The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, they are less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere twenty years ago. As for young men, it turns out the film Failure to Launch is not far from the truth. Fully one-third of men ages 22-34 are still living at home with their parents-about a 100 percent increase in the past twenty years. Boys nationwide are increasingly dropping out of school; fewer are going to college; and for the first time in American history, women are outnumbering men at undergraduate institutions three to two. Parents, teachers, and mental health professionals are worried about boys. But until now, no one has come up with good reasons for their decline-and, more important, with workable solutions to reverse this troubling trend. Now, family physician and research psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on his vast clinical experience to propose an entirely original view of why boys and young men are failing in school and at home. He argues that a combination of social, cultural, and biological factors is creating an environment that is literally toxic to boys, ranging from environmental estrogens to the over-prescription of ADHD drugs. And he presents practical solutions-from new ways of controlling boys' use of video games, to innovative (and workable) education reforms.

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Today, we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's the author of a multitude of books and a brilliant psychologist, I believe. I'm jumping ahead of myself, but he's a MD and a PhD. So I'll get into that here in a second on his bio. But so one of the books we wanted to bring him on to talk about was a book called Boys Adrift, The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. It came out on August 14th of 2007, and I come across this book reading another book called Men on Strike, I believe. It talked about some of the different issues of what's going on with men right now. I was reading a Bloomberg article yesterday about how 5 million men have disappeared from the workforce,

which is kind of alarming considering we had the baby boomers also leave the workforce, and now we're dealing with inflation, job strife, and everything else. It's really starting to affect our economy, and we're seeing the real ramifications on top of many other things, I'm sure, we will be enlightened by today he is a dr leonard sacks uh is attended public schools in shacker heights ohio from kindergarten through grade 12 he enrolled in the massachusetts institute of technology in cambridge massachusetts in the fall of 1977 he He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from MIT in January of 1980 and at the age of 19. Wow, holy crap. He then went on the University of Pennsylvania where he earned both a PhD in psychology and an MD. He did a three-year residency in family medicine in Lancaster,

Pennsylvania, and Dr. Sachs has been continuously certified by the American Board of Family Medicine since 1989. Welcome to the show, Dr. Sachs. How are you? Real good. How are you? Oh, I'm hanging in there. Evidently, it's a Wednesday, Monday where I can't read people's bios, but you certainly have more schooling than I do.

I just went to public school, so there was that. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs, please, sir. So you can find me on my website, leonardsax.com. And I also want to plug my book, Boys Adrift. You mentioned the first edition, but that's pretty ancient now. The second edition came out much more recently. A lot of things have changed in the last 15 years. But the five factors that I described have gotten worse. When I wrote the

book back as it was, as you said, it was published in 2007, the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed it, gave it a good review, but they said, you know, the evidence is not really persuasive that boys are really falling behind. Well, that was 15 years ago. The evidence a lot more persuasive now. Yeah. that was one of the reasons I used that date to 2007. What really struck me, and like I said, I was led to your book through the book called, let me find it here, Men on Strike. And I believe she'd referenced some of your work in the book. And yes, it was Men on Strike by, let me get my, Helen Smith, who is also a PhD, Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American dream and why it matters.

Her book, I believe, is almost 10, 15, 20 years old. Another book she cited was The War Against Boys, How Misguided Policies Are Harming Young Men. Christina Hoff Summers as well. And so thanks for coming on. I reached out to you and what was going on. You know, one of the things I've had is I've been single all my life. I was one of the first people to go on strike against marriage 35 years ago. I got a vasectomy at 22, and I said, basically, I'm controlling.

You know, I realize one of the biggest things that men have is they have a hard time controlling their seed, and sometimes they get stuck in things that will change the course of their lives that maybe they don't want to be stuck in. And so I opted for control. But since then, our review channel, The Chris Voss Show, does a lot of gaming review, a lot of gaming stuff. We've got to pack the big gaming shows and stuff like that. And so we developed huge groups of young men who are gaming. And we have huge discords with them, thousands of them. We've had different stuff with them.

I spent probably tens of thousands of hours with a lot of young people, kids, doing raids and doing gaming and stuff. And seeing their disinterest in women, seeing the incel groups, seeing some of the anger that they've had, and even having some of my relatives that are now 22, 23-year-old virgins that have zero interest in women whatsoever, have zero interest in marriage, has perplexed me. And so books like yours and Men on the Strike and different things really kind of made me wonder, because I was really enamored with girls as I was young. So I'm going to stand aside and after laying that foundation, give us an overview of what the book is about, if you would, please. Well, I want to respond to the comment you just made.

Sure, please. You just laid out some pretty remarkable things, that you're encountering a lot of young men who are not that interested in women. And I think that's true, and I think that's really important. And it's a major focus of both editions of Boys Adrift, the old one and the new one, because the testosterone levels of American men have dropped by half over the last 50 years. The sperm counts of American men have dropped by more than half over the last 50 years. The testosterone level of a 20-year-old man today is roughly what it would have been for a 55-year-old man 60 years ago. Wow. So you now have many young men.

And in addition to that, you've got this whole toxic culture going on. I have visited over 460 schools over the last 21 years, and I've listed those schools on my website with all my visits if you want to look them up. And I've heard from so many high school boys all across this country who've told me how their high school health teacher encouraged them to masturbate because they said, you know, hey, it's the Me Too era. He said, she said, you're going to lose. You're going to lose every time.

If a woman says that you touched her in a way that she didn't want you to and you say you didn't, you're going to lose. You're going to lose every time. If a woman says that you touched her in a way that she didn't want you to, and you say you didn't, you're going to lose. You are guilty until proven innocent. And if there was no one else there, you're sunk. And that can change your life. These are high school health teachers telling boys, just stay home and masturbate. Forget the dating thing. It's too dangerous.

So we've got dropping testosterone levels. So the drive is diminished. And we've got a whole culture that's actively telling boys, if you go on a date with a girl, you're putting your whole career at risk. If she says something, if she says you did something, you are sunk. Even if you didn't do it, it doesn't matter. You are guilty until proven innocent. So, yeah, we got more and more boys. So let me tell you a story I was thinking about as I was preparing for this interview. Again, I'm a family doctor. So mom confronts her son.

She says, what's the story? You wake up late every morning. You roll out of bed. You work a few hours a week at the coffee shop. You're 28 years old. You don't have a life. You don't even have a girlfriend. And he laughed and said, well, I used to have a girlfriend. Then she found out I only work a few hours a week at Starbucks. She dumped me. And mom was like, well, duh, how many young women want to be with a man who's got no ambition beyond earning money for his video games at Starbucks. So she insisted he come see me.

He was fine with that. So I asked him about his girlfriend. He said she was fat. She wanted me to take her places, do stuff. He said $19.95 a month. I said, wait, what's $19.95 a month? I don't follow. What's $19.95 a month?

He mentioned a porn site, a pornography site. And he said, and the girls are way prettier. I said, wait, those aren't girls. Those are pictures. They're pixels on a computer screen. Wouldn't you rather be intimate with an actual woman rather than masturbating over pornography? And he said, no. And that's a big change.

You know, 40 years ago, pornography existed, or so I've been told. But 40 years ago, young men did not boast about their collection of pornography. 40 years ago, pornography was seen as something losers did. Real men were having sex with actual women. And if you couldn't get any action, then you were masturbating or pornography. That era is gone. We now find it is normative. And what I mean by normative is that here, I'll tell you exactly what I mean by normative. So I was speaking at a high school, a boys high school where the leadership had asked me to talk to the boys about pornography because the leadership found that in Carline, when you be picked up all these boys looking at their, at porn on their phones and passing it around and,

and no sense of shame. This is great. Wonderful. What's the problem? So leadership wanted me to talk to boys about pornography. So grades nine through 12, about 300 boys in the auditorium. And I said, raise your hand if you have at least 1,000 porn photos, videos on your device. Almost all the hands go up. Raise your hand if you do not have any porn on any device. In this group of 300 kids, three hands go up. And I say, okay, you guys who just raised your hand to say you have no porn on your, would you be willing to share with your colleagues why you don't have any porn on your phone?

And one boy raises his hand and he says, I'm a born and grown Christian, Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. I don't think he'd want me to do that. And then the other two boys sitting together, they say, well, we're Mormons. We're not allowed. Okay, those three boys have an excuse. I don't even believe'd want me to do that. And then the other two boys sitting together, they say, well, we're Mormons. We're not allowed. Okay, those three boys have an excuse.

I don't even believe the other 300 boys. I don't believe that every one of those boys has 1,000 porn photos or videos on their device. But it's normative. What that means is if you don't have a good excuse, you're going to raise your hand, even if it's not true. It is now the normal thing for American boys at 15 years of age to have, or at least to say they have, thousands of porn photos and videos on their device. So why are you finding more and more young men who are not interested in engaging actual young women? Reason number one, testosterone levels have dropped. Reason number two, they've been indoctrinated in a high school curriculum that you are guilty until proven innocent.

So don't go out with a young woman because it could end your, you could end up in jail. And number three, as this young man said to me face to face, he said, the girls are way prettier. They prefer pornography. There's a lot to unpack there. You know, the proliferation of pornography, I've heard people talk about that a lot. The one thing I've found with these young boys is they're really savvy. Like, they're more savvy about women and dating and marriage. And they look at the whole picture of a life course, which I did when I was young and made my choice.

I mean, I was engaged twice. I tried. I tried to fit the social pattern even after my vasectomy. I just wanted control. I wanted to fall in love with the woman that I wanted to marry. And I'm like, this is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. And then I'll have the vasectomy reversed and I'll have kids. That was the life plan.

And I was engaged twice. I tried to make it work. And there were a lot of factors that went into why that didn't work. And part of it was because I'd been such an alpha male most of my life. And I'm not a person who is cowed very easily. I don't beta ties very well. I've had women tell me, you're the sort of guy who's not going to put up with my shit. I've heard that way too many times. It is. It is an incredible challenge. But what's interesting to me is these boys are savvy as F. They're on Instagram.

They know the grift. They know the angles. They really are disillusioned by, and I think they realize they're living in a gynocentric society. Like you say, they've seen the Me Too. They've heard the stories. In college, they're getting, you know, we've had the Me Too. They've heard the stories. In college, they're getting, you know, we've had many people on the show, not many, quite a few people on the show who've talked about what's going on in college and what's become almost illiberal liberalism.

You know, I'm a moderate Democrat. I'm not kicking it over from some other side. But they're kind of seeing the rise of this. What starts out of this? Why is the whole thing going on? Or do you want to touch maybe on the, I think there was five key things in your book. Where does this start? Was there a beginning? You know, you mentioned Christina Hoff Summers and her book, The War Against Boys. And I've shared a podium with her on several occasions.

And she's great fun to talk to about this. She believes that the growing gender gap that we see in school and in the workplace with boys, young men falling farther and farther behind their sisters, young men now earning less than their sisters in the workplace. When you look at young Americans under 35 years of age with no children at home, you now find that the average young men now earns 20% less than the average young woman, which is astonishing. Christina House Summers claims that this is the result of a liberal conspiracy against boys. With all due respect, I know she's wrong.

The growing gender gap is not the result of a liberal conspiracy. They're not well organized enough to pull that off. The growing gender gap is a result of a bunch of different things, a perfect storm, if you like, that is having the unintended consequence of disengaging boys. So just for one example, I was visiting an elementary school, and the principal and I had worked out in advance via email that I would meet with the principal first thing in the morning in her office, and then I'd visit some classrooms, speak to the teachers, and then in the evening, speak to the parents. So I'm in her office. It's first period of the day waiting to see the principal. And a few minutes pass and a boy comes in, another boy comes in, another boy comes in.

Within a few minutes, there's nine boys in the principal's office who've all been sent down because they got in trouble. And I'm pretty good at breaking the ice with six-year-olds. So I ask them, what are you guys doing here? Oh, we got in trouble. What did you get in trouble for? The teacher said, draw a picture of anything you want. And I drew a picture of a gun. I got sent down here.

Or Tyrone and me were pointing fingers at each other saying, bang, bang, you're dead. And I got sent down here. Or Tyrone and me were pointing fingers at each other saying, bang, bang, you're dead. Columbine and Virginia Tech. We don't want to endorse. We don't want to condone violence. So we're going to have a zero tolerance policy. No pointing fingers saying bang, bang, you're dead. Boy, choose his Pop-Tart into the shape of a pistol. And at six years of age, he gets suspended for three days because he chooses Pop-Tart into the shape of a pistol. And the principal in that case said, I have no discretion.

I have no discretion. This is a district policy. I have to act. I don't have any choice in the matter. So reasonable people making reasonable choices have created a system that is unintentionally toxic for boys. And we now have seven-year-old boys who say school's stupid. I'd rather go home and play video games. Do you – I'm a theorist. And, you know, for me, it's always science. So it's constantly evolving. This is why I like having people – having you on.

So anything I'm going to present to you, you know, is like stuff that I hear or compile. And I'm trying to validate this data or,ate it, I guess. There are some people that believe that there is a feminist agenda that started with birth control, the release of birth control. And if you look at marriage, we just posted marriage rates the other day that have fallen from 82%. You can see the drop off, especially in 1972, once SCOTUS, I think, made it available to everybody. You can see that there's a lot of argument in the space that there is an attack to treat men and boys like dysfunctional women in an emotional, gynocentric world, where boys try all sorts of different ways to chemically change them. Like what you said with the gun.

Boys run around and do guns. I mean, I did that as a kid. I, you know, we, you know, bing bang, you know, we saw John Wayne. Is that, is there a thing to that in a schooling system that's largely women that is trying to, do you think is, is, is leaning towards that slant or is that dating? I think the assessment is incorrect. It's certainly true that

in elementary schools, the great majority of teachers are women, which incidentally wasn't true 50 years ago. There's been an exodus of men out of early elementary education. It is now common when I visit an elementary school to find that the only man on campus is the custodian. Everyone, everyone, every teacher, every administrator is female that's not unusual or if there is a man there's one or two men out of on a faculty of 30 no i don't i don't actually i don't agree at all with what you just said because when i leave these workshops for schools the teachers are on fire they want to learn how to engage and motivate their boys they don't want to see their boys do poorly they want to see their boys do poorly.

They want to see their boys do well. And they're very interested to hear these zero-cost strategies I share that can greatly boost the achievement and motivation of boys. So, again, that's another reason why I push back against Christina Hoff's numbers. because in my firsthand experience visiting over 460 schools, the great majority, the great majority of teachers that I have worked with, whether they're in North Dakota, Texas, California, New York, Indiana, Iowa, and I've led many workshops in each of those states, actually more in North Dakota than in all the other states I just mentioned. I can't even recall encountering a teacher who didn't want her boys to succeed. They were all engaged. They all wanted to see their boys succeed. But they are the product of schools of education, in many cases, which have pathologized being a boy,

which have made being a boy a cause for discipline referral. So they're open to doing it differently. Most of these factors are not the result of people intentionally setting out to harm boys. It's unintended, but it's devastating nonetheless. Yeah. I mean, you know, the medication, putting kids on ADD medication, different things like that, you know, where, you know, boys are boys are boys. You know, I've even in sampling this and talking about this on Facebook and talking this about friends, I've seen a lot of women that have a, an attitude where they've told me, they've told me they're sabotaging their sons and they're giving their daughters priority. They, they tell their daughters, you can do anything you want. You can go succeed. And they're giving favor to their

daughters. My mom did the same thing with us actually. And, and, and, and, and in essence telling the boys just to be, go good, go be good servants to the women. And I've had mothers tell me that, that that is their agenda that they're putting forth with their children. I, I have personally, I've been quite shocked with it and horrified. And, and part of it it comes it seems to come from that sort of that that agendas thing of women are gonna rule the world you know I see this all the lot all the time on my social media feeds you know kill all men destroy man I do talk about the world of girls rule boys drool girls go to get to college to get more knowledge boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. But a better example of what you

mentioned, medications for ADHD. So a boy's not doing well in school. He was doing well in school, but his performance has really dropped off. Mom is concerned about her son. She wants her son to do well. And so she takes him to a board-certified child psychiatrist who says, well, let's try Adderall. Let's try Vyvanse and see if it helps. And so Monday morning, he takes his Adderall. And Monday afternoon, the teacher calls mom and says, wow, what a difference. This medication is so helpful. I can't believe how smart your son is.

He's so clever, so insightful. The boy, the teacher, the parent, and the prescribing physician all figure, hey, this medication was prescribed for ADHD, and it helped, and it was great. Well, a few weeks later, he's jittery. He's got insomnia. He's got a tremor. He's got no appetite. He's losing weight. Mom saw my article in the New York Times, critical of these medications, so she brings him in to see me.

And I ask him him do you have video game console in your bedroom of course yeah were you playing last night yeah what are you playing uh call of duty grand theft auto rdr2 oh great what time did you get to bed like 1 30 2 something like that and when did you try to get up 6 a.m okay he got five hours of sleep or maybe less the teenage boy needs at least eight and a half nine hours of sleep he's getting five hours of sleep or maybe less. A teenage boy needs at least eight and a half, nine hours of sleep. He's getting five hours of sleep. He is sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD of the inattentive variety. There is no Connor scale. There is no Vanderbilt questionnaire that can distinguish whether a kid is not paying attention because they're sleep deprived versus

not paying attention because they truly have ADHD. What's Adderall? What's Vyvanse? They're amphetamines. They're speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. Yeah, tremendously helpful, but the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not schedule two amphetamines. Now, everybody involved in this story, mom, teacher, doctor, wants what's best for the boy. But they messed up. They didn't do a careful sleep history. I asked mom, is your son getting plenty of sleep? And she said, yeah, he's in his bedroom no later than 9 at night.

We wake him up at 6 in the morning. That's 9 hours. She has no idea what's going on inside the bedroom. And so I advise parents, there should be no video game console in the bedroom. The bedroom is for sleeping, not for playing video games. And I can tell you, when you say that to an American parent, a lot of them will say, oh my gosh, I couldn't take his video game console away from him. He'd totally freak out. I wrote a book called The Collapse of Parenting, which was a New York Times bestseller, the collapse of parenting, because you now have parents who are incompetent,

parents who don't understand, hey, this is not a choice you can put in the lap of your 14-year-old boy. What's your 14-year-old boy supposed to say when his friend says, hey, why weren't you online last night at midnight when we all did the ambush? Is a 14-year-old boy supposed to say, well, scholars have found that sleep deprivation and adolescence is a major risk factor for behaviors that mimic attention deficit disorder. That's ridiculous. You can't expect a 14-year-old boy to say that.

You've got to allow him to say, hey, my evil parents took my video game console out of the room and locked it up. You, the parent, have to be the evil parent. You, the parent, have to understand your son's immersed in a toxic society where you get more rewards for finishing all the mission in rdr2 than you do for being a good student it's true it's your job as the parent to lock up the video game console so that your son can get a good night's sleep american parents don't get that and that is a major factor

video games are a major factor driving this growing epidemic of boys doing less well than their sisters. Because if a boy gets an A instead of a B in his Spanish, you probably didn't even want his friends to know that. That's totally uncool. All the incentives are for him to finish, be the first one to finish the missions in the new version, the latest edition of Call of Duty. And if you do that, you're the first one to finish the missions. You can advise, the latest edition of Call of Duty. And if you do that, you're the first one to finish the missions. You can advise the other kids how to do it. You greatly elevate your status in the eyes of the other kids. So parents need to be in front of that and understand what are the limits? What do the data show? We've got a lot of research now on high school boys playing video games. How much time spent playing video games is too much time. Which video games are okay and which are not? And how do we know? Again, the new edition of Boys Adrift has all

that information. And I hope interested parents will take a look. Let me ask you this because I had an epiphany with what you're saying. You know, when I, part of it is community. I mean, that's what I like about video games is community. And, you know, I mean, even as grown men, most of my, my good close friends on, on gaming are grown men and, you know, I mean, even as grown men, most of my, my good close friends on, on gaming are grown men. And, you know, we've lost the men's spaces that we used to have. You know, we used to go to a bar and hang out and have drinks and, and shoot the shit. Now, you know, we, you know, everything's virtual, especially with coronavirus. Maybe these young men are searching for community. When I was young, we had stuff like, you know, we did basketball,

we did racquetball, we had so many sports that we were involved in. We didn't have video games. I mean, they were starting to come out at the time, but I mean, that was our community, if you will. And men need tribalism and community. You know, we need a tribe. My advice is to reclaim those men's spaces. Skeet shooting. I love to talk about skeet shooting. Your son says he wants to be combat infantry, and that's why he's doing Call of Duty. Take him skeet shooting. Even if you don't know how, you can learn as well. Every town, any town of any significance in the United States has a skeet shooting club.

Join it, and you'll be hanging out with other men, all different age groups, and you learn a real skill with real rifles. I mean, obviously, it's shooting a clay pigeon. But still, it's in the real world. You're engaging with real people. Reclaim those communities. Find those communities. That's actually the fifth factor, which is called the revenge of the forsaken gods.

There's been a collapse in the construction of masculinity. And we've lost those communities. And I don't know that we can change that as a nation, but you can change that in your own family. You can change that for your own son. I tell parents you can take him to ski shooting. You can go hiking together. You can go hunting together. You can go hiking together. You can go hunting together. You can go fishing together.

There's, there are many opportunities for you to build that community with your son and other men to become a boy, a boy, to become a man, to become a man, a boy must see a man. And again, a generation ago, boys wanted to be men. We're finding nowadays more and more men want to be boys. And instead of taking their son out into the woods, into the state game lands, they're staying home playing Call of Duty with their son. I don't think that's wise. I think men need to teach their sons how to be men. Let me ask you this, And I totally agree with you because I talk about this a lot when we talk about the subject online. I, you know, my father, my, my grandfather was an alpha man. He was a, he was a welder for the union Pacific, tough as fucking nails, but still the

one of the most wonderful human being. He could be soft with you. He could be hard with you. He built his house. Like they built the first two houses they lived in. Like they just like, oh, we'll just build the damn house. Right. right you know this guy was tough as we found out when he died he'd had he'd been having heart attacks for like 10 years he never told anyone like he just drive himself to the bloody doctor don't tell the wife you know like he was just that sort of dude you know you know he cuts off an arm and it's a flesh wound. And he used to make a point of it. And so did my father, God bless him. And they would take us fishing and they would teach us all this stuff, camping. But it was, it wasn't

about, you know, learning to fish. It was about being around men and how to be a man and how to be a good person. And he would teach us, yeah. And he would teach us how to do that. And let me, let me suggest this to you. Maybe could it, could it maybe be that men just aren't those alphas anymore? Like I, I seem to be the last of, of, of alpha influence men. And even then I've, I've gone up and down and kind of realized my alpha in my later years. But maybe men are softer and weaker. I don't know if maybe that's because of, you know, testosterone. Well, with all due respect, I don't think your grandfather would be the best role model because he didn't go to the doctor when he had chest pain.

And I'm a medical doctor. If you're having chest pain, you need to have the humility to say, you know what? I think I need to get some help. Well, he would go to the doctor, but he wouldn't tell his wife or anyone. No one knew until he died that he was going to the doctor privately. So he wouldn't go to the doctor. But I'm not holding up the culture of 50 years ago as a role model. That culture was much more racist and sexist than our own culture is.

And we don't want to go back to that. We've got to find a new way for boys to flourish without putting down girls or women. Incidentally, girls are not the winners here. Girls today are more than 400% more likely to be anxious or depressed compared to girls from the same demographic just 12 years ago. So yeah, the girls are blowing the boys away at school, but they're way more likely to be anxious or depressed than their brothers are. Again, a family from my own practice, mom and dad are pulling their hair out about their son. He's a very bright boy, but he couldn't care less about school. He's flunking out of Spanish. He's getting B's and C's in his other classes, spends his free time playing video games and looking at porn,

but he's flunking out of school. Parents are very concerned about him. They're very proud of their daughter who's younger. She's acing all her classes, captain of the soccer team. But when I talked to this girl, I learned that she's secretly cutting herself with razor blades on her upper inner thigh. She can't sleep at night. She ate one piece of pizza and she's remorseful because she ate one piece of pizza. Her brother eats a whole pizza and he's got no remorse

at all. He's very happy in his bedroom with his pornography and his video games. She's utterly miserable and anxious. Both these kids are having problems. Girls are not the winners here. Yeah, and girls, girls i mean they're getting a lot of that from social media and instagram it's shown that it's really awful for them in their self-esteems and a lot of a lot of the boys have figured out instagram and the

dating and the thirst traps and and all that sort of they see it all going on and they're they're pretty savvy on the on you know what's being played before them, the only fans and everything else. The one thing I always hear is girls, they just want guys with money. They just want guys who are successful. They really don't love us. They figured out that women live differently than men. They're really savvy on a lot of this stuff. As you mentioned, women are the losers too.

From what I see in forwarding through the future, we have more women now going to college than ever before. Women are hypergamous. They always date up. So socially, economically, they're looking for mates that are above them on the social ladder. That's just how we build our great society. So these young women, if there's more of them going to college, they're going to be looking for college mates, college graduate mates.

They're not going to be finding them. So in Europe, they have more women now over 30 who are childless and not married, which means they're very likely going to stay that way than there are that are not. Well, and I've written about that. The term that the researchers use is educational assortative mating. And what that means is that if a woman has earned a four-year degree, she's looking for a man who's earned at least a four-year degree. She doesn't want to marry a man who hasn't earned a four-year degree. And the Wall Street Journal had this big article a few months ago on how at colleges nationwide, women now outnumber men three to two. So there are not enough good men to go around. And that's a major factor.

You talked earlier about the rapid decline in the rate of marriage. That's a major factor driving this rapid decline in the rate of marriage is that you have 30-year-old women who want to get married, but there aren't any good men left because if college-educated women 30-year-old women who want to get married, but there aren't any good men left because

if college-educated women outnumber college-educated men by three to two, you're playing a game of musical chairs and you're going to have a lot of women left standing. And this is true across the board. This is not just true of college-educated women. So again, back to my own practice, I'm a family doctor, a woman I've known since she was a little girl. This story takes place. She's a young woman with two kids. And I said, Linda, I bumped into Brett the other day, and he just goes on and on about how great you are and how beautiful you are and how much fun you are. And how he's asked you to marry him twice. And both times you turned him down.

I said, Linda, why don't you want to marry the father of your two kids? And she said, Dr. Sachs, I already got two babies at home. I don't need a third. Now, she'd never been to college. At every level, a woman is looking for a man who is at least as accomplished, as motivated, as hardworking as she is. And there are not enough good men to go around. Yeah. We see this on social media.

I see this all the time. We're starting to call it the where's the good men generation. Now, part of it is because a lot of women have somehow gotten this narrative, and I believe it's from the feminist movement, that if you act like men, if you perform like men, if you go out and do what men do, we go get careers, we go get jobs, we go get assets, that men will still be attracted to you. I see this all the time on social media where women say, I don't understand what's going on. I can't find a man. I've got two kids from Chad and Tyrone at the foam cannon party in Ibiza, and I've got a house, I've got this career, I've got cars. I can't get a man to love me.

And of course, number one, half the problem is, you know, men don't want to cuckold someone else's seed. They want to, they want to, they want to do their own seed. And a lot of these young boys have figured that out too. They're like, yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to step parent somebody else's thing. That doesn't appeal to us. That woman is not going to consider a man who has only a high school diploma and is bagging groceries or pushing the carts at the grocery store. When she says she can't find a man, what she means is I can't find a man who's as accomplished and motivated as I am.

And, hey, that's not going to change. That's really, I believe, hardwired into human nature, that women are looking for men who are as accomplished and motivated as they are. The question we need to answer is why can't the boys keep up? Look, 50 years ago, I attended public schools K-12 in Shaker Heights, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. And I remember our high school honors assembly very clearly, the kids on the stage who were getting the award for English, the award for poetry, they were all boys. There were very few girls. And scholars in that era, 50 years ago, were writing about, wow, you know, this is terrible.

Girls are being left behind. Girls are being shortchanged. And they had all kinds of data to support this. You know, 50 years ago, girls at college, but boys greatly outnumbered women among those graduating with highest honors by three to one. Today, girls outnumber women, girls, women outnumber men at college 60, 40, but women greatly outnumber men among those graduating with highest honors by three to one, 75,25. Fifty years ago, young women were more likely than men were to drop out of college, very often because they were getting married and starting a family, staying home to raise baby.

Today, young men in the United States is more than twice as likely as their sisters to drop out of college without earning any degree, and it's not because they're staying home to raise baby. More often it's because they're going back to their parents' home to play video games in the basement. The question we need to be asking is why? Why this drop in motivation? Why are boys now less motivated to achieve and succeed compared to sisters from the same family? And again, my answer in the book, Boys Adrift, it's not just one or two things going on. It's five different things going on. But the good news for parents is each one of those, it's actually pretty easy to fix. And what are the five things?

Okay. So the first factor is changes in education. Schools have become unfriendly to boys. Boys doing things that boys have always done now gets you in trouble, like saying, bang, bang, you're dead. As a result, academic achievement becomes uncool, unmasculine. The solution there, you have to move. You have to find a school that's not unfriendly to boys. There are many of them out there, and you may have to move. My wife and I moved from Maryland to Pennsylvania and sell my practice, had to find a new job to find the best school for your child. Your child

has to be your highest priority, number one. Number two, video games. I'm not saying video games are evil, but parents must limit, govern, and guide how much time their son is spending on video games. And again, in the book, I lay out the evidence. How much time is too much time? Which video games are okay and which are not? Man in NFL football is fine. Grand Theft Auto, GTA 5, is not fine. Your 12-year-old should not be playing that game. You know this.

This is not a guess. Medications for ADHD, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, Medidate, Focal, and Adetran. It turns out they damage the motivational center of the brain. Your son should not be on Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, medidate, focal edentrana. It turns out they damage the motivational center of the brain. Your son should not be on Adderall, Vyvanse, concerto, medidate. And parents will say, oh, he's got terrible ADHD. He really needs medication. Okay, there are other safer medications available that do not damage the brain. Fourth factor, endocrine disruptors, the drop in testosterone levels is not inevitable. That condiment, that pasta sauce in a plastic bottle,

that plastic is leaching female hormones into the product that your son is consuming, substances that act like female hormones. And that's lowering testosterone levels. There's a very funny book that I cite called Slow Death by Rubber Duck, where these two Canadians understood this and they said, okay, we're going to go cold turkey. We're not going to consume anything in plastic. And their testosterone level is normalized. It doesn't cost anything. Don't drink water out of a plastic bottle. Use a steel canteen instead. And factor five, the revenge of the

forsaken gods. Boys need a community of men, as you pointed out earlier, and they no longer have it. Instead, they look to the internet, to the marketplace, and what they find there is Drake and Bruno Mars, which are a catastrophe. American popular culture now undermines the concept of hard work and achievement for boys. So you need to understand that boys need a community of men. You need to find it. You can find it at the skeet club. It's not that hard. You know, we, there's a lot of great data there.

Let me try and go through it. You know, one thing that was interesting is my, my, my grandfather had frame. He kept an alpha frame with his wife. He was, he was the power source of everything. It wasn't't he wasn't a dominant he wasn't she had her place he had his place they had their they had their things but he was he was the head of our family like no one screwed with with grandfather everyone came and did the thing and when he died the families kind of fell apart he was the glue who held everything

together and i've seen a lot of beta tization of males and men and fathers over the years where they've fallen apart. Now, you mentioned that, you know, okay, so his generation, there was some racism and stuff. And sometimes, you know, the toxic masculinity that gets hated on men nowadays, you know, just about anything we do, you know, we speak out, we get shouted down. I get shouted down all the time by toxic feminists just for trying to talk about stuff. Like, what about this? And then you get the Me Too hate. Is it possible that when you say community as the fifth item you mentioned and the third item, maybe turn off the video games, that men really need to kind of maybe get connected

back to being men? Yesterday we had the Apollo. What does that mean? What does that mean to be a man? I don't agree with your implied claim there that a successful man has to be an alpha male. I don't agree with that at all. I've been married for 32 years. I am not the alpha male. I can tell you that. My wife runs the books. She writes all the checks. She's in control of the money. I actually earn more of the money, but she's totally in control. And I

like to joke that I work for her. And that's totally fine. Every man needs to find his own space. She does all the lawn mowing and I shop for groceries. So I'm totally not the alpha male. But we have a successful marriage. Every man is different.

Not every man needs to be an alpha male. This is the 21st century. We're not trying to go back to the 1950s. But there's nothing about the 21st century that makes the failure of boys inevitable. That's what I'm talking about here. I'm not saying that men have to be the alpha male. I'm not saying that women can't earn more money than men. They can and they often do, and that's fine.

But we have to help boys fulfill their potential. And right now, that's not happening. A growing proportion of American boys are not fulfilling their potential. And they are languishing. And it's a shame. To the great detriment of the United States. So to men, at least fathers need to at least sit down and go, what am I teaching my son as a father? Am I teaching him to be a good male person?

Am I teaching him good masculinity? Am I teaching him, you know, how to treat women well? You know, something like that. Basically, from those two points that you have of the five, a man needs to say, hey, you know, what effect am I having? What am I teaching my son with masculinity? Well, it can't just be about talking. And in fact, I don't know that talking accomplishes a lot. What's much more important is doing.

So I was talking to elementary school kids at Jackson Walnut Park. So this is a private school in Brookline, Massachusetts. And they'd asked me to speak to kindergarten through grade three. I usually talk to older kids. They asked me to talk to kindergarten through grade three. So all my talks, I'm always careful to make them age appropriate. So what do you talk to six-year-olds about? I talk to them about the importance of getting a good night's sleep.

I said, look, in your age group, you need nine, ten hours of sleep a night. You want to be up at six in the morning, you should be in bed at eight o'clock the night before. And this third-grade boy raises his hand. And he said, my dad stays up past midnight playing Call of Duty Grand Theft Auto. And I'm like, wow, how's that father teaching anything to his kid about self-control, about setting limits? As I closed my book, The Collapse of Parenting, by saying to become a better parent, you have to become a better person. You will have to learn to govern yourself if you want to teach your kid how to govern himself. And it's not easy, but that is your job if you're a parent. And it's not about going back to the 1950s, but it is about teaching a boy to be a good man.

Yeah. I mean, that's what we think about when our communities are like, what effect are we having on these? Are we teaching them to be a good man? You know, we have to deal with a lot of stuff with gaming. I mean, a lot of racism, crap, you know. We have that pop up. We have to put our foot down and say, that's not appropriate here. It's not allowed.

And we have to say, this is what good men men do and this is not what bad men do. And I also stress that the culture has become really toxic. This past September, Drake, Certified Lover Boy, most successful album ever, captured nine of the top ten spots on the Billboard Top 100. The Beatles never did that. And he's all about, you look at his lyrics, it's all about my balls bigger than yours. I'm undoubtedly the greatest, and that's just me being modest.

Bruno Mars got six Grammys for his song, That's What I Like, where he's celebrating sexual harassment. Turn around and pop it for a player, drop it for me. Kids, boys are immersed in a culture that is teaching them that being arrogant and disrespectful is cool. And that's really toxic. This is not the culture of John Wayne or Paul Newman. This is the culture of Drake and Bruno Mars.

It's a really toxic culture. And boys need a healthy community of men as an antidote to that. What about, I mean, when they see the Mary J. Blythe stuff, do they see women more as sex objects and, and, you know, does that have an effect on them as well? So I wrote an essay about WAP, wet ass pussy, which was the number one video of 2020, uh, where these two women, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, are saying, I want to gag, I want to choke, referring to giving a man oral sex. I'm a freak bitch, handcuffs. What is a boy supposed to see when he sees the most popular video in the United States is a video with two women saying that they want to gag on a man's penis?

How is he supposed to know that not every woman wants to do that? When the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both praised this video as a breakthrough for this video, got huge positive reviews across the board from all mainstream media. This is not teaching boys to be gentlemen. On the contrary. But boys are not born knowing what it means to be a gentleman. They have to be taught. And they're now immersed in the culture of Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Bruno Mars, and Drake, which is teaching them that being disrespectful and arrogant is what makes a boy cool. Well, how should they know better if they have received no instruction? Cultures become really toxic so as a parent you have to limit govern and guide what your kid

is looking at on youtube and tiktok and you need to create connection in a healthy community which could be the church could be the skeet club could be that i used to say boy scouts but they've kind of shot themselves pretty bad you you have to find a healthy community where boys can have good role models for what it means to be a man. When I was growing up, the Boy Scouts were great. We went camping, and they taught us so many life skills and challenges. Then we always had the – yeah, but definitely things have changed. And some troops are still good. And I hear from parents about some troops where the scoutmaster is a good man who's teaching boys to be honest and self-reliant, and that's great. But the national organization has utterly lost sight of their mission.

Years ago, they did some focus group because Boy Scouts have seen a dramatic decline. Boy Scouts are like Little League. I mean, they're a shadow of what they were 30 years ago. They've seen huge drops in membership. And so they did what American corporations do. They hired some consultants who did some focus groups talking to 14-year-old boys about, well, how would you like to spend your time? And the boys said, well, we'd like to hang with girls. So the Boy Scouts were like, okay, great. We'll let girls in with no understanding that their mission is to teach boys to become good men. And you don't do that in a co-ed setting. If boys want to have pizza party with girls, they don't need this Boy Scouts of America to help

them. No understanding of their mission as an organization. You know, I'm on a journey about eight months ago where I started working out at 54 years old and going to the gym every day. And I'm on a path to try and be that super hot Shvelt guy, I guess, in the retirement home. That's where I'm at. And, you know, I mean, I want to be healthier, but I also need to empower myself because I'm 54. Shit's falling apart. Let's put it that way. I had an arm fall off last night, I think, at the gym.

But I sewed it back on and didn't call the doctor, just like my grandfather. Yeah, Yeah. So, and you know, I went on this journey about testosterone cause I'm like, do I need to start getting testosterone shots? Where am I? You know, I don't, I don't build as much muscle as fast. And we had a guy on the show, like you talked about with plastics and testosterone. It was Dr. Anthony, uhJ. He wrote a book called Estrogenation. And he talked about the soaps and the plastics, like you said, and a lot of this parabens, I think it is, and different chemicals in our things. Yeah, they're really super estrogen-based. And I kind of, like I say, I use the show as a platform. We have people on, and I have lots of theories and collect the data and present them. And, and, you know, we, it's, it's, it's, it's a

constant thing to try and figure out, okay, well, you know, this collection of ideas, where, where is reality at? And at first I kind of went, okay, I'll try your little program and do your soaps and stuff. And I did that for, what was it? A while, and I didn't see a real noticeable difference, but it's kind of hard to tell at my age, but I'm like, I think I feel better wearing these clothes that are not kind of wearing this, you know, I found out about the wax on dryer sheets and stuff, and after three weeks of using the soaps, the cleaner soaps, I ran out of them, and I was like, Amazon was going to take two days to get them to me, and I'm like, okay, whatever, I'll just use the soaps that were here that I've always used all my life, man.

I put those soaps on and it was like gloves that had been plastic gloves that had been put over my thing. It was a film holding the smell on and I, it took me five washes to get that off and it was gross as hell. And I had no idea that all my life that should have been going on with me. And, and, you know, he talks about what you mentioned, how much of that stuff is impacting the boys estrogen. And I also thought too, you know, when we go out to boy Scouts and all that stuff we did as kids, we were getting vitamin D and vitamin D is a really essential thing for, for masculinity and, and, uh, testosterone. Is that, Is that good or bad? I advise most men to avoid testosterone supplements

because once you start testosterone, your testicles shut down and you've got to stay on them forever. You want to raise testosterone? That's great. Get it measured, see where you are, and then do three things. Avoid all the endocrine disruptors.

Your previous guest talked about that. I devoted two chapters in Boys Adrift to no-cost, very simple solutions to stay away from the sunscreens, the bad sunscreens, et cetera. That's number one. Don't ingest female hormone if you want to raise your male hormone. I am drinking some right now, just a little coffee. I put some in my coffee. Number two, get a good night's sleep. Sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels. And number three, work out. Weight train. Building muscle gets you going on this feedback loop that literally will help to raise testosterone levels. So you can do this. It'll take a few months, but you can become more muscular, and you can raise your testosterone levels.

But the key thing there is to avoid endocrine disruptors again, which is a major focus of my book, Boys. And I think boys, you know, men were built to be gladiators, in my opinion. Some men. Some men. Well, yeah, some of them have a real genetic streak. I was not built to be gladiators in my opinion. You can tell me if I'm wrong. Some men. Well, yeah, some of them have a real genetic streak. I was not struck to be a gladiator.

Yeah. But, but you know, we have upper body strength for a reason. You know, it's our job to be the protectors of women who are in utero for what, nine months or something. And of course the baby,

when a baby comes out, can't defend itself usually until age eight. We're designed to, to be physically whatever. And, and so for me, it's been a real fire up of, you know, I suffered depression all my life. It's really helped me with depression. And so that might be some of the community where boys can go to is to go work out.

And I advise boys in our things, go to the gym, go work out. Girls like guys that work out too. So there you go well be on your guard though because uh at the gym you will find people pushing these steroids steroids hormones on you and don't succumb to that temptation it it it leads you down the wrong path personality changes it's not healthy you can do this naturally be patient and you will get there. Yeah. My last question for you on one of your points that you talked about with the schools, finding a school that's good for boys. Do we need to bring back boys schools or have a formula that you see like in Europe where

boys can have their school and they can do their boy things and they're not, and they're not being shamed and stuff. I'm smiling because for 10 years, I led an organization called the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. When we started, there were two boys' public schools in the United States. There are now more than 70 boys' public schools in the United States. But look, there's more than 90,000 public schools in the United States. So 70 is really not that many in a country the size of the United States. Boys schools can be great. And when parents ask me, hey, my local school is

terrible. Where should I go? I'm willing to move. I will encourage them to look at a boys school. And boys public schools are great because they're free. But I've also seen boys public schools that are a disaster. Just because there's no girls in the building doesn't mean those teachers really understand how to teach boys. Don't assume that a boys' school is led by teachers who know how to teach boys. There are some great boys' teachers at co-ed schools. There are some terrible teachers at boys' schools. So there's no substitute for doing your homework as a parent and researching the school to make sure it's the right fit for your son.

There you go. Well, anything more you want to tease out on the book and your studies and get people to go check it out or order it up and read about it? Well, I hope people will visit my website, leonardsax.com, take a look at the book, Boys Adrift. Make sure it's the new edition published in 2017, not the ancient edition published in 2007. And be on your guard with regard to American culture. No earbuds, no headsets when you're in the car with your son.

You need to know what he's listening to. He shouldn't be listening to Bruno Mars or Cardi B. He should be listening to you, and you should be listening to him. What about Metallica? Can you listen to Metallica? I'm clearly a Metallica fan. That's pretty ancient. Whoa, hey, whoa.

You've crossed the line there, my friend. I mean, come on. You're at least 54 with me, so are you? Hey, my daughter and I right now are singing Loggins and Messina. Oh, good. Even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with you, honey. Everything will bring a chain of joy. And in the morning when I rise, bring a tear of joy to my eyes and tell me everything is going to be all right.

Look, there's a lot of good things in American culture. And the fact that the Billboard Top 100 is filled with junk does not need to discourage you. You can find good stuff for you and your kid to listen to together. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show, Dr. Sachs. Like I said, my whole life has been adventures and progressing and theories and scientific sort of analysis of social things and going, where are we going to be? Where are we, where are we at? You know, I mean, I kind of predicted the hedonistic dating society that we have now with the, with the pump and dumps and the, the, what do they call it in the dating thing where it's the hookup culture and the failure

of the family. And it took an extra 10 years from what I bet it would. And I'm always kind of, I'm sitting back watching everything because I'm not married. I don't have kids. I'm not in the game that you guys are. So I get to watch you guys' game. And so I'm always kind of trying to figure things out, like where are things going? So it's been a wonderful discussion to talk to you about these things. And I've got to read your book and learn a lot more, and I hope people will as well. Thanks for inviting me. There you go. Thanks, go. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss.

See everything you're reading and reviewing. Take care of your sons and daughters. You know, understand what's going on because this future impacts both sexes and the future of our country. I mean, to me, you know, if families don't, you know, families are kind of the basis of the U.S. government and taxation and, of course, Social Security support and everything else. And if families, you know, if these kids don't start breeding, having kids and stuff, we're going to be in decline. You've already seen the population decline.

So, you know, we need to keep the empire going, if you will, at least for that measure. Hey, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.