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July 21, 2025 - Conspirituality
04:43
Bonus Sample: Galloway and the Mooch: The Lost Boys of Capitalism (Pt 2)

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 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

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Time Text
I don't think my parents were ever like, oh, I'm traumatized.
I know for shit sure I was traumatized plenty of times, and I think I'm fine today.
I'm functioning adult.
I don't know why we're so worried about traumatizing them if they'll like us, but we are.
So I can't figure that out.
That is Deirdre Scaramucci, the partner of and co-parent with Anthony Scaramucci.
And this clip kicks off a bonus episode called Galloway and the Mooch, Lost Boys of Capitalism, Part 2.
Now part one, dropped this past Saturday in the main feed.
And it was an overview introduction to what I'm seeing as a rising phenomenon, an earnest, liberal, but mildly reactionary manosphere world.
And it's really visible through the lens of this limited podcast series called The Lost Boys, put out by Anthony Scaramucci and Professor G. Scott Galloway.
Galloway has a related book coming out this November that's ambitiously titled Notes on Being a Man.
And so I'm getting started on understanding Galloway and his whole scene now because my hunch is that the book is going to be a really big deal.
So in part one, I tagged the Lost Boys series as soaking in a kind of ambivalent Gen X nostalgia for simpler times, but also really imbued with this tortured relationship to the capitalism that they are trying to help young men navigate, and they're trying to help them navigate it through the mystery of gender.
And my basic take is that this turn into self-help territory is a deceptively empathetic on-ramp that leads to the dead end of encouraging young men to comply with capitalism rather than change it.
And it can't really help but be romantic, nostalgic, and ahistorical in some places.
And really the whole vibe is, you know, suck it up and that will be the new type of manhood.
And I don't really see how it's that much different from the old type.
Now, I also covered in some detail the work of Richard Reeves.
He's the author of Boys and Men from 2022.
And he's important to the Lost Boys series because Galloway dubs him his Yoda on issues of failing masculinity.
So he's the first Lost Boys guest, and he appears on episodes one and two to unpack his thesis.
He basically argues that boys are falling behind girls in education and employment, that they suffer from a dad deficit, and that they're in the precarious position of having to improvise in a world of vanished or at least changing gender scripts.
But I also surveyed the criticism of his statistical methods because there's a lot of dispute over what he's actually saying in terms of data.
And I also covered how critics like Alice Capel show how one downstream effect of Reeves' work is to offer a kind of respectable liberal validation to misogynistic influencers by giving them yet another reason to blame it all on women or feminism, despite the continued significant social, economic, and political power held by men.
Capell basically says that because Reeves chooses to focus on maleness and masculinity, he can't help but to implicitly reproduce the very zero-sum thinking on gender equality that he actually says he wants to transcend.
Okay, so in part one, the focus was squarely on Galloway and LaMooch, but today we're going to add Deirdre Scaramucci to the mix because the focus is going to be a close reading of episode seven of the Lost Boys podcast.
This is a one-hour trio discussion and it's called Raising Modern Men, a Mother's Perspective.
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