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March 3, 2015 - Louder with Crowder
21:26
How to Be a Man With Art of Manliness || Louder With Crowder
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You run this website.
It's one of the largest.
Now, what's the claim?
It's the largest men's interest magazine, independent?
We say independent.
We're not owned by a corporation, so it's just me and my wife who run the show.
So yeah, largest independent men's website.
Because, you know, those corporations.
We've got to keep them in shape.
Those corporations.
You've got to watch out.
Corporations.
And, by the way, just to make sure, this is not at all an endorsement of any of my views or political standings that Brett is on.
He just happens to be a nice gentleman.
But then again, we've also had actual terrorists on the show, Brett.
So, it doesn't mean we endorse actual terrorism.
Now...
Art of Manliness, what's funny about it is that it seems to be an actual site where men actually want to hang out there and read it.
I'm sure you know about the big scam with a lot of the men's interest magazines where they just buy up subscriptions and not many people actually read it, but you guys actually have a significant readership and return readership.
Yeah, we've developed a really passionate following because our goal from the get-go has just been to help men become better men in all aspects of their life.
And as a result of that, a lot of our content is just problem-driven.
Think about the problems that guys have and try to write content that will help them.
And it's amazing, Stephen, the letters that I've gotten over the years.
I get actual handwritten letters in the mailbox.
That's something we advocate on the site, bringing back the art of the handwritten letter.
People telling us how the site has changed their life, it's helped their marriage.
I've had one guy tell us the story about how the art of manliness led to him finding his wife.
It's a really cool story.
He basically read a post and And there's this girl that he was very, you know, he was interested in and ended up marrying her, and that's, yeah, The Art of Manliness brought them together.
That takes me to an important question I have for you.
Sure.
And it's kind of a social question, so it could be a long answer, but I definitely do...
In speaking with a lot of young men out there, there is more confusion and a lot of young men feel more conflicted about what it is to be a man in today's society than ever.
And you get some pushback obviously from feminism and from just the way society is sort of, you know, now the big message is your male privilege is showing.
So sometimes men feel inherently guilty.
Have you noticed when you get these handwritten letters back that some men just feel a little conflicted about who they should really be in modern America?
Well, the thing we get is that the site has helped them feel good about being a man.
And the truth is, yeah, there is a lot of confusion about what it means to be a man in today's society.
And that's a complex reason why that is.
A lot of people want to find simple answers that, oh, it's feminism or it's this.
But this is something that we've been dealing with.
In America, since its founding, masculinity has always been debated what it means to be a man.
And, you know, in recent years, there's been an uptick in this sort of like what this, you know, this conversation, right, with all the big media outlets about...
What does it mean to be a man today?
And what's interesting, because of the site, I've had the opportunity to do a lot of research about the history of masculinity in America.
This conversation that we're having is pretty much similar to a conversation that happened in America at the turn of the 20th century.
Because right now the conversation is, well, masculinity is obsolete because, hey, nice mug.
It is a nice mug.
For those listening to us, really, it's the Art of Manliness mug.
The Art of Manliness mug.
No, yeah, so the conversation now is that masculinity is obsolete because we're moving into an information economy, so we don't need men to be big and strong, and we don't need a manual blue-collar workforce.
They need to be more soft and sensitive, etc.
There's some truth to that.
That's where the economy's going.
But what's interesting is that At the turn of the 20th century, like late 19th century, there was a similar conversation, except that instead of moving to an information economy, the argument was that men are becoming obsolete because we are an industrialized nation, and machines are replacing men.
And a lot of our American folktales that we have, like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, if you think about it, it's about man versus machine.
I was going to say it's about cool hats and gear.
But I don't know if you know this.
It's also funny that you talk about this.
We've had a guest on before, Bill Whittle, who talks about how actually the economic conversation mirrors that.
Because as we transition from agricultural to industrial, right?
Now all of a sudden you have everyone who had their own plot of land in an agricultural society.
Agrarian, I believe the term is.
Agrarian, there you go.
And then all of a sudden you've moved to – there are a few wealthy people, the people who own these industries and factories and you create a working class.
Whereas now with the internet, economically we're returning to that same conversation where people can have their own plot of digital land and wealth effectively can be more distributed.
The kind of theory is you're going to have fewer billionaires but far more people making good six-figure incomes online independently.
So it's maybe kind of the same thing except where we're talking about man parts.
Yeah.
We're going back to that.
Yeah.
And what's interesting too is that in recent years there's been sort of like this menescence, I guess you'd call it, where the whole, you know, men, guys are growing beards again, they're wearing flannel, they're going camping, and there's all these lifestyle sites dedicated to men, right?
So being a man is awesome, right?
There are all these businesses that have popped up around that time.
What's funny is that around the late 19th century, when they were having this sort of conversation about what it means to be a man, there really was like this, I don't know, renaissance in masculinity at the time too.
You know, a lot of the ideas and, I guess, archetypes of masculinity we have in America today began in the 19th century.
Boxing became huge in America at this time.
And John L. Sullivan, the guy who's sort of the boxer guy that's on the top of the art of manliness, handlebar mustache, like he was just a star.
Like everyone just obsessed about him.
Baseball became huge.
Football became huge because these were seen as outlets where men could show off their strength, their physical strength in a world that no longer really needed men because of machines.
So it was an opportunity for men to display that.
So, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting that we're the same sort of thing.
You're seeing the same sort of thing happen today as well.
MMA is becoming really popular amongst, you know, entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley types.
CrossFit is huge.
Yeah.
We're the same sort of thing.
you know, We're good to go.
Sort of to tap into that primal masculinity that we have.
The strenuous life.
The strenuous, yeah.
Well, there's another example, yeah, of 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt and his strenuous life.
You know, you have to be the doer of deeds.
Well, that's a great example if you read a story, too.
A lot of people, they don't know enough about the man.
You know, he was sickly.
He was this kid who really wasn't, you know, the star athlete.
Probably would have been picked last for gym class.
But it's that principle.
What's so funny, too, you bring me to this point I was talking about with my wife.
Nowadays, we create sort of these false male archetypes, right?
Like, well, you're the dumb jock.
You're the sensitive one.
But the fact is, if you look at great leaders who are great intellectuals, right, they were fantastic thinkers or spiritualists, all of them believed that there was a physical manifestation of that discipline.
They believed in the strenuous life.
Hey, go out and do something hard physically every day because mentally that disciplines you.
It wasn't one or the other, if you read Roosevelt.
It was a very creative thinker.
He'd be the little goth kid today writing poems everyone would make fun of, and then he'd kick the crap out of you.
They combined brains and bronze.
That's something we talk about a lot on the site.
Lots of great thinkers, like you go back to the ancient Greeks, they thought the same way.
What it meant to be a man was combining the physical attributes also with these sort of contemplative thinking.
And they believed, like you said, that doing hard things physically, working hard physically, Showing physical courage transferred itself over to the political or moral or spiritual life.
They also did some pretty weird stuff, the Greeks.
They did some weird stuff.
They did some weird stuff.
But they'd probably say the same thing about us.
You know what, though?
YouTube cats and some of that Japanese stuff.
I don't know.
They would say, hey, that cat playing the piano is weird.
I'd be like...
That's weird.
Having an 11-year-old boy on the side is kind of weird.
So, no, you're right, and it's funny.
So now there's sort of this, I guess...
I'm trying to think of a polite way to put it because I don't want to bring feminism into the picture.
Sort of a neo-androgynous view.
Let's put it that way.
Where there's this idea that, well, you know, this false sense of machismo is what men are.
And so a lot of people have condemned men for something that's a pretty recent...
Sort of a picture of a man.
That wasn't it for a long time.
Like you're talking about, the Greeks, the Romans, our founding fathers, creative thinkers, intellectuals, who also, you know, were wielding axes and stomping heads.
Yeah, they were the warrior philosophers.
Yeah, you're right.
A lot of the arguments against masculinity, they often use sort of a straw man.
And yeah, they create like they go for the most extreme version of masculinity or what some people would call hyper masculinity.
Right.
And to their point, like, yeah, that's that type of masculinity is not that great.
It's not conducive to good society.
It doesn't help us become a better people.
But I think for the most part, most men, I think, inherently get what it means to be a good man because they they they have men in their lives that they can look to, whether it be their father or a grandfather or even mentors they had in high school.
So yeah, I mean, I don't...
I mean, that's a funny thing.
Even though we're called the art of manliness, we don't get into a lot of debates.
People don't want to go there.
It is an incredibly positive atmosphere.
I will say that because anywhere else on the internet, we've talked about this with guest after guest.
You have about the first five posts, the grace posts, and then it just devolves into the worst that humanity has to offer.
It could be like the Olive Garden.
I love Olive Garden salad and breadsticks.
They are good.
And then some guy is talking about how he's going to have a gang knock off your mother because you wouldn't know a good breadstick if it bit you in the posterior.
And I'm just like, it happens so quickly.
Your site is one of the few exceptions, almost to the point that it's like Pleasantville, where people are too nice.
Where I'm like, someone just, you know, yell something anti-Semitic or something that's going to hurt somebody's feelings.
This isn't the internet anymore.
No, I mean, we've worked really hard to develop that culture, I guess, on the site through our content.
And we moderate the comments because, you know, the site is my home.
I treat it like that.
And I wouldn't let some yahoo come into my house and just say, do whatever they want to.
I'd kick them out or even do worse things.
So I treat my website the same way.
So yeah, you're invited to come in, but here are the rules.
And if you don't play by the rules, well...
There's other places you can hang out on the internet.
But yeah, we try to keep it positive.
What's funny, you know your audience with that, I think.
And I think that, like we've talked about, in the same sort of sense, there are these sort of false male archetypes that were pushed onto people.
There's this false idea of men's interests.
You know, my friend Greg Gutfeld, who actually hosts there on Fox News, he was the editor at Men's Health and FHM. He was fired, actually, from Men's Health because he wrote an article on the positive attributes of tobacco.
And now we know it to be true that it can fight Alzheimer's.
Now, he wasn't saying go light up, but this was just very controversial, right?
You can never write that in a Men's Health magazine.
Yeah, nicotine does that.
Yeah.
I've seen those studies.
Yeah.
I don't advise that anyone smokes, by the way.
No.
He let us in on the secret, you know, and he's talked about this openly.
He says a lot of people don't really read these magazines.
They buy up subscriptions so they can sell ad space.
And he worked there.
He said the readership is incredibly low.
And I thought, you know what?
That's funny.
That's probably pretty true because you're talking about a magazine.
If you open it up, let's say you just open up one of the top male magazines right now, right?
It'll be one page, yachting attire, what to wear to your yacht party.
Then next page, Evil, rich people.
But you were just appealing to yachting attire, and the next page is basically something that would make penthouse letters from the 70s blush, just incredibly graphic.
I'm going, a lot of people wouldn't want to read this mix of material.
It turns out they don't, and I get the sense that from your sight, a lot of men are filling this void of, oh, it's a place I can go where there are pragmatic pieces that help me become a better man.
Yeah, it's funny you mention the men's magazines and the men's health.
I mean, that's actually what inspired the art of manliness.
Here's the story of the genesis of the art of manliness.
I was in a bookstore one night during law school, killing time, went to the men's interest section, the magazine section, and I was looking at the headlines, something I do all the time, and I remember just sitting there looking at the headlines on these magazines and just realizing that My gosh, every month it's the same thing.
It's like how to get six-pack abs.
Cosmo-esque sex tips.
Positions you need to try.
The $10,000 suit you need to wear.
And you need a six-pack abs to try those sex positions.
I think one time I saw eight-pack abs and I was like, Wow.
There's eight-pack abs?
Okay.
Yeah, it's called the famine victim look.
The famine victim look.
And I just realized, you know what?
This stuff doesn't resonate with me.
To me, this doesn't say masculinity.
It doesn't say manhood.
No.
It says D-back.
Yeah.
It is a really tough time.
I know people say, you have no idea what it is.
You're a man.
Women's rights get mad at you and say men's rights aren't a thing.
I'm not talking about men's rights, but I am talking about young men.
I have a pretty young demo for a more sort of right-leaning political website.
We don't do quite as well as you, but we do well.
And I get a lot of emails.
We just had Gary Wilson, for example, on where we talked about, you know, your brain on porn.
And actually, I think I'd come across him on your site, or Rob Wolf was a friend of mine who covered his stuff too.
And we just get emails from young men saying, I just fell into this.
No one told me about these pitfalls.
I mean, I'm so conflicted now.
I don't know who to talk to about this.
And that's just a microcosm pornography.
But I can imagine now, when you have people telling men, I mean, this is what they're being taught on campus, that you are guilty by birth.
And a lot of these men are feminists, or a lot of these men certainly wouldn't want to have privilege thrust upon them.
It creates a sense of needless guilt because they haven't done anything wrong.
And that's got to be tough to deal with today as a young teenager.
Yeah, I can imagine.
And you're right.
We don't really do a good job in our country or our culture of helping young men feel good about themselves.
And the result is, you can look at the statistics on how young men are doing.
Suicide is high amongst young men.
Unemployment high.
College attendance is lower.
The pornography thing is part of it.
I mean, it's really dismal.
And It's funny.
I was actually talking to a gal yesterday on my podcast.
She's a PhD in psychology.
She's a self-described feminist, but she even said, we make young men feel horrible about themselves.
We're bearing the fruits of that now.
And there was a time in our country where there was a little bit more mentoring than what took place in a young man's life.
Either through their father or their uncle was there, their grandfather.
They were there to teach them how to be a man.
And you have a lot of young men today who are growing up either in single mother homes.
There's not a father in the picture.
Or even if dad is around, he might be really busy with work.
Sure.
order to provide the lifestyle that he wants to give to his family.
Sure.
And so he never has the time to teach his kid how to shave.
And people think, oh, how to shave, teaching your kid, what's that going to do to help your son?
Yeah, they're going to learn how to shave, but there's more that goes on in that process.
Because it shows the kid knows my dad cares about me, and he wants the best for me.
And then just spending time with your kids, conversations come up spontaneously where you can talk to your son or talk to your grandson or talk to a nephew about what it means to be a good man.
And that's not happening for a while.
And that's why you have all this confusion where you have guys who are going to the internet To find out answers.
Oh, good Lord.
You just said something that was like a trigger word for me, trigger phrase.
Trigger warning.
Yeah.
I know.
They just said, you said young men are trying to go to the internet to learn.
Yeah, well, yeah.
You have young men who don't have a father, don't have a grant, don't have a male mentor.
Right.
On showing them how, I mean, what it means to be a man, what you need to do to be a good man.
So they go to the internet.
And, you know, there's not, I mean, you're basically, you know, who knows what they're learning there.
And so they, you know, they might pick up by this sort of like a lot of really popular things like the pickup artist community is really popular online.
And it's just all about, you know, To be a man, you've got to get all these notches on your belt.
And that's how they define masculinity.
And so you get these guys in this trap where they fork over a lot of money to learn how to pick up women, and then they're not successful, and then they just feel like crap because, man, being a man means you have to have sex with as many women as possible.
I'm a failure as a man, so I suck as a man.
So you get these very one-dimensional ideas of masculinity.
And it's unfortunate.
And that's a minority, though.
It's important for people to note because you'll have people, let's say, you know, feminists right now will hear art of manliness, right?
A neo-feminist, let's say, like Lear Keith, who we had on.
Right away will be upset because they'll attribute that minority male culture, that minority, sorry, of male culture.
I'm not saying male minorities.
Let me clarify that.
A small contingency of male culture who are just saying what it means to be a man is not just on my belt.
And what you offer young men is antithetical to that.
but it gets lumped into the same category as the essence of man.
Sure.
And that's a terrible mischaracterization to make.
Well, I understand.
I mean, it's just, it's easy thinking, right.
To make generalizations like that.
So I understand why it, why it happens.
But yeah, I mean, our, our goal is to help become, help men become a better man in all aspects of their life because that carries over to other areas of the life.
You know, if you're, if you, you know, for example, if your goal in life is to find a girlfriend, for example, right.
If that's what you want to do, well, you shouldn't really make your focus in life just like going to bars and like trying these lines and like doing these little techniques.
What you should be doing is just developing yourself as a man physically, you know, working on your social skills in general that are applicable not just to women but also to men.
And that women will find you attractive once you kind of develop the whole man.
And so, yeah, that's sort of our philosophy is just develop the whole man and good things will happen as a consequence of that.
In a nutshell, if you have to leave people right with this, the Brett McKay, the soundbite that Oprah would love.
I love that with Oprah.
It doesn't matter what you say.
We've just done a 40-minute interview.
Can I have a soundbite?
That's going to work good for the break.
What is it?
What would you say it is to be a man?
And how does art of manliness help with that?
To be a man means being virtuous, and by that I mean the Roman-Greek ideal of being excellent in all aspects of your life.
And the art of manliness, all our content is geared towards that, and helping men strive for excellence in their life in all aspects.
So there's your soundbite.
There you have it.
Brett McKay's Excellent Adventure, Art of Manliness.
Hey, Brett, we appreciate you, brother.
And hopefully you come back on and you can educate.
Hopefully we have Fun Dip on next time.
He's not on right now.
Fun Dip.
Fun Dip is a producer.
Okay.
You'll see him if you peruse the channel.
He's a character and he needs a good kick in the pants to become a better man sometimes.
He'll just complain about it.
Ah!
I don't have time for this.
I've got to eat my Hebrew national hot dog breakfast.
He's a character.
That sounds good.
It is delicious, actually.
If you think about it, he justifies it superbly.
If you're eating bacon, you're basically eating processed meat.
He's just replacing it for a different form with a Hebrew national hot dog.
I like his style.
I think I like this guy.
Well, we'll hook you in fun dip up.
Thank you so much, Brett, for coming on, brother.
Thanks, Dean.
It's been a pleasure.
If you like this video, be sure to subscribe or see my latest videos.
And if you don't, I'll be upset.
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