuing to feed them and feed them and feed them because they feel bad if they don't. And there has to be, and again, I'm not the parent. So a lot of this is me using you as a surrogate to, I just don't have the, how do you say no to your kids? Right? Like what if somebody that felt like they had a bad childhood, they just want to give their kids a better life. They want their kids to be a little more comfortable. Like, do you recognize if and when you spoiling your kids? Is it like a balanced thing when you have a loving partner there? Is it like a team thing where I might miss it and she catches it? Like. Because every parent I saw in this documentary, every mom, remember you wanted to do the show about toxic femininity or what did you say, the toxic women of it? Like does that mother get any blame for what she has helped produce and is still kind of cultivating? I'm just curious what you think about that. I mean, you know. There's very specific things that you can be blamed for because they have very specific outcomes. For instance, if you're one of the ones who's always shouting down your sons and yelling at them, telling them they're nothing, they're never going to be nothing, or you're just like your dad who doesn't exist and who isn't here, whatever, all of that is toxic, ⁓ matriarchal kind of family structures that have a predictable outcome. You're going to raise a boy that's going to be mad at some point. You're going be mad at women, and it's all going to be about kind of getting back at you, whatever. That's one scenario. I think in all of this. But I mean, you know, the even the physicality of the obese thing to me is interesting because we are raising mentally either anemic or mentally obese folks. We're raising kids that ⁓ they got all the physicality working in their favor, but we are not feeding their brains and their their character and their their souls. We got one part of the equation. Right. So, yeah, you you are in shape and you are fit, but not mentally. not spiritually, not intellectually, right? So you're going to actually be a brute for somebody somewhere. You'll be a brute for somebody that is fit, not just physically, but intellectually, soulfully, spiritually, you know, all that other stuff, whatnot. This, listen, you're developing human beings. This is not easy stuff. You're developing human beings, but I do think as men, and we have these conversations that are specific to men and Manosphere and the boys crisis and all of that type of stuff, we're going to have to watch our language about these things. Because even my homies that I think are embarking now on the boy crisis stuff, and they're forming partnerships between black and white boy watchers who are saying the same thing as if they are the same crisis and they are the same thing or whatnot. that my problem with what they're doing, number one, is they're erasing the boundaries of race that really feed into this in some ways that are specific and can be studied. and actually have research behind them. And two, they are still using the stupid frame of because we're spending so much time on girls or because we are spending so much time paying attention to what happens with girls, we're not paying attention to the boys, which is once again, part of the problem. That framing in itself means you are still broken. You are still sick because you are blaming a world that is constructed for your entire success, for your failure. to be successful, right? You are blaming, you live in America. There are parts in this world where people live on $2 a day, $2 a day. And you're living in a country where you can rob for food all day long, all night long, whatnot, right? And you're still complaining about the fact that the world has left you behind. The entire Senate and presidency and Supreme Court is white male driven. All of corporate America, all of business law and everything else is run by men. The systems that we are saying are chewing up men are run and profited by men, right? It is what men are doing. It is the world that men are ordering. And this idea that we can continuously keep framing it as, yeah, but women, therefore men and boys means we're not getting any closer to the real issue here. The real issue is that you are losing on some things that you should be winning on. And if you were in another country, or in another place growing up in another situation, you would probably be a lot more animated about figuring your shit out than you are in the United States because you can be. No, you cannot sit in your basement all day long, game all day long, drink Mountain Dew all day long, ⁓ and not go out into the world and try and do anything that requires ambition and expect to get a wife and a girlfriend and an equal partner because the world has changed. Women do need equal partners now because they're more educated than they ever needed. And then they ever were before. And the reason that they're more educated is because there are fewer avenues to being self-sufficient for them than school. That's why so many of them go to grad school. That's why so many of them now have advanced degrees or whatnot, because it's one of the avenues to being self-sufficient that they don't have if they're not going to do a whole bunch of the other stuff that men do. So my point is, I don't mean to preach about it, but it is basically to say, until you're willing to take full responsibility for the way that you are jacking it up as men. and as males and frame it 100 % in what you can do and what you are responsible for, you're never gonna get there. You'll be talking about just any of the rest of And I think it's interesting because the ironic part is the way that you describe some of those men complaining about it, it's not masking how they complaining about it. Like I told you, the men in my life were like this quiet stoic, you just fix the shit and you go back to your chair and you get your piece. You don't. such a good point. That is the point. That is such a good point. The men in your life did not argue with the women in his life. No, my grandfather did not sit around and saying that the first of all, let's just be clear on something. The whole world was against my grandfather. Yeah. Right. The whole world was against him and it was actively trying to make sure that he wouldn't reach his full potential. And now his grandchildren are walking around talking about war. Boy. I'm a boy, therefore, do you know what my grandfather would say to that? My grandfather would say, I'd be a billionaire if I grew up in your time. That's what my grandfather would say. Yeah. Right. He died at 92 with multiple vehicles, multiple houses, multiple everything, and did not have a lifestyle or a life situation where he should have had any of that when he passed away. Right. So if he heard this conversation we're having right now, he would not even understand it. wouldn't understand it. Like my grandfather wouldn't understand it. would, he would, he would use some words and terminology that you probably can't use today, but it's just not how he was raised. And it's just like, you don't, why would I don't argue with my, I don't argue with the women in my life. I do what I do and she does what she does. And I, and I think the way that they always gets framed in this zero sum way, like again, I do, and here's where I think schools are, are, are failing in a lot of ways, right? I don't think it's zero sum. I know money. It's a money thing. Everything requires money. But this is how I don't think it's zero sum. Like we should bring vocation ship back. I mean, one, we need it. Our infrastructures are falling apart. I've seen so much blight in my neighborhood that it just wouldn't have existed in 1970 something. Cause somebody in this neighborhood would have just been like, we might just go fix this. Like we're about to go do this. When I was living in Oakland, the Panthers took us on the Pan, the black Panther tour. If you all are ever out there, try to find them to do that for you. You got to pay them in cash. Cause you know, But they would just, and they talk about how they started, how the Black Panther started. There were kids getting killed in North Oakland because there wasn't a crosswalk. They were getting killed in the intersection. And these men got tired of it. They stopped traffic and they built a stop sign and crosswalks. they just, you just do it. And I think because it's so easy to sit in the basement and complain and to put out your, spew your feelings. Like it, look. Sometimes you get what you asked for. People ask for men to be more in their feelings and talk more about it. You can overdo some shit too. you know, every one of your feelings does not need to be validated. just doesn't deserve, every one of your feelings doesn't deserve to be validated. Listen, you're my brother, I won't go super personal, but like you are one of the closest people in my life. I lost, I didn't get something I thought I should get and I was annoyed by it. And you were just like, hey man, you can't take that shit personally. You gotta move on. And you know, you let me fuss about it for a little bit and then the conversation moved on, right? Because there's an accountability or a love there where it's like, bro, I know you, when I met you, Cole, you was building shit, you was doing shit. Like, I fuck with you, like, yo, who cares? Like, who cares? Go I don't want to breeze by this point. You just made a point that everybody should hear, right? This thing when you say like we should bring vocational back. Well, first of all, I'm gonna push this back on you just a little bit, which is. Vocational never left. Career and technical education is in every state and in every school district in the United States. you know what's different now is kids don't want to do it. They don't want to go into it. And this is the Manosphere thing. The Manosphere is people want to skip a step. They want to go from high school to having the car and the women and the vacations and the watches and the clothes and all that without what happens in between those two things. What happens between the time that you are leaving high school and you're living in a nice house with a nice car and a ⁓ fly wife and the right watches on it? That's the problem. The problem is they don't want that middle step. That's what we're dealing with. We don't have a voice crisis. We don't have a male crisis. What we have is a middle step crisis. People don't want to do the middle step that gets you to where you want to be. My push is that it is more difficult to find those. You have to go out and look. as opposed to, it used to be in every high school. There used to be shop class in every high school. There used to be- Show me a high school where if you wanted to become a carpenter, an HVAC person- Oh, I'll tell you. It's not gonna be available to you. So remember when I went back to Kentucky. So what they did is they were intentional about bringing vocation back because wages are down, all these other jobs and shit was losing. And Kentucky was like, we need X, Y, and Z. We need Wilders. And so the district, there's a high school and the district are connected. And what they did is in Kentucky, in Paducah, was a little different. It's not charter versus traditional in that area. It's the city versus the county. So there are city schools and then there's county schools. But they came together and said, we're going to build a world-class welding program. And then they started doing like these competitions and stuff, like kids in Kentucky started graduating and walking into $65,000 jobs. Now people out there can flick their nose at $65,000. $65,000 in Kentucky at 19. is really good. You're making my point right now. But I'm just saying, but they made, they put it in every state. There is a workforce development office and department that aligns with the education department of that state and these world class welding programs and railroad programs. Listen, I can tell you a personal story I used to do. I used to work in workforce development for the state of Minnesota. At one point, all the industries would come to you and say, this is what we're facing. This is what's going to happen. The railroads came and said, For the first time ever, everybody's about to retire and it's an old man's game right now. And there are no nobody in the pipeline. It's a 70 to $80,000 a year starting salary. And it's really good for people that don't want to be around other people because you will own a lot of time by yourself. And I'm thinking to myself, listen, you get to be by yourself. You get to be on the road and you make $80,000 a year straight out of high school. Sign me up. Let's get a program. Man, we would take high schoolers and young people from the community colleges out to see these jobs and be like, $80,000 a year. And here we are, we're talking like old people, $80,000 a year. Now this was like 10 years ago or so, so it was even better, think then. kids will look at their jobs and they'd like, I want to be an influencer. I won't be on no damn railroad. I won't be on no damn railroad. I'm sorry. Did you say sweat? Right. So here we are, like the old heads, like talking about how great these jobs are, how amazing, like You know what welders make, know what plumbers make, you know what electricians, the unions were coming to us. Electrical unions and others were coming to us saying, we're going to have a problem. We're supposed to build a sports facility that's a big, big contract and we don't have enough welders and we're not going to for five to 10 years, blah, blah, blah. Y'all need to get some of these high school folks in programs. The programs were there, but the interest. What would you say to people you can work for 10 hours a day? and make what you might make in one YouTube video if it goes viral. But that was the funny thing about the documentary. Because remember, the dude, see, there was that older cat. The older cat sticks out to me. He was older than the rest of them. And he actually had a real company. He had the construction company. And it's like, hey, bro, if you actually just talked about this company and how you built it. I mean, he like built some real shit. And it's like, and again, it does say a lot that. He switched over to this thing, but you know what else he didn't do? He didn't give up that damn company. still got that company. He probably couldn't find workers for that company. Probably couldn't. Anybody who owns one of them companies will tell you the biggest pain in their ass is probably employees. Well, then they go get somebody that's from a different country. Who won't be sitting around talking about, ⁓ we're having a boy crisis. You're not having a boy crisis. You don't want a work crisis. It's a crisis of privilege, Everything we talked about is privilege. There you go. That's like the blog post right there. Do you know how privileged you got to be to be in the men's sphere? You got to be able to not have to go to bed. You got to be able to just fuck around online. You got to be able to have the phone, the camera, all that. Like, it's expensive. It's expensive. And this is why I drew the line between friends of mine that's so dope and these guys, because it's like, Poor looks different now in the United States. Poor comes with a $2,000 phone. Like it doesn't, it comes with a magical box that would have changed the face of society if Socrates had his hands on it. Like, so- Let's take this in a different direction just real quick, because we talk about this documentary in the Manosphere and whatnot. Yeah. But that's a different version of the same topic that you and I have seen from a different, similar but different angle on this Manosphere stuff. Okay. Think about like the Kevin Samuel stuff, right? I wish Torrin could have made it. Torrin, I wish you were here. I wouldn't put that in the same piece. I wouldn't put those in the same, in the same And they're not the thing to me at all. I don't think that's the same thing at all. but they are, they are an avenue to try and get to young men who need some form of instruction, but it's not in the same way that that Manosphere stuff is being done. But it is trying to aim at the same kind of issue, I think, in some ways. you say that? Yeah, I think a lot of things are aimed in a... I think a lot of these things are aimed in similar ways, but they're very different. I think Kevin Samuels ⁓ was just a star in what he did. I think that like, you know, whether you like him or not, I think he started something. It wasn't working. No, I'm saying it started something. Because remember, he started out giving information to men. That's where he started at. And it just didn't pick up the same because it just wasn't... It just didn't. And then when he started women content kind of flowing and doing and got and these women that subscribed and did it or whatever, and he grew into his own type of thing. And I think his stuff was actually based in something a little different. I think it was a it was definitely performative in ways, but I think it was built in something that it grew out of something. I think the Manosphere is kind of just is something it's just I think it's pure exploitation. I think it is. It is preying on weak. The irony of the Manosphere is that you have to be very weak to fall into the Manosphere. that is the it is anti. They're doing boot camps right now. They're doing like masculinity boot camps. Who you think those are for? Nigga, I'm not going to no masculinity boot camp. I don't I don't need that. You know, if you felt like you needed it, that would be the market that I described earlier. It's a broken market, a broken people. One thing we didn't touch on enough, I think in this, but is a big part of this to me, which is I wouldn't mind all of that physicality stuff in life improvement, self-improvement stuff. If it came with some moral anchor of also have character, be a good person, develop as a person who can be trusted with your word, be trusted like your homies will trust you. ⁓ People will look at you as a Like this is what Scott Galloway is saying a lot of, you know, he's saying some of the same stuff, but he's saying a little different. Our job is to be providers and protectors and people who make the world safe for others. Our job is to be an umbrella over our communities and our women and our children and whatnot in a way where we use our strengths for good. Right. That's a different, it's the same pitch in a way, but it's also saying, but you also have to be a good person. You can't be Myron Gaines. out here like trying to figure out what's the most racist thing I can say right now. What's the most sexist thing I can say right now, right? You know? Yeah. Yeah. I don't like manufactured. I can respect somebody even if I disagree with everything, if I feel like they really believe it, right? If I'm like, if I feel like you really believe it is very different from I see you riding a wave and you just trying to like, you know, cause a stir. I've had you for a while, man. I know we have to close this conversation up. Just One, I love when we get a chance to do this, brother. I really do. it myself. I appreciate it. Nah, we'll do it again and we'll complete. We have two things that I need to do. We have to do, I think, ⁓ a three to hardware reunion here. was trying to get us, the three of us here, because it would have been great having touring. And then, you know, people have been hitting me and I know they've been hitting you. Would the A Black Hands ever do something together again? Would they ever do that? You got to stay tuned. I don't know. We have to create a tour. That's what I'm saying. Like all this support y'all given now. Y'all keep trying to push us there. Give us an audience. You know, make sure we got some place to do it and who knows what can happen. But man, I learned so much from you and I know that even when we disagree and part this we disagree then, but I think that it moved the conversation forward. I am somebody that focuses on males in schools and not at the detriment of girls. think women and girls need to continue that progress. But we also need to just build the things so that these boys can thrive in an environment where they're not demonized or made to feel like something's wrong with them or they get put on drugs because at 11 o'clock in the middle of the day, after you feed them a sugar bound lunch, you mad that they bouncing off the fucking walls. it just makes, bro, we used to feed kids, it just sugar. It didn't get mad. Like, shit, bring that time back if this the case, but. You've been great, man. Any parting words, anything that you're working on, working these people follow you and find you. You always do very well when you come on this show. People, I get comments about you, so they want to know how to get to you. How do they do it? So if you want to find me, you can find me across socials at Citizen Stewart. So you can find me on Facebook and Twitter and all those at Citizen Stewart. My sub stack is citizen.substack.com. So it's very easy to remember. What you will find there is right now I am on a public intellectual tantrum right now around stupidity being a public health issue. So I'm writing a series on stupidity actually being something that we need to destigmatize. We need to destigmatize being stupid and stupidity because like diabetes, you might catch it, but you know, like, listen, it's curable. There are things you can do. So it shouldn't be shameful to be. stupid, should be shameful to stay stupid because it makes the nation weaker, it makes communities weaker, it makes families weaker. And right now, everything we talked about, the Manosphere right now is a good example of what happens when you allow stupidity in a population to fester, especially a privileged population. So that's what you can find when you come to me at Citizen ⁓ Substack. That and other things. You can find my photography and my photojournalism and stuff I'm doing, but I am pushing this stupidity as a public health issue pretty hard and nobody likes it. Nobody likes it. Nobody likes it, but it doesn't matter because they stupid and I'm going to keep doing it. ⁓ And that's it. I appreciate you brother. I appreciate you for having me on. And will read, will, and anybody listening, will go read three of those articles. I think that you should too and like and comment, engage with it. Disagree with him. He actually likes when you disagree with him. It wakes him up in some ways. I'm so blessed and honored to have you on the show and a part of my life, man. I truly do love you and your family, man. For everybody else, thank you all for listening to Color Commentary. We'd love to hear from you, so drop us an email at colorcommentarypod at gmail.com. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe to the show, leave us a five-star rating, share it on social media, and join us every Thursday for more Color Commentary with Dr. Cole. Peace out, y'all.