Brief: Galloway and the Mooch: The Lost Boys of Capitalism (Pt 1)
On the horizon: a new liberal-center manosphere, yearning to reach out to the young men poached by Trumpism, but offering what, exactly?
Professor Scott Galloway and Anthony Scaramucci are earnest and charming in their way, and they have Trump’s number. But with their new project, Lost Boys podcast, they’re stuck in a paradox. They know enough to admit that the capitalist logic that made them both multi-millionaires is fickle, cruel, and misogynist. They know it’s beating up everyone, including young men. But they can’t imagine any other way of organizing society. So what do they offer? Nostalgia for the 1980s, self-help tips.
In this two-part series, Matthew looks at why the Lost Boys project is deceptively attractive. Liberal, libertarian, or even reactionary parenting can affect an earnest emotional bond through overtones of spiritual honesty. But all the empathy is impotent when it defaults into an apologetics for the very systems that make us suffer.
Part One looks at the overall liberal manosphere politics of Lost Boys, including the evidentiary claims put forward by their premier guest Richard Reeves, who Galloway calls his “Yoda” on the subject of how men are doing these days.
Part Two (drops Monday on Patreon) goes into a granular reading of Episode 7 of Lost Boys, where the guest is Deirdre Scaramucci, Anthony’s partner. Together, the trio discloses a ton about their ambivalent GenX childhoods and their current parenting experience, including how they rationalize losing emotional control.
Show Notes
Lost Boys - Podcast
Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon | The New Yorker
Politics for men - by Richard V Reeves
Richard Reeves? : r/AskFeminists
Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription: Richard Reeves' Of Boys and Men | Institute for Family Studies
Collapse Feminism by Alice Cappelle | Penguin Random House Canada
Communism | David Graeber
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to Deep Cover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
Deep Cover But if you wake up and you're 28 and shit's hard and you aren't killing it and you haven't bought, you know, meme coin, you don't have millions of dollars, the first thing I tell young men is forgive yourself.
As long as you're trying, as long as you're being a good person, a lot of it is out of your control.
Hey, everybody.
This brief is called Galloway and the Mooch, Lost Boys of Capitalism, Part 1, with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for subscribers, of which you could be one.
Now, part one is a 101 introduction to the rising surge of an earnest, liberal, but mildly reactionary Manosphere world as promoted currently in a limited podcast series called The Lost Boys, put out by Anthony Scaramucci and Professor G, or Scott Galloway.
Now, Galloway has a related book coming out this November that is ambitiously titled Notes on Being a Man.
And my bet is that it's going to be a big mainstream deal on the level of like a new Jonathan Haidt book.
And Galloway and Height are friends, by the way.
And Galloway is interesting to me because he is a different flavor of manfluencer.
He's not Jordan Peterson.
He's not Andrew Huberman, but he can be friendly with both.
He's got a big tent.
He's a self-made business tycoon turned professor with a twist.
He describes himself as a greedy bastard in his youth, but has now developed a kind of populist economics view that overlaps with a large chunk of the Sanders program.
So he's really strong on observing generational wealth issues that as neoliberalism has accelerated, wealth has continued to funnel to the top and from the young to the old.
And that makes him really interesting.
He's a chastened money whisperer transitioning into a young man whisperer.
And I'm going to argue that that is really compelling, but it's also a paradigmatic and political mismatch.
So I also want to flag for everyone where these ideas are coming from so that you can watch how the Galloway Manosphere Cultural Moment rolls out this fall.
I'll be reviewing the book then too.
But first, some housekeeping.
I'm Matthew Remsky, and this is Conspirituality.
And what we do here is we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And you can follow me.
You can follow Derek.
You can follow Julian on Blue Sky.
The podcast itself is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
And please support our Patreon and the Patreons of all the independent media outlets you value and can afford to support.
Because at this point, if you depend on reporters and opinion writers who hold the line against fascism, you know, you got to figure out how to support them.
Okay, so this first episode will be an overview of The Lost Boys podcast themes and what guests like Richard Reeves bring to the table.
And I'm focusing on Reeves, especially towards the end of this episode, because Galloway calls him his Yoda on the sociology of young men.
But as we'll see, Reeves' mastery of the Force has some blind spots that happen to mesh with the Lost Boy's own biases.
Now, in the second episode, which will be a little bit longer than this one, I'm going to go into a granular reading of episode seven of the Lost Boy series, where the guest is Deirdre Scaramucci.
This is Anthony's partner and wife.
And I'm going to take that time because together, these three disclose a ton, I think a lot more than they realize, actually, about their Gen X childhoods and their current parenting experience.
And that includes their rationalizations of losing emotional control.
And so I think, you know, if I'm fair about this, your takeaway will be anywhere from, you know, something generous, like these are unhealed healers trying their best to these are grandiose guys who are completely unqualified in psychology and they're only semi-conscious of their rage issues and they're searching out a new grift in the centrist manosphere geared towards helping young men comply with capitalism instead of change it.
So somewhere between those two, you know, landing points, you know, I think you'll find a place.
Now, that second take about compliance with capitalism might follow obviously from the fact that Galloway and The Mooch are self-made multimillionaires and big-time movers and shakers.
Galloway holds a BA in economics from UCLA and an MBA in marketing from UC Berkeley.
Currently, he's professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, where his teaching and research focuses on brand strategy, digital marketing, and the social impact of technology and business.
And apparently, he's very good at that.
These days, he's like on lots and lots of podcasts.
He talks for a living.
Now, Vimooch has a JD from Harvard Law and a BA in economics from Tufts.
Most famously, I think he was Donald Trump's communications director for 11 days only in 2017 before getting fired over what he thought was an off-record interview That I think produced the funniest line in all of White House reporting history.
Quote: I'm not Steve Bannon.
I'm not trying to suck my own cock.
I'm not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.
I'm here to serve the country.
So, kudos to the mooch for that.
Now, conservative estimates put Galloway's net worth at $40 million and Scaramucci's at 90 million.
And a big chunk of the mooches is now coming from Bitcoin.
And that might put him at odds with Galloway, who's openly skeptical about the nature and stability of crypto.
But given this wealth, they often sound conflicted on the distance between their childhoods and where they've wound up in their lives.
Like both of them come from blue-collar, modest backgrounds, and now they share a kind of liberal politics jacked by this low-key, testosterone-fueled individualism.
In other words, I think in many ways, these guys are a Democrat consultancy dream team.
They are rich guys who are pulling for the little guy while leaving real socialism off the table.
So I think you can look for them both to be playing outsized roles in Democrat Manosphere outreach projects like Speaking to American Men, for example, that we covered a couple of weeks ago.
Galloway openly supports Democratic candidates, and Scaramucci has nominally returned after his stint with Trump.
Now, in some ways, these episodes reviewing the Lost Boys podcast are spiritual successors to that piece that we did on Speaking to American Men, but also to a Patreon series that I've been running called Imaginary Children, which is about how our politics often form around very abstract notions of saving the children, which is a trope that can intensify to the level of conspiracy theory.
But the problem is that these notions are much more about adult crises and regret than about anything else.
Now, you'll notice, however, that I started with that cold open clip where Galloway is talking about forgiveness because it was, in my view, the best passage I could find in a podcast in which Galloway and the mooch are actually just test ballooning a new manosphere space.
A lot of where you end up in life, you have no control over success and failure.
Be humble when you're successful.
Forgive yourself when you fail, as long as you're trying every day and you're a good person.
So the first thing I tell kids or young men is, you got to forgive yourself.
You got to get past this notion that you have fucked up and you're a failure.
Just stop it.
Stop it.
I wanted to shelve the criticism to start with something positive.
This is not usually in my nature.
Because for all of the Gen X boomer bluster that these guys put out, there are moments in which Galloway, especially, can sound soft, receptive, and as he expresses in that clip, forgiving.
His typical impassioned but also agonizing drone can become softening or even comforting at some points.
And it's in these moments that I really get the hidden appeal of capitalist apologist parenting.
In its inability to imagine alternative ways of organizing society, in its resignation to the cruelty of the world, it can squeeze out a kind of tender fatalism.
And that's what I hear in certain key moments from Galloway.
But fatalism in relation to what?
Not to death, not to sickness, not to infirmity, not to disability, not to uncertainty.
The fatalism centers on the mysterious movements of the market.
In his tenderest moments, Galloway seems to want to say, you know, guy, this is all about luck.
You can't control the outcomes, and therefore it's not your fault.
And it sounds like he's talking about an existential reality to which ego surrender is an appropriate response.
But what happens is that he doesn't really, maybe he can't really sit with that for long.
There's no resting in God or the unknown because the market churns on.
It will not stop.
And so he pivots from forgiving yourself to driving yourself forward with self-help tricks.
So Galloway, like in that forgiveness passage, he hurdles straight into the paradoxical checklist of what every young man should do to excel at capitalism after they forgive themselves for having been beat up by capitalism.
So the advice is fine for what it is.
You know, he says, find the time you've wasted on your phone each week and then reschedule it to get jacked at the gym or get any job you can because making some money will make you hungry for more and learn how to talk your way up the employment ladder because most hires happen by word of mouth.
So it's all fine advice.
But Scaramucci pivots back to ask about when Galloway had to learn self-forgiveness.
And Galloway launches into this long litany of failed student election campaigns in high school, failed businesses, a bankruptcy, a divorce.
But then he settles on one moment of what he calls his deepest shame.
I was 42 when I had my first kid.
And when my youngest or my oldest came rotating out of my girlfriend, I was expecting bright angelic lights and opera singers and that I'd immediately be in love with this thing.
I was so nauseous.
I've never felt that bad.
I've never felt that bad without throwing up and passing out.
The doctors had to turn to me and say, if you go down, we're not doing anything.
We're focused on the kid and its mother.
Because they looked at me and they thought, this guy is not doing very well.
And they thought it was because that I was squeamish.
And I want to be clear, I think childbirth is disgusting.
I want to go back to the 60s where you're smoking a cigarette and you bring the baby out.
But that wasn't it.
I was so incredibly nauseous because I felt the overwhelming emotion I had when my first son was born was not joy.
It was shame.
And that is I had always found a way to make a lot of money.
I'd always had a ton of blessings, privilege, and I was very talented.
I'm not a modest person.
I think I'm a monster.
I'm talented.
I work hard, but I'd also had a lot of privilege.
I had made millions of dollars.
At some point, I'd been worth tens of millions.
But because I always kept doubling down, always thought I could overcome anything, always went all in.
And that was the Gestalt in 90s and 2000s internet.
You know, are you in it to win it?
The stories of Mark Zuckerberg pushing back the offer for 30 billion.
So I was all in on my e-commerce startup red envelope when chapter 11, three weeks before my first kid was born, I walked into that delivery room worth negative $2 million, having had been worth 10 or 20 or 30 million at some point, several points before that.
And all of a sudden, I felt not only personal failure, but for the first time, my first emotion as a father was that I was failing my son.
Let me just pause there because I think this is key.
At a peak emotional point of Galloway's life, the overriding reality in the room is money.
The market, which he made choices in, but which is also defined by such fickle mystery that you can only forgive your own failures within it is the governing reality.
This is a guy in relationship with a cruel God, but he can't get enough.
Now, I can't say I'm an expert in the Galloway opus.
As I said, this guy talks basically for a living.
But it did feel like this passage exposed something very important, but also a common American reality.
He's not locating his deepest sense of shame in some realization about his inability to love or be generous or to be self-aware or patient or exist in the present moment with a partner and a child.
He is saying that his one job in the world, as he thought about it then, was to provide money and protection for these dependents, and that at that moment he was an utter failure.
Quote, I could have put a few million away, he says, as though that would have been the sane and possible choice for everyone.
I'm starting here because I think it explains how liberal, libertarian, or even reactionary parenting can affect an earnest emotional bond with overtones of spiritual honesty while at the same time defaulting into an apologetics for the very systems that make us suffer.
It winds up creating a loop.
Forgive yourself when you get beat up so that you can get back in there and bet on the market.
And the wild thing is that they both, both Galloway and LaMooch, acknowledge how rare it is for that hamster wheel to actually work.
Forgive yourself and then recommit to the grind for a slim chance at being in the 1%.
So you might notice already I'm totally obsessed with understanding how this works, because in my opinion, this is a very, very attractive dead end.
Because as parents, we can model self-forgiveness in the shadow of oppressive systems.
But the next step is the most important.
In the next step, we can use that moment to imagine something else, or at least decide, I'm not going back into a bullshit world again, and I'm not sending you back into it either.
But unfortunately, that bullshit world seems to be all that Galloway and Scaramucci know.
It's not their fault.
What else would they know?
Here's the trick with Galloway.
He says that this is hopeless in several different ways, but he just doesn't really have another answer for it.
In that same episode, he admits that he went into that birthing room in a state of mind in which he had the following perception.
You know, Anthony, I just got to the honest answer is I get 90% of my self-esteem for my money.
It's pathetic.
It's growing.
The 10% that's growing is I want to be a good citizen.
I want to raise patriotic, loving men.
But I got to be honest, my whole life, I've identified my self-worth based on money.
And it's been, and I realize it's unhealthy.
It's been, I don't call it an obsession, but it's been a severe focus of mine.
And just not until 10 years ago did I say, okay, money is the ink in my pen, but it's not my story.
It can make, you can write certain chapters.
It can make certain chapters burn brighter, but I got to focus on other things.
And now I've decided my purpose is to raise, again, loving, patriotic men and also to try and, like we were saying before, help people I will never meet.
Okay, so I don't know whether that was an appreciative opening, but I want to move from mild kudos into the more obviously dodgy aspects of the show.
Here's Scaramucci's opening and bumper for the entire series.
And by the way, it sounds like the Mooch is driving the production, even though he's taking up kind of a sidekick persona.
Like Galloway seems to be showing up on cube between his other podcast spots.
And Scaramucci's whole shtick is like, well, you're the smart guy here.
You know, like you should tell me what's up.
When I was growing up, it was a lot simpler.
Out of a Christmas present given to a child may come a man's career.
Means your bodies are changing from boys to men.
But today, between the morass of social media and the confusion about pronoun usage and the whole change in the culture, it's a lot harder for young men to thrive.
No group has fallen further faster in America than young men.
We tore up the old script for men, which was breadwinner, head of household, etc., and we didn't replace it with anything.
No one was talking about it.
Into that void slipped some unproductive voices.
The world is full of cowards.
We suffer from a pandemic of cowardice.
People are absolutely and utterly cowards.
The problem with these unproductive voices is it starts positive and then it comes off the rails.
But we know it doesn't have to be like this.
We can do better for our young men.
I failed.
Scott has failed.
All those people you're looking up to have failed.
And you got to just stay in the game.
Okay, so I love the 1950s or 1960s audio PSAs.
I mean, both of those sound like they could have been cut before these guys were even born in 1964.
And the theme is simpler times, no social media, no pronouns, a vague hand waving at the whole Change in the culture.
But let's put a pin in that because what can that really mean beyond the cumulative effects of feminist thought and influence?
And then another thing to mention is that it took me a few listens to realize that the other clip in there where some dude is bloviating about cowardice is what they're identifying as an unproductive voice, because to be honest, a lot of the Lost Boys shtick is about the apparent loss of masculine courage and risk-taking.
So I don't know if The Mooch had an editor for this bumper or whether he would have taken editorial advice, but I do think they would have been better to really lean into their economic hard talk, which I think is where they're strongest because they admit it.
As Gen Xers, they've had it easy.
And millennials and Gen Z kids are in a much tougher situation.
But let me just backtrack a moment and spend some time on the simpler times motif, because I can't overemphasize how pervasive this theme is, how much Gen X nostalgia is the bedrock of this show.
It's like a drone, a stable note throughout.
But in all of the romance of the simplicity of media, the solitude prior to phones, a predictably mixed and precarious life shines through.
And that's going to be the focus on Monday's episode.
Galloway talking, for instance, about how much he had to work on his sexism because he grew up watching I Dream of Jeannie because, you know, the television was his nursemaid.
The solitude of being a latchkey kid.
The danger and excitement of learning about the world from older teens instead of absent parents.
The mooch describes being 11 years old and staying out all night at diners with his cousins or going to topless bars with older kids at the age of 14.
So yes, simpler times, but also conflicted, ambivalent, and sometimes dangerous.
So what happens is that a podcast purportedly about millennial and Gen Z and alpha boys is going to double as an exercise in hand-wringing over lost youth, but also a lot of unprocessed stuff about what that youth actually was.
What they are very clear about, to their credit, is the simpler times of early neoliberalism.
Galloway notes that for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old today is not doing as well as their parents were at that age, where the simple arc of economic history sloped ever upwards and economic disparities remained at a manageable scale.
Quote, my dad's boss had a slightly bigger car, a slightly bigger house, but we were all at the same country club.
This is the feeling.
But the present is where the 1% lead an entirely different life, leading to what Galloway calls an idolatry of money.
This implies a simpler social and economic landscape where, you know, the game or social standing was not solely tied to extreme wealth.
And Galloway mourns this to the extent that he even calls himself a socialist at one point.
Now, not in political terms, not in terms of policy, but in psychological terms, because he cites the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who shows that happiness does not actually increase with wealth that takes a person beyond middle-class tax status.
Like there's diminishing returns as you climb up the economic ladder in terms of happiness.
But again, the most important thing about Galloway, in my opinion, is that in the absence of a real criticism of capitalism, he has to bounce back and forth between emotional support and self-help anxiety, limited by money being the only language that he seems to have on hand.
Here's one of his favorite tangents.
You leave every day your school with negative value.
A ton of people investing in you.
You're not giving back.
And you're adding negative value around the household.
Your mom, your dad, we're investing so much in you.
And quite frankly, some people never get to surplus value.
I know a lot of adults that are a constant emotional and even a financial drain on their parents and their siblings.
At some point, what I say to them is, okay, when you become a man, it's not a religious ceremony.
It's not anything about getting your job or an age or a birthday or getting to drink alcohol or have sex.
I think when you cross over into manhood is when you have, on a net basis, are adding surplus value.
You're creating more jobs.
You're creating more tax revenue than you're taxing our government, right?
You're doing more to defend your country.
You're investing more in your country than it is given you.
You witness people's lives.
You listen to more complaints than you complain.
You solve more problems in people's lives than you create.
Now, there's one line in there about listening and empathizing more than being listened to.
And I really like that.
But otherwise, it's really bleak to think of children as racking up debt as if they were born into the company town.
But the thing is, I think Galloway is open-minded enough and self-deprecating enough that if David Graeber was still alive, Professor G could have him on as a guest and might even have listened to him talk about what pre-capitalist debt and exchange was actually like and how our natural state as humans and parents is not necessarily transactional at all.
But let me finish up this overview with the most telling tangent, I believe, in the series, in which the mooch connects the masculinity crisis to economics writ large, but he does it in a really melted way.
There's a political angle to this as well.
You know, are the neo-Victorians that ran America at the end of the Second World War understood this no-police oblige that I'm referring to?
And they were like, okay, we got to figure out a way to create rising living standards around the world.
And if we can do this successfully, there'll be less violence and there'll be more comedy.
I, like you, I don't want to live in a barbed wired security compound in a McMansion while my fellow neighbors and or my family are struggling.
I think it's very, Very important to understand that.
And as wicked of a person as Henry Ford was, he did say something brilliant about social engineering.
He said, I want to make sure that these workers can afford the car or the product that they're manufacturing.
And I got to make sure they're in a single-family home with a good school system because I don't want them descending on my dearborn Michigan mansion with tiki torches and pitchforks.
And I think that's being masculine.
Do I have that wrong?
Okay, I know he's not asking me.
He's asking his friend Galloway.
But yeah, Mooch, every word in that tangent is wrong.
I've never heard Neo-Victorian used to describe Fordism, but I suppose he's talking about like highly structured, gendered social orders as fostering productive societies.
I think he's saying that when American homes were more orderly, the American empire was also creating wealth and opportunity around the world.
Amazing how that works.
You know, as above, so below.
Now, it wasn't that the country was actually spending the war surplus on nuclear weapons and beating down socialist movements around the world and resisting civil rights tooth and nail and setting the stage for union busting in the late 70s.
The mooch isn't a historian and, you know, he's going to be as vulnerable to U.S. propaganda as anyone else.
So this isn't a knock on him personally so much as looking at how exceptionalism and traditionalism all kind of blend together in this new liberal manosphere pot.
I think the most telling part here is his tempered praise for Henry Ford.
The mooch knows enough history to know that the reason that Ford wanted his line workers to afford the cars they were making was to prevent labor unrest.
Maybe he even knows that the status of workers not being able to afford their products is a classic condition of capitalist crisis, according to Marx.
But what's telling to me here is the Mooch's conclusion, that Henry Ford embodied positive masculinity through his car pricing.
Somehow, he leaves out the part about how Ford brutalized labor unions.
He left out the part about Ford's service department, which was the 3,000 goons he hired to beat up or in one case, machine gun workers striking for fairer wages.
He leaves out the part about Ford loving Hitler and making trucks for the Reich that carried soldiers that killed Americans.
I mean, maybe that's the wicked part of his masculinity, but the good part of Ford's masculinity was that he wanted every guy to be able to make car payments because that's what makes a man.
Music Okay, so I hope I've done a fair job on the big picture of the Lost Boys.
This is an earnest, mainly liberal, charismatic, wealthy tycoon duo trying to suss out sources of young men's suffering by digging into their own anecdotes and locating those sources and confusion around cultural shifts and the excesses of capitalism they themselves have accelerated, but that leaves them in a bind.
But what will make Galloway in particular successful, I think, in this emerging manosphere space is his penchant for making or trying to make evidence-based arguments.
He is where he is because of well-received analyses of the economies of big tech.
I haven't read those books.
I don't really care to, but the reviews are generally positive from any direction.
So I just believe that he's competent in that area and maybe even helpful to a lot of people.
But when he goes out of business smarts territory and into economic policy, and then he gets into his Sanders wheelhouse about bad policies that transfer wealth from the young to the old, he does get a lot of flack from the right on his data and methods.
But from what I can see, he's still reasonably well respected as a liberal left observer of capitalist flows.
And he has a need embedded in that sort of research persona to at least respect process and data.
And that drives the Lost Boys brand to front load Richard Reeves in the first two episodes as the gold standard empirical observer of young men today.
So I'm going to spend the balance of this episode on how Galloway and the Mooch position Reeves, because I think this is what locks in the impression that Lost Boys is a serious project as opposed to, you know, Manosphere Light handwringing.
But before I get to Reeves, there are other signs of seriousness evident in the other guests so far.
There's a pretty good appearance from Dan Harris.
He's the 10% happier guy, a former broadcast journalist who pulled the brakes on his life when he had an on-air panic attack and he learned a little bit about Buddhism and mindfulness meditation.
And so he says some standard things about emotional vulnerability and self-regulation and touching grass and learning how to breathe.
And he stays out of the culture war stuff, but he does offer some broad comments on parenting in the vein of, Gen Xers have created a world in which kids receive insufficient training and social interaction.
So his argument is that earlier, less helicopter parented environments allowed children to naturally bump up against other kids and get scrapes and get insults and learn how to build up psychological immunity, unquote.
And that's a theme that will come up especially in the Patreon episode that will drop on Monday, this notion of like building calluses or psychological immunity, even if it comes from, you know, your parents losing their shit or from them neglecting you.
Okay, so former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang was also on the podcast and he offered his thoughts on increasing investment in vocational programs, that that would be good for young men.
So HVAC repair, plumbing, maintenance.
These are all resistant industries to AI and automation.
He also wanted to incentivize male teachers to have more male role models in classrooms.
He's a big fan of UBI, which he painted as inevitable as AI automates more jobs.
And then he had some more muscular stuff like free MMA training or national tough man competitions.
I can't think Of what could go wrong there.
And also, national mandatory military service, I suppose, as you would see in Israel.
He also complained that the DNC muzzled him on men's issues in the 2020 primary.
And so he praised the Lost Boys for presenting a third-way masculinity between men are evil and men can do no wrong, which he describes as creating a vacuum for bad operators.
I was disappointed, I have to say, that Yang was the only guest who was in the position of discussing neurodiversity and kids because he's the outspoken advocate dad for his autistic son, but the subject didn't come up.
The Lost Boys certainly don't stigmatize neurodiversity like the Maha crowd does, but listening to them avoid or ignore the topic just lines them up with the culture of RFK Jr., who swears up and down that he didn't know any autistic kids when he was growing up.
Thank you.
Okay, so who is Richard Reeves?
He tags himself as a European liberal.
He spent a lot of his career at liberal think tanks such as Deimos and Brookings researching social mobility and racialized income gaps.
He's British.
He's 55.
He was born in Peterborough.
He has a BA in geography from Oxford and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Warwick.
Now, politically, he says he's unaligned.
He argues that Democrats have neglected the concerns of men and boys while Republicans offer performative masculinity, but lack substantive solutions.
His now famous research-heavy book is called Of Boys and Men.
It came out in 2022.
And in it, he argues that boys are falling behind girls in education globally with wider gender gaps in college degrees and grade school.
In the labor market, he says that men show declining employment rates and stagnating wages impacted by automation and globalization.
And at home, he says that fathers have lost their traditional provider role, leading to a dad deficit, that's his term, and a sense of purposelessness.
Reeves shows that a lot of these challenges are actually more acute for black boys and men who face gendered racism and high incarceration rates.
And also, he says, that poor men are disproportionately impacted, especially when we see the stats on men dying deaths of despair.
Now, for Reeves, the left side of the political spectrum is guilty of what he calls progressive blindness, while the political right exploits male grievances and seeks to revert to traditional roles.
And you'd think that this is Reeves' own yearning, given where the three men start, which is by commiserating over the loss of certainty for young men.
So beneath the surface of the facts, there's this question about identity.
And I do think that there was a clearer script.
That's the way I like to think about this, is that the old script was for women, wife and mother.
Are you going to raise the kids?
And the old script for men, was he going to be the economic provider, head of household, breadwinner?
That was a script my parents had.
And I had a great upbringing.
I'm very lucky, et cetera.
But there wasn't like a question that they had to ask us about how they're going to divide it.
We tore those scripts up, I think, Anthony.
I'll see how you both react to this.
I think we tore them up and we said to women, your script is no longer housewife, mother.
It's anything you want it to be.
It's CEO, it's leader, it's you-go girl.
It's amazing.
And as Scott said, that's arguably the biggest economic liberation in human history.
Amazing.
So the script that girls and young women get now is around autonomy, of independence, assertiveness.
It's all uplift.
It's incredibly empowering.
We tore up the old script for men, which was breadwinner, head of household, etc.
And we didn't replace it with anything.
We just tore up the old script.
And so what that means is a lot of men now feel like they're basically improvising.
They basically don't have a script.
Now, soon after that clip, the mooch chimes in with, we knew what men were supposed to be and supposed to do.
He talks about how things were more easily defined when we were growing up.
And this is noting this period when he and Scott Galloway, as I said, they were born in 1964, quote, had some definition to our lives with certain things that boys did and certain things that girls did, unquote.
What does he suggest?
How can boys be helped, according to Reeves?
Now, he advises redshirting boys.
This means starting kindergarten a year later, which is pretty interesting idea with very contested downstream effects.
A lot of people argue about whether that's a good or terribly bad idea.
He talks about guiding men into heel professions, health, education, administration, and literacy, because he says that's, you know, a future growth sector.
He promotes fatherhood as an independent social institution focused on direct caregiving, supported by policies like equal parental leave.
All great to me.
Don't know about the red shirting, but good.
His aim is to promote what he calls a pro-social masculinity for a post-feminist world.
Now, by that, he is careful to say that he doesn't mean that this is an end to or a rejection of feminism, but rather as a societal stage that follows the significant achievements of the feminist movement.
In Reeves' post-feminist world, the lives of women have been largely recast, he says, having achieved substantial economic independence and equality, threatening men with obsolescence as they lag behind in adaptation.
So Reeves is well-educated.
He comes off as such, but he doesn't hold formal qualifications in anything that actually pertains to his fame in sociology, gender studies, parenting psychology, or child psychology.
So, I mean, right off the bat, my radar goes up for the archetype of the intellectual influencer who's a generalist who gets fixated on a complicated, big brain topic that actually requires discipline expertise.
A lot of examples in this category.
Steven Pinker jumps from linguistics to being a galaxy brain on the topic of human violence, Or Jonathan Haidt jumps from social psychology to internet studies and youth.
And when the internet and youth people review his work on kids and social media, they find all kinds of errors.
So these are guys who can seem competent from their endowed chairs at 30,000 feet, but they're also able to tell the liberal intellectual world a story that they want to hear.
Everyone loves Pinker's story that the Enlightenment changed everything irrevocably for the better, if you don't factor in little things like colonialism.
Gen X parents love that height gives them a narrow cause for their children's despair.
And for any parent of a boy, Reeves says they are suffering because the old scripts are gone.
But because they don't do fieldwork or have discipline expertise, what you get from books like these is a lot of armchair statisticalizing.
And this is the strength of Reeves' research.
But it's a strength that becomes a liability when critics look carefully at the work and accuse Reeves of misrepresenting data or presenting the redlining idea as though it's not enormously complicated.
For instance, with regard to the data, some point out that he exaggerates the claim that boys are behind in school, or he incorrectly asserts that gendered learning gaps in grade school are widening when in fact they're pretty consistent for decades, despite a significant shift in college enrollment ratios favoring women.
One of the claims that Reeves makes is that the GPA gap has widened with an A being the most common high school grade for girls and a B for boys.
But critics argue that this is a misleading way of saying that both grades grew proportionally and steadily and girls simply crossed the threshold from B to A. Now, there are also pings of something called the gap instinct, where the variance between one distribution is forgotten to be larger than the variance between two distributions.
For example, saying boys are two-thirds of a grade behind girls in reading is equivalent to saying they are one-third of a standard deviation behind, and that makes it sound like a lot bigger of a difference than it is.
So the bottom line is that it looks like in some cases Reeves' data is applied to supporting a story rather than the other way around.
But if the stats make you glaze over, Alice Capel offers a solid critique of Reeves' downstream political impacts in a book called Collapse Feminism, Rethinking Society and Challenging Patriarchy.
Capell's main argument about Reeves is that he basically, quote, pathologizes social evolutions that benefit women into a masculinity crisis.
She says that Reeves' decision, which he was free to make, to prioritize gender as the framework for analyzing disparities, implying men's underperformance is because of their gender, is seen as aligning with the manosphere at large's anti-feminist and sexist beliefs.
So one effect of his work is to offer respectable liberal validation to right-wing groups, giving them yet another reason to blame it all on women, despite the continued significant social, economic, and political power held by men.
So the impact, Capell says, is that Reeves' focus on men implicitly reproduces the very zero-sum thinking on gender equality that he says he wants to transcend.
Now, Capell also takes issue with Reeves' argument that the toxic masculinity is overused to describe any male behavior deemed undesirable.
And Capell says that this really only makes sense from the perspective of the accused in a personal or individual sense, and it ignores the systemic nature of problematic male behaviors and the historical efforts of women, including feminists, to guide men towards healthier forms of masculinity.
So the project poses as liberal, but by default, actually tends to align with conservative yearning to reinvigorate old binaries.
And finally, Capell, and other critics do this as well, tag Reeves' centrist position as not sufficiently indicting the economic ruling class.
And I think this is why he's a really good sort of intellectual guide for the Lost Boys podcast, because they say, the critics say, men's struggles stem from, you know, oligarchy and big corporations and their cronies having forced us all to take care of ourselves without any kinds of social safety nets or unions.
And with regard to unions, Reeves does acknowledge that this is a personal oversight when talking about tools for solidarity.
So TLDR, Reeves, is a compelling figure because of his apparent wonkish neutrality and appeals to common sense.
But as is typically the case with centrist thinkers, the devil is in the details.
And any focus on gender as a core organizing principle for the health of boys and men is going to have to struggle hard not to reinvigorate a kind of status quo.
And I think that's why he is, as I said, a solid intellectual anchor point for the Lost Boys project, appeals to data on gender that obscure larger issues of political and economic equality.
Okay, that's episode one.
I hope that this overview is helpful for clarifying the philosophical and economic contradictions at the heart of this part of the new liberal manosphere discourse.
On Monday, the subject is more grim because, as I mentioned, it'll be a close reading of an episode in which Deirdre Scaramucci joins the Lost Boys for a long chinwag about their own childhoods and the paradox of feeling that despite the neglect and raging fathers and the grinding poverty, that somehow the 70s and 80s were so much more normal, so much more sensible.
It's an episode that really exposes a side of the project that I think is romantic, nostalgic, and ultimately reactionary.
Because despite their multi-millionaire status, these folks, as they appear to be just regular, even decent people trying to do the best by their sons, the question that's really important is whether they're in any position to counsel anyone outside of their own houses, let alone the future.
