Conspirituality - 303: When Men Gather
Aired: 2026-04-09
Duration: 01:05:50


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[00:01:10]  Spirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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[00:01:57]  New Yorker writer Charles Bethaya recently decided to attend men's retreats.

=== Darwin, Alpha Males, and Empathy (15:25) ===

[00:02:02]  Well, at least those who would admit him.
[00:02:05]  His expose on the modern men's movement got us thinking about what's happening over those very expensive three day weekends, as well as the inspiration behind these groups dating back to the 70s.
[00:02:16]  And even how a movement tracing back to the work of Robert Bly was co opted by the right wing alpha male crowd.
[00:02:24]  Today, we discuss Bethaya's article in the context of modern men's groups, where they come from, what function they serve, and what they might get wrong, and horribly wrong.
[00:02:42]  While I was still on Twitter, I remember seeing this dude named Nick Adams posting as the alpha guy.
[00:02:48]  And it was so over the top, I just couldn't tell if he was serious or not.
[00:02:53]  It just felt like parody.
[00:02:55]  But no, of course not, because men who posture as alpha males can only sound like parody, it seems.
[00:03:03]  A former conservative politician in Australia who couldn't find much success there, he did what all aspiring alphas do.
[00:03:11]  He moved to America and became a Trump supporter.
[00:03:15]  Which, of course, he was rewarded for.
[00:03:18]  Trump positively tweeted about two of Adams' books, and then he wrote the forward.
[00:03:24]  Well, someone wrote the forward for Donald for Adams' 2024 book, Alpha Kings.
[00:03:33]  Trump nominated Adams to be the ambassador to Malaysia, which was dropped due to his extremist views.
[00:03:40]  And then Trump invented a role just for Adams called The special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism, and values, which Adams currently holds.
[00:03:54]  I just want to give you a taste of his tweets over the last few years.
[00:03:57]  So here are a couple.
[00:03:59]  You may not like it, but I sit with my legs spread wide open.
[00:04:03]  Deal with it, accept it, move on.
[00:04:06]  Alpha male out.
[00:04:08]  Does that mean like out?
[00:04:10]  You're out in the open, you've come out of the closet, you're admitting to your alpha maleness because you're manspreading on the subway.
[00:04:15]  He's not taking the subway though.
[00:04:17]  What's he talking about?
[00:04:18]  Are you serious?
[00:04:19]  Serious about what?
[00:04:21]  He's not going to be on the subway.
[00:04:22]  Oh, out just means I'm out of here.
[00:04:24]  It's like a mic drop.
[00:04:25]  I'm out.
[00:04:25]  Oh, I'm out.
[00:04:26]  Okay.
[00:04:26]  Yeah, like over and out.
[00:04:27]  Oh, alpha male out.
[00:04:29]  Mic drop out.
[00:04:30]  Okay.
[00:04:30]  All right.
[00:04:31]  Okay.
[00:04:31]  So the next one is Alpha males wash football at Hooters and play 36 holes of golf with the boys.
[00:04:37]  Beta males play nine holes with their wives and go to Chili's for the two for $20 deal.
[00:04:43]  There's a lot going on in that one.
[00:04:45]  There's a lot of golf ones I should note.
[00:04:48]  I had to choose between many golf ones, but also Chili's.
[00:04:52]  Black bean burger back when I was a vegetarian.
[00:04:54]  Excellent.
[00:04:55]  So fuck him.
[00:04:55]  Being a straight white alpha male is the toughest job in America.
[00:05:00]  Okay, this is a good one.
[00:05:02]  Keep your communist oat milk out of my coffee and we won't have any issues.
[00:05:08]  It's like somebody's threatening him with a pitcher of oat milk at his table or something like that.
[00:05:14]  That's laced with estrogen.
[00:05:17]  Is that the communist thing?
[00:05:18]  Is that like if it's not dairy, it's got to be related to soy or something like that?
[00:05:23]  I chose you to read that one, Matthew, because I thought you could explain it to us.
[00:05:27]  Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
[00:05:29]  That is, I mean, I'm fairly well read.
[00:05:31]  I can't make the connection there.
[00:05:33]  Adams also once tweeted, put down the Fortnite, pick up a Bible and a hacky sack, which, like, I, as a former serious hacky sacker in college, I did most of that, that's where I spent most of my class time.
[00:05:47]  I, I, that's why I thought all this was parody.
[00:05:49]  Yeah.
[00:05:50]  I think Fortnite is an appropriate target for these guys because it really embodies kind of like a full cultural anarchy that I don't think they can really understand.
[00:06:01]  Like, I don't know if you guys know Fortnite, but they, Collaborate with every bit of every IP they can, from like anime to DC Comics, Disney, whatever's trending on Spotify.
[00:06:12]  And so players can literally be anyone through the purchase of an infinite number of skins and accessories, and people are switching gender all the time.
[00:06:23]  So it's this very, like, if you were one of these dudes and your kid was playing this thing, they are in a very unstable environment if you're a controlling dad, right?
[00:06:34]  My old friend was the lawyer who helped to broker DJ Marshmallow in Fortnite.
[00:06:39]  And when that happened years ago, that was like something like 10 million people showed up to this event.
[00:06:44]  And that was the first time that I really was like, what is going on inside of these games?
[00:06:49]  I had no idea about the game infrastructure.
[00:06:51]  So when that event happened and he told me about it, I was like, this is crazy.
[00:06:55]  Yeah, Fortnite is an incredible sort of cultural mashup.
[00:06:59]  It's basically you are watching the entire world unfold in front of you in terms of cultural artifacts and commodities.
[00:07:07]  It's crazy.
[00:07:08]  Well, I bring up Nick because that's how New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethaya opens his article on alpha males.
[00:07:17]  While Bethaya attends some of the alpha male retreats that he writes about here and is actually rejected by more that he applied for, he looks at this cottage industry and some of its main influencers.
[00:07:28]  Now, while Adams doesn't run retreats, at least not yet, he serves as yet another white man failing upwards simply for kowtowing to power.
[00:07:37]  He writes that Trump is a quote, Study in peak alpha masculinity for the ages.
[00:07:43]  Oh, so obvious.
[00:07:45]  Why do you even have to say it clearly?
[00:07:47]  That's right.
[00:07:49]  As crazy as some of the tweets that you guys just read sound, Adams does have influence.
[00:07:55]  He has 637,000 followers on Twitter.
[00:07:59]  He has a mind numbing 2.1 million on Facebook, which is obviously the place where true alpha males gather.
[00:08:06]  Right.
[00:08:07]  A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a brief comparing Corrine Lowe's book, Having It All What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, which is a book written for women, but which I argued that men should read.
[00:08:21]  And then I compared it to Scott Galloway's male focus book, Notes on Being a Man, which Matthew, you did many episodes about really breaking that down.
[00:08:30]  And that's why the New Yorker article jumped out at me because one thing Bethaya Mines, without necessarily naming it, Is the lengths that men are going to to be men right now and how that compares to men that women want to be with because that's usually one of the main things they talk about.
[00:08:52]  It all reminds me of these memes that are going on right now.
[00:08:55]  They're comparing the male gaze.
[00:08:56]  And Matthew, you brought up the fact that traditionally this is like men being aggressive towards women.
[00:09:01]  And women are rethinking and sort of co opting it in a positive way because they're saying, Men, you think this is what we want, but This is what we actually really want.
[00:09:14]  And they call it the female gaze, which is usually something like Ryan Gosling looking sweetly into the camera or Pedro Pascal petting a dog.
[00:09:22]  Or last week, there were all these ones from the pit when the night shift came in.
[00:09:26]  And they're like, these are the men that we actually want.
[00:09:30]  So I thought this article would be a good opportunity for us to discuss and analyze this new wave of men's retreats and put them in the context of the work of men like Robert Bly and Michael Mead, who presented very different versions of masculinity in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
[00:09:46]  And perhaps this will lead us into some of our main beat conspiracy theories, because even in Bethaya's article, he tugs at how male misperceptions of reality create this paranoid sense that the world is against them.
[00:10:00]  And it could offer some insights into the right leaning, male driven half of the term conspirituality.
[00:10:07]  The article covers a lot of familiar territory for this podcast in regards to our work on the manosphere.
[00:10:14]  I've dropped a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.
[00:10:17]  And there are two aspects that I want to touch on in this first segment.
[00:10:20]  First, the term alpha male.
[00:10:23]  Now, the concept can be traced back to Rudolf Schenkel's observations of captive wolves in the 1940s, which was then used by biologist L. David Meck in his 1970 book, The Wolf.
[00:10:37]  But the mainstreaming of the term is largely due to primatologist Franz de Waal, which is where Bethaya focuses his energy.
[00:10:45]  His 1982 book, Chimpanzee Politics, ended up becoming required reading for the Republican congressman in 1994.
[00:10:55]  Due to Newt Gingrich's fascination with the idea that alpha chimps were the strongest and mightiest, a concept that was already in circulation during Reagan's pro business tenure, and which DeWall spent the rest of his career pushing back against and trying to correct.
[00:11:13]  Yeah.
[00:11:14]  Gingrich, like the Manosphere figures leading the boot camps that we're going to discuss, buys into the strong, aggressive, dominant alpha male myth.
[00:11:25]  I want to play Franz de Waal explaining the concept shortly before his death in 2024.
[00:11:31]  All social animals have social hierarchies.
[00:11:35]  If you put six puppies together, they will fight over who's the highest ranking.
[00:11:40]  If you put six goslings together, if you put kids together in a daycare center, they will do the same thing.
[00:11:46]  All young animals, they will try to establish their rank order.
[00:11:50]  But usually the first position is the most important one, and that's the one that they compete over.
[00:11:57]  People sometimes ask me what it takes to be an alpha male?
[00:12:00]  And they think the answer from a primatologist would be what it takes is to be the strongest and the meanest and the most intimidating.
[00:12:08]  But that's not really what an alpha male usually is.
[00:12:12]  An alpha male is usually also admired.
[00:12:15]  They protect the underdog, they break up fights, they have a high level of empathy.
[00:12:22]  So yeah, you may want to be an alpha male, but if your surrounding people don't see you as that, It's not going to happen.
[00:12:30]  That part where he talks about young kids just hit me because I remember in kindergarten, we used to make Lego trucks and then ram them into each other and see who would get destroyed first.
[00:12:40]  And I would make these really big ones, but that weren't very stable.
[00:12:44]  And my friend Chris, who ended up becoming like a math genius, he scored like 800 on the math SATs and ended up going into engineering.
[00:12:51]  He would build these short, compact cars that would destroy everyone else's.
[00:12:56]  And it was just an amazing display of understanding physics, I guess, which is why that was never my field.
[00:13:02]  I have to ask you, Derek, where you got that clip and why it has that music, because the music is very triumphant.
[00:13:08]  Right.
[00:13:09]  So he was on Big Think, which is one of my former columns.
[00:13:13]  And it was just the beginning.
[00:13:14]  They took a collection of what he was saying.
[00:13:16]  I see.
[00:13:17]  So I couldn't get all that together without the music.
[00:13:20]  Yeah.
[00:13:20]  So it's a much longer video.
[00:13:22]  And what DeWall brings up is what Gingrich and Manosphere influencers often miss strength is a component in the alpha male, but so is leadership, cooperation, collaboration.
[00:13:32]  And empathy, which are all equally important.
[00:13:35]  So, I don't know much about DeWall or this thesis at all, but this premise that you put six kids into kindergarten and they're going to sort of vie for ascendancy and somebody's going to be the leader, but all of these other qualities have to be in place.
[00:13:50]  I would bet that part of the cooperation and collaboration and empathy aspects are also about identifying who within the group has skills that.
[00:14:03]  Normally aren't emphasized or are normally invisible, and who can be sort of encouraged or can be brought out to offer their gifts to the rest of the group, too.
[00:14:15]  Because we're also talking about a great variation in terms of skills and neurotypes and all kinds of variations in kids.
[00:14:25]  So I wonder if that's there, too.
[00:14:27]  Yeah.
[00:14:27]  And it seems like the main point he's making and that you're referencing here, Derek, is that it's not being the most domineering.
[00:14:34]  That tends to get you into that elevated status.
[00:14:39]  It actually has a lot to do with social empathy and the capacity to interact and communicate and collaborate and be the one that people end up admiring and seeing as either competent or a good protector of the weak or qualities like that.
[00:14:57]  Well, that's the most interesting part, right?
[00:14:59]  Is that the person is valued because they can break up fights or they can champion for the underdog, which suggests that leadership.
[00:15:09]  In those terms, it is really about what benefits social cohesion more than anything else.
[00:15:13]  Not who's going to decide what everybody's going to do, but who is best at figuring out, well, how can we best work together, right?
[00:15:22]  Well, in all those 80s John Cusack movies, we know where the bully ends up every time.
[00:15:26]  So that's important too.
[00:15:29]  Now, what DeWall is referencing too kind of echoes what Charles Darwin himself went through.
[00:15:35]  Biologists latched onto the concept of survival of the fittest, which was actually coined by Herbert Spencer.
[00:15:41]  Darwin only included it in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species.
[00:15:46]  And even then, Darwin was a little reluctant to use it because he thought it dumbed down the multivariate conditions of evolution.
[00:15:54]  And in fact, Darwin's 1871 book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, argues that beauty is just as important of a driver of evolution as strength.
[00:16:06]  But the male dominated field of biology kept laser focused on natural selection until only recently.
[00:16:14]  And honestly, because a lot more women have gotten into the sciences and started looking at the material.
[00:16:19]  DeWall himself published his last book, which was called Mama's Last Hug in 2019, in order to detail the empathy and cooperative complexity of primate life over the dominance and power framing that had lodged itself in the public imagination.
[00:16:35]  It's not that strength doesn't matter, but it's not all that matters.
[00:16:39]  Yeah.
[00:16:40]  And to go back to the Darwin reference, I feel like, too, during the initial period of his ideas gaining a lot of traction, you had.
[00:16:48]  Equal parts misinterpretation and overemphasis on natural selection and survival of the fittest, right?
[00:16:53]  Where there's a kind of social Darwinism that emerges where people misuse the concepts to suggest that almost in a eugenicist kind of way, and then vice versa.
[00:17:04]  There's a lot of maybe people with a more religious orientation who say, oh no, this is a justification for being amoral or for enabling cruelty because it's quote unquote natural.
[00:17:15]  And none of that is what Darwin is actually saying.
[00:17:17]  No, the religion, I mean, we'll leave religion aside for now, but.
[00:17:21]  All of the biologists at the time having to tiptoe around religion was problematic.

=== The Squires Program Controversy (13:10) ===

[00:17:28]  Interestingly, Darwin himself was probably more eugenicist in terms of.
[00:17:34]  Than he assigned to other animals because he thought that different races had levels and orders.
[00:17:40]  That was a personal feeling of his.
[00:17:41]  Did not know that.
[00:17:42]  And there was also probably about 20 years between him publishing his original essay and the book on the origin of species.
[00:17:53]  And the only reason that he published it was because other people were starting to catch on that there was such a thing as evolution and natural selection at the time.
[00:18:05]  So he even felt rushed in publishing it.
[00:18:07]  So, there was a lot of dynamics that were, he never really felt satisfied with anything that he published because he always thought there were more components to bring in, which probably is also why he suffered from such bad stomach aches that he had to spend days at a time laid up on the couch because he was just always, he was a very stressed person, is what I'm saying.
[00:18:29]  Sure, sure.
[00:18:30]  Now, all these complexities get flattened in the men's camps that Bethaya attends.
[00:18:36]  Now, he does mention a number of them, but he ends up focusing on two.
[00:18:40]  Here's his take on the first.
[00:18:41]  Each had paid $3,000 to take part in a three day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution.
[00:18:51]  It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and as its website puts it, change your story to unfuck your life.
[00:19:00]  The van's speakers played a high volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices.
[00:19:12]  Audio torture.
[00:19:13]  So construction sounds, what, like bandsaws?
[00:19:15]  I said this a couple of weeks ago in something that we did, but this is another one of these descriptions that could easily be part of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on NPR, where it's like they give you three different scenarios and you have to guess which one is actually true because they all sound equally ridiculous and like a parody.
[00:19:30]  In an interview with NPR, Bethaya says he couldn't distinguish between these men's camps and military boot camps, and Rise's site and social media handles certainly give off that military vibe.
[00:19:42]  Their tagline is Where Greatness is Hunted.
[00:19:46]  Rise was founded by crisis consultant and motivational speaker Brendan King.
[00:19:51]  To get a taste of the group's marketing ethos, I got a clip of King recording while he was driving and he was heading out into the mountains somewhere talking about the application process to attend a Rise retreat.
[00:20:05]  See, what's funny is we always get a number of folks that will fill out an app, and it's always, you know, and it's the hate.
[00:20:12]  It's the haters.
[00:20:13]  It's the bullshit.
[00:20:14]  It's the guys that are just, you know, keyboard warriors and.
[00:20:19]  Like it's to be expected.
[00:20:20]  But what's so funny is that when those men come in and I offer them a free spot at one of our events, none of them take us up on it.
[00:20:29]  None of them.
[00:20:30]  And it's not because they couldn't get through what we do, it's that the fear of taking that step to better themselves and raising their standard is not something they're prepared to do.
[00:20:49]  So, I'd ask you, are you one of those men who dreams of living at a standard of excellence within yourself?
[00:21:01]  Or are you just a man that just wants to sit on the sidelines?
[00:21:04]  Is he talking about people who are trolling the application process?
[00:21:08]  People who are writing and saying, that sounds like a real loser program.
[00:21:12]  I would rather gnaw my arm off.
[00:21:14]  Or comments on their feeds.
[00:21:16]  Or comments on their feeds.
[00:21:17]  Like he gets pretty triggered, it seems, by people who just, you know, criticize what he's doing.
[00:21:23]  Right.
[00:21:23]  And so then, and then he's surprised and he turns it into a thing that they don't want to attend the thing for a free tuition.
[00:21:29]  Yeah.
[00:21:30]  But they've already indicated that.
[00:21:32]  That's just making content out of anything, right?
[00:21:34]  Like, yeah, that's so weird.
[00:21:36]  Yeah.
[00:21:36]  But it's also, it also just speaks to him just being like, but if you're a real man, you'll want to attend, right?
[00:21:42]  That's the whole thing.
[00:21:43]  And you can hear so many echoes of alpha maleness here.
[00:21:46]  The haters won't understand or engage, but you, you, man, listening, you're not a keyboard warrior.
[00:21:52]  You want to be out in the wild with us, shirtless in the snow, blindfolded.
[00:21:57]  Carrying logs up a steep path for who knows fucking why.
[00:22:01]  Now, this is pretty straightforward compared to some of the other programs Bethaya stumbled across.
[00:22:07]  Okay, quote, other programs sell teens on Christ like manhood, which includes learning basic auto repair.
[00:22:17]  That's $2,000.
[00:22:18]  So this is just like LLM stuff.
[00:22:20]  Like they just, it's just MAGA.
[00:22:22]  We just plugged it into some AI search engine and came up with a description.
[00:22:26]  Okay.
[00:22:26]  So the blog for the art of manliness has a primer on how to poop like a samurai.
[00:22:32]  Come on.
[00:22:33]  Legs free is good.
[00:22:34]  Legs free and armed is better.
[00:22:37]  Is that referring to the pooping posture?
[00:22:39]  Yeah.
[00:22:39]  Yeah.
[00:22:40]  So it's like squatting.
[00:22:41]  Squatting.
[00:22:42]  Squatting.
[00:22:42]  Squatting, but also holding your squat.
[00:22:44]  No, but you're using your legs.
[00:22:46]  Legs free?
[00:22:46]  What's it?
[00:22:47]  I don't know.
[00:22:47]  You're free from the support of a toilet seat.
[00:22:50]  Of a throne?
[00:22:51]  Okay.
[00:22:53]  The Men of War Crucible offers to forge modern day warriors and restore the masculine warrior spirit as typified by the Knights Templar.
[00:23:02]  One industry observer told.
[00:23:04]  Told me, they just beat the shit out of you for days on end.
[00:23:06]  It's alpha as fuck.
[00:23:09]  Warrior Week advertises an acceptance rate similar to that of an Ivy League school.
[00:23:14]  You must find a way in, the program's site warns.
[00:23:19]  I DM'd Warrior Week's head coach, who calls himself the Reverend of Truth and has said, Transformation is not theory, it's war, asking to visit a session.
[00:23:30]  He called me brother in his response, which ended in a rejection.
[00:23:33]  An automated message from another program, which also denied me, read, Thank you, Warrior.
[00:23:39]  So, I get also why the other guy doesn't like Fortnite is that he really wants everybody to sound like they're in Call of Duty.
[00:23:47]  That's what's really going on.
[00:23:49]  They don't want the little songs, they just want straight up first person shooter dialogue through all of their interactions.
[00:23:55]  That's what they want.
[00:23:56]  And I just realized when you were reading it, the person who wrote, You Must Find a Way In, I guarantee they watched a Kurosawa movie where the acolyte wanted to study with the master and had to wait outside for days.
[00:24:09]  That's absolutely where they got that.
[00:24:11]  And also perfect their legs free pooping samurai squat while holding a sword.
[00:24:18]  Right.
[00:24:18]  The Thea goes on to write about the modern day night project created by former Fit Body Boot Camp founder, Pedro's I don't know and I don't care, Kulian.
[00:24:30]  While the program ended in 2024, he then launched something new, which I think is a good frame for the rest of this episode, as it really nails the misreading of what an alpha male entails.
[00:24:42]  Culean more recently founded the Squire program, which now trains teenaged boys in six states.
[00:24:49]  It is marketed as a rite of passage for your son as he becomes a man or a savage servant, as Culean calls righteous men capable of ass kicking.
[00:24:59]  Knights had squires that helped them prepare their armor, horse, and weapons for war, Culean told me, and the squires had the knights as examples of healthy masculinity.
[00:25:09]  Squire's website portrays its work as essential to saving America.
[00:25:13]  The opposition.
[00:25:14]  Is on a mission to weaken masculine societies and turn them into soft, confused, unsure, passive aggressive, feminized betas.
[00:25:21]  It goes on Imagine how much easier it is to have great control over a society when you have a country full of young men who are docile.
[00:25:30]  So, at the same time that this is really sort of ominous with regard to father son relationships, this is also where I think the fragmentary nature of these programs shows through.
[00:25:44]  I think it was some of the best moments.
[00:25:46]  Of the reporting of this article came through this stuff about the Squires program.
[00:25:52]  And it really made me wonder how much, first of all, how much the boys are in trouble panic is a sublimation of like parental and then maybe even marital alienation.
[00:26:03]  Like the whole vibe that Bethaya records is one in which fathers are seeking mentorship from these very dodgy sources on how to relate to their sons as if they are totally clueless.
[00:26:14]  They're total beginners.
[00:26:15]  And, you know, the dynamics end up being really scattershot.
[00:26:18]  There's no real coherent.
[00:26:20]  Guidance.
[00:26:20]  There's one dad during one of the fitness things that's helping his kid with a pull up in a supportive way.
[00:26:27]  And then there's another one doing the same thing, but he's shouting at his kid, Let's go, fat boy.
[00:26:32]  And there's no sort of like opprobrium about that.
[00:26:36]  There's no guidance around like this is the way you're going to talk to kids or this is the best way of motivating them in either direction.
[00:26:41]  Like there's no standard affect that the dads are encouraged to adopt.
[00:26:45]  So I think, you know, anything that seems to connect between father and son, whether it's toxic or not, is the goal.
[00:26:53]  Like they're at that very basic level of trying to just relate to each other.
[00:26:58]  And then I just wanted to highlight two sort of things that were disturbing in this.
[00:27:04]  Zone for me.
[00:27:06]  One was kind of funny, which was, I said disturbing, but this one's kind of funny.
[00:27:11]  There's a lot of like divorce dad energy going on in the Squires program.
[00:27:16]  There's this quote where they're asked to introduce each other at the beginning of the Squires program.
[00:27:21]  And one of these guys says, Man, we're just here to literally be intentional about getting him his manhood.
[00:27:29]  Chad, a dad from Dallas, told the room, gesturing to his gangly 15 year old son, Will.
[00:27:34]  Later, Will told me, I'm mostly just here for my dad.
[00:27:39]  Unquote.
[00:27:40]  Literally.
[00:27:41]  Which is perfect.
[00:27:43]  It's just perfect.
[00:27:44]  Yeah.
[00:27:45]  So I don't even know what that means.
[00:27:47]  We're going to be intentional about getting him his manhood.
[00:27:50]  It's just sort of word salad.
[00:27:52]  Like dad is there and Will knows that this is for his dad.
[00:27:55]  Then the second one was a little bit more troubling because it featured a homeschool boy who's turning into like a manosphere influencer.
[00:28:04]  Okay.
[00:28:04]  Eckert had come with his homeschooled 14 year old son, Tyson, who shook my hand while making penetrating eye contact.
[00:28:11]  Uh oh.
[00:28:13]  Tyson.
[00:28:14]  Who was training to be a UFC fighter was there to model manhood and sonhood for the aspiring Squires.
[00:28:21]  So I don't know whether Tyson's being paid for this or, you know, he's on the coaching staff.
[00:28:25]  There were 10 teenagers who'd traveled from around the country with their dads.
[00:28:29]  The parents had each paid $900.
[00:28:31]  Most had found Squire online.
[00:28:33]  They all wore black and white Squire uniforms.
[00:28:36]  Some sons looked stoked, others looked like hostages.
[00:28:40]  Tyson Eckert, the 14 year old, lectured about character.
[00:28:44]  So this is a kid.
[00:28:45]  And he's giving a lecture now to the other kids about character, competence, confidence, capability, credibility, competitiveness, and courage, all C words, right?
[00:28:54]  And then he says, You need to lift, he told the class, displaying a shirtless photo of himself and a quote attributed to Socrates that extolled the beauty and strength of the male physique.
[00:29:05]  And Bathea does a great job there of just letting that homoerotic illusion just hang in space, waiting for somebody to pick it up.
[00:29:13]  So, what I'm not seeing, like, this is not.
[00:29:16]  Good when we have a homeschooled 14 year old who's like making penetrating eye contact and who wants to be Andrew Tate.
[00:29:23]  Not good, but I'm also not seeing any kind of like systematic or sustained mentorship model.
[00:29:28]  Like these are really encounter experiences, mainly for the dads.
[00:29:34]  And I don't know what the sons are going to get out of them.
[00:29:36]  I'm hoping that some of them are gathering out in the woods and doing their own thing on off hours.
[00:29:41]  I mean, when you were just reading that, it reminded me again of Scott Galloway's TED talk where he showed a shirtless photo of himself while he.
[00:29:49]  Made fun of fat people during the talk.
[00:29:51]  And like, there's no distance between that 50 something year old man and the 14 year old man doing the same thing.
[00:29:57]  Yeah, it's about the same thing.
[00:29:59]  When you brought up the encounter experiences, that's one of the biggest criticisms of these boot camps because they promise transformation.
[00:30:06]  When in reality, everyone knows you're not going to change your life in three days.
[00:30:10]  You might truly get inspired by what you experience.
[00:30:13]  I don't want to deny that, but it's kind of like a psychedelic trip.
[00:30:16]  A flash of insight can be empowering, but the real work is done in day to day sobriety.
[00:30:28]  So, there's an interesting genealogy to trace around men gathering in self help groups to find themselves and chart their course through the world.

=== Men's Rights Movement Schisms (03:23) ===

[00:30:38]  Today's Rise Movement, as we've just been discussing, is clearly MAGA positive, it's Catholic reactionary.
[00:30:45]  But if we go back to the early 1970s, a group of male feminists were publishing articles and books on the negative effects of traditional male stereotypes on both men and women.
[00:30:56]  And this was the dawn of a decidedly progressive men's liberation movement.
[00:31:01]  Led by thinkers like Jack Sawyer, author of On Male Liberation, but also Warren Farrell, who, from within the National Organization for Women, became coordinator of NOW's Task Force on the Masculine Mystique and began a network of more than 200 men's consciousness raising groups throughout the U.S.
[00:31:22]  But then, by the late 1970s, this men's liberation movement had fractured into pro feminists focused on the cost of male gender roles to women.
[00:31:33]  On one side, and on the other, those leaning into male grievance against society and women.
[00:31:40]  The latter group was led by Warren Farrell and others and would become the men's rights movement.
[00:31:47]  And the men's rights movement is primarily concerned with how men are discriminated against in divorce and custody proceedings and things like having higher suicide rates than women, doing the most dangerous jobs, fighting in wars.
[00:32:00]  They claim that men are seen as disposable, they're incarcerated at higher rates, suffer the routine infant trauma of circumcision, and are presumed guilty when accused by women of rape.
[00:32:12]  They claim that male power in society is actually an illusion, and it is in fact men who suffer unfair discrimination while women hold the power.
[00:32:22]  And then once we entered the internet age, various men's rights forums emerged, and all of those talking points became part of the online misogyny culture we very recently discussed with regard to today's manosphere, whose male grievance, misogynist attitudes towards women, and the weaponized seduction tropes of bad evolutionary psychology.
[00:32:44]  All took aspects of men's rights rhetoric as foundational truths that one realizes upon taking the Matrix's red pill.
[00:32:54]  You know, I'd really like to know more about that original schism and more about Farrell himself and what actually happens between liberation and rights, because I'm betting there's all kinds of personal stuff going on there as well, where a certain number of people grow up, a certain number of guys grow up in the men's liberation movement and then go through difficult life changes.
[00:33:17]  Yep.
[00:33:18]  And feel like maybe their politics aren't serving them anymore, even though they might be actually more ethical.
[00:33:27]  It's a very, very bizarre schism there.
[00:33:29]  Yeah.
[00:33:29]  I mean, so much of this is driven by a culture of grievance that is looking for scapegoats, right?
[00:33:36]  Who's to blame for the fact that my life has turned out this way or the fact that I perhaps have bad relationship skills?
[00:33:42]  And if I spent 10 years actually thinking about what it meant to be a more feminist person, then personally, when the shit hit the fan in my own life, Did that actually help me with regard to custody issues?
[00:33:55]  Right?
[00:33:55]  Like, it's like a category, I don't know, confusion, probably.
[00:34:00]  Yeah, that's right.

=== Mythopoetic Poetry and Romanticism (11:33) ===

[00:34:01]  That's right.
[00:34:01]  But then, running parallel to all of this was something referred to as the mythopoetic men's movement that was closely associated with the 1990 publication of Robert Bly's book, Ironjawn.
[00:34:16]  Book about men.
[00:34:16]  And Bly was an award winning poet and a prolific translator of poetry from other cultures.
[00:34:22]  He played a major role in popularizing poets like Hafez, Kabir, Pablo Neruda, and Rumi amongst English speakers, although there is some controversy about how much translating he actually did and how faithful he really was in his renditions of those poems and how much of this is cultural appropriation, right?
[00:34:40]  Well, yeah, because was he really an expert in Arabic and Spanish and everything else?
[00:34:44]  Well, same goes with Coleman Barr.
[00:34:46]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:34:48]  They're all part of the same group and they all used translators and then said, well, we want to make this a little more poetic sounding and infuse it with our own creativity.
[00:34:57]  Yeah, and they also, I believe, quoted Ezra Pound pretty consistently in saying that what you really have to do is you have to translate for the language of the tribe, right?
[00:35:07]  Like you have to intuit what the poem is trying to sort of communicate in its original language, even if you can't speak it, but then see how it speaks to your own heart.
[00:35:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:16]  I mean, that's what you could basically make the argument for.
[00:35:19]  Anyone trying to translate the Bible today.
[00:35:21]  And when they try to use it to say it means this, it's the same phenomenon.
[00:35:25]  We just like to try to pretend that modernity is not changed over hundreds or thousands of years in any capacity.
[00:35:34]  And so the way that I feel about it is the way the text must have been presented at that time.
[00:35:39]  That said, there are people who actually know the various iterations of Greek.
[00:35:44]  They actually learn Aramaic.
[00:35:46]  They can cross the lines and stuff like that, but it's a little bit looser in the poetry world.
[00:35:51]  Yeah, I definitely wasn't talking about them because, like, What's his name?
[00:35:54]  Mark, the Bible guy that we all love.
[00:35:57]  It was his name.
[00:35:58]  It's going to be skilled.
[00:35:59]  Like, yeah, no, those, that is definitely not who I'm talking about.
[00:36:04]  Scholars and academics who can really contextualize it are the people we should be listening to.
[00:36:08]  In his other work, Robert Bly, in his prose, he incorporated many ideas from Jungian psychology and world mythology.
[00:36:16]  And he went pretty deep in this regard.
[00:36:18]  He collaborated with prominent Jungian analyst Marion Woodman.
[00:36:21]  He was friends with Clarissa Pincola Estes, who is the famous author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, kind of.
[00:36:28]  Parallel text to his, in whatever way they may have influenced one another.
[00:36:33]  He was also married to a Jungian analyst named Ruth Council, and his career in the early 70s was actually focused on protesting the Vietnam War and supporting the anti colonial Hungrialist poet activists in India.
[00:36:48]  He also organized something called the Great Mother Conference in 1975, where nine days of poetry, music, and dance were used to examine human consciousness.
[00:36:59]  It was the 70s, guys.
[00:37:00]  The idea here was that honoring and reawakening respect for the Great Mother archetype might be some kind of cultural antidote to what the Vietnam War represented culturally.
[00:37:12]  Bly's central hypothesis, then, in his most prominent book, Iron John, was that men suffered the wound of an absent father, either physically or emotionally, and that men lack both the physical markers most women experience, like menstruation, childbirth, and menopause, and that we've lost the pre modern male initiatory rites of passage into adulthood.
[00:37:37]  So he argued that men often remain in a kind of arrested development, unable to meaningfully accept adult responsibility.
[00:37:45]  And often repeating the cycle of then becoming absent fathers themselves and thereby wounding the next generation of boys.
[00:37:54]  Did he have some theory about why pre modern rituals got abandoned?
[00:37:59]  I don't know.
[00:38:00]  You know, a lot of this does, for me, it does sort of resonate with this romanticization of the past and that somehow through modernity, we've lost touch with something really essential that connected us to the earth and to the tribe and to our traditions.
[00:38:14]  And that, you know, it's sort of in the lineage of the Joseph Campbell.
[00:38:19]  You know, who also was a big fan of Jung's notion that we've lost some deep mythic wisdom that connected us to the cycles of life, and that men especially suffer from that because we don't have as many of the biological markers.
[00:38:33]  I don't want to describe this specifically to Bly or Campbell, but in these conversations, industrialization is usually pointed to as the moment that that started happening.
[00:38:42]  I think that's partly romanticized as well, because you need to pick a point historically, like, oh, that must have been it, but that is where they usually pointed to.
[00:38:52]  Yeah.
[00:38:52]  And, you know, what's often missing in a lot of this kind of romanticization is the brutal and traumatizing reality of many traditional rites of passage for young boys and what actually happens to them as they're sort of taught how to be warriors, basically.
[00:39:08]  Or what agriculture actually entailed before machinery started coming in and making the process at least a little bit easier.
[00:39:16]  So it's, you know, it's very, it's the 19, it's the Republicans' 1950s was the best time ever argument over and over again.
[00:39:24]  Yeah.
[00:39:24]  And then for people who have Or maybe more on the progressive anti Vietnam War side of the aisle, it's like, oh, we've lost touch with the Great Mother, we've lost touch with the earth and with indigenous spiritual wisdom.
[00:39:38]  So his diagnosis of the problem with men did have some overlap, sadly, with more conservative views.
[00:39:45]  Yeah, that becomes important, right?
[00:39:46]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  So he talked about soft males who'd lost their ability to exhibit strength, but also creativity.
[00:39:53]  But he also talked about hyper masculinity as a kind of Overcompensation that ends up being very toxic.
[00:40:00]  So that's an important point.
[00:40:02]  Rather than blaming feminism, he was very careful not to in his writing, and he would talk about this, or encouraging reactionary misogynist grievance, Bly's prescription relied more on these Jungian ideas of mythopoetic descent into the underworld so as to grieve, to confront the shadow, to get back in touch with embodied and primal wildness.
[00:40:25]  He also championed men having more supportive and positive collaborative relationships.
[00:40:30]  So maybe not saying, Do it, fat boy, or whatever we were talking about earlier.
[00:40:35]  To this end, Bly, along with figures like Michael Mead and Robert Moore, created men's gatherings and retreats that incorporated drumming, singing, poetry, storytelling, and sweat lodges, all of which, of course, then made them an easy target for mockery in the media.
[00:40:51]  And all of which also made it, you know, created a kind of aesthetics and a series of rituals that were very easy for people like Aubrey Marcus to cosplay later on.
[00:41:04]  Absolutely.
[00:41:04]  With, you know, and so there's this political wateriness at the center of it all, right?
[00:41:10]  That can just be appropriated and go in any direction.
[00:41:12]  Well, yeah.
[00:41:12]  And that's one of the major criticisms of Bly, actually, from a lot of people is that he went from actually being quite politically engaged to creating a movement where, you know, I think in times when there were times he was asked about it, he said, no, we're not doing something that's really political.
[00:41:27]  This is more for all men.
[00:41:28]  He got old.
[00:41:30]  He got tired out, man.
[00:41:32]  I also wouldn't put a straight line there just simply because anytime any movement scales, People come in and co opt it.
[00:41:39]  Like this happens historically everywhere.
[00:41:42]  So I found Bly's work through Michael Mead, who I was fortunate enough to share lunch with at a mythology conference that we both spoke at in Atlanta in 2004.
[00:41:52]  His book, Water and the Men of Life, was very influential for me at that point in my life.
[00:41:56]  And it really was my introduction to the concept of men's groups.
[00:42:00]  I came across this passage from his book, Fate and Destiny The Two Agreements of the Soul.
[00:42:05]  Now, 50 year old me is not as struck.
[00:42:08]  By this, given my general analytic nature and the passage's ambiguity.
[00:42:13]  But the Derek that was half my age, whose life was steeped in mythology, would certainly have appreciated the poetry.
[00:42:20]  So I'm just sharing this as an example of how far the mythopoetic movement is from what Bethaya encounters while he was reporting for this article.
[00:42:29]  Quote, All meaningful change requires a genuine surrender.
[00:42:33]  Yet to surrender does not simply mean to give up, more to give up one's usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self.
[00:42:43]  In surrendering, we fall to the bottom of our arguments and seek to touch the origin of our lives again.
[00:42:50]  Only then can we see, as we were meant to see, from the depth of the psyche where the genius resides, where the seeds of wisdom and purpose were planted before we were born.
[00:43:01]  So it's so beautiful, Tarek.
[00:43:04]  And.
[00:43:05]  Like, how different do you guys think this is from any other kind of essentialist, like, you have to find your original purpose framework?
[00:43:12]  Because I hear that and I'm like, you know, the Derek that's half your age, I can imagine as coming in as an empathetic guy who has a working class background and like you have this strong connection to all of your sort of local people and your family and community.
[00:43:33]  And, you know, you're not going to spin that out into, Aubrey Marcus' world, right?
[00:43:38]  Like, you're not going to take that in a particular direction, but you could.
[00:43:42]  No, I wasn't born with millions in oil money like Aubrey Marcus.
[00:43:46]  You weren't.
[00:43:46]  No, the 50 year old me would say that any original purpose framework is bullshit.
[00:43:51]  And in fact, on Saturday, Julian and I will be discussing Nick Chater's book, The Mind is Flat, in the context of Mark Andreessen on The Brief.
[00:43:59]  And we sort of get into this how we're constantly contextualizing, creating reality as we go.
[00:44:05]  And yet we pine for this original idea.
[00:44:08]  So, yeah, when I read that, I'm just like, But there's a poetic sense that feels good, right?
[00:44:15]  But if you actually, like I always say, just transcribe Russell Brand.
[00:44:20]  Don't listen to him and just read the words.
[00:44:22]  And you're like, what the fuck?
[00:44:23]  This makes absolutely no sense.
[00:44:25]  And there's a little bit of that in this for me, but not nearly as gross.
[00:44:29]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:44:30]  We're just talking about matters of degree, right?
[00:44:32]  Because I listened to that and I'm like, I'm transported back to being 22 years old and thinking, wow, that's amazing guidance.
[00:44:39]  That really feels great.
[00:44:41]  Yeah.
[00:44:41]  And then you can hear, you could hear some, you know, Jordan Peterson lapdog say the exact.
[00:44:47]  Same thing.
[00:44:48]  Funny you should say that.
[00:44:49]  Right.
[00:44:50]  It's funny you should say that because these are, you know, quite different versions and maybe by matters of degree, as you're suggesting, Matthew, of what we might call men's work.
[00:44:59]  But then in 2016, along comes one Jordan Peterson striding in his self conscious suits onto the digital stage with a passionate synthesis of anti feminism, anti trans panic, reactionary, if cryptic and obscurantist Christianity at first.
[00:45:17]  And his own more reductive and performative take on Jungian maps of meaning.
[00:45:24]  It's Peterson who goes viral on YouTube for objecting to transgender people being added to Canadian human rights law and then for videos in which he destroys feminist interviewers.

=== Early Male Feminism Contradictions (05:33) ===

[00:45:35]  It's Peterson who writes the banal 2018 bestseller for young men called 12 Rules for Life and who then cries on TV about the plight of incels.
[00:45:44]  So I see Jordan Peterson really as the prominent cultural figure who combines conservative politics and spirituality.
[00:45:52]  For a whole new demographic of men aggrieved at woke feminism who are now filtering into retrograde alpha male organizations like RISE in search of some lost sense of meaning and community.
[00:46:05]  I mentioned Corinne Lowe's book earlier, and she has an entirely different take on men's work, at least in the framing of how it would help in a marriage to a woman.
[00:46:14]  I don't think I've heard any of these groups we've discussed so far talking about doing the dishes or doing laundry or nursing an infant.
[00:46:22]  And Lowe writes that mothers get trapped in this cycle.
[00:46:26]  Maternity leaves are generally longer than paternity leaves.
[00:46:29]  And so the mother takes on a lot of child rearing skills.
[00:46:33]  Then the father often says, Oh, well, you know what?
[00:46:36]  She's good at that.
[00:46:37]  So she can continue to handle that even after maternity leave ends.
[00:46:41]  So the woman is now working again and has picked up most child rearing skills.
[00:46:45]  Yeah, it's such a good observation.
[00:46:47]  I can't help but imagine the early iterations of male feminism that we were talking about before.
[00:46:51]  We're discussing things like this.
[00:46:54]  But yeah, it definitely gets deprioritized in this other framing.
[00:46:57]  Yeah.
[00:46:58]  I mean, anything in life that Good at that happens when you do a repetitive task over and over again, but the men weren't ever really going to do them to begin with.
[00:47:08]  So while Lowe doesn't write about men's groups, I imagine any of them would be served by having a woman do some of the programming.
[00:47:16]  And to be clear, some of them might do this already.
[00:47:18]  I'm not indicting them all.
[00:47:20]  I truly don't know that.
[00:47:21]  We're only covering a small selection.
[00:47:23]  But a lot of what I see is men, as I mentioned earlier, carrying logs up hills, not carrying diapers to a bin.
[00:47:30]  And I'm guessing the latter is a lot more meaningful to their wives if they want to maintain a healthy relationship, which apparently, according to a lot of what we've been reviewing, is what they say they actually want.
[00:47:42]  Yeah.
[00:47:42]  Well, the maternal burden starts with like pregnancy, labor, giving birth, nursing.
[00:47:48]  So I'd say, regardless of the man can actually take over.
[00:47:51]  Right.
[00:47:51]  So, regardless of maternity leave, which a lot of women don't get, and also the U.S. doesn't mandate paid leave at all.
[00:47:57]  Like, I was looking it up, and it's like the law in most places is that.
[00:48:02]  You'll have your job reserved for you pay free for 12 weeks, which is incredible to me.
[00:48:08]  So, anyway, the helping out framework.
[00:48:11]  It has to be active.
[00:48:12]  It has to be investigative.
[00:48:14]  Like, you have to take a serious inventory of all the domestic labor the woman partner is doing prior to this massive unpaid burden of social reproduction.
[00:48:25]  And then, you know, if you have a good relationship, you somehow attempt to replace it with your own work if you really want equity.
[00:48:32]  But I'll just ping Sylvia Federici here again from a couple of weeks ago talking about Ballerina Farm to mention that, like, that type of calculus.
[00:48:42]  Is pretty repressed and invisible because if it's well broadcast, we would really have to reevaluate the cost of social reproduction and the economy that produces like new human beings, more workers, more consumers.
[00:48:55]  And I think everybody would discover that the core work of giving humans life is unpaid for.
[00:49:00]  And so, in my opinion, the surface cultural work of the men's group self concern, you know, about men are really having a problem, is to recenter men as core subjects.
[00:49:12]  After feminism begins to extract concessions from patriarchy, just a few anyway.
[00:49:17]  But I think a deeper work is to further bury just how much essential work women have always done.
[00:49:23]  To your point there, in the brief where I'm reading Lowe and I'm reading Galloway, one of the most stark contradictions between them or differences between them is that Galloway says, don't keep score because that's just going to make you bitter.
[00:49:37]  Lowe says, keep a fucking spreadsheet of duties and of finances and all these things.
[00:49:43]  And I have to say, my wife and I. Did this a few years ago and it really changed my relationship to homework, like the work around the house.
[00:49:53]  And we started splitting up three nights a week.
[00:49:56]  We cook, like, I mean, she cooks three, I cook three.
[00:49:58]  We started splitting labor because we had a sheet to track it.
[00:50:01]  And that was, that was really honestly a very helpful thing to our relationship.
[00:50:05]  So I, again, I'll just reiterate men should read Corinne Lowe's book, even though it's written for women, because you're going to learn something about yourself.
[00:50:13]  And the thing that Galloway is doing with that, which is, which is don't keep a spreadsheet, don't keep accounts, is that.
[00:50:19]  He's doing exactly what Federici is warning about, which is don't like we very easily invoke love and a kind of vision of a non transactional relationship that winds up bending its way towards who already has the power.
[00:50:34]  And that's just constant.
[00:50:36]  Yeah.
[00:50:46]  So, you know, I think this was an entertaining piece from Bethaya of immersive journalism with, you know, decent field work.
[00:50:55]  I'm left a little bit with a Louis Theroux manosphere taste in my mouth.
[00:51:00]  You know, and I think just going forward, I'm always going to be asking for more out of these pieces because they take up a lot of resources, a lot of attention.
[00:51:05]  You know, there's a lot of editorial decisions that go.

=== Reeves Analysis of Boys' Movements (12:03) ===

[00:51:08]  So, here's my sort of critical take.
[00:51:10]  Like, I think he made a decent effort at creating links between various men's movements of the past that you've just reviewed.
[00:51:17]  Julian.
[00:51:18]  And there's a thread of material causes for various waves of male anxiety through the generations.
[00:51:22]  But the overall glue that he defaults to is psychological and it's also tautological.
[00:51:28]  Like that, for whatever reason, men are suffering in unique ways that are essentially about the problem of being men.
[00:51:34]  And it's very mysterious, right?
[00:51:36]  And I don't think that Robert Bly and Michael Mead answer that question either.
[00:51:40]  Like, what is the deep mystery of the problem of manhood?
[00:51:44]  And so that's been hanging, I think, in the culture for a long time.
[00:51:48]  I don't think that particular focus is Bethesda's fault because the movements that he bullet points as historical precedents, they all explicitly leaned into the psychosomatic wounding of men qua men.
[00:52:01]  So he talks about Teddy Roosevelt's Western cure, like let's pretend that we're cowboys, which was a remedy for feminization in the late 1800s, because this has always been a problem, obviously.
[00:52:14]  He had something called the Boone and Crockett Outdoors Club.
[00:52:18]  There was the Boy Scouts who emphasized weaning boys from their moms, the whole age of fraternities in the 1920s, and then these later softer psychologies of Bly and Mead.
[00:52:30]  But the main focus is on the mysterious essence of masculinity.
[00:52:34]  He does have one main materialist explanation that he leans into, which is his gloss of Richard Reeves.
[00:52:41]  And speaking of Galloway, Reeves calls, or sorry, Galloway calls Reeves his Yoda on boy sciences.
[00:52:48]  So this is Bethia.
[00:52:49]  Summarizing Reeves, quote, In 2022, the social scientist Richard Reeves published Of Boys and Men, which describes how men are falling behind in contemporary society.
[00:52:58]  In the past 40 years, men's wages have decreased as a percentage of overall family income, while broader wealth inequalities and job insecurity have grown.
[00:53:06]  Girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers.
[00:53:12]  Men today are five times likelier than they were in the 90s to say that they don't have any close friends.
[00:53:17]  They are also much less likely to receive mental health treatment than men and four times more likely to die by suicide.
[00:53:23]  So, I did a brief episode on Galloway's Lost Boys podcast, which he put out with Anthony Scaramucci.
[00:53:32]  And so I'll link to that.
[00:53:33]  But a chunk of it reviewed Reeves' credibility as Galloway's Yoda.
[00:53:39]  And Reeves isn't credentialed in sociology or gender studies or child psychology.
[00:53:44]  And his data, when it's looked at by discipline experts, gets picked apart to show that he exaggerates educational gaps, he misrepresents GPA trends.
[00:53:54]  And then he conflates proportional changes with widening disparities between boys and girls.
[00:53:59]  So, a lot of his argument and status as a father son whisperer relies on this notion that boys' educational outcomes are worsening.
[00:54:07]  But if we look at just one claim, for example, which is girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers, this is obviously a panic button statement for a lot of parents.
[00:54:20]  Like, boys are being left behind.
[00:54:22]  And, you know, we have two boys here, and I look at that and I'm like, huh, okay, what's really happening?
[00:54:29]  And the thing is that girls do outperform in some benchmark tasks, but they have always done so.
[00:54:36]  This has been a constant for a century.
[00:54:38]  It's worse than we thought, Matthew.
[00:54:40]  It's worse than we thought.
[00:54:42]  It goes back a century.
[00:54:43]  But Reeves' whole deal is that it's getting worse, right?
[00:54:45]  So, where Reeves says that the GPA gap has widened, with A being the most common high school grade for girls and a B for boys, what's actually happening is that both grades grew proportionally and the girls crossed a threshold.
[00:54:58]  One good thing that Reeves pushes.
[00:55:00]  For, even if the reasoning is flawed, is that he wants to see more men go into primary school teaching.
[00:55:06]  And he thinks this would be better for boys for reasons that are kind of vague, but they're about representation, they're about modeling.
[00:55:13]  I think there's something there.
[00:55:14]  But what I really agree with is that more men in caregiving labor makes for just a more feminist culture, I think.
[00:55:21]  So, I mean, I think Bethaya maybe was told by the editors that we need some sociology in there, but it is kind of frustrating to watch Reeves's kind of like airport book.
[00:55:32]  Become this key source.
[00:55:34]  But it's not Bethesda's focus.
[00:55:37]  Likewise, his attention isn't on deindustrialization or union decline or the gig economy or the opioid epidemic or any of these material things that are slamming men in material ways.
[00:55:51]  So I get this unfocused picture.
[00:55:55]  There are standard, ugly themes of misogyny, pseudo therapy, pseudo religious discipline, manufactured authenticity.
[00:56:04]  Cheap ritualism.
[00:56:07]  But I just keep asking, like, what does it all connect to, right?
[00:56:10]  Like, Bethia flags a relationship between these themes and the overarching structure of MAGA masculinity.
[00:56:18]  And he does this at the top through this rogues gallery of officials.
[00:56:23]  So he talks about Hegseth and his tattoos.
[00:56:25]  He talks about RFK Jr.'s workouts.
[00:56:29]  The shadow of the UFC is over everything.
[00:56:31]  They're going to have, you know, Fourth of July on the White House lawn to fight.
[00:56:37]  He talks about Musk's fondness for leather and Zuckerberg's masculinity glow up.
[00:56:42]  He opens by noting that Trump wrote the forward for Adams' book, as Derek said.
[00:56:47]  But I'm left with these questions, which are how do these cultural movements intersect with the clear state patriarchy that Bethesda is pointing to?
[00:57:00]  Are these groups, for instance, feeding into ICE, where they're trying to hire 50,000 new officers over the next couple of years?
[00:57:09]  Like, I think that would be a solid measure of the difference between a kind of nasty but diffuse and reiterative cultural movement and something that has real political legs.
[00:57:23]  And I think this is the issue that's the subtext of the article, given the timing.
[00:57:28]  He makes these references to the White House team.
[00:57:31]  But I don't know the extent that these movements are growing, coalescing with, transcending their workshop retreat economies to support MAGA and inspire its masculinity.
[00:57:42]  Like, how do they intersect with the prerogative?
[00:57:44]  To fascist militarism.
[00:57:47]  So At the same time, I'm coming across all of this other research in journalism that gets at those very questions by looking at a different type of men's group that is emerging.
[00:58:03]  I don't know if you guys have heard of active clubs, but these are mostly male fitness groups that train members in MMA techniques for literal fascist street fighting and a future race war.
[00:58:16]  And they do this while throwing in some of the self management and hygiene tips that you would find on the Rise Weekend.
[00:58:23]  In Canada, here, there's an excellent independent journalist named Rachel Gilmore who just published an investigation into the Frontenac Active Club in Montreal, where there's like a dozen guys who have been meeting after hours in the gym.
[00:58:37]  And they got led in by one of the members of the gym who worked there.
[00:58:41]  He's a former Olympian and boxing coach.
[00:58:44]  And they do these training exercises through midnight sessions for fascist street fights.
[00:58:51]  And the gym owners didn't know.
[00:58:54]  And when they became aware because of the reporting, They fired the coach and they shut it down.
[00:58:59]  But some of these active club guys here in Canada have been charged with like terrorism offenses.
[00:59:05]  So, you know, this is a thing.
[00:59:07]  There are 200 active clubs globally, there are 30 in Canada, there are about 80 in the States, over a couple dozen states.
[00:59:15]  There's an extremism researcher named Alexander Ritzman who talks about how some active clubs have been bragging about tactical casualty care training, which is, you know, code for.
[00:59:27]  Shooting events.
[00:59:28]  So I think there's probably some overlap with gun culture, you know, because, you know, if you're doing casualty care training, you're talking about evacuating wounded people from violent confrontations.
[00:59:39]  So there's probably a paramilitary crossover.
[00:59:43]  And then there's the obvious piece that we know that ICE is actively recruiting white nationalists.
[00:59:49]  DHS ads include references to the 1978 book, Which Way Western Man, which is standard reading for neo Nazis.
[00:59:57]  And it's also a recruitment song that is very beloved by blood and soil racists.
[01:00:03]  So, yeah, there are these connections and resonances between Bethesda's study and more organized influences on MAGA.
[01:00:11]  And I kind of want to see where those.
[01:00:14]  Gel together a little bit more.
[01:00:16]  So, you know, this is a really good analysis of how you would have written the article.
[01:00:20]  I think if you had listened to Bethaya's interview on NPR, you know, he initially thought of the germ of the piece was coming across Nick Adams on Twitter and being like, huh, how does this guy really have influence?
[01:00:32]  But then what drew him in was really understanding how an individual man gets pulled into this, like the person in his 50s who's out of shape and just is trying to find his legs again and maybe has some lack of confidence.
[01:00:47]  And so, what is that?
[01:00:48]  So, Just to be clear, he wasn't concerned with the state level of this, which is fine if you're looking at a narrative analysis of how men go through this.
[01:01:01]  What you're presenting is a much different piece, which would also, I think, be very effective in its own way for a study on that aspect of it.
[01:01:09]  He is pointing to it, though, right?
[01:01:10]  Like he does do this rogue's gallery at the top.
[01:01:13]  He says, he says, this is influencing our politics at the top level.
[01:01:19]  And I think that I can imagine in an editorial, you'd say, okay, well, what's the wider framing?
[01:01:24]  Like, what's, you know, if you zoomed out, what are the other sort of political markers here?
[01:01:30]  And then you would come up with Hegseth's tattoos and Bobby's workouts and stuff like that.
[01:01:34]  So I'm just like looking for, because I, yeah, I am genuinely, genuinely interested between this, because we have this kind of, I don't know, wellness, fitness club, retreat workshop structure that is culturally supporting something that has, a more stable state politics.
[01:01:55]  And there's gotta be a relationship there.
[01:01:57]  And yeah.
[01:01:58]  Yeah.
[01:01:58]  And what you're doing is a very good job of highlighting that relationship.
[01:02:04]  All I'm saying is what you're kind of asking for is a book, not an article.
[01:02:09]  Yeah.
[01:02:11]  And so I don't wanna ding Bethaya for not taking that frame because I think he did a good job within his frame.
[01:02:18]  And I also appreciate you taking a different frame and looking out at it, which I think is the purpose and point of analysis.
[01:02:25]  Yeah.
[01:02:25]  Well, speaking of books.
[01:02:27]  You know, the book that I think gives me a sense of where the cultural and state intersections would become really functional and efficient is this book that I'm reading called Male Fantasies by Klaus Tavelite.
[01:02:43]  And it's his history of the German Freikorps, which is the volunteer soldier army that preceded the rise of Nazism.
[01:02:53]  So, you know, you can think of ice in a lot of ways, right?
[01:02:59]  Like, Except that their funding was a little bit dodgier.
[01:03:03]  It was more sort of under the table, wasn't exactly clear who was hiring them and stuff.
[01:03:08]  But they were the shock troops of the post war governments in Germany.

=== Red Women and Post-War Sexuality (02:38) ===

[01:03:11]  And they were mainly tasked with putting down the communists.
[01:03:14]  That was their primary job.
[01:03:16]  And they were mostly unemployed World War I trench veterans with PTSD.
[01:03:22]  They had been humiliated by the post war Versailles arrangement.
[01:03:28]  And they were all in on military brotherhood, on nationalist duty.
[01:03:33]  And warfare over personal relationships or intimacy.
[01:03:37]  And they had very particular attitudes towards women, which I think are very resonant here.
[01:03:42]  They saw women with a mixture of dread and indifference, which is resonant throughout Bethaya's article as well, right?
[01:03:49]  Like the women are, you know, there's one guy who's carrying a little weight up the hill that's representing his trauma, and it just says ex wife, you know?
[01:04:04]  And so there's a lot of like, Post family stuff that they're trying to recover from, and not in a very coherent way.
[01:04:14]  But the Fry Corps had these rituals and training that provided them with a refuge from the perceived threat of emotional dissolution and female sexuality.
[01:04:27]  So the misogyny for them was like a foundational element of fascist identity.
[01:04:33]  And they divided the world into their own hardness and then the liquid mass of.
[01:04:40]  Women, but also revolutionaries who were always about to engulf them, which is a very Freudian, Jungian sort of image.
[01:04:48]  And it's also very predictive of alpha, beta language.
[01:04:52]  So Tavelite says that the Freikorps men were very into turning the body into armor through physical suffering to resist the red flood of communism.
[01:05:04]  And guess what?
[01:05:05]  The red flood is embodied in a particular type of woman, the red woman.
[01:05:10]  And the red woman was juxtaposed against the white nurse, who I think might prefigure the trad wife of today.
[01:05:17]  But here's a quote from Tavelite to close this out The red woman is vividly, aggressively sexual, in fantasy, always a whore.
[01:05:26]  Her mouth is enormous, spewing out insults at our fry corpsmen as they attempt to ride straight backed through the city streets.
[01:05:34]  The red woman is, in addition, armed, or is so at least in fantasy.
[01:05:39]  She might have a gun under her skirt, or she might lead the fry corpsmen.
[01:05:43]  Through a dark passageway to an ambush.
[01:05:45]  In other words, there is no distinguishing her sexuality from the mortal danger she presents.