2024-06-12_Pushback_and_Questions_on_Womens

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00:00:29.760 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Today on the podcast, I want to interact with a

00:00:33.440 | series of important questions posed to me by a listener who I will call Amy.

00:00:37.760 | Amy writes in and says, "Hi, Joshua. Thank you for all the work that you do." Been a big fan,

00:00:41.360 | gives me some time on her listening and says, "I was listening to a recent episode, number 1016,

00:00:48.560 | and it really hit me in a stark way." And for context, 1016 was an episode titled

00:00:54.800 | "Things Young Men Should Do in 2024," wherein I read basically a tweet thread by a Twitter user

00:01:02.480 | and then interacted a little bit with the ideas with specific advice for young men.

00:01:07.440 | Amy goes on and shares a little bit about her personal family details with me and says,

00:01:11.840 | "Anyway, I enjoy your values and leadership. I feel like I have no influence because I have no sons

00:01:19.920 | and am not a man. When I listen to an episode like this, it makes me question my existence

00:01:27.040 | and if I have any power or values as a woman." So, please bear with me in my questions. I ask

00:01:34.320 | them from a positive perspective because I'd appreciate your leadership guidance and perspective.

00:01:38.560 | And she goes on with these questions. First off, "What would Joshua teach his daughter or young

00:01:43.520 | women to become great leaders in our society? Can his," meaning Joshua's, "Can his wife be a leader

00:01:49.680 | in the family? How? What does that look like, practically speaking? Does Joshua see the value

00:01:55.840 | in women outside of the home, working for pay?" Give some examples that I'll interact with.

00:02:01.120 | "Should there be women-only clubs? Why doesn't this matter?" Give some examples also about

00:02:05.840 | negative clubs for men. "What do you do with your listeners who have no ability to benefit from the

00:02:10.640 | teachings that are men-focused?" And then says, "What about the young men who damage society in

00:02:16.160 | the name of power and vanity? Why glorify them in this podcast episode?" So, Amy, I think these

00:02:21.440 | are great questions and I want to interact with them. First, I'll do the easier ones first.

00:02:26.640 | I'm going to say this clearly and directly, and I worry that it will come across as offensive,

00:02:33.280 | but just know that that's not the goal. My goal is to be clear.

00:02:36.320 | I don't want you to listen to that podcast episode. It's fine if you do, but it's not my goal that you

00:02:46.080 | listen to that podcast episode. Rather, it is my goal that a young man should listen to that

00:02:51.840 | podcast episode or somebody who is coaching a young man or advising a young man. There's an

00:02:57.920 | enormous problem in speaking in public, and it's quite simply this. You can't control who listens

00:03:05.120 | to your words. You can't control even what they do with them, how they're represented or

00:03:11.200 | misrepresented. You can't control who listens, though. And that's okay. But what it means is,

00:03:16.320 | if you want the people that you're trying to impact to listen to your words, the only solution

00:03:22.400 | that you have is to speak in a way that will hopefully engage the kind of people that you

00:03:28.080 | want to interact with what you have to say. I have two enormous concerns. The first,

00:03:36.720 | and they're both related to young men, and they're related. So first, I observe that right now,

00:03:43.840 | men, broadly speaking, especially unmarried men, are not doing well. They're not flourishing in

00:03:52.960 | our current world. Now, there are other groups that are not doing well. There are other populations of

00:03:58.320 | people who are not flourishing. But a group that is not flourishing is young men, young single men,

00:04:05.360 | not doing well. On many objective metrics, income, wealth building, marriage rates,

00:04:11.840 | health, it's not going well. Secondly, that's who I have a deep personal burden for.

00:04:20.720 | I care about young men on a level that is different than I care about other groups of people. I also

00:04:29.760 | care about young women. I also care about poor people. I also care about refugees. I also care

00:04:38.720 | about people who are in prison. I care about lots of people. But I have a distinct personal burden

00:04:46.320 | for young men. That is who I care the most about. That is who I want to serve and help the most.

00:04:54.480 | And so, I've made a conscious choice that if I'm going to serve and care for young men,

00:05:00.880 | then I'm going to speak to the people that I want to listen. Now, anybody else is welcome to listen.

00:05:07.280 | You're welcome to listen. I want you to listen. If there's anything I have to say that can be

00:05:11.920 | useful to you or helpful to you, I want you here. But if I lose you as a listener and I gain a young

00:05:20.640 | man as a listener because of the way that I speak and the way that I communicate,

00:05:27.360 | I'm content with that choice. I would dearly love to be your friend. I would dearly love

00:05:33.840 | to interact with you. I enjoy speaking to smart, wonderful mothers, especially mothers of daughters.

00:05:40.960 | I have four sons and a daughter. I want your daughters to succeed, which is why I'm going

00:05:46.000 | to interact and share and answer your questions honestly. But we can't all do everything that

00:05:53.120 | we would like. I'll just give one analogy. You might care about saving the whales and stopping

00:05:59.680 | climate change and improving your town and fixing politics and all of those things,

00:06:04.880 | but you can't impact all of them. And one tool of success that I believe is very important that

00:06:12.800 | we really focus on is the idea most popularized by Stephen Covey of the difference between our

00:06:22.160 | circle of concern and our circle of control. As Covey taught the concept many years ago in

00:06:27.840 | Seven Habits for Highly Successful People, we all have a circle of concern, things that we're

00:06:32.560 | concerned about. And global warming and politics and war in the Middle East and our children and

00:06:41.360 | nasty playground cleanup and the beach cleanup and the plastic in the oceans. And there's thousands

00:06:46.160 | of things that we're all concerned about. But we have a much smaller circle of control. And these

00:06:52.000 | are things that we can control. These are things that we can influence and that we can affect.

00:06:56.320 | And if we are spending all our time thinking and talking about things that are within our circle

00:07:03.920 | of concern, we generally don't make much progress in life. But if we can laser in focus on things

00:07:10.560 | that are within our circle of control, on the things that we can affect, over time we can grow

00:07:16.480 | that and we can acquire more influence, more authority, more reputation, more power, and we

00:07:23.840 | can affect more of those things that are in our circle of concern. But in order to make progress,

00:07:28.160 | we have to focus on that smaller circle, that circle of control. And so, as an expression of

00:07:33.600 | that, I have a deep personal burden for men, for men who are failing in society, who are not – life

00:07:40.320 | is not working and the deck feels stacked against them. That's not to diminish the many significant

00:07:45.920 | challenges that women face, but it's to say that I am choosing to focus my energy on men,

00:07:51.840 | because that's where I believe I can have the biggest impact, because I understand them,

00:07:56.160 | I understand their issues, I understand the challenges, I understand the successes,

00:08:00.400 | I am one, and I know what works and what doesn't work for men. I also believe that is where I have

00:08:09.920 | leverage. I believe that when men are flourishing and doing well, that has a follow-on effect of

00:08:19.120 | generally contributing to a stable society where women also flourish. And so, because I believe

00:08:28.800 | that there's leverage, if I can encourage young men and encourage men broadly, then I believe that

00:08:35.920 | I can have leverage and I care about leverage. This does not minimize you as a woman or your

00:08:44.560 | daughters or your perspective or your very valid and important questions. What it does mean that

00:08:52.720 | with my limited time and energy, I want to focus on the change that I want to see in the world.

00:08:59.360 | And I'm going to – since I have a personal burden and care for men specifically, I want to speak to

00:09:07.520 | men. And so, I have chosen to do that in my style of communication, in my manner of communication.

00:09:14.960 | And even in that particular episode, I am imagining a young man coming across my podcast title,

00:09:21.360 | "Thing Young Men Should Do in 2024." And I am specifically choosing language that I hope will

00:09:28.080 | break through for a young man and give him a roadmap and talk about his issues and make him feel

00:09:33.760 | connected and heard and understood and cared for and give him a little bit of advice.

00:09:39.760 | And I will speak in that episode, I'll speak in a way that I would never speak to you as a woman.

00:09:46.080 | Just give an example. In that episode, I used a vulgar word and a vulgar expression. I didn't

00:09:51.840 | originate it, I was just reading it from the tweet thread, but I also didn't choose to censor it. Why

00:09:56.080 | not? Well, because sometimes vulgar language can be employed for effect. And it has a certain effect,

00:10:04.640 | especially in men, if you don't overuse it, but it has a certain emotional effect and an emotional

00:10:11.440 | response. I would not speak to you as a woman using vulgar language, ever. I would not speak

00:10:18.880 | to a young woman with vulgar language. I generally employ almost no vulgar language in my speech,

00:10:25.360 | neither in public nor in private. But there is a time for vulgar language for effect, and so I

00:10:31.920 | chose not to censor the particular vulgar expression that I used in that particular podcast episode.

00:10:37.040 | But I'm doing it in hopes that I can connect with men, because that's the change that I want

00:10:43.200 | to try to contribute to in the world. I've spent years thinking about this problem and I don't know

00:10:48.320 | any other way to approach it. When you communicate in public, you can't choose who listens. So you

00:10:54.960 | have to try to focus on the people that you want to listen and speak to them, and then allow other

00:11:00.240 | people to listen in if they also find the content useful and helpful. I have an audience that is

00:11:06.160 | predominantly men, much more than 80% male. And that makes me satisfied, not because I wish to

00:11:14.240 | exclude women. I don't mind. I'm grateful for any female listeners that I have. I've had great

00:11:19.360 | relationships with many female listeners, and I hope that that continues. There's nothing

00:11:24.800 | exclusionary about women. There's no way that I wish to exclude women from listening to my podcast.

00:11:32.160 | But if I were to create content or materials that were targeted towards women, I would repel men.

00:11:41.840 | Now, I may repel some women, but I think the ratio is different. If I speak to men

00:11:47.680 | in a way that is attractive to men, I'm probably going to repel some women,

00:11:54.240 | but not all. But if I speak to women in a way that is primarily attractive to women,

00:12:01.040 | I'm probably going to repel most men, if that makes sense. So, I don't know whether that's

00:12:06.640 | right or wrong. That's a decision that I have made. And so, I just say, first and foremost,

00:12:11.360 | that you don't need to listen to that. And if it doesn't help you and it doesn't serve you,

00:12:16.080 | it doesn't encourage you, or it doesn't give you a vision, if it doesn't help in some way,

00:12:20.400 | then just skip it and go and find something that does give you what you need at this particular

00:12:25.200 | point in time in your life. I have made a choice in all of my content that I will respect my

00:12:32.000 | listener's control over what he listens to. Every listener has a stop button, a skip button,

00:12:38.960 | a delete button, a subscribe button, and an unsubscribe button. And so, the choice that I

00:12:44.480 | have made is to do my very best to respect my listeners who want my content and focus on serving

00:12:52.960 | the people who want to hear my ideas at the risk of many people exercising their natural right to

00:12:59.360 | pause, unsubscribe, leave nasty reviews. All of those things are perfectly fine. But if I do that,

00:13:05.920 | I may be able to advance my mission of helping people that I feel particularly called and

00:13:10.800 | burdened to try to serve in some way. And I don't know any other pathway for me to be able to

00:13:16.080 | accomplish that. We need to develop the skills of understanding the context for different

00:13:22.880 | conversations and interactions. And this will be important even as I talk more in this episode in

00:13:28.080 | response to some of your specific questions. One challenge of our modern society is that we've

00:13:34.640 | lost privacy of interaction. I was thinking about this with light from a comment that I saw

00:13:42.720 | regarding the recent speech by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker. I think that's his name,

00:13:49.840 | forgive me, I'm not a football guy. And he was speaking, he's a Roman Catholic who was speaking

00:13:54.720 | at a Roman Catholic commencement ceremony in a Roman Catholic college. And the speech that he

00:14:00.640 | gave was, I thought, I watched about 15 minutes of it. I didn't read the whole thing or watch the

00:14:05.600 | whole thing, but I tried to get the nuts, the bits of it. I thought it was a great speech,

00:14:10.400 | a really good and useful speech to articulate some advice that was very useful. But it was

00:14:19.520 | extremely offensive to many people, including many women, because he had the temerity to say

00:14:25.120 | to a group of Roman Catholic graduates that many of the women there gathered will ultimately find

00:14:32.240 | a greater sense of fulfillment and purpose in their calling as mothers as compared to their

00:14:36.880 | calling as businesswomen or as career women. So one thing that I observed is there was a day and

00:14:44.880 | age in which a Roman Catholic could speak to a group of Roman Catholics and be understood inside

00:14:50.560 | the context of Roman Catholicism and the Christian religion. Today, you have to know when you're

00:14:57.040 | giving a speech that this is going to go on the internet and there are going to be legions of

00:15:01.040 | people who don't share any of our culture. And this has really harmed relationships, because

00:15:06.720 | I can't be confident in any setting that I'm not being recorded, that I'm not being, you know,

00:15:13.200 | someone's Apple Watch or other smartwatch is not recording my audio, that someone's not

00:15:16.800 | surreptitiously recording video of me. I just assume everything I say ever is always going to

00:15:22.080 | be on the internet. I assume every message that I'm going to write is going to be screenshotted

00:15:27.680 | and posted. And what's particularly galling to me is when you see this in the context of family

00:15:31.840 | relationships, you see children that post their message threads with their parents on the internet

00:15:39.120 | or people who fight with their parents in public on social media. It's horrific.

00:15:43.360 | And it's not all bad. Certainly, we've exposed abuse or terrible ideologies and different things

00:15:52.640 | and hidden cameras and whistleblowers and all that. It probably has its place. It's not all bad,

00:15:56.960 | but it has changed how we speak. I can't control that. But what I do think is we always need to

00:16:03.280 | understand the context of where and how we're going to speak. Even as I interact with your

00:16:08.240 | questions that you've asked me, I'm answering these questions in public wildly differently

00:16:14.000 | than I would if we were having an individual conversation, not in terms of my perspective,

00:16:19.840 | but in terms of the application. Because in individual conversation, I would always need

00:16:24.160 | to understand who you are, what you think, what your perspective is, what your background is,

00:16:30.160 | and then filter what I have to say through the light of that, pointing out any commonality or

00:16:35.600 | distinctions between those things. And yet in public, I'm not doing that. So keep those things

00:16:44.000 | in mind as we discuss these particular issues that you have said, that I'm sorry that what I

00:16:49.840 | have to say doesn't resonate with you, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay if I have the hope

00:16:55.760 | of resonating with men. I want to make one more comment also that needs to be said just because

00:17:02.800 | what you said was so pointed and so vulnerable. You wrote in your email, you said, "I feel like

00:17:08.880 | I have no influence because I have no sons and I'm not a man. When I listen to an episode like

00:17:15.040 | this, it makes me question my existence and if I have any power or value as a woman." I would like

00:17:23.040 | to as vigorously as possible encourage you that it doesn't matter how you feel, that may be a true

00:17:35.120 | description of your feelings, and those are your feelings. But what those feelings are implying to

00:17:44.480 | you is absolutely, unequivocally false. And therefore, you should reject those feelings

00:17:51.600 | vigorously, constantly, in every way, shape, and form as absolute lies.

00:17:58.320 | You do have influence. It doesn't matter that you have no sons. It matters that you are a woman,

00:18:09.920 | and you do have influence because you are a woman. You must never question your existence,

00:18:16.800 | nor should you try to judge any power or value that you have in comparison with the power or

00:18:27.920 | value of any other person, be it male or female. You are a human being created in the image of God,

00:18:37.920 | worthy of all respect that is associated with your being. You are a mother to daughters. You are a

00:18:49.200 | wife. You have undoubtedly many other roles in society. You are a daughter. You probably have

00:18:56.400 | a job. You have a business. You are a neighbor. You have many roles in society. And we will always

00:19:04.560 | accord you the respect that you deserve because these things are true. So, ignore your feelings,

00:19:11.600 | focus on what is true, what you know to be true, what everyone around you knows to be true,

00:19:17.520 | and then in time, your feelings will adapt to that truth.

00:19:20.800 | Feelings are useful ephemeral indicators of something happening, in the same way that pain

00:19:28.960 | in the body is a useful indicator of a problem in the body. But feelings are not reliable

00:19:37.440 | decision-making criteria any more than pain is in and of itself a reliable criteria of whether

00:19:49.040 | you are doing the right thing. You may be exercising, for example, and experiencing pain

00:19:55.440 | during your exercise. In one context, the pain can be an indication that you're exercising in

00:20:02.400 | a dangerous way and you should immediately stop. In another context, the pain that you're

00:20:08.800 | experiencing during your exercise may be the indication that your physical therapist who is

00:20:14.560 | helping you is pointing to you to indicate that what you're doing is working because it's stretching

00:20:22.080 | the muscle and it's solving the fundamental problem. Similarly, feelings or emotions can be

00:20:29.760 | useful flags of a real problem in a relationship or in society or in a policy or in a concept or

00:20:40.160 | in a thinking. Or they could be the exact opposite. They could be indications that something is wrong

00:20:47.760 | but it's being fixed and you're experiencing bad feelings because of it. So ignore your feelings

00:20:54.080 | and focus on what is true and what is right and what you know to be true and right and let your

00:21:00.080 | feelings adapt to that rather than drawing from your feelings a primary indication of the

00:21:08.720 | truthfulness of what you're considering. Now even as I say that, I find it ironic that I am using a

00:21:15.360 | very masculine style of communication. I'm trying to be as concise as possible but if I were

00:21:21.600 | together with you in person talking or interacting in some way then I would be very conscious of the

00:21:29.680 | fact that I'm speaking to a woman. I would spend significant time listening, probing,

00:21:35.840 | identifying, affirming and then I would try to deliver what I think is true. Those are all things

00:21:42.800 | that I would not do if I were speaking to a man. If I were speaking to a man I wouldn't be making

00:21:47.040 | this ironic disclaimer at the moment. But this indicates actually how important what I have to

00:21:52.640 | say is on the fact that we need to think about the questions that we have and we need to think

00:21:57.120 | about what we're doing, how we're training men, how we're training women, how hard it is and how

00:22:02.000 | easy it is for them to work together and what's good about it. So I think for example in that

00:22:07.040 | podcast episode one of the things that I said that's probably the most potentially offensive

00:22:12.320 | would be that men should look for a masculine environment to work in. One of the reasons that

00:22:18.240 | really works well is because as a man who interacts with both men and women you spend all your time,

00:22:25.360 | if you're a thoughtful, intelligent, emotionally intelligent, you're empathetic, you understand,

00:22:31.440 | you spend all your time tying yourself into knots thinking about how do I communicate in such a way

00:22:35.600 | that's going to be appropriate to this. And you don't realize it until you go through a good

00:22:40.400 | number of years of experience and all of a sudden you realize that's enormously draining to have to

00:22:46.000 | think about that. And so when men are in a masculine environment and they're not thinking

00:22:50.160 | about how their actions are going to be perceived by women or how their words are going to be

00:22:53.680 | perceived by women, it's enormously freeing. It frees their mental bandwidth. They can get more

00:22:58.480 | work done faster with fewer concerns because they're not thinking about the feelings of women.

00:23:03.040 | They're just moving through life and doing the thing. And if you'll talk to men and listen to

00:23:08.000 | men, you'll understand that. That's one of the reasons why there's value in sex-segregated

00:23:14.400 | societies, cultures, things like that. Now, I'm not arguing that our entire culture should be

00:23:19.040 | sex-segregated. I'm not in any way arguing that you or any other woman should be locked in her

00:23:24.480 | house wearing a burka and never come out and never interact. I think that's a recipe for disaster,

00:23:29.600 | obviously. But we've lost sight of that and this is one of many reasons men are on the defense

00:23:37.120 | right now because after years and years and years and years of this sex integration in society of

00:23:46.400 | men and women coming together, many people can see how it harms and it impacts negatively many

00:23:57.040 | aspects of life, including relationships, including productivity, including all of that.

00:24:03.520 | I don't know what the solution is for many of these things. I don't know. But at least we can

00:24:09.920 | start by talking about the problems and then identifying potential solutions. Let's dig into

00:24:15.760 | some of your specific questions, though, because I thought these questions were wonderful, useful

00:24:21.520 | questions, and I want to answer them directly to you. The first question you ask is this,

00:24:27.600 | "What would Joshua teach his daughter/young women to become great leaders in our society?"

00:24:39.280 | I'm going to do my best to answer these questions in a concise manner, and so I want to make three

00:24:46.640 | comments in response to this question specifically. Number one, "What would Joshua teach his daughter

00:24:54.320 | or young women to become great leaders?" I would teach them that leadership is not the aspiration,

00:25:01.920 | nor is it the goal. Leadership should not be our aspiration or our goal.

00:25:15.840 | Rather, service is the aspiration, and service is the goal. Or we could insert different words here.

00:25:27.120 | Change is the aspiration, and change is the goal. And leadership is a necessary means

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00:26:09.840 | Specifically, what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to counteract the idea that

00:26:14.480 | leadership is something that we should pursue for its own sake.

00:26:17.920 | And the reason I'm saying that is many people, when they think of leadership,

00:26:24.400 | they automatically substitute power for leadership.

00:26:28.880 | They try to get power over other people.

00:26:34.240 | They try to get authority over other people.

00:26:37.280 | And that often can lead to abuse of other people, subjugation of other people.

00:26:43.280 | I don't believe that leadership is a bad thing in any way.

00:26:48.800 | But I think it's a very fickle ambition specifically, and shouldn't be the primary

00:26:56.000 | aspiration or ambition that any man or woman has.

00:26:59.360 | On the contrary, I think that service is a more noble and cleaner way or cleaner

00:27:06.880 | thing to aspire to.

00:27:08.720 | And then we recognize that in order to render service or in order to affect

00:27:15.680 | positive change in whatever the domain of our service, leadership is necessary

00:27:23.280 | in order to accomplish those goals.

00:27:26.720 | The second way that I would answer this question, specifically the question that

00:27:30.400 | what would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great leaders in

00:27:33.600 | society, is that we need to teach skills.

00:27:37.680 | You need to actually have and develop skills.

00:27:42.640 | Leadership, for example, is not a skill in and of itself.

00:27:48.080 | It's a skill that is true, but is expressed in a specific domain.

00:27:54.400 | For example, you don't take a leader who is skilled at leading a sports team.

00:28:01.600 | Let's say you're interacting with a young woman who is the captain of her volleyball

00:28:06.320 | team, and she's been the captain of her volleyball team for four years.

00:28:09.120 | You don't take her as the captain of her volleyball team and then put her on a

00:28:17.520 | wildland firefighting team and say, "Because you were the captain of your wildland

00:28:22.160 | firefighting team, you're now automatically the captain of your wildland

00:28:27.520 | firefighting team."

00:28:28.320 | So, leadership can't be talked about exclusively in the context of a specific

00:28:35.120 | domain without other skills.

00:28:37.120 | Leadership requires the development of actual skills.

00:28:40.800 | Now, leadership is something that does transfer across domains.

00:28:45.840 | You may develop leadership skills and qualities in the context of a sports team,

00:28:50.800 | and then you may find yourself later on a business team expressing those skills

00:28:55.360 | in a context and see the relation of them.

00:28:58.400 | But you need to learn actual skills while you're learning and demonstrating

00:29:03.920 | leadership.

00:29:04.480 | So, if you're going to become a great leader, you need to know something.

00:29:09.280 | You need to do something.

00:29:10.800 | You need to develop skills.

00:29:12.880 | You need to cultivate your abilities.

00:29:15.760 | You need to cultivate your talents and hone them to a high degree.

00:29:19.760 | And then when you are interacting in a group context, you want to cultivate your

00:29:25.200 | skills of leadership because sometimes they're transferable.

00:29:28.960 | But you don't set a goal to just be a leader.

00:29:31.440 | Rather, you develop leadership skills in a specific context.

00:29:35.200 | The third thing I would say is leadership is not the definition of success.

00:29:42.160 | If by leadership you are associating that with power, then it's understandable how

00:29:48.320 | someone who is pursuing power over other people to be able to manipulate them or

00:29:53.440 | subjugate them, why that person would say that the only way I'll be successful is

00:29:57.680 | if I'm a leader.

00:29:59.600 | But I do not see leadership as the definition of success.

00:30:02.960 | If the only way to be successful is to be the leader or a leader, but I'm going to

00:30:09.840 | say the leader to make this point, if the only way to be successful is to be the

00:30:13.680 | leader, then by definition, only a small number of people can be successful.

00:30:18.560 | Rather, I see leadership as something that we do in various contexts and in various

00:30:26.960 | ways, and yet that's not a fundamental expression of our success or not success.

00:30:32.640 | I'll just give a personal example.

00:30:34.240 | I, Joshua Sheets, I have developed certain skills and attributes and abilities over

00:30:40.560 | the years that helped me to exercise leadership.

00:30:43.680 | Some of them are natural and innate.

00:30:46.960 | I'm a man.

00:30:47.840 | I'm physically large.

00:30:49.440 | I can speak with a loud voice when desired.

00:30:52.400 | These are basic innate attributes that I have no, I didn't do anything, but they make

00:30:57.360 | it easier.

00:30:58.000 | I have an easier time than people who are small or short.

00:31:01.680 | I have an easier time being a man than being a woman.

00:31:04.880 | I have an easier time because I can speak in a loud voice as compared to being

00:31:08.560 | physically handicapped in some way or not being able to speak in a loud voice.

00:31:11.680 | I have other basic attributes that make it easier for me to exercise leadership.

00:31:18.160 | I am a father of a family.

00:31:20.480 | I've built enormous self-confidence.

00:31:22.960 | I have a good reputation, generally with those around.

00:31:26.000 | I'm not a swindler.

00:31:27.280 | I speak well of other people.

00:31:28.960 | I'm not a gossip.

00:31:30.080 | I just generally have a good reputation among people, not perfect.

00:31:33.840 | I'm not trying to say anything wrong, but I just, I generally live on the whole a moral

00:31:39.280 | and virtuous and righteous life.

00:31:41.840 | I don't have anything.

00:31:42.800 | I don't have any skeletons hidden in my closet.

00:31:45.280 | So I'm generally well thought of by most people.

00:31:48.240 | I also have certain attributes in my normal life that make it so that I can exercise leadership.

00:31:58.480 | I have deep levels of knowledge in various domains that I've taken an interest in.

00:32:03.600 | I have formal certifications and credentials that help me to demonstrate that I am worthy

00:32:10.560 | of that respect because other credentialing bodies have demonstrated that I've done the

00:32:15.440 | work.

00:32:15.680 | I have a platform with a podcast and successful business and those kinds of things.

00:32:21.680 | So it's relatively easy for me to go around and exercise leadership.

00:32:28.960 | It wasn't always easy.

00:32:31.200 | I've worked for decades and practiced doing the hard things, stepping up, saying something

00:32:36.560 | when it was uncomfortable.

00:32:37.920 | And so I'm getting better, but I feel like in many ways I'm coming into the prime of

00:32:42.320 | my life where I'm arriving at a stage in life where as a man, other people, you've worked

00:32:47.600 | really hard to build things that are worthy of respect and other people give you levels

00:32:52.320 | of that respect.

00:32:53.840 | So then the question is this, is my goal to go around and to constantly be the dominant

00:33:01.280 | leader wherever I go?

00:33:03.920 | My answer is a resounding no.

00:33:07.360 | Because I know that I am a leader, I specifically try to be slow to speak.

00:33:19.920 | I specifically try to be the one who prefers others.

00:33:24.880 | I specifically try to encourage anyone who is younger or more timid.

00:33:29.600 | I specifically try to always get other people to go first.

00:33:33.920 | If I'm in a meeting of some kind, I don't want to be the guy who talks very much.

00:33:38.640 | I don't want to be the guy who goes on and on.

00:33:41.040 | On the contrary, I want to be the guy who lifts other people up.

00:33:44.880 | Because as I see it, the proper goal of a leader is to lose his leadership because it's

00:33:53.040 | not needed anymore.

00:33:54.240 | I first heard that phrase when I was a child from a Christian minister who very clearly

00:34:00.000 | articulated that the goal of a Christian preacher or a Christian minister should be, is, properly

00:34:07.760 | is to lose his ministry, that I should judge my effect as a Christian preacher or a Christian

00:34:16.800 | minister based upon how effectively I have raised others up to take my place.

00:34:22.560 | And so similarly, I as a father, my goal as a father is to lose my job as a father.

00:34:31.840 | Now, I'll always be a father because that's a role of definition, not a function.

00:34:36.320 | But in terms of function, I want to raise my children up to maturity.

00:34:40.480 | I want them to take over all of the functions that I'm currently doing so that I can sit

00:34:45.680 | back and relax.

00:34:46.960 | And I would say that this is similar to, I would point to my own parents as a natural

00:34:52.080 | example of this.

00:34:53.200 | My father and mother are in their 80s.

00:34:55.120 | And when we gather together as a family with them and their many children and their many

00:34:58.720 | grandchildren, they have no need to exercise leadership.

00:35:03.760 | And in fact, they consciously choose not to exercise leadership because that's no longer

00:35:10.080 | their primary function on a day-to-day basis, that their success as parents is proven by

00:35:16.800 | the fact that we, as their children, invite them to come to an event, we arrange all the

00:35:22.880 | details, and they don't have to be the father and mother doing all those things.

00:35:26.160 | It's their children now who are doing them.

00:35:28.400 | And the children plan the event, plan the – do the work, and the parents get to sit

00:35:32.400 | and relax.

00:35:33.440 | And yet, ultimately, they're the ultimate leaders.

00:35:36.320 | And so leadership is not something to be aspired to as a positional thing, that my goal is

00:35:41.360 | to be a leader.

00:35:42.400 | And once I'm a leader, then I'm always going to be the leader.

00:35:45.280 | On the contrary, leadership is a function that we take on in various contexts, and we

00:35:51.360 | do it so that we can raise other people up.

00:35:54.080 | And the goal of a leader should be whenever leadership is necessary, we step in and we

00:35:59.760 | exercise leadership for the common good, for the good of the group that we are giving leadership

00:36:05.200 | to, and then we step back as appropriate, and hopefully, in the context, we raise up

00:36:10.720 | other leaders among us.

00:36:12.320 | That's the goal of leadership.

00:36:14.000 | So those would be my answers to your first question.

00:36:16.480 | Your question was, "What would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great

00:36:20.000 | leaders in our society?"

00:36:21.520 | I would teach them, number one, that leadership is not an aspiration, or not a suitable aspiration

00:36:26.480 | or goal, services or effectiveness is, and leadership is a necessary means to accomplish

00:36:33.360 | those goals.

00:36:34.000 | Number two is I would teach young women that in order to exercise leadership, you have

00:36:40.240 | to develop skills and virtues and knowledge and ability with the skills of leadership

00:36:49.120 | simultaneously.

00:36:49.920 | You need both of those things.

00:36:51.360 | It's not that we just pursue leadership, but we'd have to genuinely be useful and

00:36:57.120 | then develop the skills of leadership, which can move from domain to domain.

00:37:01.840 | Number three, I would say that leadership is not a definition of success.

00:37:05.600 | If it were, then only a small number of people in society could be successful.

00:37:09.520 | There are other elements of success and that leadership is a function that you provide

00:37:15.680 | and that you give in various contexts with the goal of raising other people up, and it

00:37:23.040 | usually comes with an enormous cost.

00:37:25.840 | So the more that you give leadership, I think the natural experience of giving leadership

00:37:31.360 | is that the more that you give leadership, the less you want to give leadership, because

00:37:37.440 | it comes with an enormous cost.

00:37:39.200 | As a leader, you are responsible.

00:37:41.600 | All of the arrows go into you.

00:37:43.280 | All of the hurt comes from you.

00:37:44.800 | All of the attacks come against you.

00:37:46.960 | And so you better be ready to bear that cost if you're going to exercise leadership.

00:37:52.080 | And it's not something that should be done flippantly or somehow this is something that

00:37:58.800 | I want.

00:37:59.760 | The older I get, the happier I am not to be the leader because I understand the price

00:38:05.280 | that comes with leadership, but I understand that it's a necessary duty that I must

00:38:10.080 | perform in order to have service to the group.

00:38:14.240 | The next question that you asked me, can, I'm just going to say Joshua's wife, because

00:38:19.440 | you wrote his wife, can Joshua's wife be a leader in the family?

00:38:23.600 | How?

00:38:23.920 | What does that look like practically speaking?

00:38:25.760 | So my answer to that is can she?

00:38:28.240 | Absolutely.

00:38:30.000 | And I would say far beyond can is that she better be a leader in the family.

00:38:35.920 | My wife is a mother.

00:38:37.600 | And that means that if she's not leading in the family, we've got chaos.

00:38:41.520 | We've got absolute chaos.

00:38:43.040 | I need my wife to be a strong and capable and dynamic leader.

00:38:49.440 | I need her to be the absolute ruler of her home.

00:38:53.360 | And depending on the dimension or what we're involved in, there are going to be many, many

00:38:59.840 | areas beyond that.

00:39:00.960 | My wife is the matriarch of our family.

00:39:03.920 | If she doesn't exercise leadership, we're sunk.

00:39:06.960 | She has to exercise continual leadership.

00:39:10.640 | Now for her privacy, I'm not going to give any specific details of what she does.

00:39:16.960 | I'm going to speak generally and simply say that in general, can a wife be a leader in

00:39:22.320 | the family?

00:39:22.960 | How?

00:39:23.200 | What does that look like practically speaking?

00:39:25.600 | She had better be a leader in the family.

00:39:27.920 | She had better be involved with every aspect of the family.

00:39:31.200 | Every family is going to be different, but she may have children, in which case she has

00:39:35.200 | enormous amounts of work and leadership there.

00:39:37.280 | She needs to run a household.

00:39:38.880 | In some cases, she's going to be managing the family budget, managing the family's

00:39:43.760 | investments, managing the care of the household, keeping the house running and functioning

00:39:48.560 | really beautifully and making sure that all the workmen are doing their job.

00:39:52.080 | She may be out fixing stuff and changing things.

00:39:55.440 | She's got enormous work there.

00:39:57.040 | Some people have businesses.

00:39:58.320 | And so she might be running a business that's involved with the family.

00:40:02.480 | She might have a job where she has to exercise leadership.

00:40:05.120 | There may be many, many components where she exercises leadership.

00:40:08.640 | The fact that she is a woman does not in any way absolve her of the burden of leadership

00:40:13.920 | in an appropriate domain.

00:40:15.520 | And if she didn't have those characteristics, it's hard to believe that she'd be a wife

00:40:20.880 | and mother.

00:40:21.440 | What man would want to marry a woman who's weak and who's incompetent and who doesn't

00:40:26.240 | know how to exercise leadership and strength and do things?

00:40:31.280 | I need to be careful with my words.

00:40:34.560 | I don't want to cite anybody specifically because I know that there are men out there

00:40:37.600 | who say that they want that.

00:40:38.960 | I listen to men in the red pill space and some of their leaders in that space.

00:40:45.200 | And when they talk about women, it just sounds like an absolute farce.

00:40:52.080 | It sounds it's like they want a girlfriend who's not involved in anything that they're

00:40:56.560 | doing and they expect somehow to have six of them.

00:41:01.040 | And the women, their only job is to sit around and look pretty and bear babies.

00:41:06.000 | That seems to be the extent of their vision that they express for their relationships.

00:41:11.440 | Now, I don't know if it's actually working for them, but I think that's stupid.

00:41:16.880 | I would never encourage a man to look for a woman like that.

00:41:20.320 | And a woman, I can't imagine also a woman who is strong and who is capable ever accepting

00:41:25.760 | a man who treated her like that.

00:41:27.120 | So they probably deserve each other.

00:41:28.320 | The women seem to accept what they're doing and the men accept those kind of women.

00:41:32.560 | But I don't think that's a formula for a strong family.

00:41:35.440 | So we're looking, a man who wants a wife is not looking for a burden.

00:41:42.560 | He's looking for a partner and he's looking for a strong and confident and capable wife

00:41:48.880 | who is going to be by his side through everything.

00:41:52.960 | And every family is going to be different, right?

00:41:54.480 | If a guy's got a job and he's got a 40-hour a week job that he goes to and his wife has

00:42:00.880 | 10 small babies, then she's going to be super hyper domestic and focused on babies because

00:42:08.080 | how is she going to do anything more?

00:42:09.680 | And he's going to be doing everything at the job.

00:42:11.680 | They're going to have a very different expression of leadership than if they run a business

00:42:16.000 | together and their business partners and their children are all grown, they're going to have

00:42:20.800 | a very different expression.

00:42:22.320 | And so my point is that leadership is not optional for a wife in any way, shape or form.

00:42:29.120 | I think probably what you're listening for is for some kind of disclaimer to say, well,

00:42:36.320 | is Joshua's wife his leader or is Joshua's wife the leader of the family?

00:42:43.600 | That's probably what you're trying to listen for and what people get kind of all up in

00:42:48.000 | arms about.

00:42:48.560 | What I would say is that, no, my wife is not my leader.

00:42:52.000 | I am her leader.

00:42:52.960 | I'm her head.

00:42:53.920 | We are married.

00:42:55.120 | We are man and wife.

00:42:56.240 | And so if there has to be ultimate authority or ultimate leadership, it's on me.

00:43:01.040 | If there has to be ultimate blame, it's on me.

00:43:03.840 | I am responsible for all of it.

00:43:05.920 | I'm responsible for her and her leadership.

00:43:08.880 | And in the same way that if I am the CEO of a company, I'm responsible for all of it.

00:43:14.560 | Whether I'm actually culpable and I did it or not doesn't matter.

00:43:17.920 | It all rests on my shoulders and I have to fix it.

00:43:20.880 | So that doesn't, however, in any way absolve her of her burden for leadership.

00:43:27.200 | And as a husband, one of my primary jobs and one of my primary duties and responsibilities

00:43:32.560 | as a leader is to help her to develop her leadership so that she can express her gifts

00:43:39.600 | in the world.

00:43:40.080 | And that is my job and my responsibility.

00:43:42.560 | So I'm not going to go deeply into that because it gets much more personal and it's

00:43:47.280 | difficult for any person.

00:43:48.880 | But women are not absolved of the burden of leadership.

00:43:53.120 | And there will be many different times in a family's environment where she will have

00:43:59.360 | to exercise more leadership, less leadership, and her goal should be to be raising leaders.

00:44:04.960 | Her sons and daughters need to be being raised up to be leaders.

00:44:08.480 | That's what leadership does.

00:44:10.160 | Now let's go on to the next question and keep this one in mind because I'm going to

00:44:12.960 | bring in some more points for the next question.

00:44:14.480 | Next question.

00:44:15.040 | Does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home working for pay?

00:44:25.200 | First, I would say that the way that the question is asked is certainly sincere.

00:44:29.440 | And I'm not judging you for just writing down a question.

00:44:31.920 | What I'm saying is, however, is that I think this is a strange, a very strange question

00:44:38.960 | that indicates that you're not interacting with real people, but you're interacting

00:44:45.520 | with a straw man and caricature.

00:44:47.440 | Does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home?

00:44:50.320 | Of course, Joshua sees the value in women outside of the home.

00:44:54.480 | I'm not, again, I'm not a Muslim.

00:44:57.760 | I'm not saying that women should wear a burqa and be sitting at home.

00:45:01.520 | I think that's a terrible plan for society.

00:45:03.840 | Women are incredibly valuable outside of the home.

00:45:08.720 | And should women be working for pay?

00:45:10.640 | Of course, women should be working for pay.

00:45:12.880 | Women have always worked for pay.

00:45:14.480 | What would we do?

00:45:15.120 | Let's say I died today.

00:45:16.480 | What's my wife going to do?

00:45:20.000 | Is she going to sit around in the home and somehow say that, well, here I am sitting

00:45:24.320 | in the home and I can't go out and work for pay?

00:45:28.480 | Now, if I've done a good job as a man, she should never have to go and work for pay.

00:45:32.480 | That's one of my goals, especially since we invented life insurance, is I hope that she

00:45:36.000 | would never have to do that.

00:45:37.520 | But imagine if I didn't have life insurance.

00:45:39.760 | Or imagine I have a daughter.

00:45:41.360 | Since when does my daughter get to be absolved of the need to support herself?

00:45:45.920 | Now, as her father, if I can support her, I want to support her.

00:45:49.120 | And I'm going to treat my daughters differently than I treat my sons.

00:45:52.160 | But the point remains that she's not absolved of work and working outside the home just

00:45:58.640 | because she's a woman, nor is she absolved of the need to work for pay.

00:46:02.640 | I'm not aware of any society anywhere in the world in which women have ever been freed

00:46:10.720 | from the need to work or to work outside of the home.

00:46:13.680 | Let's go back to some of the oldest texts in recorded history.

00:46:17.440 | Go to Abraham and how he found a wife for his son Isaac.

00:46:22.560 | So Abraham, probably a little under 4,000 years ago, maybe 3,900, 3,800 years ago at

00:46:28.560 | this point, something like that, that Abraham was living.

00:46:30.880 | And he wanted to find a wife for his son Isaac.

00:46:33.200 | So he sends his servant from where he was living back to the land of his people.

00:46:37.200 | And the servant prays to God and says, "God, show me the woman or a woman who is appropriate

00:46:43.840 | for me to bring back for Isaac, my master, as his wife."

00:46:48.240 | Well, what does he find?

00:46:49.440 | He goes to the well of the town and here come the young maidens to draw water and that's

00:46:55.280 | where he meets Rebecca.

00:46:56.880 | She's going to draw water and bring water from the well for her family.

00:47:01.120 | So here she is working outside of the home.

00:47:04.400 | Rachel and Leah, they were shepherdesses with Jacob later.

00:47:08.960 | And so you go throughout all of human history and women have always had to work and they

00:47:13.360 | have always had to work outside of the home.

00:47:15.360 | In many cases, serving again as a shepherdess or some similar function.

00:47:20.160 | Now, in an agrarian society, why do we get the concept of working in the home?

00:47:25.520 | In the agrarian society, we can see very clearly that there are certain functions and jobs

00:47:33.520 | that men can do because of their physical stature and size.

00:47:36.880 | And there are other functions and jobs that women can do because of their physical stature

00:47:41.520 | and size and abilities.

00:47:42.960 | There's years ago, I used to read this personal finance blog.

00:47:45.120 | I forgot the name of it, but there was a couple that moved to the northeast and they bought

00:47:49.520 | a farm and they were fire people, early retirement people, and they moved out to this farm and

00:47:53.920 | they were progressive liberals who had moved to this farm to have a couple of children,

00:47:58.240 | I think in Vermont, and have babies.

00:48:00.320 | And I read an article that the lady wrote and she talked about how frustrated she was

00:48:04.480 | that they were progressive liberals who very much believed in gender equality.

00:48:08.320 | And yet they were frustrated that on the farm, they found themselves falling into gender

00:48:12.000 | stereotypical roles on the farm, that she did the cooking and the cleaning and the husband

00:48:16.400 | was doing all of the outdoors farm work.

00:48:18.400 | So I'd say this is obvious and understandable in an agrarian context.

00:48:22.160 | I think one of the keys though that I would point to is that throughout history, most

00:48:26.480 | family businesses and most work has been family integrated in some way.

00:48:30.560 | There's always been household productivity in some way.

00:48:33.920 | There's always been kind of, again, a household business of some kind.

00:48:39.520 | So you have one context in an agrarian context of what that looks like.

00:48:43.120 | You have a different context in a family business or a merchant, but there's lots and lots of

00:48:48.880 | business and women are not absolved of that work outside the home.

00:48:52.160 | It's not like just because you're a woman, you get to sit at home and do nothing but

00:48:55.600 | cook and clean the house.

00:48:57.600 | I think that it's nice if women can do that.

00:49:00.240 | There aren't many things easier and more relaxing than sitting in a house and cooking and cleaning.

00:49:05.040 | It's pretty simple, straightforward, easy work, but I don't think you get that pass.

00:49:09.200 | You don't get to just do that unless you're fortunate to be married to a rich man.

00:49:13.200 | Families and couples, families are economic units and there has to be a benefit to the

00:49:20.800 | economic unit of each spouse's labor.

00:49:24.960 | Otherwise, there is a real challenge and there's a real problem.

00:49:28.080 | Now, throughout history, men have, especially rich men, have appreciated certain things

00:49:34.240 | that women can bring into their life that don't resemble hard labor and so different

00:49:39.920 | cultures have a different expression of this.

00:49:41.440 | But if you find a rich man, it makes him happy a lot of times that his wife doesn't have

00:49:46.320 | to do hard labor.

00:49:47.520 | I take a great deal of joy and satisfaction in the idea that my wife doesn't have to go

00:49:53.120 | and work for wages and work somewhere else.

00:49:56.000 | But in some cases, there may not be another possibility.

00:49:59.680 | She might have to and this should be obvious.

00:50:02.400 | Again, I say, what if I died?

00:50:04.160 | What if my wife never married?

00:50:06.080 | If she just – think about these things and don't just assume that somehow women get

00:50:11.760 | to escape from work because they're women.

00:50:15.440 | It's not the case.

00:50:16.480 | They have to work because they're women.

00:50:18.800 | The work looks differently.

00:50:20.400 | Now, let's turn more pointedly to the issue at hand.

00:50:23.280 | If Joshua is talking about the problems with dual-income families, what's the problem?

00:50:28.880 | Well, at its core, one problem is that the lifestyle just doesn't seem to be sustainable.

00:50:34.960 | And I mean that in the most literal sense possible.

00:50:37.840 | If you look at human reproduction statistics right now, if you were a biologist studying

00:50:44.080 | the human species, you would be writing reports day and night about this species going extinct

00:50:51.760 | or at least subgroups of this species going extinct.

00:50:57.200 | The data on societies that are built around men and women having jobs and each of them

00:51:06.800 | having his or her own career and that being the primary organizing principle of the society,

00:51:14.160 | these societies are going extinct in just a few generations.

00:51:19.360 | It is entirely unsustainable in the most literal sense that I can possibly say it.

00:51:27.600 | Every society that has structured around the idea that men and women should each have jobs

00:51:35.120 | and careers and that the primary organizing principle of their lives should be them earning

00:51:42.000 | money for their own gratification, these cultures will not exist a century or two from now.

00:51:49.280 | They are unsustainable.

00:51:51.680 | They're very strong in the moment, but they're a very recent phenomenon and they will go

00:51:57.600 | extinct within a couple of generations because they're not having any babies.

00:52:03.040 | Throughout human history, the continuance of the family and of the community and of

00:52:11.840 | the culture was always a primary focus.

00:52:17.040 | Now, there are times and it's expressed in different ways.

00:52:20.800 | Throughout most of human history, there's been so much work that you could barely get

00:52:25.280 | subsistence living on it.

00:52:26.640 | Nobody thought about self-fulfillment and self-gratification and self-actualization

00:52:30.720 | through my work.

00:52:31.280 | You work to live.

00:52:32.160 | You work to eat, to literally stay alive.

00:52:34.720 | Throughout most of human history, you had babies because you wanted to have sex.

00:52:38.800 | And if you could find someone to have sex with, then you had babies.

00:52:42.080 | Today, well, we think that we're masters of our own reproduction and that we should

00:52:45.840 | choose exactly when each and one of our every babies comes along.

00:52:49.360 | So, my point is that this society is quite literally unsustainable.

00:52:53.280 | Quite literally, every group that doesn't find a solution will disappear from the world

00:52:58.800 | in a couple of generations.

00:53:00.320 | If you think I'm being hyperbolic, it's because you've not done the math.

00:53:06.400 | I am not employing hyperbole here in this context.

00:53:12.640 | So, the question is, let's flip it on its face.

00:53:15.360 | Instead of asking me, "Do I see value in women outside of the home working for pay?"

00:53:20.000 | I am asking you, "Do you see value of women in the home not working for pay?"

00:53:28.640 | That's the point I'm trying to make.

00:53:31.040 | I saw this made the other day in a quite eloquent thread from a Twitter post from

00:53:40.800 | one of my favorite authors, Anthony Esalen.

00:53:42.880 | Here is his tweet verbatim.

00:53:45.520 | It was in the context of the Harrison Butker furor this last week.

00:53:51.040 | "By far the most accomplished woman I know personally, whose name I won't reveal because

00:53:57.280 | I don't want to cause her trouble, recommended that I read Mr. Butker's commencement speech.

00:54:02.320 | She said it was spectacular.

00:54:06.080 | This was before I told her that I'd written about it.

00:54:09.120 | There are a few things in play that nobody has talked about.

00:54:12.160 | Here's one.

00:54:13.600 | Jesus says that we must become like little children, or we will not enter the kingdom

00:54:19.360 | of heaven.

00:54:19.920 | Now, we are not overtly cruel to children.

00:54:23.760 | Boys aren't going down into the coal mines and girls aren't going into the sweatshops.

00:54:27.680 | But I'd prefer the life of a child in the New York slums that Jacob Rees described

00:54:33.200 | in the 1890s, and he was closely attentive to what the slum children did for a play,

00:54:38.640 | did for play, in all seasons, than the life of a typical American child now.

00:54:43.600 | If children are to be outdoors playing, building things, visiting each other's houses,

00:54:50.240 | roaming the town or the woods, there must be people at home.

00:54:54.000 | You cannot have that life if the neighborhood is empty during the hours between breakfast

00:54:59.360 | and supper.

00:54:59.920 | And what about small children?

00:55:02.000 | If no one is at home, they must be taken care of in an institutional way by people

00:55:08.240 | who may like them, but who do not love them, and who have no strong connection to their

00:55:13.040 | parents, their relatives, or their neighbors, if any connection at all.

00:55:16.400 | I look back upon my childhood, less bound by the need to earn money than my father's

00:55:22.000 | childhood was, but also a little less free.

00:55:25.040 | And I know from observation that that childhood is no longer a living presence in the town

00:55:32.560 | where I grew up.

00:55:33.760 | It is not a living presence where I am now, and I do not see it when I drive through any

00:55:38.480 | American town anywhere.

00:55:40.160 | But children are owed a real child's life by rights.

00:55:46.480 | They ought to be outdoors, without adult supervision, with other children of various ages and from

00:55:52.880 | various families, doing things that children have always done.

00:55:56.000 | That life is not only good for them, it is good for U.S.

00:56:00.240 | grown-ups. Jane Jacobs, the astute liberal critic of American city planning, pointed

00:56:07.120 | out that it's children that bind a neighborhood or a town together.

00:56:10.560 | That's because children crisscross through streets and yards and all the routines of

00:56:15.280 | adult business.

00:56:16.640 | Children provide ready occasions for adults to get to know each other.

00:56:20.560 | Children provide them with the motive to do more than that.

00:56:23.680 | They are the excuse for many a festival.

00:56:26.640 | You will say that that's all well and good if you can afford to live on one salary.

00:56:30.400 | But here, the habits have been transformed into necessities.

00:56:33.840 | It is not simply that you, as an individual family, have to make enough money to afford

00:56:38.480 | a house.

00:56:39.360 | It is that housing prices generally have risen to what households can afford.

00:56:43.360 | Imagine two auctions in two worlds selling the same product, but to audiences of different

00:56:49.520 | means.

00:56:50.240 | It will get a higher price from the people with deeper pockets.

00:56:53.200 | They will be no better off than they would have been had they been in that other world

00:57:02.000 | attending the other auction.

00:57:03.280 | Or look around an expensive new subdivision where farmland once was and consider how much

00:57:10.160 | of its showy excess will have been purchased at the expense of a real child life.

00:57:15.680 | What the heck for?

00:57:17.680 | With what gain in human happiness?

00:57:22.160 | Thus ends Esalen's quote.

00:57:23.840 | So I'm answering your question, does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home

00:57:29.120 | working for pay?

00:57:30.160 | And my answer is unequivocally, yes, I do.

00:57:32.800 | But I'm arguing, do you, Amy, or anyone else listening, of course, Amy, do you see the

00:57:40.480 | value of women working inside of the home working not for pay?

00:57:46.320 | My answer is that for every society that has forgotten that value, your culture will cease

00:57:52.720 | to exist.

00:57:53.680 | The only way you've gotten thus far is by stealing our culture, those of us who reproduce,

00:58:01.520 | for a limited period of time.

00:58:02.880 | I'm not angry about this, but I'm just trying to make an observation.

00:58:05.920 | Let me pull down my tone just for a moment.

00:58:08.720 | I say that because your culture, meaning you, the culture that doesn't value women, doesn't

00:58:15.280 | inside of the home, doesn't value women working not for pay, doesn't value children.

00:58:20.320 | The only reason you're still alive is – or you're still going – the only reason we

00:58:25.200 | live at this moment in 2024, where you have become the dominant culture, is that for about

00:58:31.280 | the last 50 years, you caught a whole bunch of family people all around the world unawares.

00:58:36.560 | And it's kind of like what happened with Christianity.

00:58:42.000 | As a Christian, I follow the statistics.

00:58:44.000 | For decades, we lost untold numbers of our Christian children to secular people in the

00:58:51.200 | world.

00:58:51.520 | Secularists used to boast about this in their public writings.

00:58:54.160 | You could find it.

00:58:55.120 | That, okay, you go ahead and raise your kids, but as soon as they get to school, we'll

00:58:58.400 | get them.

00:58:59.120 | As soon as they get to college, we'll get them.

00:59:00.960 | And that was true for a time.

00:59:02.320 | Then we figured out what was happening.

00:59:04.720 | We figured out that our ideological opponents were stealing all our children, and we figured

00:59:08.880 | out how to make sure that didn't happen.

00:59:10.640 | And so we've gotten a lot better at keeping our children – not all of them, but we've

00:59:14.000 | gotten a lot better at keeping our children in the traditions.

00:59:17.120 | So, similarly, you see the similar thing that has happened with culture.

00:59:20.400 | Now, I'm not here talking about religion.

00:59:21.920 | I'm just talking about people who procreate and who expand their cultures and those who

00:59:25.680 | don't.

00:59:26.000 | The – I've come to like the term "urban monoculture" that Malcolm and Simone Collins

00:59:32.640 | use.

00:59:32.880 | I think it's an apt term that I'm going to start using.

00:59:36.000 | But the urban monoculture has only succeeded by sucking in children from the countryside

00:59:42.720 | around it.

00:59:43.520 | So if you go into any city in the world, you go to Tokyo or you go to New York City or

00:59:48.080 | you go to Seoul or you go to Philadelphia or you go to Delhi or anything like this,

00:59:52.080 | what these cities have done is they've sucked up all of the children from all of the families

00:59:56.720 | in the farmlands all around, and they've sucked them all in for a promise of more money,

01:00:01.520 | a better job, a better life.

01:00:03.840 | And there's an element in which that's pretty true.

01:00:06.080 | If you grew up in absolute destitute poverty, then you would say, "You know what?

01:00:12.160 | I'd like to be able to have enough to eat."

01:00:13.680 | But those city cultures, those urban monocultures will not exist in the future unless they continue

01:00:20.160 | stealing children from the countryside around.

01:00:22.960 | So those of us with children who don't like our children being stolen actually have to

01:00:27.520 | sit back and say, "What do we do differently?

01:00:29.760 | How do we hang on to our children?

01:00:31.600 | Because I don't want my family line to end with my children.

01:00:35.120 | I want to think about my children's children's children.

01:00:38.080 | That's my goal.

01:00:38.880 | So I need to build something that's sustainable.

01:00:40.960 | So I need to understand the attraction and allure of the city, but I need to make sure

01:00:44.640 | that we don't fall prey to it."

01:00:46.000 | And so my comment is simply that do you see the value in women working inside the home?

01:00:52.960 | Do you see the value in women working not for pay?

01:00:58.640 | If you don't, then you're probably not going to have children.

01:01:03.360 | And while it might be the case that the women who want to do that, they'll live their lives,

01:01:09.200 | what was that comedian who will get up and masturbate in the morning in her bed because

01:01:14.400 | she doesn't have children and she'll smoke pot with her friends in the afternoon and

01:01:17.600 | make a whole skit out of it?

01:01:18.960 | Great.

01:01:19.360 | Go ahead.

01:01:19.840 | Live the life.

01:01:21.200 | It's fine.

01:01:21.760 | It's a free country.

01:01:23.680 | You can live that way.

01:01:24.960 | You can do your best to share that message.

01:01:27.200 | But I'm not willing to go down that path anymore because I also know that on the whole,

01:01:31.600 | women today report being far less happy than they once were, far less self-satisfied than

01:01:39.120 | they once were.

01:01:40.080 | And all I got to do is fire up TikTok and I can find a whole generation of women whose

01:01:45.040 | mothers raised them to be positive career women who would say, "Wouldn't it be nice

01:01:50.400 | to just clean a house and cook my husband's supper?

01:01:54.880 | Wouldn't that be nice and raise some children that like me and know me and just live a more

01:01:59.280 | contented life?"

01:02:00.080 | You can decide.

01:02:01.920 | It's a free country.

01:02:03.120 | But why am I pushing back?

01:02:04.720 | Well, because I want us to exist.

01:02:06.640 | I'm a humanist.

01:02:07.520 | I want to see humans flourish.

01:02:09.120 | And I want you and your family a few generations from now to be strong and growing.

01:02:13.440 | I want your community, your culture, your town to be strong and growing, not the emptied

01:02:17.920 | out hellscape that you see all around the world.

01:02:20.000 | If you think again I'm being hyperbolic, I'm not.

01:02:23.200 | The United States, you're insulated from it.

01:02:25.200 | But go and drive the countryside of Japan or Korea or Italy.

01:02:31.280 | Go buy a one-euro town and try to live in a town where there's no people.

01:02:34.320 | I'm simply saying to a lot of people that your neighborhoods suck.

01:02:39.280 | Your lifestyle sucks.

01:02:40.880 | It's stressful and it's not necessary.

01:02:43.200 | Now, if you want to do it, go for it.

01:02:44.880 | I'm not going to change it.

01:02:47.440 | But the other lifestyle that appreciates children and marriage and family is actually kind of

01:02:55.200 | nice and it deserves respect, deserves appreciation.

01:02:59.360 | Come to an event I host sometime and go and ask my wife if she'd like to go and have some

01:03:07.200 | other strange man boss or strange woman boss control her life and tell her what she can

01:03:12.960 | do versus her husband.

01:03:14.000 | See what she says.

01:03:15.440 | Go ahead.

01:03:15.920 | So now going on to the other questions.

01:03:19.200 | The next sub-question of does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home working

01:03:24.000 | for pay?

01:03:24.480 | I hope I've done a good job of saying yes, absolutely I see the value of it.

01:03:28.000 | Do we see the value of the other and understand that there needs to be a balance?

01:03:32.080 | That was what I'm trying to strike at, is that women don't get to just sit around and

01:03:36.080 | not work.

01:03:36.640 | But it is appropriate if women who want to have the ambition of working inside the home,

01:03:44.960 | not working for pay.

01:03:45.840 | And that's probably a necessary thing for us to have a sustainable culture.

01:03:49.600 | We want, next sub-component of this, we want an educated society.

01:03:55.040 | And right now public school is the provider of that.

01:03:57.920 | Do you want men teaching society's young children?

01:04:02.720 | I affirm that we want an educated society.

01:04:06.800 | I question the premise that public school is the provider of that.

01:04:12.240 | I'm not convinced that we should hold public school in high regard.

01:04:16.080 | I'm not going to make a big thing of this.

01:04:18.400 | I just question the premise.

01:04:19.600 | I acknowledge that it may be a provider of that, but I'm not convinced it's all that

01:04:24.640 | great a provider of that.

01:04:26.640 | And I'm also not convinced that there wouldn't be a better alternative if public schools

01:04:30.720 | didn't exist.

01:04:32.080 | One of the things that people often mistake is they mistake ignorance for dysfunction.

01:04:40.800 | I recently released a podcast where I read a chapter on the death of the nation state.

01:04:47.920 | It's pretty hard for most people like you and me to conceive of a world without nation

01:04:55.760 | states like we have today.

01:04:57.520 | But that's more due to our historical ignorance than it is to any basic component of society.

01:05:07.760 | Society functioned just fine before nation states existed, and it'll probably function

01:05:14.080 | just fine after nation states exist.

01:05:16.480 | It'll just look different.

01:05:18.000 | And so, similarly, I think it's absurd to think that you didn't have an educated society

01:05:25.200 | prior to the institution of government schools.

01:05:27.840 | Now, you can go back and you can find compelling evidence, for example, that in colonial America,

01:05:36.080 | the literacy rate of colonial America was near universal long before the imposition

01:05:41.680 | of government schools.

01:05:42.560 | I've seen rebuttals to that, and I have not dug deeply enough in to say what's true

01:05:49.600 | and what's not true.

01:05:50.880 | I don't know.

01:05:51.840 | But I think the evidence of the very strong literacy rate of the colonies, the early American

01:05:59.440 | colonies, is very strong.

01:06:01.200 | Just remember, if you want an example, that if you go back and you read the Federalist

01:06:06.240 | Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, go back and remember that these publications

01:06:11.200 | were written as a public argument intended to sway the common man.

01:06:16.480 | So you pull them open and you ask yourself if your current government school educated

01:06:21.760 | society can interact with the arguments in the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist

01:06:26.560 | Papers and would be persuaded by that.

01:06:30.400 | And then go ahead and turn on whatever the coming debate is between Donald Trump and

01:06:34.480 | President Biden and see what was better.

01:06:38.320 | I think that there's good evidence to say that people prior to government schools were

01:06:43.680 | pretty well educated.

01:06:45.520 | And because, and again, Amy, this is not about you, but just because you're ignorant of

01:06:50.000 | that fact doesn't mean that it isn't a fact or that there isn't a better alternative

01:06:56.320 | model.

01:06:57.120 | Government schools are one model, but they're not necessarily the best model.

01:07:00.960 | I would also question and say, what is an educated society in the first place?

01:07:06.720 | One thing that's fascinating to me is if you go back, you hear things where people

01:07:09.840 | would say things like, oh, so-and-so only had a sixth grade education.

01:07:13.280 | The question is, what did a sixth grade education mean?

01:07:16.400 | I have in my homeschool library a complete set of the McGuffey Readers and also a complete

01:07:23.600 | set of Ray's Arithmetic.

01:07:26.000 | McGuffey Readers and Ray's Arithmetic are examples of the kinds of school books that

01:07:32.320 | elementary school children used as their only school books.

01:07:38.240 | If you completed a sixth grade education of McGuffey Readers and Ray's Arithmetic, you

01:07:45.040 | would probably be far ahead of the majority of high school graduates today just by completing

01:07:53.120 | those basic school books.

01:07:55.840 | It wouldn't take you very long.

01:07:58.160 | You could easily do it in sixth grades, and you'd be far ahead of the actual knowledge.

01:08:02.720 | Now, would you know as much as today's median school graduate?

01:08:08.640 | I don't know.

01:08:09.200 | There's a much more diverse range of knowledge that is expected of a graduate today, meaning

01:08:16.800 | that today we expect our graduates to have all kinds of scientific knowledge that was

01:08:22.080 | not generally emphasized a century or two ago.

01:08:26.720 | We add on much higher levels of math expectation, whereas it was not expected that a high school

01:08:33.360 | student or a normal person needed to access advanced math.

01:08:37.680 | I have the Ray's Arithmetic algebra.

01:08:39.280 | It was just basic algebra and geometry, especially well-suited to daily factors.

01:08:44.560 | But I don't think that you're going to win the argument that we're a much superiorly

01:08:49.680 | educated society on the whole today than before.

01:08:53.600 | So I know that's not the main thrust of it, but I want to just – we need to learn to

01:08:56.800 | question these things and say, "Why do I believe what we believe?

01:08:59.440 | Do I believe that all the people in the past were ignorant?"

01:09:01.680 | Well, then why is it that Jane Austen's novels received – why did people suck up Jane Austen's

01:09:10.080 | novels or – who's the British writer, Oliver Twist – and why were these people so famous

01:09:17.040 | if they were so uneducated?

01:09:18.800 | Is there – do we just have to depend upon the model of government schools?

01:09:23.760 | So you say, "Do you want men teaching society's young children?"

01:09:26.480 | Why would you not want men teaching society's young children?

01:09:30.800 | I am perfectly happy to affirm that, yes, I want women teaching society's young children,

01:09:35.520 | but why would you not want men teaching society's young children?

01:09:39.840 | I don't see any reason why teaching young children should be either a male or a female

01:09:46.640 | role exclusively.

01:09:48.640 | Now, I think in general, it's probably the case that more women will be patient with

01:09:54.640 | young children than men, naturally.

01:09:58.000 | I think it's also probably the case that it matters whether you're teaching a mixed

01:10:02.720 | classroom, which is a separate discussion in and of itself, but I think it's much more

01:10:09.920 | important that the teacher have a clear understanding of who he or she is teaching rather than who

01:10:18.320 | the teacher is.

01:10:19.440 | My favorite teacher is Charlotte Mason.

01:10:22.560 | Charlotte Mason was an incredible woman.

01:10:26.880 | Her books today are giants in the education space.

01:10:31.520 | She never had biological children, never married.

01:10:34.320 | She dedicated her career to teaching, and she was way ahead of her time, and I think

01:10:42.560 | still today should be studied and studied and studied by any person who is interested

01:10:48.080 | in education because her insights on children and on the education of children are enormously

01:10:53.840 | important.

01:10:54.960 | I would be thrilled for Charlotte Mason herself to teach my sons or my daughter, no problem

01:11:04.800 | whatsoever.

01:11:05.520 | I would not be thrilled for Charlotte Mason or any teacher to teach my sons or my daughter

01:11:16.000 | in the same exact way because they are different.

01:11:19.440 | They learn differently.

01:11:21.200 | The environment, if it's all boys or all girls or boys and girls together, is very

01:11:28.640 | different, creates enormously different social dynamics, and it's very different.

01:11:35.200 | So I would say instead of worrying about whether the person teaching society's young children

01:11:42.000 | is a man or a woman, we should be more focused on does the man or woman teaching understand

01:11:50.400 | who he or she is teaching.

01:11:53.040 | There are young female teachers today who love boys, understand boys, and are so skilled

01:12:04.240 | at bringing out the best in boys.

01:12:06.880 | I would bet there's not a man in the world who couldn't name several teachers who poured

01:12:12.720 | into his life and just helped him to flourish and to develop and to be incredibly powerful

01:12:19.520 | and strong and just - what man couldn't do that?

01:12:24.000 | I also know that there are teachers, young female teachers in classrooms today who hate

01:12:32.880 | boys and who consider it their personal goal to bring down the patriarchy and who take

01:12:39.120 | joy in watching boys fail.

01:12:41.120 | Both of those are true.

01:12:43.440 | So we need to have these conversations so that we can understand what are we actually

01:12:48.640 | driving at here?

01:12:49.680 | Next question.

01:12:51.440 | Do you want men caring for your daughter, wife, and sisters in sensitive areas, for

01:12:56.640 | example, OB/GYN care, medical care, mental and emotional health, etc.?

01:13:03.200 | My answer is absolutely.

01:13:05.280 | I'm also entirely open to women being involved in that kind of work.

01:13:10.880 | This is where we get into a question of competence versus identity.

01:13:15.840 | In the United States, traditionally, we have had a culture of competence where we expected

01:13:25.200 | and demanded competence from people.

01:13:27.760 | So, for example, one of my favorite heroes, heroine, heroines, one of my favorite heroines

01:13:34.480 | is Dr. Denmark, who was the first female doctor to graduate from - I forget the name of the

01:13:44.320 | academy that she graduated from many years ago.

01:13:47.040 | She's my heroine because of her working life.

01:13:50.640 | She worked actively as a pediatrician until she was 104, and she died at 114 after 10

01:13:56.880 | years of retirement.

01:13:58.160 | I love her story.

01:13:59.360 | And I found her story first, disconnected.

01:14:02.080 | Later, I found out that my wife was a patient of hers when my wife was a baby.

01:14:07.440 | She had been sick, and my mother-in-law had taken my wife to her as a patient when she

01:14:13.120 | was a baby and had received some very useful and satisfying advice from Dr. Denmark.

01:14:19.600 | It used to be extremely meaningful to refer to Dr. Denmark with honor as the first female

01:14:28.560 | physician in her academic class or whatever, in her college in that time, because what

01:14:35.920 | we understood at that time was she had demonstrated her competence as a physician by passing through

01:14:43.120 | the same curriculum that men passed through in order to be qualified as physicians.

01:14:49.280 | She received respect because of her accomplishments, and her accomplishments were noteworthy because

01:14:55.440 | at that time, women were not ordinarily becoming physicians.

01:14:59.600 | Now, I'm open to the idea that all of those previous barring of women from all the stuff

01:15:07.120 | needed to go.

01:15:07.840 | I'm totally open to that.

01:15:09.040 | I'm not trying to go back into that, be dumb even if I were, because we're not living in

01:15:13.120 | that system.

01:15:13.920 | I'm an enormous proponent and in favor of highly educated women.

01:15:18.640 | My wife is highly educated.

01:15:20.400 | My daughter will be highly educated.

01:15:23.040 | I'm totally in favor of that.

01:15:24.400 | So, but the point is that there was a system of meritocracy based on accomplishment.

01:15:30.240 | We've replaced that now with the concept of identity, and the dominant cultural forces

01:15:36.560 | around have decided that identity is the primary thing.

01:15:39.680 | So, we've watered down the barriers for accomplishment in favor of inclusion.

01:15:46.880 | It's a pretty feminine thing, and this is one of the causal reasons that men are saying,

01:15:52.320 | "I don't care.

01:15:53.040 | It doesn't mean anything.

01:15:54.320 | I'm not going to do it."

01:15:55.600 | Men thrive on competition, and they've always respected women who were accomplished and

01:16:00.400 | who achieved, whereas in today's world, we have a very female-dominated system, and we've

01:16:07.680 | replaced accomplishment and externally proven achievement as our benchmark with inclusion

01:16:16.960 | as our benchmark.

01:16:18.000 | Probably, they both should go together.

01:16:20.640 | I think what's really beautiful is in a natural relationship, a natural husband and wife

01:16:25.760 | relationship that's good in every respect, you get a good buffering of each other's

01:16:30.240 | strengths and weaknesses.

01:16:31.360 | So, probably, men and women should be working together on this, and there should be

01:16:35.600 | accomplishment and inclusion.

01:16:37.920 | That's probably the ultimate benefit, but it's unproven that we can have both of them.

01:16:45.280 | It seems like we've got to go back and forth.

01:16:47.040 | So, back to the question that you said.

01:16:48.320 | I'm totally fine with men being caregivers for my daughter and wife and sisters in

01:16:57.280 | sensitive areas.

01:16:58.000 | It's always been that way.

01:16:59.680 | Did a woman who was – where the family doctor came and helped her with the delivery of her

01:17:06.480 | baby, was she upset because he was a man?

01:17:09.040 | No.

01:17:10.340 | Generally speaking, no.

01:17:11.600 | I do affirm, however, that there is something really beautiful about women being involved,

01:17:19.840 | especially with women.

01:17:21.360 | And so, there are male midwives in the world.

01:17:25.040 | I've never wished for one.

01:17:27.440 | I've always been enormously grateful that we've had wonderful female midwives.

01:17:31.920 | There are plenty of male obstetrician-gynecologists out there.

01:17:36.080 | I've never wished for one.

01:17:37.200 | I'm grateful that there are wonderful female OBGYNs.

01:17:41.600 | I'm a little less confident with regard to counseling.

01:17:45.440 | I am not sure about most of the world of mental health and psychiatry, and I get

01:17:52.800 | concerned about the difference in a male worldview and a female worldview, but I'm

01:17:58.400 | entirely open to it, just more cautious in that space than I am in the other spaces.

01:18:04.560 | The point, however, that I was driving at is simply the system of dual-income households

01:18:14.080 | is unsustainable.

01:18:16.160 | And so, if we're going to continue it, we have to find new solutions.

01:18:20.800 | Now, you were responding, Amy, to a particular episode that was just talking about young

01:18:25.200 | men, but that one came in the context of a couple other multi-hour episodes that probably

01:18:29.840 | also influenced your questions, where I'm talking about the unsustainability of our

01:18:34.400 | current model.

01:18:35.520 | So, my argument is not that women shouldn't be doctors and psychiatrists and all that

01:18:43.360 | stuff in any way.

01:18:44.640 | What I'm saying is that if all of our women are becoming doctors, and if becoming a

01:18:50.560 | doctor is likely to lead to a woman not having any babies or only one or two babies, as

01:18:57.120 | the data seems to indicate, generally speaking, then when we have more women doctors,

01:19:01.760 | we're not going to have any babies.

01:19:03.120 | So, what can we do?

01:19:04.720 | Well, if my daughter is going to become a doctor, what are the choices that we can

01:19:10.000 | make?

01:19:10.640 | Well, first, she could put all of her focus into becoming a doctor, and she could believe

01:19:16.640 | that her job and her career is going to be the primary thing that gives her meaning in

01:19:21.680 | life.

01:19:22.400 | That's a choice that she makes.

01:19:24.240 | And so, I'm going to prepare her, educationally speaking, that she can flourish in that world

01:19:29.760 | and be really good at it if that's the choice that she decides to make.

01:19:34.720 | I think the data would indicate that that's probably not going to be a very satisfying

01:19:40.160 | choice for her.

01:19:41.440 | I think that it's pretty obvious that while it may be right for some women, on the whole,

01:19:46.160 | most women would like to have a slightly different life and lifestyle than what is

01:19:50.800 | described exclusively by that.

01:19:52.720 | So, how are we going to integrate her love of being a doctor with her ability to have

01:19:58.160 | children and get married?

01:19:59.920 | Well, we have a couple of other things that we can work with.

01:20:02.800 | Number one, we can work with her age.

01:20:05.760 | Maybe she can go to medical school at the age of 15.

01:20:09.200 | Okay, I'm open to that.

01:20:10.640 | Seems a little extreme to me, but I'm open to that.

01:20:13.600 | Maybe we can redesign education so that she can, instead of high school, she can be doing

01:20:18.640 | her medical school so that she's a doctor sooner, so that she can get established herself

01:20:23.360 | and get ahead in her career and still be able to do that in time for her to have children

01:20:27.280 | before the biological window is closed.

01:20:29.440 | That's an option.

01:20:30.640 | Another option is for us to redesign the career track.

01:20:34.240 | So, why shouldn't she get married and have children while she's in medical school?

01:20:38.960 | That's an option.

01:20:39.680 | And that would be especially great if it were an option where she worked for longer.

01:20:46.080 | So, why do we have to pressure women to say you have to start your career on exactly the

01:20:51.360 | same schedule as men, knowing that it means that they're probably going to not be able

01:20:55.840 | to achieve their goals of having the number of children that they want to have?

01:20:58.960 | Why not have it start earlier?

01:21:00.480 | We need at least about 10 years for her to be free of overwhelming career and work obligations

01:21:08.640 | so that she can be really present and focused with having babies and taking care of young

01:21:13.040 | children, things like that.

01:21:14.480 | It might be nice to have 20, but 10 is better than nothing.

01:21:18.000 | Or, so that's a lever we can push on so that she can be more free, and maybe she just starts

01:21:24.880 | on a deferred basis.

01:21:26.560 | Another thing that can be a push on is let's redesign the rigor of it.

01:21:30.240 | So, maybe instead of it being she does it all the time and she has to do it six days

01:21:35.360 | a week, 80 hours a week on call all the time, maybe we can design a career that's more friendly

01:21:39.920 | to her job as a mother.

01:21:41.440 | Something I frequently recommend to doctors is can you still be a physician?

01:21:45.040 | Just be less of a physician.

01:21:47.120 | Do it 60% so you gain the good without the things that are overwhelming.

01:21:51.840 | And then, can she work for longer?

01:21:53.840 | Now, one of the things I know, which is always hard to put together, is people say on the

01:21:58.160 | one hand that they're just living for their career and they're so satisfied and they're

01:22:01.520 | so fulfilled, but I, as a financial planner, talk to a whole lot of people who are trying

01:22:04.880 | to get out of their jobs and their careers as quickly as possible.

01:22:07.760 | So, I just assume that for some people it is, for some people it's not, some people

01:22:11.600 | they want different things, and so maybe they can work for longer.

01:22:18.080 | So, again, Dr. Denmark, she worked as a physician until she was 104.

01:22:22.320 | She had a child, so maybe she raised – I don't remember all the details of her job,

01:22:27.360 | but she was good.

01:22:28.400 | Or I think of someone like Francis Hesselbein.

01:22:31.120 | Francis Hesselbein, famous leader who was a housewife and a mother.

01:22:35.200 | I think she had one baby and she was just a very simple woman until she was in her 50s

01:22:39.920 | when she really started her career and her career really took off for her.

01:22:44.000 | And she had developed amazing leadership ability with all of her local groups and the things

01:22:51.920 | that she was involved in with her community.

01:22:54.560 | She had joined the Girl Scouts as a volunteer troop leader, and ultimately she became the

01:22:59.200 | CEO of the Girl Scouts back in the 1970s, and then she worked for the Girl Scouts from

01:23:04.400 | the 1970s to the early '90s, and then she just continued on and she had all kinds of

01:23:09.840 | other work until ultimately she died at 107.

01:23:12.240 | I don't think she ever retired from that point.

01:23:14.320 | So, that's a great model that we should consider that would allow these things to

01:23:19.440 | work out well.

01:23:20.720 | So, I'm not trying to keep women out of any of these things.

01:23:24.800 | I'm trying to insert the idea that we have to reconsider how we do this.

01:23:30.240 | And I'm also trying to insert the idea that family is an important consideration.

01:23:34.960 | It's something that I apply to my own life in all of my thinking.

01:23:38.960 | I'm not laser focused right now at this stage of my life.

01:23:42.080 | I'm making as much money as I can and going for the moon.

01:23:45.120 | Why?

01:23:45.360 | I have children and so I want to have children and that is going to involve some costs and

01:23:49.920 | sacrifices to my career and my opportunities.

01:23:53.040 | I also want to defend the fact that there are a lot of women who would be perfectly

01:23:57.040 | happy having nothing to do with the career world and would be perfectly happy to be wives

01:24:02.000 | and mothers.

01:24:02.800 | And I want to defend their rights to that decision just as vigorously as anyone else

01:24:08.800 | because I think they often get stepped on in today's world and they get ignored.

01:24:12.400 | And the fact remains that I'm perfectly happy with that.

01:24:16.080 | There's a lot of men who are very happy with that.

01:24:18.320 | And I like having a trophy wife that is my wife and that's it.

01:24:22.800 | And that's something that's perfectly reasonable.

01:24:25.120 | I'm not going to set that as the only course for my daughter.

01:24:28.800 | I'm not going to tell her, "Well, honey, if you can just look pretty and, you know,

01:24:32.800 | learn how to do your nails better and learn how to cook a better sandwich, then that's

01:24:36.880 | just going to solve all of your problems in life."

01:24:38.720 | Obviously not.

01:24:39.520 | My wife, sorry, my daughter is, my vision is going to be a matriarch someday.

01:24:45.760 | And so I've got to prepare her for that because she's got to be the strongest, most well-educated,

01:24:51.520 | most thoughtful, most well-prepared woman in the world to be a wife and mother.

01:24:56.080 | And so that's not, like, I don't want a lazy wife.

01:25:00.560 | I don't want an unaccomplished wife.

01:25:03.280 | I don't see why, I don't think the standards are any somehow higher that a woman is more

01:25:08.080 | noble because, "Well, I finished my PhD and I got this high-powered job."

01:25:12.000 | Great.

01:25:12.240 | Good for you.

01:25:12.720 | Go for it.

01:25:13.520 | Wonderful.

01:25:14.320 | That doesn't make you any more noble than anyone else who also works and has a different

01:25:17.760 | perspective and is very well-prepared for a different kind of work.

01:25:21.040 | So I think that you're drawing these questions from a straw man that perhaps, by virtue of

01:25:30.480 | our culture, straw manning the decisions of women into somehow making it seem like they're

01:25:36.480 | incompetent.

01:25:38.480 | And I would submit from the men that I know and the men that I listen to, for example,

01:25:45.760 | if you listen to the culture, there's this meme that men are intimidated by strong, educated,

01:25:51.360 | competent, independent women.

01:25:52.720 | I don't know any men who are intimidated by strong, educated, competent, independent

01:25:58.400 | women.

01:25:58.800 | I'm surrounded in my life by strong, educated, competent, independent women.

01:26:03.200 | I'm not intimidated.

01:26:05.920 | It's not a thing.

01:26:07.120 | Women might think it's not a thing.

01:26:08.720 | No one's intimidated by it.

01:26:09.920 | The point comes down to the toxicity, that there is a culture that creates toxic women,

01:26:18.800 | that hate men and despise men rather than love them and appreciate them.

01:26:24.640 | I think it's an unfortunate artifact of the cultural formation things, that women live

01:26:31.120 | in fear of men, and then they learn to hate men in many cases, and then they despise men,

01:26:35.920 | and the men just observe it and say, "Yeah, I'm not intimidated.

01:26:39.040 | I'm just not attracted."

01:26:40.480 | And I don't think those have to be the case.

01:26:42.480 | I know lots of strong, independent, accomplished, beautifully educated, very successful women

01:26:48.240 | who are wonderfully sweet, and attractive, and kind, and you love being around them,

01:26:52.480 | and you love talking to them.

01:26:54.080 | These things are not necessarily in competition.

01:26:56.640 | They're not incompatible.

01:26:58.880 | They just need to be thought about and intelligently managed.

01:27:04.480 | Now, the next question, do you want men in positions of risk where it goes unchecked?

01:27:08.960 | For example, banking and investing, health care politics, uncharted technology.

01:27:12.720 | It's a strange question, because it implies that men are unchecked if they're in those

01:27:23.680 | situations.

01:27:24.480 | I'm not going to argue this one too forcefully.

01:27:31.600 | What I would say, though, is the best people to check men are generally men, and men are

01:27:40.160 | most willing to check one another if women are not present.

01:27:45.120 | So I think you have a misunderstanding of male culture and a misunderstanding of what

01:27:53.040 | changes when men and women are in mixed company as compared to men in a male-only environment.

01:28:01.200 | Men love to correct other men.

01:28:05.120 | Men will always stand up and check other men when they see excess.

01:28:12.240 | History is full of that.

01:28:14.640 | And I would just ask you, ask the men in your life where they're more likely to speak up.

01:28:21.600 | It's in a masculine environment.

01:28:24.320 | When you're in a genuine, in a true men, and by true, I just mean men are only there, and

01:28:29.440 | men are only there, and men are only watching and talking to each other, men generally have

01:28:33.840 | no problem standing up for one another because they're not performing.

01:28:38.880 | And they do that because they care about the issue, not about the people.

01:28:42.240 | When women are introduced into that environment, I don't know, maybe there's benefits to it,

01:28:48.400 | but I'm going to guess that it's probably more negative because it changes the cultural

01:28:52.160 | environment.

01:28:52.560 | Because now men engage in performative stuff for women, and they're thinking about how

01:28:57.280 | the women perceive them instead of focusing on the actual issue at hand.

01:29:00.400 | One of the things that's unique about male culture is that you can get a group of men

01:29:04.960 | in the room together, and those men can have a literal yelling match with one another.

01:29:10.160 | And then they can solve the underlying issue, and boom, it's done.

01:29:15.040 | It's forgotten.

01:29:16.320 | It's forgiven.

01:29:16.800 | There's no, it's just, we don't, no grudges held.

01:29:19.600 | It's done.

01:29:20.800 | Men can interact with each other in the sharpest and most externally like divisive seeming

01:29:27.440 | ways, but they're focused on finding the truth.

01:29:30.080 | And that's what you want in an environment where there's a potential for abuse.

01:29:33.760 | I can't prove it.

01:29:36.800 | I would say that it's probably more negative to have men and women tiptoeing around things,

01:29:44.960 | trying to figure out how to talk to one another in a professional context when really important

01:29:50.320 | risk is on the line, as an example in banking and investing and in healthcare and in politics

01:29:55.920 | and things like that.

01:29:57.520 | Let me bring in here in this context one paragraph from an excellent book by Dr.

01:30:01.440 | Leonard Sachs called "Boys Adrift," and he's talking in a chapter about team and

01:30:08.560 | competition with men.

01:30:10.400 | And this is an interesting, he's talking about the importance of competition for boys

01:30:15.760 | because competition creates motivation.

01:30:18.560 | And here's his comment.

01:30:20.000 | "Why doesn't this approach," meaning the approach of encouraging competition among

01:30:23.920 | boys, "Why doesn't this approach work as well for many girls?

01:30:27.440 | Here's why.

01:30:28.480 | Most girls value friendship above team affiliation.

01:30:32.000 | If Emily and Melissa are best friends and you put Emily and Melissa on opposing teams,

01:30:37.280 | both girls may be uncomfortable.

01:30:39.440 | Emily doesn't want to make Melissa sad, so she may be reluctant to beat Melissa.

01:30:44.560 | She'd rather play alongside Melissa than try to make her lose.

01:30:47.840 | But if Justin and Jared are best friends and you put them on opposing teams, Justin will

01:30:52.800 | happily run down the field and knock Jared down.

01:30:55.600 | In that situation, I've seen Jared get up, dust himself off and say to Justin, "You

01:31:00.320 | think that was a good hit?

01:31:01.600 | Ha, I'll get you better next time."

01:31:04.000 | That kind of good-natured competition actually builds their friendship.

01:31:08.000 | Boys are more likely to understand that friends don't have to be teammates and teammates don't

01:31:12.800 | have to be friends.

01:31:14.000 | And boys are more likely to be invested in the success of their team regardless of whether

01:31:17.920 | any of their friends are on the team.

01:31:19.840 | I'll read another segment in a moment, but I would encourage you the books by Leonard

01:31:25.040 | Sachs, "Boys Adrift" is one, "Girls on the Edge" is another.

01:31:29.040 | They're both excellent and important to talk about these issues in context so that we can

01:31:34.640 | think about it.

01:31:35.440 | So that's my answer to that.

01:31:36.480 | Now, the next question you said, "Should there be women-only clubs?

01:31:41.200 | Why doesn't this matter?"

01:31:43.600 | My answer is absolutely there should be women-only clubs and you and your daughters need to be

01:31:50.480 | in them and creating them and starting them.

01:31:53.200 | This is enormously important for the development of your daughters.

01:31:57.760 | I'm going to read now from Dr. Leonard Sachs' book called "Girls Adrift," chapter seven,

01:32:02.960 | spirit.

01:32:03.440 | First two introductory paragraphs, "Up to this point, we've addressed areas where I

01:32:07.760 | think and hope we can all be in agreement.

01:32:10.080 | Every girl should use her mind to be in control of her emotions rather than her emotions controlling

01:32:14.800 | her.

01:32:15.520 | Every girl should strive to be physically fit within healthy limits.

01:32:18.720 | While we may not always agree about the best strategies to achieve these objectives, we

01:32:22.080 | all agree on the objectives for every girl to fulfill her physical and intellectual potential.

01:32:27.600 | But when we turn to matters of the spirit, some parents are uncomfortable."

01:32:31.600 | And he goes on, "When I'm speaking to parents and I say something like, 'For some girls,

01:32:36.240 | life is about more than just mind and body, the core of their identity is all about the

01:32:40.560 | spiritual journey,' I see some parents grow visibly restless.

01:32:44.480 | It's easy to understand why.

01:32:46.400 | 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, some of these parents were themselves teenagers who rebelled against

01:32:51.920 | their own parents' attempts to indoctrinate them into a particular religion.

01:32:55.680 | Often, they don't see the point of religious involvement or even spiritual engagement in

01:32:59.920 | the 21st century."

01:33:01.440 | And he goes on and he talks about how girls develop in their spirit and gives various

01:33:07.760 | examples.

01:33:08.480 | And here's a subsection called "A Community of Girls and Women."

01:33:12.000 | "A community of girls and women.

01:33:14.480 | Community matters.

01:33:16.560 | The kind of community in which your daughter engages will shape the person she becomes.

01:33:21.200 | In chapter two, I described how a girl growing up 40 or 50 years ago was more likely to be

01:33:26.720 | involved in communities that included adult women, whether at church, in her extended

01:33:31.120 | family, in a sewing circle, or just sitting on her neighbor's front porch.

01:33:34.880 | Today, a girl's community is more likely to consist primarily of other girls her own

01:33:40.160 | age.

01:33:40.560 | That means girls talking mostly with other girls, but girl talk can be toxic to girls,

01:33:47.280 | even when they don't mean it to be.

01:33:48.640 | When girls talk with one another, the most popular topics tend to include their own personal

01:33:54.160 | problems.

01:33:55.120 | That's as true of nine-year-old girls as it is of 19-year-old women.

01:33:59.120 | All too often, the sharing and self-disclosure can spin into an obsessive rehash of negative

01:34:04.000 | emotion.

01:34:04.960 | As the old saying goes, "Rolling in the mud is not the best way of getting clean."

01:34:08.640 | "When girls are talking about these problems, it probably feels good to get that level of

01:34:13.600 | support and validation," says Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University

01:34:18.000 | of Missouri.

01:34:18.880 | "But they are not putting two and two together, that actually this excessive talking can make

01:34:23.360 | them feel worse."

01:34:24.960 | Dr. Rose and her colleagues call this phenomenon "co-rumination."

01:34:30.160 | It seems to be increasingly common among girls today, but remains rare among boys.

01:34:34.880 | The essence of co-rumination is that talking with same-age peers about personal problems

01:34:40.480 | makes girls more anxious.

01:34:42.000 | Tessa Lee Thomas, 13 years old, gave a reporter an example of how it can happen.

01:34:47.120 | "Sometimes we get into disagreements, and we have to settle them.

01:34:51.200 | My friends think that my other friend did something wrong, but she didn't do something

01:34:54.960 | wrong.

01:34:55.680 | Sometimes it makes the situation worse than where we were when we began.

01:34:59.760 | It spiraled into something bigger than it was."

01:35:01.920 | That's what can happen when girls counsel other girls, because girls providing counsel

01:35:07.040 | to same-age girls isn't the right kind of community.

01:35:10.080 | The right kind of community bridges the generations, connecting girls with women.

01:35:14.480 | The right kind of community involves girls learning from women their mother's age and

01:35:18.640 | their grandmother's age.

01:35:20.240 | Older women can provide your daughter with mature context and perspective.

01:35:24.560 | Girls who are the same age as your daughter can't do that.

01:35:27.440 | It doesn't have to be anything formal or structured.

01:35:31.040 | Sophia was a high school girl working part-time as a receptionist at a medical clinic when

01:35:35.120 | she told me how much she valued the opinions and support provided by her co-workers at

01:35:39.600 | the clinic, all of whom are adult women.

01:35:42.640 | She had a huge crush on a guy at her high school, and he was taking advantage of her.

01:35:48.000 | The other girls at the high school saw nothing wrong with what was going on.

01:35:51.680 | In fact, they envied her because he was popular and athletic, and he wasn't being physically

01:35:56.080 | intimate with anybody else.

01:35:57.600 | But he wasn't making any promises to her either.

01:36:00.480 | When she told the older women in her office about it, they offered a different perspective.

01:36:04.400 | Quote, "If you act like a doormat, don't be surprised when he steps all over you,"

01:36:08.640 | one of them told her.

01:36:09.600 | Quote, "If you let him treat you like a piece of meat, don't be surprised if he chews you

01:36:14.080 | up and spits you out," said another older woman.

01:36:16.640 | Sophia broke off the relationship, if you could call a series of late-night booty calls

01:36:20.720 | a relationship.

01:36:21.840 | He wasn't phased at all.

01:36:23.120 | He was like, "Okay, whatever.

01:36:24.560 | I was getting tired of it anyhow."

01:36:25.840 | I think he said that just to be mean, but it proves that the women at work were right.

01:36:30.960 | He wasn't serious about us, about having a relationship.

01:36:34.640 | He was just using me.

01:36:36.400 | How does a girl become a woman?

01:36:39.200 | What does it mean to be a "real" woman?

01:36:42.720 | These are questions that almost every enduring culture has answered by providing a community

01:36:46.960 | of women to show girls the way.

01:36:49.440 | I'm not talking only about mothers teaching their daughters, but about a community of

01:36:52.960 | women teaching the girls.

01:36:54.640 | We used to have many such communities in the United States, formal and informal.

01:36:59.360 | Quilting circles, sewing circles, all-female Bible study groups, all-female book clubs,

01:37:04.800 | Girl Scout troops, the variety of women's clubs that operated in association with the

01:37:09.120 | General Federation of Women's Clubs, and so forth.

01:37:11.840 | Remnants of such groups still exist, but girls today are much more likely to hang out with

01:37:15.840 | other girls their age than they are to mix socially with women their parents' age.

01:37:20.000 | I'm going to insert Joshua's snide comment.

01:37:23.040 | Because their mothers are all at work and don't have time to facilitate the cultural

01:37:29.280 | groups that they should be facilitating, because their mothers are all busy at their jobs.

01:37:33.120 | Forgive the snide comment.

01:37:36.080 | Girls teaching same-age girls what it means to be a woman is a new phenomenon in human

01:37:41.040 | history.

01:37:41.920 | It's equivalent to the blind leading the blind.

01:37:44.640 | Teenage girls don't have the wisdom, experience, and perspective that a 35-year-old woman or

01:37:49.200 | a 65-year-old woman can provide.

01:37:51.120 | Many cultures have rituals to mark a girl's passage into womanhood.

01:37:55.600 | The Quinceañera in many Spanish-speaking cultures, the relatively recent emergence

01:38:00.000 | of the bat mitzvah in many Jewish communities today, and Kenalda'a among the Navajo are

01:38:06.240 | three examples.

01:38:07.840 | But as the demise of the early 20th century debutante ball illustrates, these coming-of-age

01:38:13.360 | rituals for girls can be empty or even counterproductive if the focus shifts from identity to surface,

01:38:19.520 | from a focus on who you are to a focus on how you look.

01:38:23.120 | And even with the best of intentions, a one-day ritual like a bat mitzvah or Quinceañera

01:38:27.680 | isn't enough.

01:38:28.800 | One day or one week isn't enough.

01:38:30.960 | Girls need a community that lasts.

01:38:32.800 | Some girls' schools understand this.

01:38:35.680 | A girls' school can easily provide an authentic community of girls and women, as long as the

01:38:40.400 | leadership of the school understands the reality that the school's mission must go beyond

01:38:45.280 | academics.

01:38:46.480 | Men may be fine for teaching girls English or Spanish or mathematics or social studies.

01:38:51.600 | Indeed, some of the most effective and most popular teachers I have met at girls' schools

01:38:55.760 | have been men.

01:38:56.800 | But only a woman can teach girls what it means to be a woman, how each girl must figure out

01:39:02.240 | for herself how she will express and balance her inner feminine and her inner masculine.

01:39:07.920 | I have visited a number of girls' schools, such as Lauriston in Australia, Oakcrest School

01:39:12.480 | in Virginia, and the Pace Center in Orlando, that consciously, thoughtfully, and intentionally

01:39:18.000 | provide that community of women for girls.

01:39:20.400 | But the great majority of girls attend a co-ed school.

01:39:24.560 | You can't expect most co-ed schools to have much interest in creating all-female communities.

01:39:29.760 | You may have to take the lead yourself.

01:39:32.000 | You need to create an alternative counterculture in which it's cool for girls to spend time

01:39:36.480 | in a community of women.

01:39:38.000 | If your daughter attends a co-ed school, then you might look to your church or synagogue

01:39:41.920 | or mosque to provide that community.

01:39:43.920 | If you don't belong to a local church or synagogue or mosque, consider joining one.

01:39:48.080 | Not for your sake, but for your daughter's.

01:39:50.000 | If your church or synagogue or mosque doesn't offer an all-female religious retreat, try

01:39:55.200 | to organize one.

01:39:56.640 | Remind the leaders of your congregation that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam each have

01:40:00.880 | long traditions of celebrating all-female religious communions in community.

01:40:05.520 | No men allowed.

01:40:08.000 | Most churches and synagogues and mosques in North America offer youth groups for children

01:40:13.600 | and teenagers.

01:40:14.800 | These groups are usually co-ed and stratified by age.

01:40:18.320 | A typical youth group activity nowadays is a pizza party or an outing to the bowling

01:40:22.320 | alley for all the ninth grade girls and boys together.

01:40:24.800 | But everything we've learned suggests that a better approach might be to offer a single

01:40:30.480 | sex group, not stratified by age.

01:40:34.000 | In fact, it might be time to rethink the whole idea of the church youth group or synagogue

01:40:38.800 | youth group or Muslim youth group.

01:40:40.800 | These groups should not be about teens hanging out with teens.

01:40:44.720 | If teens want to hang out with teens, most of them don't need any help from the church

01:40:48.080 | or the synagogue or the mosque.

01:40:49.840 | The church or synagogue or mosque should offer opportunities for activities that the kids

01:40:54.480 | can't easily arrange by themselves.

01:40:56.880 | For example, an all-female hiking trip along a stretch of the Appalachian Trail or an all-female

01:41:03.040 | canoe trip with girls from age 11 on up to grandmothers.

01:41:06.480 | You don't have to tie into an established organization or religious group to do this.

01:41:10.800 | Organize a get-together with half a dozen girls and at least two adult women.

01:41:14.720 | You might create a sewing circle if you or a friend of yours knows how to sew.

01:41:18.960 | You could organize a once-a-month cooking or baking club with the club meeting at a

01:41:22.560 | different girl's house each month.

01:41:24.240 | In December, you make holiday treats.

01:41:26.320 | In the summer, you make slushies and smoothies, something different each season.

01:41:29.840 | My wife, my daughter, and I recently visited my brother's family in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

01:41:35.040 | When my brother's wife, Linda, heard that my daughter, Sarah, likes to knit,

01:41:38.960 | Linda invited Sarah to come with her to a little shop in Shaker called Around the Table Yarns.

01:41:44.320 | When Sarah entered the shop, she encountered a single large table with women of all different

01:41:49.040 | ages, including one other teenage girl seated around the table.

01:41:52.880 | One grandmother was knitting an elephant for her grandchild.

01:41:55.760 | The room was lined with cubbyholes filled with skeins of yarn for sale,

01:41:59.840 | from inexpensive cotton thread to luxurious cashmere.

01:42:03.120 | But you don't have to pay anything or buy anything in order to sit at the table and knit.

01:42:06.800 | Anybody is welcome to come in and sit down, as long as you want to knit.

01:42:11.840 | The two owners, Pam and Beth, will be happy to help you with any problems

01:42:15.280 | you're having with your knitting project.

01:42:17.120 | No charge.

01:42:17.840 | Linda told me later, "I've made so many friends there.

01:42:21.360 | I meet someone new almost every time I go.

01:42:23.920 | You can talk about your kids, your family, your vacation plans.

01:42:27.200 | Nobody looks at their phones.

01:42:28.720 | We're really just enjoying each other.

01:42:30.720 | At Starbucks, everybody is looking at their phone, or they're talking to the one person

01:42:34.480 | they brought with them.

01:42:35.760 | At this shop, people are sitting around the table and talking.

01:42:38.960 | With everybody.

01:42:40.160 | That's what the place is for.

01:42:41.520 | Sometimes people bring in home-baked cookies to share.

01:42:44.960 | It's a relaxed place to create bonds across generations, where a 13-year-old girl like

01:42:49.600 | my daughter can easily strike up a conversation with a 74-year-old grandmother, and everybody's

01:42:54.560 | having a good time.

01:42:55.440 | If sewing, knitting, and baking seem gender-stereotyped to you, then come up with something else.

01:43:00.720 | Maybe a backcountry hiking or fishing trip.

01:43:03.040 | It's not about the activity.

01:43:06.080 | The sewing, the knitting, and the baking are only an excuse to get women and girls together,

01:43:10.320 | to create an opportunity for connection.

01:43:12.160 | Your group should bridge the generations.

01:43:15.680 | That means ideally involving not just other parents, but also grandparents.

01:43:19.920 | Encourage your daughter to develop friendships with women your age and your mother's age.

01:43:24.000 | Sometimes we just need to rediscover old ways of connecting girls with women.

01:43:29.040 | Sewing circles were never primarily about sewing.

01:43:32.800 | They were about women and girls helping each other, which included helping girls to negotiate

01:43:37.840 | the transitions through adolescence and into womanhood.

01:43:41.840 | The challenges are different today, of course, but the value of a mature adult perspective

01:43:46.080 | hasn't changed.

01:43:47.040 | Your daughter may know more than you do about how to upload videos from a cell phone to

01:43:52.560 | a YouTube channel, but you know more than she does about how alcohol affects the behavior

01:43:58.720 | of teenage boys.

01:43:59.760 | She needs your perspective and the perspective of other adults your age and older.

01:44:04.960 | Don't let your daughter fall into the trap of thinking that her knowledge is a substitute

01:44:10.640 | for your wisdom.

01:44:11.840 | As Bly and Woodman observed, the average 12-year-old girl today knows more about the

01:44:16.560 | varieties of human sexual experience than the average 60-year-old knew in 1890, for

01:44:22.480 | example, regarding oral sex and anal intercourse.

01:44:25.680 | But knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom.

01:44:28.160 | Most girls today don't fully understand the harm that sex can do to a girl, to her

01:44:33.520 | spirit, if it's sex at the wrong time in her life or sex with the wrong person.

01:44:38.640 | That understanding is not a matter of knowledge.

01:44:41.760 | It's a matter of wisdom.

01:44:43.120 | Very few 12-year-old girls, or boys, have that wisdom, and it can't easily be taught

01:44:49.520 | in a sex education class.

01:44:51.520 | That's why they need you and other adults your age.

01:44:54.800 | I was discussing this topic with Rev. Alan James, who has hosted me on several speaking

01:44:59.600 | engagements in Minnesota.

01:45:01.360 | When Rev. James was pastor of the Small Presbyterian Church in Maple Plain, Minnesota, he helped

01:45:06.480 | to organize summer canoeing trips, girls with women, and separate trips for boys and

01:45:11.360 | men.

01:45:11.860 | In a typical trip, eight girls and eight women would gather at the headwaters of the

01:45:16.320 | Namakagon River in Wisconsin.

01:45:19.360 | They would canoe down the Namakagon to the St. Croix River, which divides Wisconsin

01:45:23.520 | from Minnesota.

01:45:24.320 | That canoe ride is on the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, managed by the National Park

01:45:29.440 | Service, and the Park Service maintains many beautiful campsites accessible only from the

01:45:34.240 | river.

01:45:35.120 | A typical trip begins with one girl paired with one woman, and together they canoe to

01:45:39.920 | the first stop, about two hours downriver.

01:45:42.720 | They pull the canoe off the river at the designated campsite and wait for the other

01:45:46.400 | pairs to join them.

01:45:47.600 | They all make lunch together.

01:45:49.280 | Then the girl gets back in the canoe with a different woman for another two-hour trip

01:45:53.200 | downriver.

01:45:54.160 | They pull off the river at the next campsite, where they gather brush and prepare a campfire.

01:45:58.320 | All the girls and women then cook supper together.

01:46:01.520 | They sit around the campfire, tell stories, sing songs.

01:46:05.280 | Then they go to sleep in their tents, three days and two nights.

01:46:08.720 | Each two-hour trek downriver, the girl is paired with a different woman.

01:46:13.440 | Two hours in a canoe on a quiet, beautiful river is a great opportunity for a girl to

01:46:18.000 | talk to a woman, to listen to a woman, and to learn from a woman.

01:46:21.840 | Rev. James told me that the river excursions were very popular in his day, but that his

01:46:27.360 | former church no longer offers them.

01:46:29.760 | He isn't sure why.

01:46:31.600 | I think I know why.

01:46:32.640 | Parents today are less likely than parents in previous generations to tell their daughter

01:46:37.680 | what the daughter will be doing this summer.

01:46:39.360 | Instead, today's parents are more likely to ask the daughter what the daughter wants

01:46:43.600 | to do.

01:46:43.920 | And very few girls today will answer, "Well, what I'd really like to do is spend three

01:46:49.360 | days canoeing down the Namakagon River with some random group of women from the church

01:46:53.440 | who I don't even know."

01:46:54.320 | Instead, the girl says, "I'd like to do the summer session at Stanford University

01:46:58.800 | for top high school students.

01:47:00.240 | I think that would look great on my college application."

01:47:02.560 | Or she says, "I'd like to go to the summer intensive field hockey program.

01:47:07.120 | I think it would improve my chances of getting a scholarship at an NCAA Division I program.

01:47:11.680 | I'm thinking UConn."

01:47:12.800 | Or she says, "I want to work on my YouTube channel.

01:47:16.640 | I want to be the next JoJo Siwa."

01:47:18.880 | If you don't know who JoJo Siwa is, you might start by watching her YouTube channel,

01:47:22.800 | YouTube video Boomerang, which she made at 12 years of age and which has had over 840

01:47:27.280 | million views on YouTube.

01:47:29.120 | These experiences at Stanford, at the hockey field camp, or in the bedroom making a YouTube

01:47:34.320 | video are very different from one another.

01:47:37.120 | What they have in common is an emphasis on performance, on impressing other people with

01:47:42.560 | how amazing you are.

01:47:44.080 | None of them invites or requires a spiritual journey.

01:47:48.640 | None of them will nurture your girl's core sense of identity, her sense of who she is

01:47:54.640 | as something separate from what she does.

01:47:57.440 | Contemporary North American popular culture does not value bonds across generations.

01:48:03.040 | There are very few shows on broadcast or cable TV, very few popular videos on YouTube that

01:48:08.720 | portray their value and significance.

01:48:10.880 | That means you can't wait for your daughter to ask for an activity that nurtures and promotes

01:48:16.400 | intergenerational bonds.

01:48:17.760 | You have to find such an activity, creating it from scratch if necessary, and then offer

01:48:23.680 | it to her.

01:48:24.240 | That's what Yolanda Zhang did.

01:48:26.960 | She created a program called Girl Strong, specifically to grow these bonds across generations.

01:48:32.400 | Her program has five components, or pillars.

01:48:35.840 | One of the five pillars is a weekend overnight mother-daughter retreat at Albion Hills Conservation

01:48:41.680 | Park, about an hour's drive northwest of Toronto.

01:48:44.720 | The weekend includes a ropes course where girls have to work as a team with their moms

01:48:49.120 | to walk along ropes suspended midair, building shelter and starting a fire using materials

01:48:54.160 | nearby, using a rope swing to get from one platform to another, and so forth.

01:48:58.720 | Parents are enthusiastic about Zhang's program.

01:49:02.480 | One mother described how the program has "done wonders for my daughter.

01:49:06.480 | Her teachers at school have all remarked at how much she is coming out of her shell."

01:49:10.160 | Another mom reports how her daughter, since participating in the mother-daughter weekend,

01:49:15.200 | now amazes her with her ability to speak confidently in front of strangers.

01:49:20.080 | One weekend won't change everything, but it's a start.

01:49:24.000 | And not every parent can be a Yolanda Zhang, but you must try to find a program like hers

01:49:29.040 | for your daughter.

01:49:29.760 | "If we choose, we can accept our unique place in history," wrote Bly and Woodman.

01:49:36.800 | For the first time in history, there is a general international consensus among educated

01:49:41.200 | people that girls and women have a fundamental right to equal opportunity.

01:49:46.240 | For the past three decades, most of us have assumed that the best way to ensure equal

01:49:50.480 | opportunity is to pretend that girls and women are more or less the same as boys and men,

01:49:56.240 | that we should instruct them in the same sports in the same way and that they have the same

01:50:00.160 | spiritual needs.

01:50:01.040 | That assumption hasn't worked very well.

01:50:04.160 | In matters of the spirit, as in athletics, simply lifting the strategies that have been

01:50:08.880 | used for boys and applying them to girls in gender-blind fashion doesn't work well for

01:50:14.080 | many girls.

01:50:15.200 | We have to recognize that girls need girl-specific interventions.

01:50:19.200 | Sewing circles might not be the best way to engage boys in a community of men, but I'm

01:50:24.560 | hearing about some communities where it seems to be a great idea for girls.

01:50:28.080 | If girls are not healthy spiritually, they may find themselves not so much living as

01:50:34.880 | performing.

01:50:36.080 | I discussed in Chapter 2 how easily this can happen in the era of social media.

01:50:40.320 | The technology of social networking sites and texting make it easy for girls to think

01:50:44.960 | they are living their own lives, when in fact they are really putting on a show for their

01:50:49.040 | peers.

01:50:49.520 | Even back in the 1990s, years before modern social media even existed, Marion Woodman

01:50:55.920 | wrote that most girls "have been performing since they were tiny children.

01:51:01.520 | They don't know that there's any other way to live except for the voice inside that's

01:51:07.760 | saying, 'If this is it, it's not worth living.'

01:51:11.440 | Today, that problem is more severe."

01:51:16.800 | I would encourage you to read Girls on the Edge.

01:51:23.920 | It's a great book.

01:51:24.560 | But the point is, absolutely.

01:51:28.080 | Women need women-only clubs, just like men need men-only clubs.

01:51:38.320 | I would love to be living next to that knitting shop, and I would be getting my wife and daughter

01:51:45.040 | in there as often as possible.

01:51:47.600 | I do now.

01:51:48.320 | Every single time there's any conceivable female event, my wife has a little club.

01:51:56.000 | She calls it Book Club.

01:51:56.960 | But they don't actually read any books.

01:52:00.080 | It started as a book club around one book, and then it just turned into a group of women

01:52:03.680 | who got together regularly, and they don't read books, but they still call it Book Club.

01:52:08.480 | But it's just a way of girls getting together.

01:52:10.960 | And this is really, really important.

01:52:13.600 | And it's doable to create in an ad hoc basis.

01:52:17.680 | If you have a healthy church or a healthy homeschool co-op or a healthy community, then

01:52:22.320 | naturally women who are wise understand we need this.

01:52:26.320 | My sisters always did it by hosting tea parties, and they would regularly host a tea party,

01:52:30.720 | and you get everyone from the 85-year-old to the 5-year-old all together to drink tea.

01:52:34.880 | And so you try to find a female version of that.

01:52:38.320 | And men need it just as much.

01:52:40.800 | The problem is, as I said in a different episode, those places have disappeared.

01:52:45.520 | The closest I can come up with is a cigar lounge.

01:52:47.760 | I love going to cigar lounges, primarily because they're one of the very few male-dominated

01:52:53.200 | places I can find.

01:52:54.240 | I used to go to a barbershop in Florida, and the barbershop was for years – it was a

01:53:00.000 | traditional men's barbershop.

01:53:01.760 | There were no female barbers, and it was all men, all male patrons.

01:53:07.920 | And occasionally a woman would come in with her child and cut the baby's hair, the child's

01:53:12.000 | hair, but it was all men.

01:53:13.120 | That was the barbershop I grew up being taken to by my dad, and it was great.

01:53:17.840 | And then in comes a woman barber.

01:53:20.880 | Okay, fine.

01:53:21.760 | Women are perfectly capable of cutting men's hair.

01:53:24.240 | They do a great job.

01:53:25.120 | They probably do a better job, for all I know.

01:53:27.440 | But it destroys the environment.

01:53:29.680 | And then the woman has her female clients and the male clients, and I don't go to the

01:53:33.440 | barbershop anymore.

01:53:34.400 | It's gone.

01:53:35.280 | And so this is what has happened, is that it used to be that men had places to go, and

01:53:40.720 | they were respected.

01:53:42.240 | And then women said, "Men can't have places.

01:53:44.720 | I got to get in there, because they're going to have a good old boys club, and I'm going

01:53:48.000 | to be out."

01:53:48.560 | And now men are falling apart, because they don't have places.

01:53:53.120 | And all of everything that was written by Dr. Sacks for girls is every bit as valid

01:53:59.680 | for men.

01:54:00.240 | Men have to have those environments in order for us, as mature men, to train and correct

01:54:08.240 | and help facilitate the growth of our boys.

01:54:11.520 | That's what men do.

01:54:13.200 | Men need that.

01:54:15.120 | And women need it too.

01:54:16.800 | From time to time, I speak in council with single mothers who have sons.

01:54:21.440 | A single mom desperately needs there to exist men's groups, where men in a positive environment

01:54:27.840 | are going to bring those boys in and bring them in.

01:54:31.120 | And so this can be done.

01:54:33.520 | And traditionally, it has been done in positive ways.

01:54:36.320 | And it can still be done, just not formally.

01:54:38.640 | So in a church, and I grew up in a church, and we had our church meetings, but then we

01:54:42.560 | had a men's prayer meeting.

01:54:43.680 | So once a week, every week, we'd get together very early in the morning, and we'd pray for

01:54:47.600 | an hour or two, and then we'd have breakfast together.

01:54:49.520 | And it was just men.

01:54:50.880 | And we would have men's leadership meetings and things like that.

01:54:54.400 | And today, I look back and I realize how important those things are.

01:54:58.160 | They're fundamental to the flourishing of men.

01:55:01.040 | And they're fundamental to the flourishing of women as well.

01:55:03.520 | So then your next question.

01:55:04.720 | What about the men-only clubs, strip clubs, gyms, ball fields, bars, where damage arises

01:55:09.760 | from these locations and interactions?

01:55:11.920 | For example, my husband is prone to over-drinking, yet wants to spend time with guys, and this

01:55:16.400 | tends towards bars and drinking activity.

01:55:18.400 | Is this a valuable activity?

01:55:20.000 | Well, first of all, I would point out that none of those are men-only clubs.

01:55:24.480 | A strip club, by definition, is not a men-only club.

01:55:27.440 | It's a strip club where there are naked women and men.

01:55:30.400 | And then today, as I understand, there are lots of women who go to those as well.

01:55:36.560 | These are obviously leeches on society.

01:55:39.520 | Any sane and healthy society should obviously eradicate these institutions, and they should

01:55:44.080 | be gotten rid of.

01:55:45.040 | They're not healthy, they're destructive, and they destroy men.

01:55:48.000 | Now, gyms or ball fields, where do you find a male-only gym?

01:55:51.920 | If it could be done legally, I know lots of men who would happily pay double or triple

01:55:57.840 | to go to a male-only gym, just for the chance to work out without women constantly around,

01:56:03.280 | especially in today's scantily clad culture.

01:56:05.920 | Men and fathers want to go to the gym to work out.

01:56:09.920 | So it can be achieved a little bit with having a super gritty gym.

01:56:13.840 | If you find a really, really gritty gym that's just repulsive to women because it's ugly

01:56:18.240 | and it's dirty and there's concrete and there's rust, then that's one way that men try to

01:56:22.960 | create things that repel women.

01:56:24.640 | But most modern gyms, there's no chance.

01:56:27.360 | They're not a male-only space.

01:56:29.520 | So I can't even answer the question.

01:56:31.040 | Bars are not male-only.

01:56:32.240 | I don't know of a bar that is male-only.

01:56:34.320 | If it were, my guess is there'd probably be – I mean, I don't have any evidence for

01:56:39.440 | this, let me not go beyond what I can say, but a male-only environment is probably a

01:56:45.360 | healthier drinking environment than a mixed-sex bar because men are not trying to drink to

01:56:51.440 | screw up their courage, to suppress their inhibitions to go and approach that woman.

01:56:55.440 | They don't fall into such nasty things.

01:56:57.840 | I am not in any way saying that men don't have toxic traits and sin that happens in

01:57:04.320 | men's cultures.

01:57:06.080 | There's all kinds of bad things that can happen in a male-only environment, but probably

01:57:11.840 | not so many as you might think that would happen in an exclusively male-only environment.

01:57:17.680 | So I'm not arguing for entirely separate lives, but men do need these places.

01:57:22.880 | And what's interesting is that a lot of times the damaging effects are caused by men's

01:57:29.920 | lack of spiritual development.

01:57:31.680 | So for example, let me give a simple example.

01:57:34.720 | I grew up in a very mature, very masculine environment.

01:57:37.520 | I have strong relationships and the ability to talk extensively with other men without

01:57:47.920 | any problem.

01:57:48.960 | Just for context, one time I drove from Florida to Tennessee to attend a conference and I

01:57:56.320 | invited my dad along and he just came along just so we could spend the time in the car

01:58:00.240 | to talk.

01:58:01.040 | So we drove from West Palm Beach, Florida to Nashville, Tennessee, which I don't remember

01:58:04.640 | how long that drive is, but it's a long time.

01:58:06.880 | And we talked nonstop on the way up.

01:58:08.640 | We didn't listen to music.

01:58:09.520 | We didn't listen to podcasts.

01:58:10.640 | We talked for whatever it was, 14 hours straight.

01:58:13.200 | And then we attended the conference.

01:58:14.800 | We ate every meal together at the conference and talked there.

01:58:18.400 | And then we drove home and we talked for 16 hours straight on the way home.

01:58:22.480 | No problem whatsoever talking.

01:58:24.560 | I would have no problem with the men that I grew up in, the men in the church.

01:58:27.680 | Most of my relationships saying to people, "Hey, let's go and let's go and talk."

01:58:31.360 | So for me, saying to someone, "Let's get together for fellowship" is a totally normal

01:58:38.320 | thing that I'm happy to do with men.

01:58:39.920 | Let's get together for fellowship.

01:58:40.960 | We don't need any excuses.

01:58:42.480 | We don't need any crutches.

01:58:43.840 | I don't need any excuse or crutch to say that.

01:58:46.640 | There's a lot of men who are very spiritually underdeveloped.

01:58:51.280 | They don't have the ability to do that.

01:58:53.120 | So they need a crutch.

01:58:54.400 | And Joshua's theory on coffee, cigars, and alcohol are that these are excuses that men

01:59:00.960 | use to say to another man, "Hey, let's spend some time together."

01:59:06.160 | But it's easier.

01:59:07.040 | It takes quite a lot of maturity to say, "Let's go and fellowship for an hour or two."

01:59:11.600 | It's much easier to say, "Let's have a coffee" or "Let's go and have a drink."

01:59:15.200 | That's what men are desperate for a lot of times when they go drinking.

01:59:18.480 | They go to the bar because they're trying to have some conversations.

01:59:21.600 | And I don't think that these things are necessarily bad things.

01:59:24.000 | So I don't usually employ the language of, "Let's go fellowship for an hour."

01:59:27.040 | I do that with my dad.

01:59:28.160 | But, you know, we'll have a glass of water and sit down.

01:59:30.560 | But I don't say to him, "Let's go and have a beer together."

01:59:33.440 | But I do say that to men, "Let's go and have a drink.

01:59:35.360 | Let's go and have a cigar."

01:59:36.400 | Because these are tools that facilitate conversation and fellowship, which is what people are looking

01:59:41.280 | for.

01:59:41.840 | So what I would say is that if someone is prone to over-drinking, then they shouldn't

01:59:47.120 | drink.

01:59:47.440 | That's a separate conversation.

01:59:49.200 | But there's probably a better chance of getting rid of the drinking by having a good

01:59:54.560 | opportunity for there to be some kind of club that existed, a men's-only club.

02:00:01.440 | Not a strip club with naked women, but a true men's-only club.

02:00:05.360 | And if you see where guys do this, again, they do it in a cigar bar or a game lounge

02:00:09.760 | or a pool hall, something like that.

02:00:11.600 | The men go there not because they're looking for the alcohol.

02:00:15.040 | They're looking for the camaraderie and the companionship.

02:00:17.920 | I hope this is useful.

02:00:20.640 | I'm investing my time into this because I care.

02:00:22.640 | I hope it's useful to you.

02:00:24.080 | The next question I'm going to answer more quickly.

02:00:26.080 | "What do you do with your listeners who have no ability to benefit from the teachings

02:00:29.520 | that are men-focused?"

02:00:30.560 | I encourage those listeners to go somewhere else and find something else that is useful.

02:00:38.000 | That's what you have to do.

02:00:39.520 | What I would say, however, is that even if you are a woman, you will probably learn something

02:00:46.000 | from what I have to say because I am consciously not filtering myself to appeal to a male/female

02:00:55.280 | crowd.

02:00:55.780 | I generally try to imagine myself speaking to a man and try to speak the way I would

02:01:01.520 | speak to men, knowing that women can listen in.

02:01:04.080 | And that's totally fine.

02:01:05.120 | So what I would say is that you will hear something different from me because I'm trying

02:01:12.480 | to speak as truthfully and in as non-censored a way as I possibly can, rather than trying

02:01:21.600 | to curtail my words to speak to women, which is generally what men will do.

02:01:26.640 | Men don't enjoy conflict and they don't enjoy conflict with women.

02:01:30.640 | So what they generally will do is they will censor their speech and the things that they

02:01:34.560 | say to women.

02:01:35.680 | They won't say what they think.

02:01:37.040 | They won't say what they believe.

02:01:38.640 | It's easier to say something patronizing so the woman will leave you alone and then

02:01:42.880 | resort to silence.

02:01:43.920 | That's a normal way that men handle women.

02:01:48.880 | So what I would say is you listen and you ask me questions, which is smart, and I'm

02:01:54.560 | trying to give you the truth as I best understand it, as best I'm able to.

02:01:59.440 | Then you say, "What about the male listeners who have daughters?

02:02:02.000 | How do you speak to them to help their daughters and be invested in their development?"

02:02:06.240 | As much as I possibly can, I care about the issues enormously.

02:02:09.440 | That's why I'm spending time on it.

02:02:10.960 | My observation is we are some—I was going to say much more in tune.

02:02:18.240 | Let me just modify that and say we've spent a lot of time on trying to help our daughters

02:02:23.280 | flourish.

02:02:23.760 | That's well and good and right, and maybe that corrective action was necessary.

02:02:30.640 | I'm totally open to that.

02:02:31.760 | Our boys are not flourishing right now.

02:02:36.080 | They are dying.

02:02:37.200 | In many cases, literally.

02:02:40.480 | If we want to have a future for our culture and our society and our community, we have

02:02:49.040 | a lot of work to do.

02:02:50.240 | That's why I'm talking about it.

02:02:53.360 | I care about women enormously.

02:02:56.400 | I care about the success of women.

02:02:59.280 | I'm particularly burdened that we're not talking to men and about men and their problems.

02:03:06.560 | I am astonished—I'll use just an example, the Andrew Tate phenomenon.

02:03:10.800 | I am astonished at how many women are surprised at the appeal of a man like Andrew Tate.

02:03:19.280 | It should be obvious.

02:03:24.080 | Any guy like me who's a millennial, grew up in the culture we grew up in,

02:03:28.720 | I'm not astonished at all about the appeal of Andrew Tate.

02:03:32.320 | I understand the appeal viscerally.

02:03:34.320 | I'm not astonished at all at the appeal of the Incel movement and the Red Pill people.

02:03:38.880 | I understand these things very, very viscerally.

02:03:43.280 | I also happen to think that the solutions recommended by these movements are wrong,

02:03:49.440 | harmful and destructive, and aren't going to produce any good outcomes.

02:03:56.720 | So, if I see that, then I have a responsibility as a man to try to come up to understand the

02:04:03.840 | problems, to empathize with them, and then try to chart an alternative course that I

02:04:08.800 | think is healthier, and time and results will prove.

02:04:11.280 | I conclude with the final question.

02:04:13.840 | What about the young men who damage society in the name of power/vanity?

02:04:17.040 | Why glorify them in this podcast episode, number 1016?

02:04:23.200 | I don't know that I glorified them.

02:04:25.760 | I'm not sure exactly who you were responding to.

02:04:29.440 | So, if I glorified somebody who is damaging society in the name of power and vanity,

02:04:34.720 | then I apologize for that, because I don't ever wish to glorify people who are damaging

02:04:40.000 | society in the name of power and vanity.

02:04:42.800 | I desire to confront those people and take them down, and I've demonstrated in various

02:04:48.800 | ways in my life that I'm committed to do that, even at personal harm.

02:04:52.320 | So, if I did that, I'm not sure what you're alluding to, then I do apologize for that,

02:04:56.720 | because I never want to do that.

02:04:58.080 | So, you can tell me how I did that in that particular podcast episode.

02:05:02.640 | However, what I would say is, if you want to have the young men who are damaging society

02:05:13.920 | in the name of power and vanity controlled, taken out, and put in their place,

02:05:21.040 | you aren't going to do it.

02:05:25.120 | It's going to be the men who do it.

02:05:28.320 | I can't think of any example in which that I could draw to bear to say, "Here is how

02:05:40.160 | a woman has taken control of young men who are damaging society."

02:05:45.680 | That difficult and distasteful work can probably only be done by men.

02:05:54.640 | It will probably be done by men whose wives are bending their ear and making sure they

02:05:59.760 | see what's happening, and that's the best expression for women, but if you're going

02:06:04.320 | to take out those young men, it's probably going to be mature men who do that.

02:06:09.120 | To me, that's important.

02:06:10.640 | So, if you want to have mature men who take out young men who are damaging society, then

02:06:17.680 | we've got to work really hard on cultivating the young men.

02:06:22.320 | Let me give a very graphic and very sad example of this that kind of demonstrates the destruction

02:06:28.880 | that we see.

02:06:29.440 | You asked earlier in your questions, and you said, "Do you want men caring for your

02:06:35.200 | daughter, wife?"

02:06:35.680 | And I answered all those questions.

02:06:36.880 | "Do you want men in positions of risk?"

02:06:38.320 | I would also say we have a duty to protect women, and when men protect women, it's

02:06:46.000 | not because they're always trying to subjugate women.

02:06:49.360 | It's because they want to protect women.

02:06:50.880 | My brother sent me a link to an article yesterday of a story I hadn't heard of previously,

02:06:54.960 | a horrific story.

02:06:55.840 | It happened a few years ago in West Palm Beach, Florida.

02:06:59.440 | There was a therapist, a female therapist, who went to the house of a patient of hers

02:07:11.680 | who she was providing psychiatric treatment for.

02:07:14.720 | This young man, a disturbed young man for whom she was providing psychiatric treatment

02:07:20.480 | for, kidnapped her, raped her, and tortured her over the duration of a period of about

02:07:28.400 | 12 to 15 hours, something like that, if I've got my facts straight.

02:07:32.880 | The police were called to the house.

02:07:36.160 | There was a catastrophic breakdown of policing procedure because the deputies knocked on

02:07:42.560 | the house and tried to figure out what was going on, and the man had put up black plastic

02:07:49.120 | tablecloths covering the windows so nothing could be seen.

02:07:51.840 | While the police were outside the house, the woman successfully screamed, and they heard

02:07:56.800 | the scream, and they dealt with the scream, but they went on and on trying to figure out

02:08:01.600 | whether they should go in, whether they shouldn't go in, and eventually the female therapist

02:08:10.160 | who was locked in the house, her girlfriend had gotten concerned about her and knew where

02:08:17.360 | she was and finally convinced the police that her car was in the driveway and they should

02:08:21.440 | go in.

02:08:22.240 | So they went in the door, they walk in the door.

02:08:24.720 | The guy is standing there with a knife at this woman's throat.

02:08:28.480 | One of the police officers shot the guy in the head.

02:08:30.880 | He ultimately survived, later pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him.

02:08:34.720 | A horrific story, but an example to say what kind of sane society would ever approve of

02:08:46.320 | sending a female psychiatric mental health counselor, therapist, whatever it's called,

02:08:53.360 | to the house of a mentally disturbed young man.

02:08:57.120 | I'm glad that the victim's girlfriend followed through and finally convinced the police to

02:09:03.920 | finally enter the problem.

02:09:05.360 | I'm grateful for that.

02:09:06.400 | It's insane that the victim's girlfriend would ever allow her girlfriend to be in a

02:09:16.000 | situation like that.

02:09:18.160 | That is a decisional relationship dynamic that is incomprehensible to me.

02:09:22.560 | I would never permit my wife to be in a situation like that.

02:09:26.880 | I would never permit my daughter to be in a situation like that.

02:09:30.080 | I would go across the world to stop any woman in my life from being in a situation like

02:09:38.800 | that.

02:09:39.040 | You recall my earlier discomfort with the idea of a female counselor or psychiatrist.

02:09:47.920 | There's probably many great ones out there.

02:09:50.000 | This one, however, for a counselor to show that lack of judgment is incomprehensible

02:09:58.720 | to me.

02:09:59.120 | I hope that she's able to recover from her injuries.

02:10:04.000 | I wish deeply for justice to be done to the evil man who has harmed her.

02:10:11.520 | He is in no way to be his crime and his evil is in no way made less evil because of her

02:10:20.720 | poor decision making.

02:10:21.840 | I wish for him to be executed for his crime.

02:10:25.520 | My point is simply we play with cultural norms at our peril.

02:10:30.720 | And when we change them, we had better understand what we're doing and why we're doing it.

02:10:37.440 | And a culture that ultimately sends a female mental health counselor unaccompanied to the

02:10:45.760 | house of a mentally disturbed young man is a culture that does not wish to continue to

02:10:51.840 | live.

02:10:52.080 | It's a culture that has already agreed to its own end and it's just a matter of time.

02:10:57.120 | That's the flip side.

02:11:06.480 | That's the flip side.

02:11:07.360 | And right now we're in an extreme counter-reaction scenario.

02:11:12.400 | Men have pretty well lost their will to protect women at the moment, speaking broadly.

02:11:19.040 | Not all.

02:11:20.880 | Not in all circumstances.

02:11:22.160 | Society has lost its will to protect women.

02:11:26.080 | There are probably no easy answers.

02:11:30.000 | I mean, let me say that with more confidence.

02:11:32.800 | There are no easy answers in this.

02:11:34.960 | There are opportunities for abuse on all sides.

02:11:37.840 | There are opportunities for abuse towards men, towards women.

02:11:40.080 | We cannot let the extreme factions of our society be the ones to say, to control the

02:11:47.840 | dominant narrative.

02:11:49.120 | Thoughtful, intelligent men and women like you and me, we are the ones who need to be

02:11:58.720 | talking about these things soberly, openly, forthrightly, bristling our way through the

02:12:06.400 | arrows of the internet if we want our societies to succeed and to flourish.

02:12:13.120 | We all want our boys and our girls to flourish.

02:12:17.840 | They're not flourishing at the moment and we got to figure out why.

02:12:22.080 | We can't just accept the fact that probably the top 20% are going to flourish no matter

02:12:26.480 | what, we need to focus on that middle 60% that we can save, that we can improve with

02:12:33.760 | a strong, rational society.

02:12:36.080 | I don't pretend to have all the answers.

02:12:38.560 | Those are my answers to your questions.

02:12:40.320 | Don't argue against a straw man.

02:12:42.960 | A man who says that women should be honored and appreciated for their contributions as

02:12:50.560 | mothers and their contributions in the home is not saying anything more than that.

02:12:56.560 | Don't fight against the straw man that somehow a guy who says that is saying that he wants

02:13:01.600 | women to be ignorant and not know how to read.

02:13:03.600 | That's another culture.

02:13:04.800 | That's not mine.

02:13:05.920 | I would like to end that culture, but I would like to not replace it with the culture that

02:13:12.480 | has countless TikTok videos of women crying unconsolably because of the nightmare that

02:13:20.720 | they're living through with their own unrequited hopes and dreams.

02:13:24.720 | We can do better, and I hope that we can figure out some new pathways in the future to deal

02:13:29.920 | with, be appreciative for all the problems in the past that our cultures and societies

02:13:33.520 | have solved, but let's solve the ones that are facing us in the face today.

02:13:37.600 | Thank you for your email and for your questions.

02:13:40.560 | I hope that I have answered them clearly and directly, and I hope that there's something

02:13:44.800 | useful to you in them, in my answers.

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2024-06-12_Pushback_and_Questions_on_Womens_Careers