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

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Young men are struggling to find guidance and make sense of their place in society, so what can we do about it? In today’s Part 2 episode, Richard Reeves and Ryan discuss changing roles and expectations for men, avoiding radicalization, and their perspectives as fathers of young men. Don’t forget to listen to Part 1 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify where Richard and Ryan explain why helping one gender won’t hurt the other, how the educational system is failing men, and what the biggest misunderstandings are about gender dynamics. Richard Reeves is author of Of Boys and Men, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Follow Richard on Instagram and X @RichardVReeves Check out Richard’s Substack: https://ofboysandmen.substack.com/📚 You can grab signed copies of Of Boys and Men and Richard’s other book, Dream Hoarders, at The Painted Porch.💡 Want to hear more on this topic? Check out Ryan’s interview with Scott Galloway on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Right Now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife, and my in-laws so we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune, we'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune, we'd be cramped.

So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs. To stay in a cool place,

you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb.

Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family. And you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home. But if you're going to do it, do it right. And that's why you should check out Airbnb. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life.

And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I was talking about how I have two young boys in the last episode, two sons, and, you know, it's hard to be a person in the world.

It's hard to be a kid. I was thinking, you know, we do love to kick around young men. We do love to kick around the patriarchy and the people who won't get out of the way, the people who historically have been not so great to other people. It reminds me of that scene. Did you guys see White Lotus?

There's this scene where the whole family is sitting together in one of the, what's her name? Whatever, Sweeney. That girl, you know who I'm talking about. She has this great scene where she's talking about how men are all the problems she's going on and on. I'll play that real fast.

Mom, good news. We've been looking around the hotel and it seems like all of the white, straight men are doing just fine. They're still thriving. And then the mom's like, you're talking about your brother. You're talking about your dad.

These are human beings. These are and can be very good people. And those are the people that I'm trying to speak to with the daily stoic. Those are the boys I'm trying to raise. That is not problematic people, but good people. I wanna raise good young men. I'm trying to be a that is not problematic people, but good people. I want to raise good young men. I'm trying to be a good youngish man.

I guess I can't say I'm a young man anymore with that gray hair. But I came to stoicism as a young man because I was lacking in guidance. I was lacking good examples. I was lacking structure. I was advantaged in many ways, but I needed more. And that's what the stooics did for me.

And what I'm trying to do for my boys, I really liked my guest today's amazing book of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves. He also wrote a great book called Dream Hoarders. We have signed copies of both of them in the painted porch. These are things we've been talking about at the Daily Stoke for a while now.

We've talked about them at the Daily Dad for a while now. And I think they've become even more salient and important now that we saw that voting block of young men, disaffected, angry, misunderstood men, move during the election. And if we don't speak to those men, if we don't provide them a better path forward, I don't think we're gonna like

where we're gonna end up in society. And we've certainly seen more extreme versions of this, of other society. When you leave men without purpose, without structure, without guidance, without good role models, they become radicalized, they become angry, they act out, they become a liability to society

instead of the positive contributors and stability and wisdom that a society can have, that the best societies have. And so I think about that a lot with my young boys. And that's why I wanted to have Richard Reeves on the podcast. We split this episode up into two parts. These are some similar themes that I talked about in my episode with Scott Galloway and many other guests over the years.

So I'll leave you this wonderful episode and check out of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling and Why It Matters and What You Can Do About It, The Pain of Porch or Anywhere Books are Sold. And don't forget to listen to part one of this episode also. and don't forget to listen to part one of this episode also. It's a hard thing as a parent to protect their innocence and to not make them cynical before they should be cynical in some ways. But I do think there is generational work. If you went from 2000 to 2024, there is, I think, a general observable trend of what we're talking about with the delayed gratification of, here, let me bring you some new pencils and then not bringing the new pencils.

Yeah. So I get that sort of sense as someone who feels like the exception to a lot of that, like I got lucky. I left college without debt and I left early. So right before the financial crisis, I moved to Austin 10 years ago before the housing market. I feel like I like either walked through raindrops or snuck under the wire on a bunch of things. So like, I have a house, I have a career I like, I'm

not saddled with a bunch of things where I could see how if it had gone in just a slightly different direction, I'd be pretty upset. And I think understanding that energy, like you can't just gaslight a generation about that. I think you have to, you have to really show it's funny to me, I'll give you about that. I think you have to really show. It's funny to me, I'll give you an example. I think coming out of COVID, we should have an increased sense of our capacity and our ability to solve really tough, complex problems.

But instead we've taken the, especially young men, taken the exact opposite lesson. And why do you think that is? Why has that happened? Well, I was gonna ask you about that. I think a big part of it is because a bunch of online grifters have decided that that is a much more salient message to send.

I think it's easier to be a demagogue than it is to be someone who appeals to reason and a population's better angels. Yeah. Plus, I guess you could layer onto that social media, which thrives a bit more on the kind of conflict. I mean, I think there's a very controversial figure, Andrew Tate, who's like the misogynist online influencer. It was very interesting when you look at his business model, he was incentivising people to comment on and clip from him, but he was incentivising them every bit as much as they

were attacking him, as if they were supporting him. So that was someone who, he understood the algorithm of short form video content very quickly and understood that fighting is the point. And therefore extremism is the point. And so clearly you get led in those directions. It's interesting, I mean, partly I think it's this trust in institutions thing. It's like, are the institutions working for me? And maybe it's also simply that particularly for young men, this question about their role,

this question about how to be in the world is relatively new. I think that the script used to be pretty clear. That was the good thing, if I can risk saying this, about the old model of my parents' model of the kind of provider, breadwinner provider, husband, husband-father provider, all bundled together and then the kind of homemaker, child-re provider, husband, husband, father, provider, all bundled together. And then the kind of homemaker, child rearing kind of work. It was not just clear, but it was centuries of stasis about that clarity. Yeah.

It wasn't even a question. Yeah. And so when my own dad lost, he was the main breadwinner. They had a very equal marriage. They still have a very equal marriage, even when they were raising us, but still now. But then when he lost his job and he was unemployed, there was a question like he said to me once, he said, well, my job is to get another job now to look after you. Because I asked him why he was still shaving and putting a shirt on and he's like, well,

because I have to get another job. Now I'm not saying that wasn't without his stresses and strains. It certainly was, but it did have the advantage of clarity. And what we've done, I think we've torn up those old scripts and replaced the one for women with a quite a positive script about empowerment and autonomy, you go girl, et cetera, which is fantastic.

We've torn up the old male script about, well, you're gonna be the provider, you're gonna protect your provider. So we've torn that up and we've replaced it with. Nothing. And that is the space that a lot of the online influence would come in and what they'll say is, and that's why we have to go back. Yeah. Right. Because, and that's an appealing idea for men who are like, I am completely lost.

I don't know what to do. I know, I know what I'm supposed to not do. Yeah. I know what I'm supposed to not say, but I'm not quite clear what I am supposed to do or why society or family, whatever actually needs me specifically. And that sense of feeling unneeded, I think is driving a lot of this male malaise. I think it's making a lot of men dislocated. I think there's a lot of retreat going on because of that scriptlessness, right? They're improvising and it's really, really hard to improvise a self. And it's an also, and it's easy for those who are fortunate enough maybe to have education and economic

resources to just say, well, just get with the program. I'm sure that you and I could agree that we're like total gender egalitarians and we've got these modern marriages and we're figuring it out and we're in touch with our emotions and like, what's wrong with you? And it's much easier for people who are in positions of high economic resource to do that. And I've come to believe that this lack of empathy for the real problems of many men, especially those with the least economic power,

has created a massive vacuum in our culture and in our politics, and that that has been exploited. But that's our fault for not, I mean, Jordan Peterson's, the Canadian psychologist, I know you know who he is, but I found it extraordinary his success. Yes. Despite his brilliance on many fronts, and I have strong disagreements with him about certain things.

Cause if you read his book, 12 rules for life, which kicked around our house for a bit, like, like most kind of sons raised in mostly liberal households, my boys obviously went through a slightly counter-cultural phase. It's anodyne in its advice. Why was he so successful? Because he just made these young men feel someone had seen and heard them. That's literally all he did.

He just communicated empathy. And it turned out there's this massive reservoir of men. The question to me is not why is Jordan Peterson so popular. It's why are there not more Jordan Petersons? Like, what is he doing? He's charismatic. He's not condescending. He is taking great cultural myths, stories, and ideas

and making them accessible. He's using the tools. He's meeting people where they are. All that's wonderful. I think he's also a fascinating arc in how you can be eaten by the algorithm and fame is a toxic drug and pulled one. Yeah, I think he is watching his descent into what I don't think it's an exaggeration to say is essentially madness

at this point. I think he's lost his mind. But the playbook there, I think, it's not something that should be mocked or criticized. It's something that should be emulated by people who want to integrate these people into society. And, and yeah, it's, it's easy if you get it to be like, these are the assumptions, these are the personality traits. These are the things you need to be successful in this sort of new modern world. And you can almost go like, but, but if, what if that doesn't occur to you naturally?

What if you didn't have parents that modeled some of these things for you? What if you have kind of a like a cultural dyslexia or a learning disability? It's hard for you to go, oh, in a world where women are equal, or in some cases, the predominant, like in publishing, where I operate in YouTube, publishing is one of those industries where there is, women are vastly overrepresented in a way that I don't think is positive or negative, it just is. But so if you can't understand the culture

that it's gonna create in that industry and figure out how to work in it, you're not gonna succeed, right? So how do you teach people to adjust and operate in environments that are maybe different than the one they grew up in, that's a hard thing to do. And yeah, I think empathy is a key thing.

But then also understanding that your lack of empathy is creating a market for someone who has a more exploitative form of empathy to play to those grievances or that disorientation. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that a slightly more maybe self-critical way to think about this too is how anybody that does start to talk about these issues kind of facing boys and men runs the risk potentially of being thrown under that bus.

It's why everyone lined up to tell me not to write this book. Yes. Right. And why I couldn't get a publisher. Because like this is just people are going to think you you're some red pill, some men's rights activist, right? Which is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Cause if I said to people, if the only people allowed to write and talk about this

are the people like that, then we shouldn't be surprised if the only people talking about this are the people like that. So maybe boring centrist people like me with charts. Yeah. Right. One of the, one of the mottos of my new think tank is keep it boring.

My son overheard that. As opposed to polemical? Yeah. My son overheard that and said, what's your motto? I said, keep it boring. And he said, well, you're the man for that job, dad. Ha ha. Funny, aren't they?

It's great. It's great. But what's interesting is that it's a bit self-fulfilling. So what can happen is if somebody who does start to raise these awareness of these issues is almost kind of instantly castigated as being reactionary, and then they find more audiences among reactionaries and they find themselves pilloried maybe on the left, and the way to make a living and build an audience is among the people who think who are more reactionary, then you've just created the very situation which you're claiming to lament.

And so the space that I think we have to fill here is to be able to have an empathetic, data-based conversation about the real problems of boys and men and not allow the algorithm or the disagreements or the fringe people to push you one way or the other. Because what happens, I've really noticed this with a lot of men. I'll give you one specific example, which is they start off working on these issues in good faith and they're pretty calm and they've got the data and they point out things like the suicide rate among men is four times higher and it's gone up by a third among young men since 2010 and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then they repeat that message over and over again and they never get anywhere.

And everyone just keeps telling them they're wrong or you would say, or eye rolling. And they get, essentially they get radicalized and then they get angry. And then they start to express themselves with a really angry affect. In fact, Ezra Klein had this line about Jordan Peterson where he said, his affect is that of a clenched fist.

And I don't think it was, but you do see that happening. And you see it, especially on the right, kind of reactionary figures, there's this kind of very clenched fist, kind of reactionary kind of fighter mentality around it. But to some extent, we create that by not having these alternatives, which are more about a helping hand or by just empathetically saying, yes, these problems are real and we should be addressing them. And so to some extent, the ecosystem, it's very easy to say, oh, these guys, they all go to the right and then they get their reactionary.

But maybe to some extent we push them to the right by not acknowledging some of what they're saying being true and saying, oh, interesting. Why are so many young men flocking to Jordan Peterson? And it might not be that they're all misogynists who want women to be barefoot and in the kitchen, there might be something else going on here. And this unwillingness to kind of look in the mirror and say, maybe something's going wrong in our culture here that is allowing that opportunity. And so maybe we need to do something differently rather than just blaming

him and, or blaming the men who are attracted to him. Well, I think that you need, you need a strong sense of self and a comfort with oneself and also a strong sense of focus. These are to me all very important, I think traits that would go into what the Stokes would call sort of command of the self. And so I remember you and I did, we were on that interview with the free press and we're sort of all in agreement and then someone's like, and then, you know, they're giving transgender surgery to prisoners or something. someone's like, and then, you know, they're given transgender surgery to prisoners or something. And you and I both said, you know,

we don't actually need to talk about that at all. Let's just talk about this. And there is this, I think, in a world of so much information where you can always find something objectionable or weird or extreme. If you are easily kind of provoked or distracted, you're always gonna find something to be outraged about. Right?

And there's always gonna be someone who understands that that content is easier to monetize and succeed with. And so you need kind of a calm demeanor and a strong sense of self and purpose, I think as a person, but then definitely as someone who's trying to talk about sensitive or difficult issues. So you're not just constantly getting sucked into stuff. You need that. Or I think this information ecosystem that we live in, it will eat you alive. Yeah.

You're easy pickings. Yeah. That's interesting. I think about that quite a bit in my own work and how I present around it and how I talk about it. One of the things that I have comfortably very strongly is that unless this feels uncomfortable, probably not doing it right. If there are people who come into this conversation with skepticism, particularly women, if there's not a degree of skepticism with which you're approaching this whole conversation about why it's time to pay more attention to boys and men, I don't trust you quite as much because it should be a difficult conversation.

And I not only acknowledge the difficulty with it, I honor that difficulty. And I actually trust someone a lot more who says, you know what, I was, I was really skeptical about this. Yeah. Uh, and I'm still got some issues around it, but you know what, actually there is some stuff here. And although this is difficult, I actually do think we need to do more here. And how do we do that without leaving women behind? And this is really hard. Anybody that thinks this is easy, it's not doing it properly because they're either like, I roll tiny violin.

Are you kidding me? I'm out of here. Or they're like, hell yeah. men are struggling because those feminists have taken over. And so join me on the barricades of the reactionary. Right. Like, okay, fine. Anybody that thinks this is easy is not serious because this is difficult culturally. It's difficult in terms of language. It's difficult in terms of issue selection is doing non-zero sum thinking. It's really hard. Right?

And so anybody that's finding this easy, I probably don't want you in the room. Yeah. All right. You're probably on one side or the other because especially at this moment in history where we still got so much more to do in many cases for women and girls. And so many women have had to face so much discrimination. Sure. In my lifetime.

Yeah. To get here, asking them to just say, oh yeah, sorry, do you mind doing boys and men now? You've had your three seconds of attention. Can we go back to our 10,000 years of worrying about men again, right? That should be hard. I find it a little bit hard, yeah.

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Unlock weekly Christmas mystery bonus content and listen to every episode ad free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. I mean, I've been saying that like the main challenge of our time is to not let the crazy people turn you into a crazy person. Like just how do you not get sucked in on either side? How do you not become cynical? How do you not become angry? How do you not become radicalized?

And it's really hard because algorithms are working on radicalizing you, political movements are working on radicalizing you, the shittiness of the world is also working on radicalizing you. And so to sort of stick with like first principles, to stick with what's true, to stick with a kind of an openheartedness is a feat of strength, you know?

Like focusing on and not being pulled in this direction. I think this is a skill we have to work on and cultivate as a society, both as like, as I think people who make stuff, like the idea of not falling prey to audience capture is important, but that's kind of inside baseball. I think most people have to worry about not getting sort of captured or radicalized by whatever they randomly click on or also whatever they're naturally predisposed to go to, just

kind of staying in your. Yeah, it's just a way of, and this is a very stoic thought too, I think, is in the thick of daily life. It's in that interaction. It's in the conversation. It's obviously an intellectual challenge, but it becomes a physical challenge. So if you're with somebody who strongly disagrees with you and is arguing very strongly against you and you find their views absurd or they're very emotional and so on, your cortisol starts to spike.

Your body's reacting kind of differently and then that affects your brain. And I have these heuristics that I try and use, some of which I've learned from my intellectual hero is John Stuart Mill, the 19th century liberal philosopher who I wrote a book about. And he had this lovely line that he used in a letter that I try and keep in my mind,

especially in those moments where you're having a difficult conversation with someone or someone's really coming at you. You have this line where he said, like, if someone's strongly disagreeing with you about something, they're almost certainly trying to get to the same mountain top as you. They've just chosen a different path. And I have that image in my mind and I try and keep it in my mind, which is like, it's very unlikely this person I'm arguing with doesn't want similar things in the long run, right?

Very unlikely. Possibly. But let's assume that, let's just say we're arguing about like boys and men or kind of whatever, right? They probably want to reduce rates of male suicide, increase men's economic outcomes, help men be more engaged fathers. They probably want that, right? I doubt they want the opposite of any of those things, right?

But they think the way to do that is by giving more economic power to women or bringing back marriage or whatever it is. I'm disagreeing with some of them. I am going to disagree with more than others. And I just try and think, hmm, that's a different path. And maybe I can learn something from that, right? Because it's almost never the case that you're a hundred percent right. And I'm zero percent. Right. And all vice versa. It's almost always going to be the case that you're 97%. Right.

Yeah. I'm 3% or whatever it is. And so your job is to try and get that 3%. Yeah. Not to ram the 97% down my throat. It's like, okay, fine. I think this person, I have, I really noticed this with my, even in family relationships is we have very politically diverse family, especially on the American side of my

family. And what I've kind of discovered is that some of the stuff that a relative might say to me is wrapped in all kinds of rhetoric. So it'd be more sort of from the right is wrapped up in rhetoric and it's massively over. And my initial reaction is like, yeah, that's completely untrue. Yeah. And then I go and look at it and say, huh, it's not completely untrue, right? It's just been so distorted along the way that when I go and look at it, I go, and you know what, there actually is something to that. And I wouldn't have known that otherwise.

And it's made me think a little bit differently about that IRS reform was the one that came out recently, which is so boring, I won't get into it. But the point it holds, which is that you might learn something from this. And John Stuart Mill was fascinating because he's kind of, obviously he feels like this figure from a long time ago, but here you have a guy who's promising, he's brilliant,

he's on this path, and then it kind of all falls apart. He has this mental breakdown. If that happened in 2018 or 2020, you could see, and that's when John Stuart Mill became red-pilled and went extreme in one direction. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think what's fascinating, he has this grievance and this painful childhood,

the thing, it's not working for him. And he sort of actually ends up emerging from it more openhearted, much more kind, more patient, all these, I think, generally positive traits he takes out of this very painful experience, but you could easily imagine it going the exact opposite. The other way.

Yeah, so in his case, he was raised red pill as a utilitarian by his father, who was a massive utilitarian. He was the, quote, God's son of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism. So he was raised, and his breakdown, it was a complete loss of faith. So he's raised with this incredibly clear philosophy.

It answers all the questions. It gives you a very clear agenda. And then it just blew up for him. And then suddenly he's in this new place where he's questioning and opening and essentially realizing that there are no easy answers. There is no political philosophy or religion or anything that answers all the questions for your life's journey. It's a painful one, it's a learning one, and it's a developed one. What happens is that if you even look

at the metaphors that he uses before and after this, and he was very young, but before it's like the metaphors were much more about machines. They were very mechanical. Our society works as a machine and a great utility. And after that, almost all of those metaphors are organic. He falls in love with nature. He spends time outside. This is poetry becomes a part of his life. It's that poetry thing, but it's about growth. And if you kind of look, he uses plants, he uses growth. He talks about being stunted. He talks about sunlight. And so he uses his botanical interests, but it becomes his political philosophy too, which is just intrinsically developmental and intrinsically about

different individuals need different circumstances in which to thrive, but it's all about growth. And so it becomes, it's not a small shift because it's going from basically treating individuals as like cogs in a machine to be made as happy as possible. Right? Here we go. Like Jeremy Bentham famous, Bentham famously said, I don't care if you're a soldier or a slave or whatever it is, I just care how happy you are. Right. And I was like, yeah,

I'm not cool with that. And instead it's this really incredibly, I would say, although he remained very, uh, non-believing in his own, uh, his own life has a, uh, almost a theological feel to it, which is this ultimate dignity of the human individual and the developmental potential of each individual requiring a society that will recognize it in all its diversity. Men and women. Men and women. Oh, he's the father of British feminism.

He introduced a one word change to the 1867 reform bill to change man to person. Overnight it would have enfranchised women half a century before they actually did. When they actually did in 1928, giving women full equality, the women's rights campaigners who were in the gallery of parliament when the bill was passed, they left parliament, got armfuls of flowers and went down in the embankment to Mill's statue and laid flowers in his honor for the work that he had done for women. And it's entirely consistent with this idea

that back to where we were a while ago, back in the individual flourishing, even if there are some differences on group averages, what matters is the dignity of the individual. Yeah, I sort of take it that his upbringing was so, he was like an athlete. It was like all about him. It was about personal optimization.

He was this, he was the machine. Yes. You know, his dad was Earl Woods, or, you know, like was trying to create this superhuman and it all falls apart. And he remakes himself as this much more, what's that quote about happiness is a door that opened outwards.

He becomes an outward focused individual in a totally different way. And yeah, to me, that's a recipe for sort of human flourishing. And a sense of gender, I mean, he's clearly a man, he's married to a woman, but he just has this much more expansive definition of like, yeah, he doesn't try to change that to say men and

women. He tries to change that law to say person. Like it's just this sort of removal of the distinction and just whatever you are, whoever you are, you deserve these natural rights as a person. Yeah, that's exactly right. And also perhaps the most inspiring thing about people like him is what you were saying a moment ago is almost the way of being in the world and the way of interacting with other people. And this idea of learning from each other and openness.

That's the real change. And so I think you're right that the challenge in many ways of the current era is to avoid these different gravitational pulls, right? There's the audience one, there's a political one, there's the polarization one. It almost feels like you're trying to navigate between these gravity wells, all of which are trying to pull you one direction and incentivizing you and rewarding you in some ways. That's difficult. And it's so, it's how you do it like right now.

It's how you do it in each conversation. And that's very, very million. Like in the end, that's what Mill was about. It was about like, how do we as individuals develop those virtues to be able to engage in the world in that way? And so I think that in that sense, liberalism, in the million sense of the term, is a way of living

and a way of being in the world rather than a construct, rather than a societal construct. Somebody asked Gandhi what worried him the most, and he said, hardness of the heart of the educated or hardness of heart in the educated. And so I think it's, yeah, that kind of, we could, today we might say polarization or whatever, but it's the idea of like losing that openness

and that connectiveness to each other that I think is, to me, the idea of virtue is so important, especially in these divisive times because virtue is secular and non-gendered. So one of the stoic teachers, his name is Mussonius Rufus, he writes this essay on how he says, should women be taught philosophy? And he says, yes, they should because he's like, virtue is virtue. Excellence doesn't know gender. He said, it might be different for different, the roles in society might be different, but he goes, you don't care what gender your hunting dog is.

And I just, right, you care that it can do the thing it's supposed to do. And that can change what the Romans thought the role of a man and woman is obviously very different than what we think of it as today. But if you go, yeah, excellence are these virtues, these traits, you know, courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

Like if we can all agree that those things are good, they're gonna manifest themselves differently but, and in different roles, but they're not hyper gendered, I don't think. And so I think if we think about it as, yeah, how do we get people to flourish and fulfill their potential as individuals? That to me is virtue is a thing we can hold up as a way to do that. As long as we don't give into the sort of very religious definition of virtue, which I think some people like,

you know, Josh Hollies or whatever are trying to, they're trying to make virtue partisan and, yeah, not accessible. Yeah. And then it's like virtue is closer in that framing, in his framing to being like a list of proper opinions rather than a kind of way of being, a way of being open. And I'd be interested to get your reaction to this challenge that I have, which is that I agree with everything you've just said about virtues, like beyond gender, pre-gender, whatever. And in the end, personhood is what matters. And one of the things I struggle with everything you've just said about virtues, like beyond gender, pre-gender, whatever. And in the end, personhood is what matters.

And one of the things I struggle with is in writing this book and in creating a whole think tank around boys and men, am I making the problem worse by making more salient these differences, which in the long run, I think shouldn't be that important. Right? In other words, like am I adding to this over identification around gender, uh, as opposed to just drawing attention to the fact that there are some problems kind of facing boys and men that aren't getting enough attention in policy circles. So I don't, I just, it's one of the, it's one of the criticisms I have of my work that I find it hardest to answer, honestly, which is you're basically putting fuel on the fire

of this identity politics problem by establishing this whole thing about boys and men. And my answer for what it's worth, which I don't feel very satisfied with is like, there's this huge number of people doing great work on behalf of women and girls. And they're not going to, in fact, they're growing as more. And so like, I'm just trying to have a little bit of stuff on boys and men and on average, it's okay. But I'm not satisfied. You can make the same argument about historically black colleges,

or is that creating, no, there should be spaces for different people to thrive in. And look, it's a problem if you have HBCUs, because that's the only place that a young black man or woman can go. But if it's a place that you feel attracted to going, it's a wonderful thing. And attracted to going, it's a wonderful thing. And by the way, anyone should be able to go there, right? But the idea of having those

spaces, I think, is important. And I don't think pretending that gender doesn't exist is helpful to anyone or that people might be drawn to do different things. Just like, look, if you're born tall, it presents certain options. You don't have to pursue those options, but it would be weird to pretend that, you know, there aren't certain athletic pursuits that are more possible to you as a result of this. You know what I mean?

So I think if you're doing it in a thoughtful way, it's additive, and then I think if you're doing it in an identity politics sort of divisive us-versed-them way, then it is a problem. But I don't think that that's what you're doing it in an identity politics, sort of divisive us versus them way, then it is a problem. But I don't think that that's what you're doing at all. And I think as a person with two boys, I'm like, hey, they have a unique set of challenges. And my job and my wife's job is to help them be successful as people, which happens to include them being boys,

or at least at this moment. You know what I mean? I think that's helpful. Thank you. But it is a reminder of like where, what's the right space to be doing the work in. It is much more around these real problems, these practical issues and not into this whole identity stuff. Like not into the, what is a woman? What is a man? Stuff, right? I'm just like, can we talk about high school graduation rates? Right? And so one of the deals I've made with people sometimes is like, can we talk about the Barbie movie?

I was like, okay, only if we can then talk about high school graduation rates in Michigan, right? Or technical high schools. Can we have that deal? Because of course, those more cultural elements, especially right now, they're just sexier, right? They're just like, and they're very lived and everyone's into them. And what I've really admired about what a lot of the women's groups do, the kind of less the identity ones is that they'll do really good analysis of like, what's driving the gender pay gap? What happened to women's promotion chances during COVID? What's the pipeline issue there?

How do we construct cultures and systems that are a bit more female friendly? And they just do that well. And there's just really good research on that. And if something happens that seems to threaten the progress of women on any of those fronts, they're on it. And they're saying, hang on, the gender pay gap just got worse. What's happening there? Let's dig in and try and figure out what's happening and see if that's a problem.

And I think that's great. Yeah. They're not saying women versus men, you know, women good, it's not a Hollywood movie. It's a policy paper. Yeah. Unfortunately, the latter is quite boring. The decision to say like, hey, I'm gonna say what I think is true

as opposed to what I think people wanna hear is a tough decision. I mean, I definitely know, like with what I think people wanna hear is a tough decision. I mean, I definitely know, like with what I talk about with stoicism, that if I just stuck with the self-improvement, like if I just stuck with courage and discipline, it would do, I would, I'd have a bigger audience, I'd have less disagreement, less contention

than if I went to the other, the wisdom and justice side of things. Right? Like there's the, where you talk about what stoicism offers is attractive, where you talk about what stoicism asks or obligates, but you know, you can't just pick and choose. You can't just take the stuff you like or the stuff that's salient or the stuff that gets people excited. You have, I think, the idea of taking your profession seriously and your obligations to the truth, to me, that's a part of kind of just having a code and being a person of honor or virtue. And there's going to be costs

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And if so, how do you psychologically defend against the own, those- I try to ignore the metrics for the most part. I think there's an unhelpful amount of data available. psychologically defend against the own those. I try to ignore the metrics for the most part. I think there's an unhelpful amount of data available. And then I'm asking myself always, am I being a good steward of these ideas or am I being a good business person? And like I did this series,

I'm doing the series on the Cardinal Virtues, I'm doing the wisdom book now. But like I went into the justice book going, this is the most important book to me personally, but probably going to sell the worst. But that's, I didn't get into writing about an obscure school of ancient philosophy because I was-

You want to become rich and famous. I want to maximize sales. You want to be rich and famous. Yeah, there's other things to focus on. So the decision to like sort of do what you think is important and to, you know, obviously I try to optimize for the world that we're into,

but I want to make sure that's not like leading. But I wonder if you've experienced this. I definitely felt, especially when the stoicism stuff started to take off, I felt like in a way that it isn't true so much on the left leaning stuff, I was fascinated. It was sort of peek behind the curtain, watching this sort of right wing conservative ecosystem, sort of once-wing conservative ecosystem,

sort of once you get, like, I could feel a gravitational pull of contacts, conferences, funding, sort of there for the take. So I think JD Vance is a fascinating person in watching that's captured in a different sense where who he was in 2016 versus who he is in 2024 is a fascinating evolution to me. And I think it's part and parcel of this system that looks to sort of co-opt and bring people in. And I imagine you felt some of that gravitational pull on your work a little bit. A little bit, but it's very odd actually, not perhaps in the way you might expect.

I feel like I'm probably right now between these different gravitational pulls. Yes. And I use the sort of fringe attacks as a useful data point. So I did a panel with UN Women and we had some kind of funding from Melinda French Gates and so Q attacks from right, right? Oh yeah, fine. He's become a lefty. He just thinks men should deconstruct themselves to be better femin right, right? Oh yeah, fine. He's become a lefty. He just thinks men should deconstruct themselves to be better feminists.

And then I'll do some, I'll publish something that's going to more around kind of that's around marriage or something like that. And then, or very critical of the current administration's failure to acknowledge this. And then you'll get the same from the left. So he just, you know, men, men, it just doesn't want men to have to compete. And once you go, okay, good. Probably about right. But so I actually think right now I feel pretty to go. And I, okay, good. Probably about right. Yes.

But so I actually think right now I feel pretty well balanced between the two, but, but I don't have the same issue that the podcasters have or the people who are in that space have. And I have, I'm interested to know your view about this because I've just, I've noticed that when I'm doing this work, when I think about the podcasts that I'm going to go on and talk about men quite often, they tend to go on and talk about men, quite often they tend to be a little bit more center, right? Probably. Whereas a lot of the broadcast stuff, I do more kind of entry stuff.

NBC is much, is more women and more kind of probably gone center left. And I do think that if you're in this podcast space and a couple of the guys who are in this space have said this to me, it's like, if you just talk about stuff, straightforwardly about men, male issues, you get attacked from the left. Right? And you get applauded on the right and you get exactly, and, and, and so the gravity. You go towards the people that like you. Yeah. I don't know whether you've got any observations on that, but it is, I think I can detect even in some of the podcasts that I'm kind of aware of, like either a little bit of a pull or them having to kind of lean very intentionally against it. And of course they want the numbers.

They want an audience. That's how they make their living. And so it feels like it's almost this dynamic that sets in where you get attacked and then you get defensive. You pull that way, you get applauded, you get audience. I actually think like, again, this is probably getting inside baseball, you get applauded, you get audience. I actually think, like, again, this is probably getting inside baseball,

so I'll make it less inside baseball. I was thinking about this for my kids. So like, when I was a kid, I don't know, I would hear about something, I'd watch something on TV, I'd read an article about something. All these things existed independently. There was no enormous Borg putting these bits of data together and coming up with a profile of what it thought I was

and then serving me more and more of that. So like, I don't know, my dad listened to Rush Limbaugh so then I could listen to Rush Limbaugh and then that could be a phase in my life. It didn't, or I could be into this band and then not be into that band. As opposed, there was nothing trying to make me more Or I could be into this band and then not be into that band. As opposed, there was nothing trying to make me more

of that thing to serve me more unlimited amounts of that thing. And so now I think about it as my kids get older and they watch a YouTube video that can exist in isolation. It's a potentially lucrative rabbit hole to pull them down. So instead of just something for them to explore, there's an incentive to draw them deeper and deeper into things.

And the perilousness of that kind of keeps me up a little bit. Yeah, although I'll try and make you feel a bit better about it, which is just observing my own, my boys are all in their twenties now. And just to young people more generally, there's this line, I can't know if it may have been saying that to someone said, you

either live above or below the algorithm. In other words, you either see it or you don't. And I've noticed that actually it's the older generations in our family that they don't know where of it. Whereas my kids and their friends, they're totally aware of it. And they actually help me sometimes. And like my sons, I get this thing and they're like, well, it's cause you watch that thing.

Yes. And look where it comes from dad. And it's got terrible provenance and it's awful. And like, right. Sure. And so, and they go through phases, et cetera, but to some extent, the, the more that you can train your kids about algorithmic sophistication, understand the algorithm and then they're able to control it a little bit more.

They see it. And so I think my generation is stuck in the middle a little bit where I'm like, uh, I think this is your algorithm, but I don't know how does the algorithm work again. And I'm like, why am I seeing that? And like, I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in that, but it thinks that, whereas they're like, here's why dad, right? And here's what you need to do to control it. And so I'm pretty hopeful.

Also my youngest son, his friends, they all just deleted TikTok from their phones because they're like, this is stupid. This is a waste of our time. And so that kind of learning is happening, I think. And so like, it's not like the algorithms are not going to go away. And so what we've got to do is like, we have to figure it out. Yeah. Make sure kids are above it and they can kind of see it coming. No, that's a great way. You're either above or you're below. You're either using it or it is using you and you gotta be conscious of that. I just think it was easier to have passing fads or phases in a world where this wasn't being tracked and recorded

because you could just, you could be into something for six weeks and then change your personality in a way that you have the same, you know, like I've had the same email address for 20 plus years now. Right. And so that's connected to all these different things. And that affects what I see and don't see in a way that if I didn't have that, or if I started like, I wonder what would happen if I started over with everything tomorrow, I just created new accounts on everything. Declare email bankruptcy or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,

or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or Declare email bankruptcy or just reinvent. Cookie bankruptcy, right? And then what would I discover about myself? What patterns had I been stuck in that I didn't realize? And so that's a lot to put on a 15 year old, that hey, the phase you went through three years ago is still informing what you see and think now in ways that you're not conscious of.

Yeah, although I've seen my sons definitely go through different phases and come out of them. And they seem to be able to just craft the algorithms in various ways. But it is an interesting thought that for all the discussion of one kind of more choice and identity and fluidity and so on, maybe we had more options to be more kind of fluid in that broader sense,

right? In the past, because we were less hostage to our own previous selves. Yeah, I was talking to this woman and she was telling me that her daughter cut off all her hair and that it caused this whole problem at school in a way that was funny, but also you could see, everyone was like, oh, are you... They were being too supportive of it. Instead of just being like, you're a teenage girl who's cutting off your hair because you're being

a teenage girl, not you're a teenage girl who's not sure if you're a teenage girl. Yeah, yeah. You know, and just the inability to just do that thing in a, I'm look, I'm sure it's always been a problem, but it's funny to see, oh, people's sort of political algorithm is acting on her in positive and negative ways as opposed to just seeing this as what it was,

which is a bit of isolated teenage behavior. There's a real danger of overinterpretation there for sure. And I kind of look back and think, I'm kind of glad that some of my periods and some of the things that I did were not overinterpreted. There's a willingness to kind of pounce a little bit, like, ah, there's sort of, you know, my parents were of the generation of I did were not over-interpreted. There's a willingness to kind of pounce a little bit, like, ah, there, so I was like, you know, my parents were of the generation of more benign neglect,

and which I'm very grateful for. And I remember trying to explain to my father what the word parenting meant, because I was going to some parenting, he said, what's that word? Parenting, parenting. That's a verb? Yeah, exactly, he said, when did that become a verb?

And I looked it up and it was in the late, early eighties. It wasn't a verb. I said, well, that's a verb. He said, when did that become a verb? And I looked it up and it was in the late seven, early eighties. It wasn't a verbal. I said, well, didn't you did parenting? He's like, no, we didn't. Maybe it's supervision. So he said, we just had kids and did all these things. But I actually, one of my theories is that the turning of parent into a verb parenting may have been a bad turn because most more generally that degree of surveillance and over interpretation has become a bit of an issue. And just the space to just be like, kind of like did my hair, I did my hair and it's kind of weird braid thing for over like down there.

And I don't remember my parents just being like, fuck. I mean, they weren't like, yeah. Anyway, you want to check out some books? I'll show you the book store. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.

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