The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son by Michael Ian Black

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son by Michael Ian Black Michaelianblack.org A poignant look at boyhood, in the form of a heartfelt letter from comedian Michael Ian Black to his teenage son before he leaves for college, and a radical plea for rethinking masculinity and teaching young men to give and receive love. In a world in which the word masculinity now often goes hand in hand with toxic, comedian, actor, and father Michael Ian Black offers up a way forward for boys, men, and anyone who loves them. Part memoir, part advice book, and written as a heartfelt letter to his college-bound son, A Better Man reveals Black’s own complicated relationship with his father, explores the damage and rising violence caused by the expectations placed on boys to “man up,” and searches for the best way to help young men be part of the solution, not the problem. “If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability,” he writes, “how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness?” Honest, funny, and hopeful, Black skillfully navigates the complex gender issues of our time and delivers a poignant answer to an urgent question: How can we be, and raise, better men? Michael Ian Black is an actor, writer, and comedian best known for co-creating the sketch comedy troupes The State and Stella. He has appeared in many television shows and movies including "Ed," "This is Forty," "Wet Hot American Summer," and the various VH1 "I Love the..." shows. He has written several books, both for adults and children, and lives in CT with his wife and kids.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to go to YouTube.com to see the video version of this interview. At YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Hit that bell notification button. You can see all the wonderful videos of all the wonderful interviews we have over there. You can follow me at Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. And also on Facebook.com forward slash The Chris Voss Show. There's a bunch of groups over there, too. You can follow and everything and all that good stuff. Today, we have a most excellent author on the show. And, of course, we always have all the best authors.

We just, I don't know, we Google them in the Google machine. They come up, and there they are. Today, we have a most inspiring and funny man on the show. You've likely heard of him, seen him on the big screen, or seen him talking about his book. He's an accomplished author as well. He has written an amazing moving book called A Better Man, a mostly serious letter to my son. His name is Michael Ian Black. He is a multimedia talent who started numerous films and TV series. He's written and directed two films.

He's a prolific author and commentator and regularly tours the country performing his brand of jokes and observations. His most recently starred in TV Land's The Jim Gaffigan Show and the Comedy Central's Another Period. He also reprised one of his iconic film roles in Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer 10 years later, and previously in Wet Hot Summer, The First Day of Camp. His third stand-up comedy special, Noted Expert, was released on Epyx, and he's authored 11 books. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? I'm super. Hi, Chris. Super, super. You gotta love it. So, Michael, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs.

Oh, I mean, I live on Twitter. So at Michael Ian Black on Twitter. I spend too much time there. I think we all do. My biggest- Yeah, it's unhealthy. What I do is unhealthy on Twitter. There you go.

Well, have you gotten on TikTok yet? It's even worse. No, I feel like, I feel like I've aged out of TikTok. I, I, my understanding is that once you're over 40, you're not even allowed on there. Like they look, they look at the crows lines around your eyes. And if you have them, you're not allowed on TikTok. I think you're allowed to be a voyeur, but if you watch it, you sit down and you go, I'm just going to watch a couple of these. And like four hours later and that 3am in the morning, you're, you're, you go i'm just gonna watch a couple of these and like four hours later and at 3 a.m in the morning you're you're screwed yeah i don't need any more of that in my

life i have too much scrolling that i do already i don't need to add another app well uh we're in for some interesting times in the next week or the next couple months if you will and and god knows which way it's gonna go. But you've written this amazing, beautiful, moving, epic book, in my opinion. And let's talk about what motivated you want to write this book. Sure. So as you said, it's called The Better Man, A Mostly Serious Letter to My Son. And I have two kids, a son and a daughter. My son, who's older, was entering his senior year of high school, about to go to college. And the immediate event that motivated it was the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida. I'd been paying a lot of attention to gun violence since Sandy Hook, which happened when my kids were in elementary school and happened about half a dozen miles from my house. And when Marjorie Stoneman happened, I just felt like people weren't talking about

something really obvious. And it wasn't even something I'd really noticed before, or at least thought about in any deep way, which is why is it that it's always boys and young men pulling the trigger on these crimes? And that question led me to writing this book for my son who was about to leave home. And give us an overview, like a big picture of what the book is about, and then we'll get into some of the weeds of it. It's about reflecting on what I've learned about being a man, some lessons that I hope he will take as he enters adulthood. And it's also, there's a little bit of history in there, a little bit of sociology in there. And believe me, I'm not an expert in anything, but I felt like I needed to at least paint a broad enough picture so that people understood where I was coming from. So that, you know, necessitated a lot of research and reading and trying to

understand stuff that I'm not really qualified to understand, but I did my best. I think you did an extraordinary job. I, I, you could even name this a handbook for being a man in today's times. I was really moved by it, cried in a few different places, honestly, I'll admit to it. And I don't have children, but especially where the book opens with the shooting at the elementary school years ago. I forget the name of it for some reason. My sorry, it escapes me you know you sent your kids off to school that day and you see this on tv uh it's just a moving opening to the book but you go through a lot of unpacking of of manhood what it means to be a man uh it's a beautiful thing that

you've written to your son and uh uh also your uh the thing thing that got into me too was you talking about your relationship with your parents, your father, and everything else. And it's almost like an instruction manual on how to be a man in today's times, or at least that's kind of how it came across to me, if you will. Well, that's generous. And I appreciate that very much. I wouldn't phrase it that way myself only because I don't, I don't think I have all the answers. Like I'm just, I'm just trying to work this through, like everybody else. So, you know, to say instruction manual sort of implies that I know what the hell I'm talking about. And I don't, you know, these are just questions that I'm trying to create a satisfactory answer to for myself and for my son. And, you know, I guess you can certainly read it as there's there's advice in there. But it's advice that, you know, I often fall short of taking myself. Like, you know, when it's called a better man, but that's not you know,, that's, that's as much addressed to me as anybody else. Like I'm trying to be better too. Yeah.

Cause most of the time I suck. I think, I think we all kind of are on that pathway. I mean, life comes without a manual and, and we're all just trying to be better. Like you say, we're just trying to suck less, I suppose. That's all I'm doing every day. Just suck a little bit less. That's my goal. And most days I don't succeed, by the way. That's my goal on my chart, my board. Your vision board? My vision board. Don't suck. Which is unlike some other people's vision board

that walk the avenues or something. I don't know. I don't know. Well, yeah. I mean, there certainly seem to be vision boards out there that seem to say suck a lot more. And those people seem to be pretty successful at it. And you got to have an OnlyFans account today. I don't know if you've opened one, but I'm still working on getting mine open. But you know, that seems to be the thing these days. But the one of the things I really love to, well, there's a lot of stuff that I really loved about the book. A lot of it in you discussing your issues with parents and your father's relationship with you and stuff brought back a lot of my stuff in what were in there. And it opens with you talk about the Parkland shooter in interrogation. I watched the same interrogation. I sat there for hours, just compelled,

sometimes jumping through it, just trying to figure out what sort of guy this was. And I've kind of gone through the same thing with my nephew, where I'm trying to, he's going into the world, you know, he's having trouble and he's having trouble navigating it because of what's going on with, you know, toxic masculinity and Black Lives Matter and addressing all these different issues. And you really, you really try and unpack them in the book as best you can and give him the best value of your advice. And I was, I was just really struck by that. I mean, how hard was it for you to sit down and write this and go through all the different details and research that you want to do? Or how long did it take to?

Well, I wrote it fairly quickly for me. I mean, I'm not a very fast writer in general, but for me, it was a fairly quick book to write. It was still like four months overdue. I passed my deadline, but it was hard. I mean, all writing is hard. Like, that's the first thing. The second thing is these particular topics were especially hard because, for one, like I said, like, I all, and explain, second of all, and third of all, not sound like I'm preaching. Like I was really trying to do my best to not sound sanctimonious or like I was any better than anybody else. I was trying to be compassionate towards people, even people with whom I disagree. I was trying really hard not to

cast too much blame anywhere, but just to kind of present an overview of where I think we are and hopefully nudge us towards where I'd like us to go. I love how you broke down and talk about masculinity and everything else. One of the things you had in the book, the measure of a man is our utility. And you really talk about how, where manhood is at, the issues that it has. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more? Sure. What I meant by saying the measure of man is his utility is we generally think about men as kind of creatures that do things we we we are utilized we hunt and we build stuff and we defend and

we're there to um make money um like our roles in the culture are kind of proscribed along those ways. You know, the question to a man in general is what can you do for me? And a man's answer is sort of his life. And that's all great. Like, I do think that's really important for men and women. But for men, I think it's important to start thinking of ourselves in broader terms than that. We can't just define ourselves by what we provide or what our success is. Or conversely, we can't think of ourselves as failures if, for example, we don't make as much money as the guy down the street. We're more than what we do, and we're more than what we make with our hands. The phrase that I've been using lately is full-spectrum human beings Like we not only provide, but as humans, like we also need to be provided for, and there's no shame in that. In fact, I think it's a gift when you're able to ask for and receive somebody else's love. You're giving them a gift. You're giving them the gift

of allowing them to love you. And it's really hard, I think, for guys especially to always accept that love and to believe that they're worthy of it. Because so much of what comes along with our utility is feeling like we're never doing enough. Yeah. And, and I like how you, you really talk about how, uh, the, the roles of men and women, uh, through history and, and how we got to where we are because there's a lot of men, you know, even, even myself and conversations I'm having with my fellow men, um, and, and questioning our roles and, you know, the me too movement, uh, raised a lot of those questions and where are we as guys and everything else. I grew up through the era of the 80s where, you know, the man went to work, the woman stayed home. There was a lot of that sexism sort of thing.

And you walk through that whole thing beautifully and explain it in a way that just makes so much sense. And then why we're struggling right now with our place in the world where women have a lot of power, a lot of money, they don't need us quite as much and what that means to us. And then of course, our issues with, you know, not being as connected with our empathy, our feelings. And what really moved me too, is you talked about how we're, you know, we're always going for the gaming, you know, we're always every, we're trying to, you know, show our masculinity in so many different ways. If you want to talk to that a little bit more. Well, when you talk about the history, you could go back hundreds of years, and you'd see a lot of the same patterns that we have now. I really focused on the last, let's say, half a

century since the women's movement really took off and exploded in the culture. And what happened, as people know, but I'll just lay it out, is that women advocated for themselves. This wave of feminism was primarily about having access to the same opportunities that men have in the workplace. And over time, they've gotten them. It's not over by any means. I mean, women still make less. They still don't hold the same number of CEO positions. They're not as represented in politics and in positions of power. But I think it's undeniable that the progress that they've made has been extraordinary in the last 40 or 50 years. So what comes along with that is that women have been encroaching ever steadily on the domain that men used to think of as their own, which is like the workplace, the factory floor, the office. And really, they've been succeeding in those environments tremendously.

And a lot of men, I think, ended up and continue to feel threatened by that. They felt like this was their domain. And suddenly there were these other people that were moving into it. And the way they reacted could have gone in a couple different ways. And some guys have been welcoming and open to it and understand that the pie isn't necessarily one size. That is women enter the workplace, the pie actually increases, More opportunities end up emerging. Some guys, on the other hand, have retreated sort of further into what they would consider a kind of masculine territory. So you see more anger, you see more defiance, you see more kind of boastfulness and this sort of you know caricature of toughness and you see um a lot of displays of what people call toxic masculinity and um it's a conundrum it's a

conundrum that men face because to accept women where they are going means for a lot of guys redefining and reconfigurating their own manhood. To me, that's an opportunity to mean to me, that is ultimately a really good thing. But we're in the beginning stages of that transformation. And I think we need to sort of fully understand what it means. And I'm not saying I do fully understand it, but I think I have some idea. I, and I love how you unpack toxic masculinity and some of these different issues in the book, because everyone's trying to feel their way through it. And I think, and you talk about this in the book, one of the issues that we have as men is, you know, we've been kind of raised to be cut off from our feelings, cut off from, from empathy. And, and, you know, we, we kind of have this whole sort of, our feelings cut off from from empathy and and you know we we

kind of have this whole sort of we're raised as warriors you know one of the cyclical things you talk about in the book is how we're men raised to war they go to war that raise boys to go to war and we seem to have been perpetuating cycle we raise boys to be soldiers and we have soldiers so we can go to war and we have wars so you, you know, it's like it feeds on itself and has throughout history, but it doesn't work anymore. That cycle for a variety of reasons doesn't work. For one thing, like it sucks to kill people. You know, it sucks to go to war. Like, let's just start with the basic premise right there. The second thing is, because the world is so interconnected, sort of these big wars are becoming, in a way, obsolete, because we're so interconnected that to destroy somebody else is, in a very real sense, to destroy ourselves. The third thing is, technologically speaking, we don't need masses of soldiers anymore. The technology has changed that. You can say that's a good thing or a bad thing. But the simple fact is, like, we don't need millions of men sort of standing by to march off to war at any given moment. So if you don't have the need for these soldiers, why do we still have a mindset of raising boys to be soldiers? And if you break it down, if you break down traditional masculine archetypes, ultimately what you come up with is, oh yeah,

these are all the qualities, strength, fortitude, a lack of empathy, cut off from your feelings. Like all of those qualities, those are really good for soldiers in war. Those are really bad qualities for humans just in the workplace, for example, or trying to raise a family. That's a really brilliant point. That's very well said. And going through a lot of the different things that you experienced in your life, I mean, like a lot of my father came back to me where relationships with my father, my relationship with your parent, you talk about how you, you came to be, uh, with your father and your relationship with him and some of the things you thought about and, and, and watching, seeing you go through that in the book,

you know, brought back a lot of that to me. You grew up with two mothers, which gave you an extraordinary experience of balance that a lot of people don't have. I think that was something that I think that I think having those two different experiences gave you a lot more insight into, I don't know, the whole nature of growing up as a child, the expectations, the limitations of parents. And then and then in the book, you're talking about what you're going through as a parent, what you're seeing in your children and, and, and then your relationship with your wife and your hopes, your dreams, what you want for them, what goes through. It was very beautifully put together as you go through the whole book. And, and yeah, and you

don't come across as like, you're too too knowledgeable or like this is the way it is. It's a very, it gives you the thought process of going, you know, here's my advice. Here's what to do. Here's the topics as I go through them. And you're just left going, really thinking through these things, weighing them through not only your experience in the book, but coming out the other side. How did your son receive it? I'm curious. Oh, he hasn't read it. Are kidding me are you kidding me why would he read a book that i wrote oh you can tell i don't have children of my own clearly uh so i probably should know that

i think he's really gonna sit down and read like a book that i wrote to him with every ounce of love that i have oh sit down and read that? No, no. And this is why I had a vasectomy at 20. So there you go. One thing I liked about, there were some different concepts you wrote about the book. Bullets are world enders.

And I really love the saying at that. You talk about different emotional intelligence, personal anger and sarcasm, conflict internal, some of the different catharsis as you went through. What were some of the hardest things for you to talk about in the book to cover and speak to? You know, I've written about my dad before, but it's never easy because he died when I was young. He died when I was 12. And I write about that. And I guess it was the defining moment of my life. And I guess it continues to be 38 years now after the fact.

Yeah. Every death is a world ender, you know, and you're ending, you know, somebody's world literally ends, and then the people around them, like their, their worlds change, and shift. And in some cases, and, you know, certainly my childhood felt like it ended in that moment. And it's hard to write about him because there's so much unresolved that I have. I mean, so many unresolved feelings and, you know, he was a good guy. He was a really sweet, kind, gentle man, but I don't think he was a particularly good father, at least in the sense that he didn't really know how to talk to his children. He didn't know how to relate to his children. He certainly never hugged us or told us he loved us. And it wasn't like I doubted that he loved me. I didn't. But I remember feeling

really acutely that I needed to hear the words, that that was important to me. And not having that left me feeling a little stung, you know, particularly because he died when I started to feel like I could begin to talk to him and begin to kind of get to know him a little bit as a person instead of just as a dad, as a guy who seemed larger than life. But he was a product of his own upbringing and his own circumstances. He grew up in Queens in the 1950s and early sixties. And his dad was a cop and, you know, I don't think was particularly emotive. In fact, I know he wasn't, you know, his, his, his father would, when he got angry, would do what a lot of guys do, including myself,

which is descend into a kind of stony silence. And my aunt said it could last for weeks, you he, um, was a kind of shy and retiring and sensitive guy who was brought up not to be any of those things. And I think that was, that was, that was probably hard for him. Um, so writing about him him and understanding him better, you know, was maybe the hardest part emotionally. There was other stuff, you know, trying to explain things was really hard, just sort of from a writing point of view, but just, you know, having this conversation with my dad, a conversation that I never had in real life and a conversation I continue to have with him, you know, that, that, that was the hardest part, but also I think maybe the best part for me. The, uh, that's very moving, man. The, uh, I, I had a similar, I don't know if

I call them similar, but similar issues to my father. He was very emotionally detached narcissist. Uh, he really wasn't, uh, he really had a hard time just connecting with us and uh there was there was a lot of uh uh what would you how would you say there's a lot of abuse um emperor and one of the things you talk about the book too is is how sometimes as men we're hard on our kids or we use violence because we're trying to prepare our children for the world and how ugly and mean and violent the world is. And that really impacted me when you brought that up

and just the thing of it and how sometimes I've used that. You talk about in the book about how we measure each other up as guys. And sometimes we, we, we, we, we abuse each other because, you know, we're just trying to toughen each other up for all this stuff. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it was, it was, it was something that I didn't fully understand before I started writing this book. And, and maybe there's psychologists out there who will disagree with this assessment, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I was talking to somebody on Twitter. A Twitter, a follower reached out to me. I don't remember why she did, but maybe she'd seen me talk or something about this subject. And she talked about how her father, who'd been a football player and had two daughters and a son, was really

gentle with the daughters, but really physically and verbally abusive to the son. And she couldn't really reconcile that. And the dad, you know, what she ultimately came to is that she, he wanted the son to be something he wasn't. And that his going to sound crazy because it is crazy. It's a crazy mindset, but I think, I think there's something to it. He loved his son enough to hurt him because he felt like it would, it was better for him to hurt him than for the world to hurt him. I've heard a lot of fathers reflect that idea that if you think I'm tough on you, wait till you get out into the world. And it's a really corrosive way of thinking because your job, I think, as a dad, isn't to beat the shit out of your kid because the world's going to do it worse. Your job as a dad is to support and love your son so that when the world does beat the shit out of him, he knows that he's valued, that he's loved, that there's a place of safety and comfort for him to retreat to. But in a weird way, like I, I felt like I understood

the mentality for the first time talking to this woman. Um, and I think there's a lot of truth to it. I think there is too. I would agree with you. In fact, I've, I've read some stuff on psychology and I'm no professional, uh, uh, but, but they say, you know, the reason women are such coddlers of, you know, they're when, when you fall on skin, your knee, you know, you run to mom, mom's like, I'll make it better and give you a big hug. And that's like, suck it up. That's life. You know, life isn't fair. You know, dad is trying to prepare you for the thing, but sometimes the way dad executes it, you know, when I gave my father's eulogy um there was a line that i kept using that uh you know he did the best he could uh with what he had and and i

like yeah you talk about with your father and and and your the lineage of your parents um the same thing with mine you know he came from a tougher age and you, you kind of had to look that they, they did the best they could with what they had and they, they were trying and they, they loved us, even though they, maybe they weren't good at saying, Hey, I love you, man. But you know, they, they went through all that and stuff. And I think you do a really beautiful job in the book of explaining that. Hopefully your son will read it someday i don't know but

you're gonna we joke that we joke that uh it'll be one of the first books he read after he reads after i die like that'll he'll just crack it right open right after i'm dead and and run through it isn't it interesting how we go through this as men and you talk a little bit about the book how how about how we're not alone we're not these we're not these islands and and and we are we are the products of men the men that came before us and this is interesting how we go through these cathartic sort of things after we've lost our fathers uh and the roles and we question the men who who uh came before us and and we and we, and we, we're, we're kind of lost there at always trying to find out who we are, whether, whether we become maybe a better man than our fathers or not, or how we measured up in some ways. And interesting how that works out. I think it's inevitable. I think

it's a product of just time. I think women probably do the same thing. You know, you, you get to, I mean, it, for me, it started to happen once I had my own kids, you know, that's really when I started to feel connected to the generation before me. And, you know, you could sort of, I could part of a lineage for the first time. I didn't take any particular pride in it. It wasn't like, behold, you know, I am of this family. It was just that I started to feel connected to time in a deeper way than I ever had before. And certainly when you lose a parent, I've now lost my mom too. You, I start to, I started to feel like I was kind of carrying forward, not for them, but with them, you know, that, that I'm, I'm taking them with me. And I certainly feel that to this day, really strongly with my dad, like, as I am now 10 years older than he ever was, like part of me

feels like I'm taking him with me, you know, and, and I'm showing him and his father and all the rest of them like this, this world. And, you know, and hopefully I'm doing a good job of it, but it's, it's, it, it is a profound feeling to, to, to recognize that you're just, you know, a spec in all of this. But what you can do as a spec is not insignificant. You know, you raise another spec or a couple of specs and you're like, Hey, look what I made. And as you put in the title of your book, a better man, we just keep trying to improve and get better

and better but i i also like how because i've tried to do this with my nephew you talk about dating you talk about uh you know the new world where we we've got to be really careful when women say no and and how to how to you know navigate a lot of these different norms these social norms or new social norms that are coming about where men are questioning their manhood and questioning who they are. And I think you did a really good job. The one part you got me in the book, though,

is when it was close to the end when you go, and now here's the time when I tell you where we're getting divorced. And then you're just kidding. It's after like 20 years. That got me. You got me on that one. I was like, what the fuck did he

really do that and then you're like i just kid but uh that was very and and it's it's littered with all sorts of funny uh antidotes and and different things and great comedy through it's not it's not like a total tearjerker serious book i'm not totally serious mostly it's longer two months down yeah how has the book been received so far? What's some of the different feedback that you've gotten on it? Generally well. I mean, almost exclusively well. I mean, I've been very heartened by the reviews. I've been heartened by reader response. Some readers get upset with me because I do get,

I do talk about the current political situation a little bit. I don't get too deeply into it because it's not really the focus of the book, but it's kind of unavoidable. And I didn't want to pull punches about where I was. Because I do think that our current political situation relates really directly to what this book is about there. In fact, there's an article from I think I closed the tab, but a woman at NPR today talking about the hyper-masculinity of Donald Trump and what it means. And these issues feel abstract, but we see them play out in really concrete ways. The whole mask debate, I think, is a perfect example, these absurd ideas of masculinity. We see that it's in particular, it's men who are reluctant to wear the masks. And at its root, it's because they feel

like it makes them look weak. Or maybe another way to put it is it makes them look less strong. And it's, it's, it's as if they're placing their own image over their health and over the health of their loved ones. And it's sad, and it's scary that these, this, this guardedness that we have these defenses as men are so firmly entrenched that we can't let them down even to protect our health, even to keep us out of the hospital. I mean, it's ridiculous, but it's very real. What's that? Like a self-suicide where you're just like, I'll be a man if it kills me. And you're like, well, it just did. And I think you really put your finger in the pulse of it.

I know you don't want to get too political, but a lot of what stems out of these last four to five years are what we're going on with a lot of manhood issues. You know, manhood issues about jobs, about work, about their contribution to family family about the value we see in ourselves and that was one of the things i really enjoyed about the book as well was you you talk about how men value themselves and what we put into and you know the one great example is you talk about how we really go to games and we play games like i do but you know i'm modern warfare call of duty you know i really have an affinity to do that you know i'm modern warfare call of duty you know i really have an affinity to do that and sometimes i sit around and go what really drives me to do this like all the time like what am i what am i what the hell am i doing and i really should do something

else but you talk about some of that in fact i think you talked about a guy who's uh who's like a top scrabble player and i didn't even know until then there was like a Scrabble tournament sort of thing. Oh yeah. That's a big, that's a big thing. Yeah. And a lot of these guys are one of these gentlemen you speak of, you know, it doesn't have much of a life, uh, seems to not have much success relationship wise or business wise, but you know, he wins at Scrabble and it's, it's kind of interesting how, uh, you, you talk about how our minds play that game with us as men. And we lose out and we leave a lot of that out of our lives that don't complete us or fill us out. And it really makes you question, okay, well, we really need to, we really need to expand the concept of man, the idea of man and who we are as men. And that was one of the things I really enjoyed about the book,

because you leave a lot to what we have to think about. Well, we are raised in a hyper-competitive environment. Everything that we're trained to do as men from a young age is towards competition and success and winning, however you define it. So I think every guy understands that we need to find something in which we can win to just feel validated in the world. So you get this guy whose nickname, his name is Joel Sherman. His nickname is GI Joel. And the GI stands for gastrointestinal because he has stomach issues. And so it's a sort of tongue in cheek name, but he's one of the top Scrabble players in the world. But yeah, he, at the time that he won the championship and he may have won again since then, I don't know. He was living with his dad. He didn't have, I don't think any

gainful employment. He'd never, I don't think had any real romantic relationships in his life, but he's one of the best Scrabble players in the world. And he said that playing, winning the championship, I think the quote is validated my existence. Um, and that sucks. It sucks that it takes winning a game or being the best at something or the second best at something to validate your existence. I think every guy understands that impulse. I certainly do. I mean, I'm a poker player. And after a lot of thought, like, why do I do this? Why do I play this game? It's a friend of mine, her boyfriend was a professional poker player. And she asked him that question once. And he said, it's because poker players, and I think all games players, are trying to order the universe. Like you're trying to play God. You're trying to control something because so much of our lives feels out of control. So if you can just control this one thing, it will be like you validated your existence.

There's a lot to be said for competition. I love it. I love healthy competition. I love competing. I love working hard at stuff. And believe me, like I'm not trying to redefine masculinity in that way. But the word you used is the word that I use, which is I want to expand it. I want to expand the way we think of masculinity so that we still can be competitive, but we understand that that's a small slice of our lives, that this kind of rugged individualism that American men are raised to have has a lot of value, but there's also a lot of value in teamwork and partnership and sharing credit or giving credit. There's a lot of value in being part of a whole. And there's also a lot of value in pursuing something individually. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. We, we can have it all. But it, but it does mean, I think for guys opening up our minds about what it can be, what it can mean to be a man.

And, you know, a lot of people are talking today about how, you know, I don't want to raise a boy or a girl, you know, with, with blue or pink, you know, stuff. I don't want to give them GI Joe dolls or Barbie dolls, or, you know, there's some, some people are trying to kind of create a unisex if they will. I don't, I don't know where that any of that's going to go, but what's interesting, you talk about the book about how, uh, you know, sometimes these roles are really easy to adapt to. Uh, sometimes we just come in the world knowing what we do. Uh, and one of the other things that really moved me was you really nailed, uh, like with, and, and I've done this to my nephew and nieces and stuff, that whole loser thing. Well, you're a loser or you're a winner.

And we try and drive that into people. In fact, we see that in the, in the political world, um, or we call each other that. And there's this, uh, hazing that we do. I guess that's the word I'm looking for. This hazing that we do to qualify each other and do this hierarchy stack. And we're always trying to find out where we are in the hierarchy stack. In fact, you talk about in the book with like poker, you know, one of the factors is how much money you make. Like when I play games with my friends on Call of Duty, you know, it's where you are on the board at the end. And then it's the shit you get to smack talk, you get to do, or, or, you know, you get, you get because you're lower on the board and it's that, it's that sort of game that we play with each other. But I love how you talk about expanding that to, um, expanding the whole concept of man. Cause I think that's, I think you're right. I think that's what we really need to do. And, and then we need to

balance because you, you talk about with your experience, especially being raised by multiple types of parents at, at, at having the yin and yang, you know, the, the, the feminine side, the male side and having it be okay. Or I shouldn't call you a loser if you, if you like the color pink, you know, that sort of thing. And I think it's great how you expand on that in the book. It's funny. I don't even know if I included this in the book or not, but it used to be that pink was the color for boys and blue was the color for girls. And it was because pink was associated with it was kind of like a lighter shade of red. And red was the color soldiers wore in a lot of countries. And it was a kind of martial color, like, you know, the sort of soldier light. And blue was thought of as sort of more girly and more ethereal. And it started to change in the 30s. And when it really changed was at Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration, Mimi Eisenhower, the first lady wore a pink dress. And that kind of ended up changing the way we think of blue and pink. Like these ideas that feel so fixed in the culture are meaningless and kind of come and go.

You know, one standard of masculinity, even in like the 1700s, used to be the very kind of come and go, you know, one, one standard of, of masculinity, even in like the 1700s used to be the very kind of like live, thin, lean, you know, kind of philosopher, warrior. You think about like Lafayette or somebody like that. even even washington he was big he was tall but he wasn't like that physically imposing like those ideas shift over time and like the bigger guys the brawny guys were thought of as like kind of dumb brutes because they worked with their hands all day where you know the more masculine guys from the enlightenment fought with their brains, you know, and somebody like James Madison, who was tiny. I don't think people question his masculinity. You know what I mean? It, these ideas that we have that feel so fixed, aren't they change over time. Our roles in the culture change over time to a certain extent. There's no reason why our role in the

culture right now can't change. It needs to change. And it needs to change for pragmatic reasons. It's not only that we are doing shitty things, and we do do shitty things as guys, that's sort of unquestionable. It's that from a purely pragmatic point of view, if you just want to look at the economy, for example, the jobs that used to be associated with men, coal mining, factory work, whatever, meat processing, whatever it is, like so many of those jobs, those jobs that require brawn are going away. They're being replaced by automation or they're being shipped overseas. Manufacturing still exists in this country, but it's being performed by fewer and fewer people because robots are doing most of it. The jobs that are being created are jobs in healthcare or in the creative

fields, or they're jobs that require teams. They're jobs that require listening and cooperating. And these are all kind of traditionally feminine traits. Like guys have to get their head around this, like to compete in the workplace, to just fulfill your traditional duty as a guy to like put food on the table, like you have to adapt, or those jobs just aren't going to be there just so if for no other reason, if like, if you're not even interested in like being happier, but you want to put food on the table, like you have to figure out how to adapt to the new reality. And that is the new reality. It's why we see women thriving in this workplace. You know, women aren't chopping down trees any faster than men, but they are collaborating better

and sharing credit better and listening to their colleagues better, delegating well, like women kind of are raised with these skills already. Men have to learn these skills. And that's part of what this book is about. And one of the challenges we have in our society is we think about things from a level of scarcity. Well, if I give my job to someone else or someone in another country, then I don't have a job, which isn't true. Same thing with like what you talk about in the book where women work more, we have to accept that. And then we have to figure out a way to expand ourselves and give balance. But that doesn't mean that something is taken away from us. And I think that's the

hardest thing men don't understand. Well, if a woman works, then what do I do? And you talk a lot about that in the book. What was your favorite story or favorite part of the book that you enjoyed the most? That's a great question. I'm trying to think what I enjoyed about writing. I mean, writing is so painful. Like what is there to enjoy about it? Well, it was, it was, it mostly painful or was it mostly enjoyable? The act of writing itself, the act of like putting words together on a page that make it comprehensible. That's really hard for me. I think maybe the most enjoyable part was just the end and speaking really directly to my son about how much I value him, how much I love him. That came easily to me, you know,

cause that's just really speaking from the heart in a really direct way. I liked, I liked that those words are on a page for him and that they're not going to go anywhere. And that if he's, if he's ever down, when things been, when bad things happen to him, you know, he'll be able to flip to the back of that book and know, you know, there's, there's somebody who loves him very much and, you know, more than one person, but I'm the only one who wrote a book to him. You went on the dad hierarchy scale.

Way to go, dude. You got us beat there, man. No, I was going to say it's really beautiful what you put down in the book because like we talked about, you and I didn't have great conversations with our fathers, even at these late stages with my father when he was starting to have strokes. You could see the way things were going. Things were, things were really, you know, his dementia was kicking in.

And I tried to sit down with them and, and get clean with them. I called it and I tried to go through everything we'd been through or every, every resentment maybe I had, or maybe that he had. And we, I went to these cleaning sessions with him to try and make sure that when he went, there wasn't anything more that I needed to say. And I actually advised my siblings to do the same. Their take on it was very much different. in such a way where you can heal that wound that we have with our fathers, where you have something that can be a tome that he can even pass down to his children. And of course, you've given it the

beauty of the world where I'm sharing it with my friends. Hopefully they're going to share it with their kids and stuff like that. But you've given him a tome where here's the conversation that I never had with my father, wasn't able to have with my father, maybe the things that I missed having with my father that are important to you and I can pass it down to you. Is that a good analogy? And I also think your image of a cleaning session is good. I mean, I feel like I maybe had that with my dad in writing this book. I was lucky that I was able to do that with my mom. I wrote a book a few years ago. My mom was sick and, and I interviewed her extensively for the book. And it was great. It was great to have those conversations with her and to hear her story

and to hear where she was coming from and to understand her as an adult, you know, adult to adult. And yeah, that's that, as you said, there's just aren't, that's not a conversation I was able to have with my dad, but I feel like maybe with this book I did. And I do feel a little more settled in that relationship since having written this book. Isn't that beautiful? The catharsis of how that works. You're writing to one person, but you're, you're resolving your own issues and, and, and going through it and working through it and everything else. It's like writing it. I knew, you know,

it dawned on me as I was writing this book that I wasn't just writing it to my son. I was also writing it to my dad. It took me a little bit to understand that, but it to my son. I was also writing it to my dad. Um, it took me a little bit to understand that, but it's absolutely true. What an incredible journey, man. Anything more we want to talk about your book? We probably go through this forever, but, uh, uh, we want people to go buy the book. So I don't want to give them too many secrets away. Yeah. Um, no, I, I hope people give it a look and enjoy it. I think people will too. It's a beautiful book. It's a moving book.

Like I say, it made me cry in a few different places. Part of it was just going through your catharsis and then thinking about my relationship with my father. I don't have kids, and I have a lot of friends that are fathers, and I kind of go through their experiences with them and what they share, but reading about you raising children and going through your children, your thoughts about bringing your home, your family home on the first day and stuff was really moving. It was really beautiful. And it gave me an insight, especially getting married and stuff for things. I just want to commend you. You did a really beautiful job of that.

And for someone who's never been through that experience, I sat and thought people that have been through the experience are going to be in touched and moved even more. And I really think you put together, it may not be the consummate handbook of like, this is how you do it, but it definitely opens our mind to how to expand our manhood and how to span masculine and everything else. So I just want to commend you and thank you for that because it's a beautiful tool and I'm going to share it with everybody I know. Well, thank you, Chris. That really means a lot to me. And, uh, it's especially gratifying to hear from somebody who doesn't have kids, um, that it could, it could speak to you too. So

that, that means a lot to me and I appreciate it. It almost made me want some, but then my friend is, uh, just had a baby. So, and I really like my sleep but but i props to everybody who went down that road there you go believe me there were many moments where i was like why did i do this why did i do this this was a mistake i have two huskies i do that with the huskies plenty i'm like uh so there you go uh michael give us your plugs or people want to uh you want them to look you up on the interwebs, check out your stuff. Only on Twitter at Michael Ian Black. I'm also on Instagram though.

I post there less frequently, but usually sillier at Michael Ian Black. So, you know, it's jokes on both, but probably more jokes on Instagram. There you go. Check him out. You can go to Amazon or other different places. A Better Man, A Mostly Serious Letter to My Son, Michael Ian Black. I highly recommend this book. I really, really, this is one of the most moving books I've read, and I read books on every day.

We have, you know, one to two different authors on. Really check this book out. Share it with you, especially if you've got young kids, teenagers, people that are going around the world, people that are struggling with, you know, these social changes, and even some of our older selves. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Forge Us, Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. See the video version of this as well.

Go to Goodreads.com, Forge Us, Chris Voss. You can see all the books that I'm reading there and our reviews and all that good stuff. And also go to Facebook.com, For the chrisfossshow.com. Thanks, Miles, for tuning in. Make sure you vote if you haven't as yet. Wear your mask. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.