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July 7, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:08:00
When Does Masculinity Become Toxic? | David French | EP 560
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I reached out to you for the podcast because I read an article you wrote in the New York Times recently entitled The Democrats' $20 Million Dollar Man Problem, the most positive article that has been published about me in the New York Times.
Yeah, I really do feel like a lot of the things that are ripping America apart will begin to ease if we can deal with this loneliness, this alienization, this lack of belonging.
How we got here is quite the bloody miracle.
People were celebrating the demise of men or denying the demise of men or beginning to characterize traditional masculinity as inherently toxic.
And what that told a lot of young men was not, well, you have a problem, and instead was telling these young men, you are the problem.
Hello, everybody.
So a small miracle occurred at the end of May this year.
The New York Times wrote a piece that featured me that was positive, or at least mostly positive.
And it was entitled The Democrats' $20 Million Dollar Man Problem.
It was written by a journalist David French.
And David had written a couple of pieces about me, and some positive and some less so.
And I thought it would be very interesting to talk to him about the Democrats' $20 million man problem.
Now, we ranged much more widely than merely that, but that's the focus of the conversation.
So join us for that.
I felt that the Democrats' investment of $20 million to solve their problem with men was money spent so absurdly badly that it was a kind of staggering miracle.
And I thought we could have a conversation about all of that because you're obviously concerned about the Democrats' man problem, but more deeply, you have the sense, not to put words in your mouth, that something is amiss on the masculine front, and you're also at odds and ends, let's say, about who men should turn to.
Right, right.
Well, you know, let me just start off with the way that I started off that piece.
And there's a very memorable moment for me.
And it was not the only time that something like this has occurred because I've been writing and talking about the challenges that men and particularly young men are facing for a long time.
I mean, I was sort of standing there jumping up and down going, young men are in trouble, young men are in crisis for a long time.
And around 20, oh, gosh, 16, 17, 18, I began to encounter a lot of young men who were saying that you had really impacted their lives for the better.
And I began with a vignette about a former Marine who was driving me somewhere and started talking about how you had really changed his life.
I believe the phrase he used was saved his life.
And I was really curious about that.
And so I asked him how that happened.
And he was talking about when he got out of the service.
And this is something as a veteran that I have seen with a lot of soldiers, sailors, Marines.
When you leave the service, one of the things that you lose is your sense of daily purpose, especially if you've deployed and you've been downrange.
You have incredible sense of purpose, even though it's very, very stressful.
It's very, very difficult.
It's very, very scary.
But you have this real purpose.
And you come home and you leave the military and you begin to lack purpose.
You lack direction.
And you know where that takes people.
It takes people into bad places.
And he talked about, this must have been right after your book, 12 Rules came out.
And he talked about reading that book and how just that very simple thing of the making of your bed and the adjustment of how he viewed the world and the intentional acts of service or kindness to other people really kind of was like a reboot for him.
And that always stuck with me.
And it stuck with me for two reasons, Jordan.
Reason number one was just the sheer power of somebody caring.
Okay.
And this is something that is a huge problem.
So many young men, as you know, I'm not going to tell you anything about young men you don't already know, but so many young men do not have fathers.
They do not have male role models.
And so that fact that a man cares and wants to see them succeed and wants to see them succeed in the right way is incredibly important.
And then the other thing that really stood out was the way in which your communications with them were not trite self-help, although you had some basic rules, but you really dove deeply into the philosophical reasons and even the religious or scriptural reasons why you articulated these points.
And so two things were happening at once.
You were saying, I care, and you were giving a sophisticated enough approach that said that I'm not patronizing you.
I'm treating you like an adult.
And I think those two things at once was kind of, you know, for lack of a better term, like the alchemy or the magic of the moment because, and, you know, as I wrote, a lot of people on the other side of the cultural spectrum were the last thing they were doing was delivering a message that said, I care.
In many ways, it seemed as if people were celebrating the demise of men or denying the demise of men or beginning to characterize traditional masculinity as inherently toxic or inherently problematic.
And what that told a lot of young men was not, well, you have a problem, which a lot of young men knew, I do have a problem, failing to succeed at school, failing to get some real purpose.
And instead was telling these young men, you are the problem, which is a totally different thing, which is saying there's something wrong with you.
And that was, I think, an extremely destructive development in the culture.
Now, it was unevenly applied.
Like I, during the sort of the rise of the so-called manosphere, I was living in rural and suburban Tennessee, and you didn't see that really attack on young men as much.
But there are other places in other parts of the country where that was very much a present reality in a lot of young men's lives.
And so you have a lot of young men who are struggling.
You have a lot who are fatherless.
You have a lot who lack male mentors.
And then you had this one side of this sort of cultural divide saying there's something wrong with you.
There's something inherently wrong with what you want to do, what you want to be, what your goals are, your dreams are, your aspirations.
And somebody else says, no, I care about you.
I want you to succeed.
I want you to feel meaning.
I want you to feel purpose.
In that situation, like that message is like encountering an oasis in a desert.
So let me ask you some questions about that.
I guess the first question I have is why personally, why is this an issue for you?
And I want to tangle that up with a different question, though, because there's a political element to this, obviously.
And I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
You wrote that the Democrats had a $20 million man problem.
So although it's not exactly a political problem, it's actually a philosophical problem or it's a spiritual problem.
It's deeper than the political.
It's just manifesting itself in the political.
So I want to address two things.
The first question I want to address is, why is this an issue for you?
And then let's sort out some of the political issues before we proceed in the conversation.
Well, it's an issue for me for multiple reasons.
One, I'm a father of a son.
I have a 24-year-old son.
And I have seen with my own eyes, you know, in that peer group that he has, how many young men in that peer group, you know, spend a period of time kind of wandering in the wilderness, if that makes sense.
I've seen you can't be a father of a son in this era and have not seen the struggles that a lot, so many young men have had.
And so one of the things is I want to be a good mentor to my son.
I want to love my son well.
And when you try to love your own son well, you cannot help but enter this larger world of what's happening with young men in general.
And so that was right in front of my face watching his peer group come of age and the struggles that many people in his peer group had.
And so that was very direct and personal.
Then the next personal layer was I'm also a veteran.
And so I served in the Army as a JAG officer, an Army lawyer.
I deployed to Iraq during the surge in 07, 08.
And because I joined later in life, I joined the Army later in life.
I was the second oldest officer on the base behind our commander.
But that gave me an actual opportunity to serve in a mentoring capacity for some of these much younger soldiers.
And I could see their struggles and I could see their questions about the world and the life after the military.
And then the third thing is I'm very concerned about American culture more broadly, the way in which an increasing number of people feel a sense of despair and anxiety and hopelessness, that we've seen this rise of deaths of despair.
And then when you dig into it, who is dying the deaths of despair?
Well, yes, there are women married and single who are, but by and large, it's disproportionately single men, either never married or divorced men.
And there's this real sense of a lack of community and connection.
And then you layer on top of this, and again, this is all stuff you're very familiar with.
You have the declining number of friendships amongst young men in particular and men in particular.
And it's all adding up to an immense amount of human suffering.
It's adding up to pain, loss, anguish at the very edges.
It's adding up to suicide and suicidal attempts.
And so we have a society and a culture where millions upon millions of people are feeling the sense of anguish.
And if you don't have a heart for that, like if you, if that doesn't touch your heart, just leave aside the politics.
You know, I would say, hey, guys, if that isn't touching your heart, take another look at this, right?
And then the other thing, the political aspect, I truly believe, and there's really a lot to back this up, that a lot of our political dysfunction is downstream from our personal and cultural lack, a sense of a lack of belonging in our communities and our families and amongst friends.
And so I really do feel like a lot of the things that are ripping America apart will begin to ease if we can deal with this loneliness, this alienization, this lack of belonging.
And so even if you're just cold-blooded about it, like even if you're like, well, I just want American politics to be less dysfunctional, American to be less divided, just dealing with the issue that is besetting, again, particularly young men is an imperative.
So it's an imperative morally.
It's an imperative culturally.
It's an imperative politically.
And if you have an ounce of love in your heart for people, it's just an imperative spiritually.
I've been a Christian evangelical conservative my entire life.
I voted for Kamala Harris, the first Democrat I voted for in national election in my life.
So I have been a conservative.
I was a delegate to the 2012 Republican convention.
So yeah, I've been a Christian conservative my entire life and have volunteered for Republican campaigns in 1998, 1988, sorry, joined the college Republicans at my small Christian college that I attended in Nashville.
And very different experience from my law school, which was very liberal.
My small Christian college was super conservative.
And it was so conservative that we realized as college Republicans that we had nowhere, we had no more votes to get for George H.W. Bush over Dekakis.
But yeah, I've been a conservative my entire life and a Republican.
I'm not a Republican anymore, but I've been a Republican most of my adult life.
You have written for The Atlantic and For the New York Times.
Why do they allow you to write for them?
Well, you know, they were actually looking for a pro-life person when they were trying to hire a new columnist, actually looking for somebody who was conservative and somebody who had, you know, I'm also a veteran.
I don't believe there were any columnists who were veterans.
I'm also a lawyer.
I don't believe at the time of my hiring that there were any other columnists who were lawyers.
I'm a constitutional lawyer.
So, you know, I think that's the overall mix.
But, you know, you'd have to ask my boss as to why.
But I was very pleasantly surprised, I'll be honest with you, when I got the job offer.
It was definitely not something I was seeking out, but it came to me and I was very grateful and thankful.
And I've had a really good experience there.
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Okay.
Okay.
So you pointed out three reasons that you're concerned.
Because you have a son, and then you talked about what you saw in his circle of friends.
Because you're a veteran and you played a mentorship role there.
And then because you're concerned with broad cultural issues.
Let's start with the personal.
I want to tell you a story about my son when he was about 13.
So I reviewed his report card and it wasn't stellar, let's say, although it was fine, but it wasn't stellar.
And so I asked him about that and he said, well, Dad, I'm doing pretty well.
I'm doing really well for a boy.
And I thought, I'd never heard him say anything like that.
And it was certainly nothing that he had picked up at home.
And it was quite striking to me because for him, that was just matter of fact.
And of course, that's a deep rabbit hole because when your son comes to you and says, I'm doing pretty good for a boy, if you have any sense, the first thing you think is, where the hell did that come from?
And so seriously, because now that's an implicit presupposition that the boys underperform the girls.
That was certainly not a presupposition when I was his age.
And it wasn't anything that was appropriate for him because there's nothing wrong with his mind or his conscientiousness.
And so, you know, I've observed that boys are, the school system is not set up for them in the least.
The vast majority of teachers are not only female, but infantilizing female and radically left.
Boys' play preferences are denigrated.
They're required to sit for hours at a time, which is not in keeping with their nature, especially if they're active, in which case they get diagnosed with ADHD and get put on methylphenidate, which suppresses play behavior as one of its primary functions.
And then they're told that competitive games are wrong because we should all cooperate by people who are too stupid to notice that competitive games are cooperative because everybody's playing by the same rules.
And then they're told that boys' ambition is pathological and that the patriarchy is, and marriage, for that matter, is an oppressive institution.
And if they manage to escape from all that, then they're told that the activities of males are destroying the planet.
And that's pretty much a comprehensive, that's comprehensive evil queen pathology, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's not bloody wells.
Then you add to that, there's an additional twist, too, which we should delve into.
You know, it's a universal cultural problem to make adults out of juvenile males.
That's why there are initiation rights in so many cultures.
And you have to create a responsible man.
And the reason for that is that it's a hell of a lot easier to be irresponsible and immature than it is to be responsible and mature.
For men and women.
For men and women.
Right.
Well, the thing about women is once they have an infant, that kind of catalyzes the maturity.
And maybe their nature has a proclivity to initiate women a little more dramatically than it initiates men.
So the fundamental problem that cultures face is how to make men out of boys and how to stop young women from getting pregnant out of wedlock.
That's the anthropological evidence.
And so, well, so the boys face, I think, a virtual conspiracy of demoralization.
And That seems to me to be well, that's underneath the political, but the Democrats have been playing that hand madly for, I'd say, four generations.
And now they're reaping what they sowed.
Yeah, I would, there's, boy, there's a lot in there.
Let me go kind of step by step and let me begin with one thing that I think you articulated right off the top that is, I think, a very important disconnect that is happening.
So a lot of this articulation you hear from the extreme left, and you laid out the way there are folks on the extreme left who has just comprehensively demolish masculinity.
Now, I'd say most boys have not been exposed to that in school.
That might be a very, that might, you might see that in some hyper progressive prep schools or whatever, but the some degree of that, some element of that is coming and leaking through and permeating through a lot of American culture.
And one of the things that I have seen is that a lot of the people, when we talk about this, when we raise this issue, a lot of people in the commentary and the commentary class and the academic class immediately denigrate a lot of the evidence about the struggles of young men and boys because they don't see in their milieu,
they don't see men struggling because they're in places where it might be, say, elite academia or high-level corporate work or in the military or government, where men are still at the tip of the spear, at the apex of kind of American commercial and political and economic achievement.
Men are still doing quite well.
It's the big, giant, giant number of people who are not in that sort of tip of the spear who are really struggling.
And because so many of us live in these bubbles, a lot of people don't see it at all.
They don't see it at all.
And this is something that I think is endemic in our commentariat.
And that is a lot of our commentariat lives and eats and breathes a very rarefied cultural air.
And they don't have any real world sense of the way that people are living their lives and the struggles they're facing outside of that milieu.
And so when you walk into and you start talking about how these young men are struggling, a lot of times you get immediate, I've been in these rooms where people will immediately dismiss you.
Well, disproportionate number of men are CEOs, a disproportionate number of men are in Congress, you know, you name it.
And I'm like, I'm not talking about the tip of the spear here.
I'm talking about millions upon millions of people, regular Americans, who are struggling.
And in many ways, they're not struggling because of you, but are you helping or are you hurting?
And I can tell you right now, if you're telling men that, for example, traditional masculinity ideology is inherently toxic, you're hurting.
You're not helping.
And I tend to have an explanation of the struggles of young men that's rooted in a lot more than ideology and politics.
It's rooted in changing economies and changing technologies.
A lot of things changed in a way that left men in a position where they would often feel like, I'm not as necessary.
I'm not as needed as I was.
A lot of the raw strength, that raw physical strength, for example, that men have became less and less important to be a part of a vibrant economy.
Military is shrinking.
The U.S. military is much smaller right now than it was at the height of the Cold War.
A lot of these things created dynamics where men felt less needed.
And then you have another part of this cultural world that then jumps on men who are feeling less needed, who are not elitists, who are not tip of the spear or regular everyday folks who are just trying to do their best and are coming in and saying, well, a lot of the things that you feel or a lot of the way that you are is just bad and wrong.
And so that created this environment in this sense where I'm struggling and an awful lot of people don't care.
And that, I feel like, is just a giant cultural disaster that unfolded.
And now it's not unfolding everywhere the same.
That litany of things that you said about what people on the far left think and did, like my son and his peers, they never heard any of that in rural Middle Tennessee.
That is not their experience in rural Middle Tennessee.
But I will say that all the technological changes and the changes to career and the changes to all these other big cultural changes absolutely impact us everywhere.
And so young men with, you know, are facing a world, even if they're in a very sort of man-friendly part of the country, which rural Tennessee is, they're still walking into an economy and they're still walking into a culture that has been through a lot, generations of upheaval.
And in that circumstance, you really have to intentionally lean in to mentor young men into virtuous masculinity.
It doesn't happen by osmosis.
It doesn't happen by inertia.
It happens through intention.
And so that's where, you know, when I was writing my piece that you reached out, I was, that's, you know, when you're in your book, 12 Rules is a lot about intention, like living an intentional life and thinking things through and having an approach and having a purpose.
And that's exactly how you cultivate virtuous masculinity is it's you're living a life of intention.
It's not happening by osmosis.
It's not happening by inertia.
And in fact, a lot of the cultural inertia was destructive, not constructive.
And so creating a, it was, I think it was absolutely vitally necessary to create a kind of counterculture to that that was like, hey, young men, we love you.
We care about you.
We want you to succeed.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, and you often see a lot of emotion spring up in men when they do encounter somebody, whether it's somebody who wrote a book or delivered a Speech that finally says to them that very simple message that that's what they hear.
I care for you.
I want you to succeed.
I'm here.
I'm going to help you do it.
And the best people who do this do it.
I want you to succeed in the right way.
The worst voices are, just go get what's yours, young man.
That's the toxic message that gets, that indulges the worst elements of our nature.
The message that says that here, train you up in a way that is much more akin to, you know, the Kipling poem, if, than sort of any kind of like blind ambition or greed or sexual conquest or sexual exploitation.
But if you're building people in virtuous masculinity, I think that is the oasis in the desert.
Whereas that toxic, you know, go get what's yours, sexual prowess, financial accomplishment is the be all end all.
That's the mirage.
That's the illusion.
And that just leads them deeper into the desert.
We should talk about that a little bit, I think, from a psychological perspective, because there are real reasons why that more psychopathic end of the so-called manosphere has its attractiveness.
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So back in 2016, when my objection to my liberal government's utter stupidity launched me into the public eye, I told the Senate and the public in general that this conspiracy,
so to speak, to weaken men would produce a very toxic and fascist-like backlash.
Now, one of the things that man I admire greatly, that psychologist Carl Jung pointed out, was that you can be socialized into a conformist persona.
And the way out of that is through the dark side, so to speak, to incorporate elements of the psyche that haven't been, that have been set to the side in the domestication effort.
Hyper-domesticated young men are going to find hyper-aggressive young men attractive as role models.
And the reason for that is they need that aggression.
And the fact that that's attractive is just an indication of how much demoralization has taken place.
Well, I also think that's a eternal battle.
I've put it this way.
Somebody has asked me, who are the best men and the worst men that you've encountered?
And the answer is the same.
Football coaches.
Some of the best men I've ever encountered are football coaches who have been able to socialize young men and take this energy, this drive, this aggression and create it into and turn it into a brotherhood, turn it into a community, turn it into a fellowship that is pouring into fighting for each other the right way.
And so I've seen a football coach be incredibly instrumental in a young man's life by taking all of that that's in them, all that stew that's in them and molding it and channeling them and turning them into tremendous citizens and turning them into good teammates and good friends.
And you will meet so many former football players who will say the person who changed my life as much or more than my father, depending on the relationship with their father, was their football coach.
And then you will find men who will say the one of the most malignant influences in my entire life was my football coach because he taught me to hurt people.
He taught me to inflict pain.
He told me that rage and aggression were my friend.
I should cultivate them and burn, you know.
And I've actually seen, I've seen different kinds of coaches.
And so I would say that, you know, one of the interesting realities of life is that you've, and this goes all way back, if you go back to June 6th, 1944, on Normandy Beach, you had two different kinds of young man, young male acculturation confronting each other on that pivotal day in world history, where you had one, a generation of youth acculturated into cruelty, into viciousness.
And yes, they were very lethal and they were very well trained and they were very proficient in the profession of arms, which caused a lot of people to admire them, but they were cruel and they were vicious while they were lethal.
And then on the other side, you had the forces of American and British democracy and Canadian democracy as well.
One of the beaches was Canadian, right?
So you had these coming across the channel.
They weren't perfect people and they weren't perfect cultures, but these young men were acculturated to use their sense of their courage and their aggression to defeat cruelty, to protect the weak, to protect the vulnerable.
And it is striking to me, it is striking to me how that virtuous masculinity, that virtuous courage and aggression so comprehensively triumphed in World War II.
I'm reading this book right now about the fall of Berlin.
And this is a great lesson in why you shun cruelty and you exhibit compassion.
At the very end of the war, when Nazi Germany was collapsing, people were falling all over themselves to come to the American side and to escape the Soviet side.
And so this was something where not only by our valor did we win the war, our compassion also helped us win the war.
And that's when I'm looking at this sort of angel and devil on the young man's shoulder.
I've often think of the bad coach and the good coach, or at the most extreme, and I don't know, gosh, I'm a middle-aged man, so I guess I always have to talk about World War II at some point.
You know, at the extremes, you have the pure evil of fascism and communism and the virtuous valor of a democracy awakened.
And these are the angels and devils that are always on the shoulder of young men here.
And look, I know that there are parallels with women, but we're talking about men.
These are the angels and devils that are on young men's shoulders.
And you're exactly right.
A lot of young men will be drawn to that devilish side because not only does it feel rewarding and strong, it's easier.
It's easier in so many ways because you don't engage in self-discipline.
You don't check yourself.
You don't engage in kindness because kindness carries a cost.
And so it's the easier path to indulge that unmitigated, unbridled aggression and ambition.
It is the harder path to temper that aggression and ambition with courage and compassion.
And so that's the, I think that's the eternal struggle, and it manifests itself in different eras in different ways.
So I've been spending some time considering the archetypal image of the shepherd in the biblical writings.
Yeah.
And of course, so Moses was a shepherd and David was a shepherd and Christ is a shepherd metaphorically.
So the question is, why the image of the shepherd?
And you put your finger on it in the discussion that you just brought forward.
So in pastoral times, especially in the Middle East, being a shepherd was actually a pretty, it was a demanding and dangerous job.
Like all jobs were demanding and dangerous.
Nothing easy about it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so the shepherd had to fight off wolves and lions.
And he had to take care of himself in the wilderness.
So just right there, that's hard.
But then the crucial issue is that that monstrous capacity to fight off the predators and even to some degree to fend for yourself was turned into service to the most vulnerable.
That's why the lamb, the protection of the lamb is such a numinous image in the Western cultural tradition, especially at the biblical level, because all that aggression,
I mean, you touched on this, say, with regard to valor in World War II, all that capacity for aggression and teamwork aggression for that matter is supposed to be subordinated to service to the most vulnerable.
And so the shepherd is this amalgam of monstrous power and service to the most vulnerable, self-sacrificial service to the most vulnerable.
Of course, that's a hallmark of Christianity itself and something that distinguishes it from all other theories of sovereignty, right?
Because Christianity is very paradoxical and peculiar in that regard, that it defines sovereignty not as the aristocratic will to power, dominance and force, let's say, of pagan Rome or even aristocratic Greece for that matter,
but transmutes that into the capacity for stalwart and forthright behavior in service to the most vulnerable.
And that means the highest serves the lowest, and that actually becomes a defining characteristic of what's highest, which is really quite a miracle of conceptual rearrangement.
And so this is part of this kind of notion is part of what's been driving my discussions with men.
I mean, most of what I've done on the public stage has been, much of what I've done on the public stage has been in response to my observation of the desperate situation of, well, young people, because you can't demoralize young men without devastating young women.
You know, I don't know if you know this, but you know in the West now that more than 50% of women at the age of 30 have no children.
It's more than 50%, right?
Half of them will never have a child.
And so on the one hand, we have the absolute radical pathological demoralization of young men.
And then we have the insistence that although all that masculinity is toxic and patriarchal, that's precisely what young women should pursue.
And so they pursue that, in some ways displacing young men, but more detrimentally for themselves, squandering their youth on service to the evil corporate world, bizarrely enough, given that it's a leftist trope and the demolition of their, not only of their fertility, but the probability of their participation in the long-term partnership of marriage.
So, I mean, you can hardly imagine a more toxic brew than that.
And how we got here is quite the bloody miracle.
I'd like you to comment on that.
I'd also like you to tell me, if you would, what kind of response you got to your New York Times article.
Okay, well, yeah, let me start with that, and then I'll get to the second, the bigger one.
Remarkably positive from readers.
There is a, you know, one thing that I think is a lot of people miss, especially people who are all in all the time into political fights online, is that there is still a big American center, center left, center right.
There is a big American center that has a lot of common concerns.
And so whereas somebody on Twitter might be talking about toxic masculinity, you know, there's no problem with young men, the future is female, and all of that stuff, there's millions of Democratic moms who have sons who love their sons so much and are worried about their sons.
And so when I go back to first principles, rather than immediately diving into gender gaps and political races and all this, instead talk about struggles, you actually meet people where they are and where millions of moms are and dads, moms and dads are right now is I'm having trouble.
My son is having trouble or my son's friends are having trouble.
My nephew is having trouble, whatever.
That's where millions of people are and they are hungry for somebody to approach that problem with empathy and approach that problem saying, I see all of this.
I see you.
I see what is happening.
And so I think that that's why the response to that article was overwhelmingly positive, certainly into my inbox.
Now online, it was much more mixed, but that's an artifact of lots of things that are actually irrelevant to the article.
But it was remarkably positive.
And Jordan, I'll tell you another story that I think would be encouraging to you.
I was in a meeting, one of these meetings, you know, I call them save the world meetings where you get a bunch of people into a room and everyone's talking about what's wrong with the culture and what's wrong with everything and what can we do to fix it.
And this room was much more left-leaning, much more left-leaning.
There was a few conservatives in there.
I was in there, a couple other people.
But one thing that was so striking, woman after woman at the meetings stood up and said, we need to be reaching young men and we need to be telling young men we love them.
I'm a mom of boys and I love my boys and I do not want this culture telling my boys there's something wrong with them.
And this was happening in left-leaning spaces, not far left, not like radical left, but in left-leaning spaces.
And so I think, and I have seen it with my own eyes, that there is a desperate hunger in America, broad America, for constructive mentoring of young men.
Another thing, you may have followed this, but Admiral William McCraven, who was the admiral who headed special, you know, American Special Forces, directed Operation Neptune's spear, which killed bin Laden, just a remarkable American man, American story, American role model.
He gave a commencement speech at UT Austin several years ago, and it's known as the Make Up Your Bed speech, a theme that you've articulated as well.
Millions and millions and millions of views for that thing.
It has been just spread and metastasized all over America and not just in conservative spaces.
And so that's what I think is encouraging.
Lots of people in that big American middle are saying, waking up and saying something here is wrong.
And that's why the response to the Times article was more positive, I think, than people might expect.
The other thing, going to the bigger, deeper question, you know, I get so tired of like the concept of the gender wars and the concept, the way our political parties exploit gender gaps.
So, you know, the way our political parties come in and say the Republicans might say, well, we win more with men than with women.
So we're going to really dive in with men.
Or the Democrats say, we men win more with women than men.
And they really dive in with women, which means we have these giant engines of cultural and political influence who are exacerbating gender and sex disagreements as part of their political project, right?
And so it's making, it's creating the sense that rather than we're all in this together and that you cannot have, you know, women in America writ large cannot be in a healthy place unless men in America are in a healthy place and vice versa.
So the idea that we're all in this together, that this is not a zero-sum game, I think that's a message that has to be repeated and repeated and repeated, that the success of men does not mean the failure of women.
The success of women does not mean the failure of men.
And, you know, I don't know that I, here's the way I would put, I don't have the same perspective view about corporate evil and all of that.
But I will say this.
I do think that one thing that really distresses me is that we see people having fewer kids than they say they want to have.
And we see people getting married later than they say they want to get married or not getting married at all when they say they want to get married.
And I think we have this gap between people's desires, the deepest desires and longings of their heart, and their actual lives, what's actually happening in their lives, that is really putting a pall of anxiety and failure and hopelessness over American life.
So what is it that we can do to close this gap between your heart's longing and the reality of your life?
And by the way, longing for children and longing for a marriage is, that's not, I don't think everybody, you know, as a Christian who believes in the Bible, it's very plain from scripture that not everybody has to be married.
But if you're somebody, marriage is a marvel, a wonderful institution.
It's wonderful for me.
So saying I want to get married, that's a good thing.
Saying I want to have kids, that's a good thing.
And how can we narrow that gap between the heart's longing and the reality?
Honestly, Jordan, I think that's one of the central cultural and political projects of our time.
And it's why neither party has been able to win a commanding majority for anything more than a two to four year period in the last generation, is that so many millions of Americans feel like their dreams are out of their reach and they're looking everywhere for a solution to this.
And in the political sphere, they're definitely not getting it.
So, one of the things I thought when I reached out to you is that since we were concerned about the same issues, that it might be worthwhile sorting out whatever differences we might have.
You know, and I don't know how much you know about my work enough to have written about it sometimes, but I'm curious if you have any questions or concerns about what you see that I've been doing.
And because I'd like to address them because we don't need the split.
Right.
Well, you know, I would put it like this.
There are lots of elements of your work that I have really appreciated.
And I've really appreciated the impact of your work that I've seen on people I know and people I love.
And I have very much appreciated that.
I think we probably have some pretty sharp political differences when it comes to how do we manifest, who do we support, and how do we manifest our shared concerns into the political world and into politics.
And then I think there are some things that we disagree on that really have nothing at all to do with what we're talking about.
I know I think I wrote in The Atlantic that I was critical of your stance on the Ukraine war, that you're kind of seeing the Russian invasion as at least understandable.
I don't think you would say justifiable, but understandable to a certain extent.
And then some of your stances on vaccines.
And I know you've talked about some people need to go to prison around their stance around vaccines.
And so it's interesting.
There's an interesting approach you can take when you have areas of commonality and areas of difference.
You can dig into the difference and say, these differences are why we are opponents.
Or you can dig into the commonalities and you can say these commonalities are why we are friends, but who have differences.
And I would really like to see in American politics more of the latter approach on a consistent basis that rather than saying, hey, we have this overlap, but the differences mean we're fundamentally opposed, say the overlap means that we have a lot of fundamental agreements, but like almost every human being on the planet, we do have differences.
And I'm happy to dive into the Ukraine war or to vaccines or any other issue where you think we might have differences.
I think that might be helpful for people to hear some of that.
But that was, you know, when I have written critically, it's been mainly focused around some of these political choices.
And to be honest, they're political choices that are not unique to you at all.
These are a lot of the beefs that I have with the change in the Republican Party more broadly.
I never thought I would see a day, for example, when the Democrats were more hawkish against Russia than Republicans were, for example.
I never saw, I never saw, and this is on me, but I never saw a strong movement, anti-vaccine or vaccine skeptical movement coming out of the Republican Party.
That was always a far left, crunchy, Democratic, Marin County progressive thing.
And so there are many ways that the Republican Party has departed from my previous views.
And I feel like you're more in line with the mainstream Republican Party now than I am.
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Yeah, it's hard to say.
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't called for anybody to be imprisoned with regard to their stance on vaccines.
I'm not very thrilled about the fact that there was force applied when people were making medical choices.
I think that was a big mistake.
And I think there's the backlash that we see against vaccines is certainly part and parcel of that.
With regards to the pesky Russians, well, you know, my sense is we missed a massive opportunity in the 1990s to strike a real accord with the Russians.
And there was all sorts of reasons for that, not least one of the reasons being that it was very convenient for the military-industrial complex, so to speak, to have a perpetual enemy.
And Russia seems to fit that bill quite well.
And so it's not like I'm thrilled about the fact that the Russians have been chomping at the bit on the Ukrainian side of the world for the last multiple years.
I don't regard Russia as a permanent enemy.
China is a different story in all likelihood.
I don't think we really need to go either of those places.
I mean, they've been beat to death in many ways.
And I am more interested in the issue that we're discussing.
Tell me a little bit more about what you saw with your son's friends that concerned you.
Yeah.
And boy, some of my son's friends might be watching this podcast.
So I don't want to cast a broad brush and have them think, Dave, what does Mr. French think about what, you know, no, I'm very proud of his son's son.
Yeah.
I have great, he has wonderful young men in his life, but I'm talking writ large.
I'm talking about his broader peer group.
Okay.
And one thing, there's a couple of things that I saw.
Definitely alienization from the academic world.
No question.
That thing that your son said about like I did well for a girl, absolutely saw that with this sort of sense that This sense of this isn't communicating to me, this isn't reaching me, definitely saw the effects of sort of inhibiting and play.
That's another big one.
You know, when I was in first grade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I was born in Alabama, raised in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee to Kentucky, so all across the South.
When I was in first grade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we had three recesses a day.
Three recesses a day.
And they were crazy and they were wild.
And all growing up, you know, we played tackle football at recess in my elementary school in Stamping Ground, Kentucky.
So it was just a different experience growing up.
And so much more constrained play, a sense that school wasn't really for them.
A loss of the free-range childhood.
I know you've talked to Jonathan Hyde in the past, but this sort of loss of the broader play-based childhood where kids roam the neighborhood.
That's what I did when I was growing up.
The number of forts I cut through thick underbrush.
I mean, by the time I was like in middle school, I was a master builder of rural fortifications.
Like, I mean, you know, you would just go and leave and play and come back and your parents would, my parents were great.
They would make me be home for dinner and then, what'd you do?
And then I would tell them about my adventures and boom, I'd be out again until, you know, my curfew.
And so all of those things have resulted in this sense of the loss of all of that, this sense of growing frustration, this sense of growing recklessness.
And then you made this medication point that's very, I think, very important.
I don't want to paint with too broad a brush.
There are a lot of people for whom medication has been important, but I feel like it's been over-prescribed at a large scale.
Everything about it is a lie.
You know, the original hypothesis, just to be clear about this, is that there were a small subset of children who were neurologically abnormal.
And if you put them on a stimulant, which is what methylphenidate is, most common ADHD medication, it's an amphetamine, that paradoxically calmed them down.
And the fact that they calmed down was an indication of their neurological abnormality.
Okay, every single bit of that is a preposterous lie.
What methylphenidate does is increase the probability that you will continue to attend to whatever you happen to be attending to.
It locks you on and it suppresses play behavior.
And there's no evidence whatsoever that it has a paradoxical effect on a small subset of children with attention deficit disorder.
What it does quite clearly is stop boys from playing roughly, especially the ones that are more extroverted and, well, more extroverted, more sociable, more assertive, more talkative, all of that, more boisterous.
And so I don't think there's any evidence at all in the clinical literature of the medium to long-term utility of attention deficit disorder medication.
I don't think there ever has been.
Like I followed that literature since 1982.
In fact, the first scrape I had in graduate school was with a professor at McGill who was at the forefront of ADHD research and who was a methylphenidate advocate.
And I criticized her papers on the grounds of no long-term follow-up.
And so, and it's some preposterous percentage of boys now are put on methylphenidate medication.
And so when I was a kid is when it really began starting, because I can remember when some of my peers would start to go on Riddling.
And, you know, the and that was even back in the day when I was, I'm Gen X. I mean, we were the ultimate free-range generation.
I was a latchkey kid for a little while.
And so you take all of these things, less play, less ability to, you know, the academic environment, less hospitable, less recess.
And then there's a lot of downstream consequences of that.
And then you say, here's a pill.
No, that was not the path.
And again, again, I don't want to overstate this, but I will say that we went too far in that direction.
And there's been, we've paid, and a lot of well-meaning doctors, a lot of well-meaning parents doing the best they could with the circumstances that they had, you know, fell into this.
And it's just been so tragic.
And so one of the reasons why I'm such a booster, for example, of Jonathan Heights' work is that he really wants to get us back to that play-based childhood.
And look, everything's trade-offs.
You know, it's an interesting irony that the Latchkey kid generation became the helicopter parents.
The Gen X generation, we were the Latchkey kids.
And it's my generation that hovers over their kids.
And, you know, even more than helicopter, the snowplow parent that like clears the way.
And I think one of the reasons is some of the excesses of the latchkey world were really negative.
I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff that happened in that total free-range environment.
But then there was this over-correction that went all the way to tightly managed play.
And, you know, not to refer too much to Jonathan, but there's in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind with my dear friend Greg Luke Yanoff, was really important.
And one of the ways that really helped open my eyes and helped me put a finger on what was happening was offering this contrast.
Like in my generation, how young were you the first time you left a house without supervision?
And for me, the answer is I was really young, maybe seven, eight.
I'm not out of the question that it was even six years old.
But you ask parents now and they might raise their hand and say, well, when my kid was 14, you know, we tried to raise like free-range kids and it was difficult even in rural Tennessee because we would get to the point where we would tell parents as they were coming over, they were letting their kid come over to play.
We would say, look, we have a philosophy where we let our kids run around the neighborhood and play.
Is that okay with you?
Because we wanted to pre-clear that because some parents would say, I would really rather not if that's okay.
That is not something that would come up in 1984.
What kind of neighborhood?
What kind of neighborhood was that?
It was a rural Tennessee neighborhood.
We lived literally across the street from us was just open pasture.
And behind us was another street with a cul-de-sac.
And then we moved from there to the very opposite of that, one of these very densely planned communities right outside of Nashville both of them remarkably safe but both of them very different one was very outdoors one was very much like if you were going to run through the woods you're going to encounter a bunch of deer you were going to encounter turkeys you were going to encounter you know there were coyotes in the hills and the other one was well you're going to encounter a coffee shop and And a pizzeria.
But in both of them, some parents, some parents, and this is Tennessee, Red Tennessee, some parents were totally cool with the free range, but a lot were absolutely not.
In both situations.
I wonder, tell me what you think about this.
I mean, when these massive cultural changes take place, it's never a straightforward thing to specify why.
I mean, in the neighborhood that I grew up in, and so I I was a child in the 70s so I was born in 62 so you know I was had my young childhood in the 60s and my middle childhood in the 70s at that point I grew up in in a little town let's say from the time I was nine till I graduated from high school town of about 3,000
Fairview, Alberta.
At that time, the neighborhoods were, there were a lot of women who were still at home in the neighborhoods.
You know, and so the neighborhoods were established in known territory because there was a, they were regulated by a network of interconnected women.
And so when you had your kids outside to play, outside wasn't hostile territory defined by the presence of no one but strangers.
It was territory defined by the watchful eye of a loose network of women.
And that all disappeared in really in the 1980s.
And it isn't obvious how that can be put back.
Like the question is, why did people start to become fearful of the neighborhood given that there was no radical increase in the probability that your child was going to be abducted by, you know, some psychopath?
That's a really good question.
You know, we human beings are generally not, we're often not very good at proper threat calibration.
And so, you know, you, in the 1980s, you began to have the stories like the missing kids on the milk cartons.
Yeah, you got that just when women entered the workforce en masse, you know, those two things coincided.
You also got the sexual predation and satanic ritual abuse conspiracies in daycare.
You know, and to me, that was all a manifestation of unconscious concern about having your children like radically unsupervised, not just unsupervised.
Or just abused and exploited.
Yeah, I remember the satanic panic very well.
It was terrible.
It was weird and yeah, it was very dark.
And so, you have this situation.
And I think, so when I'm coming of age in the late 70s, early 80s, you had this situation where, and I used the phrase latchkey kid before, and there was this kind of gap between the home situation that you described where the dad was at work and moms were all over the neighborhood, the two parents working, and then the two parents working the way things are now, where there's loads of afterschool activities.
If your kids are in sports, it's like all consuming.
And there's just much more, especially for middle-class and upper-middle-class families, there's just activity after activity after activity.
So, there isn't this latchkey phenomenon as much.
And so, I think one of the things that happened in that latchkey gap, those latchkey years, for some kids, it was awesome.
For me, it was fantastic.
I loved roaming the neighborhood, but I was also a kind of nerdy, responsible, straight-as-an-arrow kid.
So, when I was a latchkey kid, one of the things I started was neighborhood chess tournaments.
So, if that doesn't tell you I was a raging nerd in middle school, I don't know what does.
But I started like chess tournaments, and people would come to my house and play chess, or I would just walk outside with the basketball and start bouncing the basketball, and people would come from all over the neighborhood to play basketball.
And that, for me, was great.
But I also know that there were kids who were violently bullied, just terribly bullied in their neighborhoods.
There were girls who were assaulted in their neighborhoods.
And so, not everybody's experience of that latchkey generation, we kind of lionized it on Twitter, but not everybody's experience in that time period was good.
And so, a lot of those kids who had that bad experience then come of age, and they vow, my kids will not experience this.
And I would also, you know, this is a podcast, so we can do some sort of like speculation, free association.
But I do also wonder if the part of the delay in having children, if part of the anxiety of the moment is that you have a lot of people who are not wanting to have kids, and the fewer number of children, is they don't want to have kids until they're ready to be able to make sure everything is okay.
Yeah.
They want to...
I think, David, what we should do is we should close this section off.
We should talk about exactly that on the Daily Wire side.
Okay.
Yeah, because I've been speaking about...
with my wife a lot she's particularly concerned about the plight of young women um and the fact that if if if men if young men lack mentors that i would say the crisis is actually even more acute among young women on the mentorship front i think especially when you add in the pornography element to this where young men lack mentors and are being acculturated into relationships by through early exposure to pornography.
And we wonder why there are major relationship problems in this country.
Yeah, well, that's another thing that we can talk about on the Daily Wire side.
So, I want to talk to you, if you would, about some ideas about the timeline for life.
How old are you?
56.
56.
So, we're roughly the same age.
I'm 63.
And so I guess you were a kid more in the 80s and I was a kid a little bit more in the 70s, but it's not that much different.
So let's do that.
Let's close this off.
The more discussion that can be had about the utility in encouraging young people in general, we've got to figure out exactly what that means.
That's what we'll talk about on the Daily Wire side.
What does the proper time course of a life look like?
So for everybody, yeah, because this delay that you described, that's what triggered that for me.
So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire and we'll continue this discussion focusing on what an optimized timeline for life might look like from a developmental perspective.
And so in the meantime, I'd like to thank you for speaking with me today and for your work on the cultural front, bringing the plight of young men to broader attention, especially among people on the left, because that's of crucial importance.
And I'm very pleased to hear that your work has had some broad impact.
Maybe that'll continue to be the case.
The next $20 million the Democrats spend might be better spent in consequence.
So any closing words?
No, I've really enjoyed the conversation.
This is an absolute passion of mine.
It's been that way for a long time, is this idea that we have so many millions of men who are young men who are really struggling.
And how can we reach them?
How can we inspire them with a virtuous vision for what it means to be a man?
Because I'm convinced it's only the virtuous vision that's ultimately going to be fulfilling.
And, you know, look, it's a real pleasure to talk to somebody who's been thinking about this, eating, drinking, breathing this for a very long time.
And I have appreciated the good fruit that I have seen in young men in my life and that I've seen that have had as a result of some of your writings and some of your teaching.
And I do appreciate that.
And I think people should appreciate that.
Well, thank you very much, sir.
And to all you watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated.
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