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Download the Dave app or go to dave.com/listen. For terms and conditions, go to dave.com/legal. Eligibility criteria and instant transfer fees apply. Advance is typically approved in five minutes. Banking services provided by Evolve Bank and Trust, member FDIC. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Today on the podcast, I want to interact with a series of important questions posed to me by a listener who I will call Amy.

Amy writes in and says, "Hi, Joshua. Thank you for all the work that you do." Been a big fan, gives me some time on her listening and says, "I was listening to a recent episode, number 1016, and it really hit me in a stark way." And for context, 1016 was an episode titled "Things Young Men Should Do in 2024," wherein I read basically a tweet thread by a Twitter user and then interacted a little bit with the ideas with specific advice for young men.

Amy goes on and shares a little bit about her personal family details with me and says, "Anyway, I enjoy your values and leadership. I feel like I have no influence because I have no sons and am not a man. When I listen to an episode like this, it makes me question my existence and if I have any power or values as a woman." So, please bear with me in my questions.

I ask them from a positive perspective because I'd appreciate your leadership guidance and perspective. And she goes on with these questions. First off, "What would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great leaders in our society? Can his," meaning Joshua's, "Can his wife be a leader in the family?

How? What does that look like, practically speaking? Does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home, working for pay?" Give some examples that I'll interact with. "Should there be women-only clubs? Why doesn't this matter?" Give some examples also about negative clubs for men. "What do you do with your listeners who have no ability to benefit from the teachings that are men-focused?" And then says, "What about the young men who damage society in the name of power and vanity?

Why glorify them in this podcast episode?" So, Amy, I think these are great questions and I want to interact with them. First, I'll do the easier ones first. I'm going to say this clearly and directly, and I worry that it will come across as offensive, but just know that that's not the goal.

My goal is to be clear. 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 listen to that podcast episode. Rather, it is my goal that a young man should listen to that podcast episode or somebody who is coaching a young man or advising a young man.

There's an enormous problem in speaking in public, and it's quite simply this. You can't control who listens to your words. You can't control even what they do with them, how they're represented or misrepresented. You can't control who listens, though. And that's okay. But what it means is, if you want the people that you're trying to impact to listen to your words, the only solution that you have is to speak in a way that will hopefully engage the kind of people that you want to interact with what you have to say.

I have two enormous concerns. The first, and they're both related to young men, and they're related. So first, I observe that right now, men, broadly speaking, especially unmarried men, are not doing well. They're not flourishing in our current world. Now, there are other groups that are not doing well.

There are other populations of people who are not flourishing. But a group that is not flourishing is young men, young single men, not doing well. On many objective metrics, income, wealth building, marriage rates, health, it's not going well. Secondly, that's who I have a deep personal burden for. I care about young men on a level that is different than I care about other groups of people.

I also care about young women. I also care about poor people. I also care about refugees. I also care about people who are in prison. I care about lots of people. But I have a distinct personal burden for young men. That is who I care the most about. That is who I want to serve and help the most.

And so, I've made a conscious choice that if I'm going to serve and care for young men, then I'm going to speak to the people that I want to listen. Now, anybody else is welcome to listen. You're welcome to listen. I want you to listen. If there's anything I have to say that can be useful to you or helpful to you, I want you here.

But if I lose you as a listener and I gain a young man as a listener because of the way that I speak and the way that I communicate, I'm content with that choice. I would dearly love to be your friend. I would dearly love to interact with you.

I enjoy speaking to smart, wonderful mothers, especially mothers of daughters. I have four sons and a daughter. I want your daughters to succeed, which is why I'm going to interact and share and answer your questions honestly. But we can't all do everything that we would like. I'll just give one analogy.

You might care about saving the whales and stopping climate change and improving your town and fixing politics and all of those things, but you can't impact all of them. And one tool of success that I believe is very important that we really focus on is the idea most popularized by Stephen Covey of the difference between our circle of concern and our circle of control.

As Covey taught the concept many years ago in Seven Habits for Highly Successful People, we all have a circle of concern, things that we're concerned about. And global warming and politics and war in the Middle East and our children and nasty playground cleanup and the beach cleanup and the plastic in the oceans.

And there's thousands of things that we're all concerned about. But we have a much smaller circle of control. And these are things that we can control. These are things that we can influence and that we can affect. And if we are spending all our time thinking and talking about things that are within our circle of concern, we generally don't make much progress in life.

But if we can laser in focus on things that are within our circle of control, on the things that we can affect, over time we can grow that and we can acquire more influence, more authority, more reputation, more power, and we can affect more of those things that are in our circle of concern.

But in order to make progress, we have to focus on that smaller circle, that circle of control. And so, as an expression of that, I have a deep personal burden for men, for men who are failing in society, who are not – life is not working and the deck feels stacked against them.

That's not to diminish the many significant challenges that women face, but it's to say that I am choosing to focus my energy on men, because that's where I believe I can have the biggest impact, because I understand them, I understand their issues, I understand the challenges, I understand the successes, I am one, and I know what works and what doesn't work for men.

I also believe that is where I have leverage. I believe that when men are flourishing and doing well, that has a follow-on effect of generally contributing to a stable society where women also flourish. And so, because I believe that there's leverage, if I can encourage young men and encourage men broadly, then I believe that I can have leverage and I care about leverage.

This does not minimize you as a woman or your daughters or your perspective or your very valid and important questions. What it does mean that with my limited time and energy, I want to focus on the change that I want to see in the world. And I'm going to – since I have a personal burden and care for men specifically, I want to speak to men.

And so, I have chosen to do that in my style of communication, in my manner of communication. And even in that particular episode, I am imagining a young man coming across my podcast title, "Thing Young Men Should Do in 2024." And I am specifically choosing language that I hope will break through for a young man and give him a roadmap and talk about his issues and make him feel connected and heard and understood and cared for and give him a little bit of advice.

And I will speak in that episode, I'll speak in a way that I would never speak to you as a woman. Just give an example. In that episode, I used a vulgar word and a vulgar expression. I didn't originate it, I was just reading it from the tweet thread, but I also didn't choose to censor it.

Why not? Well, because sometimes vulgar language can be employed for effect. And it has a certain effect, especially in men, if you don't overuse it, but it has a certain emotional effect and an emotional response. I would not speak to you as a woman using vulgar language, ever. I would not speak to a young woman with vulgar language.

I generally employ almost no vulgar language in my speech, neither in public nor in private. But there is a time for vulgar language for effect, and so I chose not to censor the particular vulgar expression that I used in that particular podcast episode. But I'm doing it in hopes that I can connect with men, because that's the change that I want to try to contribute to in the world.

I've spent years thinking about this problem and I don't know any other way to approach it. When you communicate in public, you can't choose who listens. So you have to try to focus on the people that you want to listen and speak to them, and then allow other people to listen in if they also find the content useful and helpful.

I have an audience that is predominantly men, much more than 80% male. And that makes me satisfied, not because I wish to exclude women. I don't mind. I'm grateful for any female listeners that I have. I've had great relationships with many female listeners, and I hope that that continues.

There's nothing exclusionary about women. There's no way that I wish to exclude women from listening to my podcast. But if I were to create content or materials that were targeted towards women, I would repel men. Now, I may repel some women, but I think the ratio is different. If I speak to men in a way that is attractive to men, I'm probably going to repel some women, but not all.

But if I speak to women in a way that is primarily attractive to women, I'm probably going to repel most men, if that makes sense. So, I don't know whether that's right or wrong. That's a decision that I have made. And so, I just say, first and foremost, that you don't need to listen to that.

And if it doesn't help you and it doesn't serve you, it doesn't encourage you, or it doesn't give you a vision, if it doesn't help in some way, then just skip it and go and find something that does give you what you need at this particular point in time in your life.

I have made a choice in all of my content that I will respect my listener's control over what he listens to. Every listener has a stop button, a skip button, a delete button, a subscribe button, and an unsubscribe button. And so, the choice that I have made is to do my very best to respect my listeners who want my content and focus on serving the people who want to hear my ideas at the risk of many people exercising their natural right to pause, unsubscribe, leave nasty reviews.

All of those things are perfectly fine. But if I do that, I may be able to advance my mission of helping people that I feel particularly called and burdened to try to serve in some way. And I don't know any other pathway for me to be able to accomplish that.

We need to develop the skills of understanding the context for different conversations and interactions. And this will be important even as I talk more in this episode in response to some of your specific questions. One challenge of our modern society is that we've lost privacy of interaction. I was thinking about this with light from a comment that I saw regarding the recent speech by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.

I think that's his name, forgive me, I'm not a football guy. And he was speaking, he's a Roman Catholic who was speaking at a Roman Catholic commencement ceremony in a Roman Catholic college. And the speech that he gave was, I thought, I watched about 15 minutes of it. I didn't read the whole thing or watch the whole thing, but I tried to get the nuts, the bits of it.

I thought it was a great speech, a really good and useful speech to articulate some advice that was very useful. But it was extremely offensive to many people, including many women, because he had the temerity to say to a group of Roman Catholic graduates that many of the women there gathered will ultimately find a greater sense of fulfillment and purpose in their calling as mothers as compared to their calling as businesswomen or as career women.

So one thing that I observed is there was a day and age in which a Roman Catholic could speak to a group of Roman Catholics and be understood inside the context of Roman Catholicism and the Christian religion. Today, you have to know when you're giving a speech that this is going to go on the internet and there are going to be legions of people who don't share any of our culture.

And this has really harmed relationships, because I can't be confident in any setting that I'm not being recorded, that I'm not being, you know, someone's Apple Watch or other smartwatch is not recording my audio, that someone's not surreptitiously recording video of me. I just assume everything I say ever is always going to be on the internet.

I assume every message that I'm going to write is going to be screenshotted and posted. And what's particularly galling to me is when you see this in the context of family relationships, you see children that post their message threads with their parents on the internet or people who fight with their parents in public on social media.

It's horrific. And it's not all bad. Certainly, we've exposed abuse or terrible ideologies and different things and hidden cameras and whistleblowers and all that. It probably has its place. It's not all bad, but it has changed how we speak. I can't control that. But what I do think is we always need to understand the context of where and how we're going to speak.

Even as I interact with your questions that you've asked me, I'm answering these questions in public wildly differently than I would if we were having an individual conversation, not in terms of my perspective, but in terms of the application. Because in individual conversation, I would always need to understand who you are, what you think, what your perspective is, what your background is, and then filter what I have to say through the light of that, pointing out any commonality or distinctions between those things.

And yet in public, I'm not doing that. So keep those things in mind as we discuss these particular issues that you have said, that I'm sorry that what I have to say doesn't resonate with you, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay if I have the hope of resonating with men.

I want to make one more comment also that needs to be said just because what you said was so pointed and so vulnerable. You wrote in your email, you said, "I feel like I have no influence because I have no sons and I'm not a man. When I listen to an episode like this, it makes me question my existence and if I have any power or value as a woman." I would like to as vigorously as possible encourage you that it doesn't matter how you feel, that may be a true description of your feelings, and those are your feelings.

But what those feelings are implying to you is absolutely, unequivocally false. And therefore, you should reject those feelings vigorously, constantly, in every way, shape, and form as absolute lies. You do have influence. It doesn't matter that you have no sons. It matters that you are a woman, and you do have influence because you are a woman.

You must never question your existence, nor should you try to judge any power or value that you have in comparison with the power or value of any other person, be it male or female. You are a human being created in the image of God, worthy of all respect that is associated with your being.

You are a mother to daughters. You are a wife. You have undoubtedly many other roles in society. You are a daughter. You probably have a job. You have a business. You are a neighbor. You have many roles in society. And we will always accord you the respect that you deserve because these things are true.

So, ignore your feelings, focus on what is true, what you know to be true, what everyone around you knows to be true, and then in time, your feelings will adapt to that truth. Feelings are useful ephemeral indicators of something happening, in the same way that pain in the body is a useful indicator of a problem in the body.

But feelings are not reliable decision-making criteria any more than pain is in and of itself a reliable criteria of whether you are doing the right thing. You may be exercising, for example, and experiencing pain during your exercise. In one context, the pain can be an indication that you're exercising in a dangerous way and you should immediately stop.

In another context, the pain that you're experiencing during your exercise may be the indication that your physical therapist who is helping you is pointing to you to indicate that what you're doing is working because it's stretching the muscle and it's solving the fundamental problem. Similarly, feelings or emotions can be useful flags of a real problem in a relationship or in society or in a policy or in a concept or in a thinking.

Or they could be the exact opposite. They could be indications that something is wrong but it's being fixed and you're experiencing bad feelings because of it. So ignore your feelings and focus on what is true and what is right and what you know to be true and right and let your feelings adapt to that rather than drawing from your feelings a primary indication of the truthfulness of what you're considering.

Now even as I say that, I find it ironic that I am using a very masculine style of communication. I'm trying to be as concise as possible but if I were together with you in person talking or interacting in some way then I would be very conscious of the fact that I'm speaking to a woman.

I would spend significant time listening, probing, identifying, affirming and then I would try to deliver what I think is true. Those are all things that I would not do if I were speaking to a man. If I were speaking to a man I wouldn't be making this ironic disclaimer at the moment.

But this indicates actually how important what I have to say is on the fact that we need to think about the questions that we have and we need to think about what we're doing, how we're training men, how we're training women, how hard it is and how easy it is for them to work together and what's good about it.

So I think for example in that podcast episode one of the things that I said that's probably the most potentially offensive would be that men should look for a masculine environment to work in. One of the reasons that really works well is because as a man who interacts with both men and women you spend all your time, if you're a thoughtful, intelligent, emotionally intelligent, you're empathetic, you understand, you spend all your time tying yourself into knots thinking about how do I communicate in such a way that's going to be appropriate to this.

And you don't realize it until you go through a good number of years of experience and all of a sudden you realize that's enormously draining to have to think about that. And so when men are in a masculine environment and they're not thinking about how their actions are going to be perceived by women or how their words are going to be perceived by women, it's enormously freeing.

It frees their mental bandwidth. They can get more work done faster with fewer concerns because they're not thinking about the feelings of women. They're just moving through life and doing the thing. And if you'll talk to men and listen to men, you'll understand that. That's one of the reasons why there's value in sex-segregated societies, cultures, things like that.

Now, I'm not arguing that our entire culture should be sex-segregated. I'm not in any way arguing that you or any other woman should be locked in her house wearing a burka and never come out and never interact. I think that's a recipe for disaster, obviously. But we've lost sight of that and this is one of many reasons men are on the defense right now because after years and years and years and years of this sex integration in society of men and women coming together, many people can see how it harms and it impacts negatively many aspects of life, including relationships, including productivity, including all of that.

I don't know what the solution is for many of these things. I don't know. But at least we can start by talking about the problems and then identifying potential solutions. Let's dig into some of your specific questions, though, because I thought these questions were wonderful, useful questions, and I want to answer them directly to you.

The first question you ask is this, "What would Joshua teach his daughter/young women to become great leaders in our society?" I'm going to do my best to answer these questions in a concise manner, and so I want to make three comments in response to this question specifically. Number one, "What would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great leaders?" I would teach them that leadership is not the aspiration, nor is it the goal.

Leadership should not be our aspiration or our goal. Rather, service is the aspiration, and service is the goal. Or we could insert different words here. Change is the aspiration, and change is the goal. And leadership is a necessary means to accomplish this goal. That's not just the sound of that first sip of morning joe.

It's the sound of someone shopping for a car on Carvana from the comfort of home. That's a good blend. It's time to take it easy, like answering some easy questions to get pre-qualified for a car in minutes. Talk about starting the morning right. Just like customizing your terms so your car fits your budget.

Visit Carvana.com or download the app to experience car shopping the way it should be, convenient, comfortable. Specifically, what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to counteract the idea that leadership is something that we should pursue for its own sake. And the reason I'm saying that is many people, when they think of leadership, they automatically substitute power for leadership.

They try to get power over other people. They try to get authority over other people. And that often can lead to abuse of other people, subjugation of other people. I don't believe that leadership is a bad thing in any way. But I think it's a very fickle ambition specifically, and shouldn't be the primary aspiration or ambition that any man or woman has.

On the contrary, I think that service is a more noble and cleaner way or cleaner thing to aspire to. And then we recognize that in order to render service or in order to affect positive change in whatever the domain of our service, leadership is necessary in order to accomplish those goals.

The second way that I would answer this question, specifically the question that what would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great leaders in society, is that we need to teach skills. You need to actually have and develop skills. Leadership, for example, is not a skill in and of itself.

It's a skill that is true, but is expressed in a specific domain. For example, you don't take a leader who is skilled at leading a sports team. Let's say you're interacting with a young woman who is the captain of her volleyball team, and she's been the captain of her volleyball team for four years.

You don't take her as the captain of her volleyball team and then put her on a wildland firefighting team and say, "Because you were the captain of your wildland firefighting team, you're now automatically the captain of your wildland firefighting team." So, leadership can't be talked about exclusively in the context of a specific domain without other skills.

Leadership requires the development of actual skills. Now, leadership is something that does transfer across domains. You may develop leadership skills and qualities in the context of a sports team, and then you may find yourself later on a business team expressing those skills in a context and see the relation of them.

But you need to learn actual skills while you're learning and demonstrating leadership. So, if you're going to become a great leader, you need to know something. You need to do something. You need to develop skills. You need to cultivate your abilities. You need to cultivate your talents and hone them to a high degree.

And then when you are interacting in a group context, you want to cultivate your skills of leadership because sometimes they're transferable. But you don't set a goal to just be a leader. Rather, you develop leadership skills in a specific context. The third thing I would say is leadership is not the definition of success.

If by leadership you are associating that with power, then it's understandable how someone who is pursuing power over other people to be able to manipulate them or subjugate them, why that person would say that the only way I'll be successful is if I'm a leader. But I do not see leadership as the definition of success.

If the only way to be successful is to be the leader or a leader, but I'm going to say the leader to make this point, if the only way to be successful is to be the leader, then by definition, only a small number of people can be successful. Rather, I see leadership as something that we do in various contexts and in various ways, and yet that's not a fundamental expression of our success or not success.

I'll just give a personal example. I, Joshua Sheets, I have developed certain skills and attributes and abilities over the years that helped me to exercise leadership. Some of them are natural and innate. I'm a man. I'm physically large. I can speak with a loud voice when desired. These are basic innate attributes that I have no, I didn't do anything, but they make it easier.

I have an easier time than people who are small or short. I have an easier time being a man than being a woman. I have an easier time because I can speak in a loud voice as compared to being physically handicapped in some way or not being able to speak in a loud voice.

I have other basic attributes that make it easier for me to exercise leadership. I am a father of a family. I've built enormous self-confidence. I have a good reputation, generally with those around. I'm not a swindler. I speak well of other people. I'm not a gossip. I just generally have a good reputation among people, not perfect.

I'm not trying to say anything wrong, but I just, I generally live on the whole a moral and virtuous and righteous life. I don't have anything. I don't have any skeletons hidden in my closet. So I'm generally well thought of by most people. I also have certain attributes in my normal life that make it so that I can exercise leadership.

I have deep levels of knowledge in various domains that I've taken an interest in. I have formal certifications and credentials that help me to demonstrate that I am worthy of that respect because other credentialing bodies have demonstrated that I've done the work. I have a platform with a podcast and successful business and those kinds of things.

So it's relatively easy for me to go around and exercise leadership. It wasn't always easy. I've worked for decades and practiced doing the hard things, stepping up, saying something when it was uncomfortable. And so I'm getting better, but I feel like in many ways I'm coming into the prime of my life where I'm arriving at a stage in life where as a man, other people, you've worked really hard to build things that are worthy of respect and other people give you levels of that respect.

So then the question is this, is my goal to go around and to constantly be the dominant leader wherever I go? My answer is a resounding no. Because I know that I am a leader, I specifically try to be slow to speak. I specifically try to be the one who prefers others.

I specifically try to encourage anyone who is younger or more timid. I specifically try to always get other people to go first. If I'm in a meeting of some kind, I don't want to be the guy who talks very much. I don't want to be the guy who goes on and on.

On the contrary, I want to be the guy who lifts other people up. Because as I see it, the proper goal of a leader is to lose his leadership because it's not needed anymore. I first heard that phrase when I was a child from a Christian minister who very clearly articulated that the goal of a Christian preacher or a Christian minister should be, is, properly is to lose his ministry, that I should judge my effect as a Christian preacher or a Christian minister based upon how effectively I have raised others up to take my place.

And so similarly, I as a father, my goal as a father is to lose my job as a father. Now, I'll always be a father because that's a role of definition, not a function. But in terms of function, I want to raise my children up to maturity. I want them to take over all of the functions that I'm currently doing so that I can sit back and relax.

And I would say that this is similar to, I would point to my own parents as a natural example of this. My father and mother are in their 80s. And when we gather together as a family with them and their many children and their many grandchildren, they have no need to exercise leadership.

And in fact, they consciously choose not to exercise leadership because that's no longer their primary function on a day-to-day basis, that their success as parents is proven by the fact that we, as their children, invite them to come to an event, we arrange all the details, and they don't have to be the father and mother doing all those things.

It's their children now who are doing them. And the children plan the event, plan the – do the work, and the parents get to sit and relax. And yet, ultimately, they're the ultimate leaders. And so leadership is not something to be aspired to as a positional thing, that my goal is to be a leader.

And once I'm a leader, then I'm always going to be the leader. On the contrary, leadership is a function that we take on in various contexts, and we do it so that we can raise other people up. And the goal of a leader should be whenever leadership is necessary, we step in and we exercise leadership for the common good, for the good of the group that we are giving leadership to, and then we step back as appropriate, and hopefully, in the context, we raise up other leaders among us.

That's the goal of leadership. So those would be my answers to your first question. Your question was, "What would Joshua teach his daughter or young women to become great leaders in our society?" I would teach them, number one, that leadership is not an aspiration, or not a suitable aspiration or goal, services or effectiveness is, and leadership is a necessary means to accomplish those goals.

Number two is I would teach young women that in order to exercise leadership, you have to develop skills and virtues and knowledge and ability with the skills of leadership simultaneously. You need both of those things. It's not that we just pursue leadership, but we'd have to genuinely be useful and then develop the skills of leadership, which can move from domain to domain.

Number three, I would say that leadership is not a definition of success. If it were, then only a small number of people in society could be successful. There are other elements of success and that leadership is a function that you provide and that you give in various contexts with the goal of raising other people up, and it usually comes with an enormous cost.

So the more that you give leadership, I think the natural experience of giving leadership is that the more that you give leadership, the less you want to give leadership, because it comes with an enormous cost. As a leader, you are responsible. All of the arrows go into you. All of the hurt comes from you.

All of the attacks come against you. And so you better be ready to bear that cost if you're going to exercise leadership. And it's not something that should be done flippantly or somehow this is something that I want. The older I get, the happier I am not to be the leader because I understand the price that comes with leadership, but I understand that it's a necessary duty that I must perform in order to have service to the group.

The next question that you asked me, can, I'm just going to say Joshua's wife, because you wrote his wife, can Joshua's wife be a leader in the family? How? What does that look like practically speaking? So my answer to that is can she? Absolutely. And I would say far beyond can is that she better be a leader in the family.

My wife is a mother. And that means that if she's not leading in the family, we've got chaos. We've got absolute chaos. I need my wife to be a strong and capable and dynamic leader. I need her to be the absolute ruler of her home. And depending on the dimension or what we're involved in, there are going to be many, many areas beyond that.

My wife is the matriarch of our family. If she doesn't exercise leadership, we're sunk. She has to exercise continual leadership. Now for her privacy, I'm not going to give any specific details of what she does. I'm going to speak generally and simply say that in general, can a wife be a leader in the family?

How? What does that look like practically speaking? She had better be a leader in the family. She had better be involved with every aspect of the family. Every family is going to be different, but she may have children, in which case she has enormous amounts of work and leadership there.

She needs to run a household. In some cases, she's going to be managing the family budget, managing the family's investments, managing the care of the household, keeping the house running and functioning really beautifully and making sure that all the workmen are doing their job. She may be out fixing stuff and changing things.

She's got enormous work there. Some people have businesses. And so she might be running a business that's involved with the family. She might have a job where she has to exercise leadership. There may be many, many components where she exercises leadership. The fact that she is a woman does not in any way absolve her of the burden of leadership in an appropriate domain.

And if she didn't have those characteristics, it's hard to believe that she'd be a wife and mother. What man would want to marry a woman who's weak and who's incompetent and who doesn't know how to exercise leadership and strength and do things? I need to be careful with my words.

I don't want to cite anybody specifically because I know that there are men out there who say that they want that. I listen to men in the red pill space and some of their leaders in that space. And when they talk about women, it just sounds like an absolute farce.

It sounds it's like they want a girlfriend who's not involved in anything that they're doing and they expect somehow to have six of them. And the women, their only job is to sit around and look pretty and bear babies. That seems to be the extent of their vision that they express for their relationships.

Now, I don't know if it's actually working for them, but I think that's stupid. I would never encourage a man to look for a woman like that. And a woman, I can't imagine also a woman who is strong and who is capable ever accepting a man who treated her like that.

So they probably deserve each other. The women seem to accept what they're doing and the men accept those kind of women. But I don't think that's a formula for a strong family. So we're looking, a man who wants a wife is not looking for a burden. He's looking for a partner and he's looking for a strong and confident and capable wife who is going to be by his side through everything.

And every family is going to be different, right? 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 10 small babies, then she's going to be super hyper domestic and focused on babies because how is she going to do anything more?

And he's going to be doing everything at the job. They're going to have a very different expression of leadership than if they run a business together and their business partners and their children are all grown, they're going to have a very different expression. And so my point is that leadership is not optional for a wife in any way, shape or form.

I think probably what you're listening for is for some kind of disclaimer to say, well, is Joshua's wife his leader or is Joshua's wife the leader of the family? That's probably what you're trying to listen for and what people get kind of all up in arms about. What I would say is that, no, my wife is not my leader.

I am her leader. I'm her head. We are married. We are man and wife. And so if there has to be ultimate authority or ultimate leadership, it's on me. If there has to be ultimate blame, it's on me. I am responsible for all of it. I'm responsible for her and her leadership.

And in the same way that if I am the CEO of a company, I'm responsible for all of it. Whether I'm actually culpable and I did it or not doesn't matter. It all rests on my shoulders and I have to fix it. So that doesn't, however, in any way absolve her of her burden for leadership.

And as a husband, one of my primary jobs and one of my primary duties and responsibilities as a leader is to help her to develop her leadership so that she can express her gifts in the world. And that is my job and my responsibility. So I'm not going to go deeply into that because it gets much more personal and it's difficult for any person.

But women are not absolved of the burden of leadership. And there will be many different times in a family's environment where she will have to exercise more leadership, less leadership, and her goal should be to be raising leaders. Her sons and daughters need to be being raised up to be leaders.

That's what leadership does. Now let's go on to the next question and keep this one in mind because I'm going to bring in some more points for the next question. Next question. Does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home working for pay? First, I would say that the way that the question is asked is certainly sincere.

And I'm not judging you for just writing down a question. What I'm saying is, however, is that I think this is a strange, a very strange question that indicates that you're not interacting with real people, but you're interacting with a straw man and caricature. Does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home?

Of course, Joshua sees the value in women outside of the home. I'm not, again, I'm not a Muslim. I'm not saying that women should wear a burqa and be sitting at home. I think that's a terrible plan for society. Women are incredibly valuable outside of the home. And should women be working for pay?

Of course, women should be working for pay. Women have always worked for pay. What would we do? Let's say I died today. What's my wife going to do? Is she going to sit around in the home and somehow say that, well, here I am sitting in the home and I can't go out and work for pay?

Now, if I've done a good job as a man, she should never have to go and work for pay. That's one of my goals, especially since we invented life insurance, is I hope that she would never have to do that. But imagine if I didn't have life insurance. Or imagine I have a daughter.

Since when does my daughter get to be absolved of the need to support herself? Now, as her father, if I can support her, I want to support her. And I'm going to treat my daughters differently than I treat my sons. But the point remains that she's not absolved of work and working outside the home just because she's a woman, nor is she absolved of the need to work for pay.

I'm not aware of any society anywhere in the world in which women have ever been freed from the need to work or to work outside of the home. Let's go back to some of the oldest texts in recorded history. Go to Abraham and how he found a wife for his son Isaac.

So Abraham, probably a little under 4,000 years ago, maybe 3,900, 3,800 years ago at this point, something like that, that Abraham was living. And he wanted to find a wife for his son Isaac. So he sends his servant from where he was living back to the land of his people.

And the servant prays to God and says, "God, show me the woman or a woman who is appropriate for me to bring back for Isaac, my master, as his wife." Well, what does he find? He goes to the well of the town and here come the young maidens to draw water and that's where he meets Rebecca.

She's going to draw water and bring water from the well for her family. So here she is working outside of the home. Rachel and Leah, they were shepherdesses with Jacob later. And so you go throughout all of human history and women have always had to work and they have always had to work outside of the home.

In many cases, serving again as a shepherdess or some similar function. Now, in an agrarian society, why do we get the concept of working in the home? In the agrarian society, we can see very clearly that there are certain functions and jobs that men can do because of their physical stature and size.

And there are other functions and jobs that women can do because of their physical stature and size and abilities. There's years ago, I used to read this personal finance blog. I forgot the name of it, but there was a couple that moved to the northeast and they bought a farm and they were fire people, early retirement people, and they moved out to this farm and they were progressive liberals who had moved to this farm to have a couple of children, I think in Vermont, and have babies.

And I read an article that the lady wrote and she talked about how frustrated she was that they were progressive liberals who very much believed in gender equality. And yet they were frustrated that on the farm, they found themselves falling into gender stereotypical roles on the farm, that she did the cooking and the cleaning and the husband was doing all of the outdoors farm work.

So I'd say this is obvious and understandable in an agrarian context. I think one of the keys though that I would point to is that throughout history, most family businesses and most work has been family integrated in some way. There's always been household productivity in some way. There's always been kind of, again, a household business of some kind.

So you have one context in an agrarian context of what that looks like. You have a different context in a family business or a merchant, but there's lots and lots of business and women are not absolved of that work outside the home. It's not like just because you're a woman, you get to sit at home and do nothing but cook and clean the house.

I think that it's nice if women can do that. There aren't many things easier and more relaxing than sitting in a house and cooking and cleaning. It's pretty simple, straightforward, easy work, but I don't think you get that pass. You don't get to just do that unless you're fortunate to be married to a rich man.

Families and couples, families are economic units and there has to be a benefit to the economic unit of each spouse's labor. Otherwise, there is a real challenge and there's a real problem. Now, throughout history, men have, especially rich men, have appreciated certain things that women can bring into their life that don't resemble hard labor and so different cultures have a different expression of this.

But if you find a rich man, it makes him happy a lot of times that his wife doesn't have to do hard labor. I take a great deal of joy and satisfaction in the idea that my wife doesn't have to go and work for wages and work somewhere else.

But in some cases, there may not be another possibility. She might have to and this should be obvious. Again, I say, what if I died? What if my wife never married? If she just – think about these things and don't just assume that somehow women get to escape from work because they're women.

It's not the case. They have to work because they're women. The work looks differently. Now, let's turn more pointedly to the issue at hand. If Joshua is talking about the problems with dual-income families, what's the problem? Well, at its core, one problem is that the lifestyle just doesn't seem to be sustainable.

And I mean that in the most literal sense possible. If you look at human reproduction statistics right now, if you were a biologist studying the human species, you would be writing reports day and night about this species going extinct or at least subgroups of this species going extinct. The data on societies that are built around men and women having jobs and each of them having his or her own career and that being the primary organizing principle of the society, these societies are going extinct in just a few generations.

It is entirely unsustainable in the most literal sense that I can possibly say it. Every society that has structured around the idea that men and women should each have jobs and careers and that the primary organizing principle of their lives should be them earning money for their own gratification, these cultures will not exist a century or two from now.

They are unsustainable. They're very strong in the moment, but they're a very recent phenomenon and they will go extinct within a couple of generations because they're not having any babies. Throughout human history, the continuance of the family and of the community and of the culture was always a primary focus.

Now, there are times and it's expressed in different ways. Throughout most of human history, there's been so much work that you could barely get subsistence living on it. Nobody thought about self-fulfillment and self-gratification and self-actualization through my work. You work to live. You work to eat, to literally stay alive.

Throughout most of human history, you had babies because you wanted to have sex. And if you could find someone to have sex with, then you had babies. Today, well, we think that we're masters of our own reproduction and that we should choose exactly when each and one of our every babies comes along.

So, my point is that this society is quite literally unsustainable. Quite literally, every group that doesn't find a solution will disappear from the world in a couple of generations. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, it's because you've not done the math. I am not employing hyperbole here in this context.

So, the question is, let's flip it on its face. Instead of asking me, "Do I see value in women outside of the home working for pay?" I am asking you, "Do you see value of women in the home not working for pay?" That's the point I'm trying to make.

I saw this made the other day in a quite eloquent thread from a Twitter post from one of my favorite authors, Anthony Esalen. Here is his tweet verbatim. It was in the context of the Harrison Butker furor this last week. "By far the most accomplished woman I know personally, whose name I won't reveal because I don't want to cause her trouble, recommended that I read Mr.

Butker's commencement speech. She said it was spectacular. This was before I told her that I'd written about it. There are a few things in play that nobody has talked about. Here's one. Jesus says that we must become like little children, or we will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now, we are not overtly cruel to children. Boys aren't going down into the coal mines and girls aren't going into the sweatshops. But I'd prefer the life of a child in the New York slums that Jacob Rees described in the 1890s, and he was closely attentive to what the slum children did for a play, did for play, in all seasons, than the life of a typical American child now.

If children are to be outdoors playing, building things, visiting each other's houses, roaming the town or the woods, there must be people at home. You cannot have that life if the neighborhood is empty during the hours between breakfast and supper. And what about small children? If no one is at home, they must be taken care of in an institutional way by people who may like them, but who do not love them, and who have no strong connection to their parents, their relatives, or their neighbors, if any connection at all.

I look back upon my childhood, less bound by the need to earn money than my father's childhood was, but also a little less free. And I know from observation that that childhood is no longer a living presence in the town where I grew up. It is not a living presence where I am now, and I do not see it when I drive through any American town anywhere.

But children are owed a real child's life by rights. They ought to be outdoors, without adult supervision, with other children of various ages and from various families, doing things that children have always done. That life is not only good for them, it is good for U.S. grown-ups. Jane Jacobs, the astute liberal critic of American city planning, pointed out that it's children that bind a neighborhood or a town together.

That's because children crisscross through streets and yards and all the routines of adult business. Children provide ready occasions for adults to get to know each other. Children provide them with the motive to do more than that. They are the excuse for many a festival. You will say that that's all well and good if you can afford to live on one salary.

But here, the habits have been transformed into necessities. It is not simply that you, as an individual family, have to make enough money to afford a house. It is that housing prices generally have risen to what households can afford. Imagine two auctions in two worlds selling the same product, but to audiences of different means.

It will get a higher price from the people with deeper pockets. They will be no better off than they would have been had they been in that other world attending the other auction. Or look around an expensive new subdivision where farmland once was and consider how much of its showy excess will have been purchased at the expense of a real child life.

What the heck for? With what gain in human happiness? Thus ends Esalen's quote. So I'm answering your question, does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home working for pay? And my answer is unequivocally, yes, I do. But I'm arguing, do you, Amy, or anyone else listening, of course, Amy, do you see the value of women working inside of the home working not for pay?

My answer is that for every society that has forgotten that value, your culture will cease to exist. The only way you've gotten thus far is by stealing our culture, those of us who reproduce, for a limited period of time. I'm not angry about this, but I'm just trying to make an observation.

Let me pull down my tone just for a moment. I say that because your culture, meaning you, the culture that doesn't value women, doesn't inside of the home, doesn't value women working not for pay, doesn't value children. The only reason you're still alive is – or you're still going – the only reason we live at this moment in 2024, where you have become the dominant culture, is that for about the last 50 years, you caught a whole bunch of family people all around the world unawares.

And it's kind of like what happened with Christianity. As a Christian, I follow the statistics. For decades, we lost untold numbers of our Christian children to secular people in the world. Secularists used to boast about this in their public writings. You could find it. That, okay, you go ahead and raise your kids, but as soon as they get to school, we'll get them.

As soon as they get to college, we'll get them. And that was true for a time. Then we figured out what was happening. We figured out that our ideological opponents were stealing all our children, and we figured out how to make sure that didn't happen. And so we've gotten a lot better at keeping our children – not all of them, but we've gotten a lot better at keeping our children in the traditions.

So, similarly, you see the similar thing that has happened with culture. Now, I'm not here talking about religion. I'm just talking about people who procreate and who expand their cultures and those who don't. The – I've come to like the term "urban monoculture" that Malcolm and Simone Collins use.

I think it's an apt term that I'm going to start using. But the urban monoculture has only succeeded by sucking in children from the countryside around it. So if you go into any city in the world, you go to Tokyo or you go to New York City or you go to Seoul or you go to Philadelphia or you go to Delhi or anything like this, what these cities have done is they've sucked up all of the children from all of the families in the farmlands all around, and they've sucked them all in for a promise of more money, a better job, a better life.

And there's an element in which that's pretty true. If you grew up in absolute destitute poverty, then you would say, "You know what? I'd like to be able to have enough to eat." But those city cultures, those urban monocultures will not exist in the future unless they continue stealing children from the countryside around.

So those of us with children who don't like our children being stolen actually have to sit back and say, "What do we do differently? How do we hang on to our children? Because I don't want my family line to end with my children. I want to think about my children's children's children.

That's my goal. So I need to build something that's sustainable. So I need to understand the attraction and allure of the city, but I need to make sure that we don't fall prey to it." And so my comment is simply that do you see the value in women working inside the home?

Do you see the value in women working not for pay? If you don't, then you're probably not going to have children. And while it might be the case that the women who want to do that, they'll live their lives, what was that comedian who will get up and masturbate in the morning in her bed because she doesn't have children and she'll smoke pot with her friends in the afternoon and make a whole skit out of it?

Great. Go ahead. Live the life. It's fine. It's a free country. You can live that way. You can do your best to share that message. But I'm not willing to go down that path anymore because I also know that on the whole, women today report being far less happy than they once were, far less self-satisfied than they once were.

And all I got to do is fire up TikTok and I can find a whole generation of women whose mothers raised them to be positive career women who would say, "Wouldn't it be nice to just clean a house and cook my husband's supper? Wouldn't that be nice and raise some children that like me and know me and just live a more contented life?" You can decide.

It's a free country. But why am I pushing back? Well, because I want us to exist. I'm a humanist. I want to see humans flourish. And I want you and your family a few generations from now to be strong and growing. I want your community, your culture, your town to be strong and growing, not the emptied out hellscape that you see all around the world.

If you think again I'm being hyperbolic, I'm not. The United States, you're insulated from it. But go and drive the countryside of Japan or Korea or Italy. Go buy a one-euro town and try to live in a town where there's no people. I'm simply saying to a lot of people that your neighborhoods suck.

Your lifestyle sucks. It's stressful and it's not necessary. Now, if you want to do it, go for it. I'm not going to change it. But the other lifestyle that appreciates children and marriage and family is actually kind of nice and it deserves respect, deserves appreciation. Come to an event I host sometime and go and ask my wife if she'd like to go and have some other strange man boss or strange woman boss control her life and tell her what she can do versus her husband.

See what she says. Go ahead. So now going on to the other questions. The next sub-question of does Joshua see the value in women outside of the home working for pay? I hope I've done a good job of saying yes, absolutely I see the value of it. Do we see the value of the other and understand that there needs to be a balance?

That was what I'm trying to strike at, is that women don't get to just sit around and not work. But it is appropriate if women who want to have the ambition of working inside the home, not working for pay. And that's probably a necessary thing for us to have a sustainable culture.

We want, next sub-component of this, we want an educated society. And right now public school is the provider of that. Do you want men teaching society's young children? I affirm that we want an educated society. I question the premise that public school is the provider of that. I'm not convinced that we should hold public school in high regard.

I'm not going to make a big thing of this. I just question the premise. I acknowledge that it may be a provider of that, but I'm not convinced it's all that great a provider of that. And I'm also not convinced that there wouldn't be a better alternative if public schools didn't exist.

One of the things that people often mistake is they mistake ignorance for dysfunction. I recently released a podcast where I read a chapter on the death of the nation state. It's pretty hard for most people like you and me to conceive of a world without nation states like we have today.

But that's more due to our historical ignorance than it is to any basic component of society. Society functioned just fine before nation states existed, and it'll probably function just fine after nation states exist. It'll just look different. And so, similarly, I think it's absurd to think that you didn't have an educated society prior to the institution of government schools.

Now, you can go back and you can find compelling evidence, for example, that in colonial America, the literacy rate of colonial America was near universal long before the imposition of government schools. I've seen rebuttals to that, and I have not dug deeply enough in to say what's true and what's not true.

I don't know. But I think the evidence of the very strong literacy rate of the colonies, the early American colonies, is very strong. Just remember, if you want an example, that if you go back and you read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, go back and remember that these publications were written as a public argument intended to sway the common man.

So you pull them open and you ask yourself if your current government school educated society can interact with the arguments in the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers and would be persuaded by that. And then go ahead and turn on whatever the coming debate is between Donald Trump and President Biden and see what was better.

I think that there's good evidence to say that people prior to government schools were pretty well educated. And because, and again, Amy, this is not about you, but just because you're ignorant of that fact doesn't mean that it isn't a fact or that there isn't a better alternative model.

Government schools are one model, but they're not necessarily the best model. I would also question and say, what is an educated society in the first place? One thing that's fascinating to me is if you go back, you hear things where people would say things like, oh, so-and-so only had a sixth grade education.

The question is, what did a sixth grade education mean? I have in my homeschool library a complete set of the McGuffey Readers and also a complete set of Ray's Arithmetic. McGuffey Readers and Ray's Arithmetic are examples of the kinds of school books that elementary school children used as their only school books.

If you completed a sixth grade education of McGuffey Readers and Ray's Arithmetic, you would probably be far ahead of the majority of high school graduates today just by completing those basic school books. It wouldn't take you very long. You could easily do it in sixth grades, and you'd be far ahead of the actual knowledge.

Now, would you know as much as today's median school graduate? I don't know. There's a much more diverse range of knowledge that is expected of a graduate today, meaning that today we expect our graduates to have all kinds of scientific knowledge that was not generally emphasized a century or two ago.

We add on much higher levels of math expectation, whereas it was not expected that a high school student or a normal person needed to access advanced math. I have the Ray's Arithmetic algebra. It was just basic algebra and geometry, especially well-suited to daily factors. But I don't think that you're going to win the argument that we're a much superiorly educated society on the whole today than before.

So I know that's not the main thrust of it, but I want to just – we need to learn to question these things and say, "Why do I believe what we believe? Do I believe that all the people in the past were ignorant?" Well, then why is it that Jane Austen's novels received – why did people suck up Jane Austen's novels or – who's the British writer, Oliver Twist – and why were these people so famous if they were so uneducated?

Is there – do we just have to depend upon the model of government schools? So you say, "Do you want men teaching society's young children?" Why would you not want men teaching society's young children? I am perfectly happy to affirm that, yes, I want women teaching society's young children, but why would you not want men teaching society's young children?

I don't see any reason why teaching young children should be either a male or a female role exclusively. Now, I think in general, it's probably the case that more women will be patient with young children than men, naturally. I think it's also probably the case that it matters whether you're teaching a mixed classroom, which is a separate discussion in and of itself, but I think it's much more important that the teacher have a clear understanding of who he or she is teaching rather than who the teacher is.

My favorite teacher is Charlotte Mason. Charlotte Mason was an incredible woman. Her books today are giants in the education space. She never had biological children, never married. She dedicated her career to teaching, and she was way ahead of her time, and I think still today should be studied and studied and studied by any person who is interested in education because her insights on children and on the education of children are enormously important.

I would be thrilled for Charlotte Mason herself to teach my sons or my daughter, no problem whatsoever. I would not be thrilled for Charlotte Mason or any teacher to teach my sons or my daughter in the same exact way because they are different. They learn differently. The environment, if it's all boys or all girls or boys and girls together, is very different, creates enormously different social dynamics, and it's very different.

So I would say instead of worrying about whether the person teaching society's young children is a man or a woman, we should be more focused on does the man or woman teaching understand who he or she is teaching. There are young female teachers today who love boys, understand boys, and are so skilled at bringing out the best in boys.

I would bet there's not a man in the world who couldn't name several teachers who poured into his life and just helped him to flourish and to develop and to be incredibly powerful and strong and just - what man couldn't do that? I also know that there are teachers, young female teachers in classrooms today who hate boys and who consider it their personal goal to bring down the patriarchy and who take joy in watching boys fail.

Both of those are true. So we need to have these conversations so that we can understand what are we actually driving at here? Next question. Do you want men caring for your daughter, wife, and sisters in sensitive areas, for example, OB/GYN care, medical care, mental and emotional health, etc.?

My answer is absolutely. I'm also entirely open to women being involved in that kind of work. This is where we get into a question of competence versus identity. In the United States, traditionally, we have had a culture of competence where we expected and demanded competence from people. So, for example, one of my favorite heroes, heroine, heroines, one of my favorite heroines is Dr.

Denmark, who was the first female doctor to graduate from - I forget the name of the academy that she graduated from many years ago. She's my heroine because of her working life. She worked actively as a pediatrician until she was 104, and she died at 114 after 10 years of retirement.

I love her story. And I found her story first, disconnected. Later, I found out that my wife was a patient of hers when my wife was a baby. She had been sick, and my mother-in-law had taken my wife to her as a patient when she was a baby and had received some very useful and satisfying advice from Dr.

Denmark. It used to be extremely meaningful to refer to Dr. Denmark with honor as the first female physician in her academic class or whatever, in her college in that time, because what we understood at that time was she had demonstrated her competence as a physician by passing through the same curriculum that men passed through in order to be qualified as physicians.

She received respect because of her accomplishments, and her accomplishments were noteworthy because at that time, women were not ordinarily becoming physicians. Now, I'm open to the idea that all of those previous barring of women from all the stuff needed to go. I'm totally open to that. I'm not trying to go back into that, be dumb even if I were, because we're not living in that system.

I'm an enormous proponent and in favor of highly educated women. My wife is highly educated. My daughter will be highly educated. I'm totally in favor of that. So, but the point is that there was a system of meritocracy based on accomplishment. We've replaced that now with the concept of identity, and the dominant cultural forces around have decided that identity is the primary thing.

So, we've watered down the barriers for accomplishment in favor of inclusion. It's a pretty feminine thing, and this is one of the causal reasons that men are saying, "I don't care. It doesn't mean anything. I'm not going to do it." Men thrive on competition, and they've always respected women who were accomplished and who achieved, whereas in today's world, we have a very female-dominated system, and we've replaced accomplishment and externally proven achievement as our benchmark with inclusion as our benchmark.

Probably, they both should go together. I think what's really beautiful is in a natural relationship, a natural husband and wife relationship that's good in every respect, you get a good buffering of each other's strengths and weaknesses. So, probably, men and women should be working together on this, and there should be accomplishment and inclusion.

That's probably the ultimate benefit, but it's unproven that we can have both of them. It seems like we've got to go back and forth. So, back to the question that you said. I'm totally fine with men being caregivers for my daughter and wife and sisters in sensitive areas. It's always been that way.

Did a woman who was – where the family doctor came and helped her with the delivery of her baby, was she upset because he was a man? No. Generally speaking, no. I do affirm, however, that there is something really beautiful about women being involved, especially with women. And so, there are male midwives in the world.

I've never wished for one. I've always been enormously grateful that we've had wonderful female midwives. There are plenty of male obstetrician-gynecologists out there. I've never wished for one. I'm grateful that there are wonderful female OBGYNs. I'm a little less confident with regard to counseling. I am not sure about most of the world of mental health and psychiatry, and I get concerned about the difference in a male worldview and a female worldview, but I'm entirely open to it, just more cautious in that space than I am in the other spaces.

The point, however, that I was driving at is simply the system of dual-income households is unsustainable. And so, if we're going to continue it, we have to find new solutions. Now, you were responding, Amy, to a particular episode that was just talking about young men, but that one came in the context of a couple other multi-hour episodes that probably also influenced your questions, where I'm talking about the unsustainability of our current model.

So, my argument is not that women shouldn't be doctors and psychiatrists and all that stuff in any way. What I'm saying is that if all of our women are becoming doctors, and if becoming a doctor is likely to lead to a woman not having any babies or only one or two babies, as the data seems to indicate, generally speaking, then when we have more women doctors, we're not going to have any babies.

So, what can we do? Well, if my daughter is going to become a doctor, what are the choices that we can make? Well, first, she could put all of her focus into becoming a doctor, and she could believe that her job and her career is going to be the primary thing that gives her meaning in life.

That's a choice that she makes. And so, I'm going to prepare her, educationally speaking, that she can flourish in that world and be really good at it if that's the choice that she decides to make. I think the data would indicate that that's probably not going to be a very satisfying choice for her.

I think that it's pretty obvious that while it may be right for some women, on the whole, most women would like to have a slightly different life and lifestyle than what is described exclusively by that. So, how are we going to integrate her love of being a doctor with her ability to have children and get married?

Well, we have a couple of other things that we can work with. Number one, we can work with her age. Maybe she can go to medical school at the age of 15. Okay, I'm open to that. Seems a little extreme to me, but I'm open to that. Maybe we can redesign education so that she can, instead of high school, she can be doing her medical school so that she's a doctor sooner, so that she can get established herself and get ahead in her career and still be able to do that in time for her to have children before the biological window is closed.

That's an option. Another option is for us to redesign the career track. So, why shouldn't she get married and have children while she's in medical school? That's an option. And that would be especially great if it were an option where she worked for longer. So, why do we have to pressure women to say you have to start your career on exactly the same schedule as men, knowing that it means that they're probably going to not be able to achieve their goals of having the number of children that they want to have?

Why not have it start earlier? We need at least about 10 years for her to be free of overwhelming career and work obligations so that she can be really present and focused with having babies and taking care of young children, things like that. It might be nice to have 20, but 10 is better than nothing.

Or, so that's a lever we can push on so that she can be more free, and maybe she just starts on a deferred basis. Another thing that can be a push on is let's redesign the rigor of it. So, maybe instead of it being she does it all the time and she has to do it six days a week, 80 hours a week on call all the time, maybe we can design a career that's more friendly to her job as a mother.

Something I frequently recommend to doctors is can you still be a physician? Just be less of a physician. Do it 60% so you gain the good without the things that are overwhelming. And then, can she work for longer? Now, one of the things I know, which is always hard to put together, is people say on the one hand that they're just living for their career and they're so satisfied and they're so fulfilled, but I, as a financial planner, talk to a whole lot of people who are trying to get out of their jobs and their careers as quickly as possible.

So, I just assume that for some people it is, for some people it's not, some people they want different things, and so maybe they can work for longer. So, again, Dr. Denmark, she worked as a physician until she was 104. She had a child, so maybe she raised – I don't remember all the details of her job, but she was good.

Or I think of someone like Francis Hesselbein. Francis Hesselbein, famous leader who was a housewife and a mother. I think she had one baby and she was just a very simple woman until she was in her 50s when she really started her career and her career really took off for her.

And she had developed amazing leadership ability with all of her local groups and the things that she was involved in with her community. She had joined the Girl Scouts as a volunteer troop leader, and ultimately she became the CEO of the Girl Scouts back in the 1970s, and then she worked for the Girl Scouts from the 1970s to the early '90s, and then she just continued on and she had all kinds of other work until ultimately she died at 107.

I don't think she ever retired from that point. So, that's a great model that we should consider that would allow these things to work out well. So, I'm not trying to keep women out of any of these things. I'm trying to insert the idea that we have to reconsider how we do this.

And I'm also trying to insert the idea that family is an important consideration. It's something that I apply to my own life in all of my thinking. I'm not laser focused right now at this stage of my life. I'm making as much money as I can and going for the moon.

Why? I have children and so I want to have children and that is going to involve some costs and sacrifices to my career and my opportunities. I also want to defend the fact that there are a lot of women who would be perfectly happy having nothing to do with the career world and would be perfectly happy to be wives and mothers.

And I want to defend their rights to that decision just as vigorously as anyone else because I think they often get stepped on in today's world and they get ignored. And the fact remains that I'm perfectly happy with that. There's a lot of men who are very happy with that.

And I like having a trophy wife that is my wife and that's it. And that's something that's perfectly reasonable. I'm not going to set that as the only course for my daughter. I'm not going to tell her, "Well, honey, if you can just look pretty and, you know, learn how to do your nails better and learn how to cook a better sandwich, then that's just going to solve all of your problems in life." Obviously not.

My wife, sorry, my daughter is, my vision is going to be a matriarch someday. And so I've got to prepare her for that because she's got to be the strongest, most well-educated, most thoughtful, most well-prepared woman in the world to be a wife and mother. And so that's not, like, I don't want a lazy wife.

I don't want an unaccomplished wife. I don't see why, I don't think the standards are any somehow higher that a woman is more noble because, "Well, I finished my PhD and I got this high-powered job." Great. Good for you. Go for it. Wonderful. That doesn't make you any more noble than anyone else who also works and has a different perspective and is very well-prepared for a different kind of work.

So I think that you're drawing these questions from a straw man that perhaps, by virtue of our culture, straw manning the decisions of women into somehow making it seem like they're incompetent. And I would submit from the men that I know and the men that I listen to, for example, if you listen to the culture, there's this meme that men are intimidated by strong, educated, competent, independent women.

I don't know any men who are intimidated by strong, educated, competent, independent women. I'm surrounded in my life by strong, educated, competent, independent women. I'm not intimidated. It's not a thing. Women might think it's not a thing. No one's intimidated by it. The point comes down to the toxicity, that there is a culture that creates toxic women, that hate men and despise men rather than love them and appreciate them.

I think it's an unfortunate artifact of the cultural formation things, that women live in fear of men, and then they learn to hate men in many cases, and then they despise men, and the men just observe it and say, "Yeah, I'm not intimidated. I'm just not attracted." And I don't think those have to be the case.

I know lots of strong, independent, accomplished, beautifully educated, very successful women who are wonderfully sweet, and attractive, and kind, and you love being around them, and you love talking to them. These things are not necessarily in competition. They're not incompatible. They just need to be thought about and intelligently managed.

Now, the next question, do you want men in positions of risk where it goes unchecked? For example, banking and investing, health care politics, uncharted technology. It's a strange question, because it implies that men are unchecked if they're in those situations. I'm not going to argue this one too forcefully.

What I would say, though, is the best people to check men are generally men, and men are most willing to check one another if women are not present. So I think you have a misunderstanding of male culture and a misunderstanding of what changes when men and women are in mixed company as compared to men in a male-only environment.

Men love to correct other men. Men will always stand up and check other men when they see excess. History is full of that. And I would just ask you, ask the men in your life where they're more likely to speak up. It's in a masculine environment. When you're in a genuine, in a true men, and by true, I just mean men are only there, and men are only there, and men are only watching and talking to each other, men generally have no problem standing up for one another because they're not performing.

And they do that because they care about the issue, not about the people. When women are introduced into that environment, I don't know, maybe there's benefits to it, but I'm going to guess that it's probably more negative because it changes the cultural environment. Because now men engage in performative stuff for women, and they're thinking about how the women perceive them instead of focusing on the actual issue at hand.

One of the things that's unique about male culture is that you can get a group of men in the room together, and those men can have a literal yelling match with one another. And then they can solve the underlying issue, and boom, it's done. It's forgotten. It's forgiven. There's no, it's just, we don't, no grudges held.

It's done. Men can interact with each other in the sharpest and most externally like divisive seeming ways, but they're focused on finding the truth. And that's what you want in an environment where there's a potential for abuse. I can't prove it. I would say that it's probably more negative to have men and women tiptoeing around things, trying to figure out how to talk to one another in a professional context when really important risk is on the line, as an example in banking and investing and in healthcare and in politics and things like that.

Let me bring in here in this context one paragraph from an excellent book by Dr. Leonard Sachs called "Boys Adrift," and he's talking in a chapter about team and competition with men. And this is an interesting, he's talking about the importance of competition for boys because competition creates motivation.

And here's his comment. "Why doesn't this approach," meaning the approach of encouraging competition among boys, "Why doesn't this approach work as well for many girls? Here's why. Most girls value friendship above team affiliation. If Emily and Melissa are best friends and you put Emily and Melissa on opposing teams, both girls may be uncomfortable.

Emily doesn't want to make Melissa sad, so she may be reluctant to beat Melissa. She'd rather play alongside Melissa than try to make her lose. But if Justin and Jared are best friends and you put them on opposing teams, Justin will happily run down the field and knock Jared down.

In that situation, I've seen Jared get up, dust himself off and say to Justin, "You think that was a good hit? Ha, I'll get you better next time." That kind of good-natured competition actually builds their friendship. Boys are more likely to understand that friends don't have to be teammates and teammates don't have to be friends.

And boys are more likely to be invested in the success of their team regardless of whether any of their friends are on the team. I'll read another segment in a moment, but I would encourage you the books by Leonard Sachs, "Boys Adrift" is one, "Girls on the Edge" is another.

They're both excellent and important to talk about these issues in context so that we can think about it. So that's my answer to that. Now, the next question you said, "Should there be women-only clubs? Why doesn't this matter?" My answer is absolutely there should be women-only clubs and you and your daughters need to be in them and creating them and starting them.

This is enormously important for the development of your daughters. I'm going to read now from Dr. Leonard Sachs' book called "Girls Adrift," chapter seven, spirit. First two introductory paragraphs, "Up to this point, we've addressed areas where I think and hope we can all be in agreement. Every girl should use her mind to be in control of her emotions rather than her emotions controlling her.

Every girl should strive to be physically fit within healthy limits. While we may not always agree about the best strategies to achieve these objectives, we all agree on the objectives for every girl to fulfill her physical and intellectual potential. But when we turn to matters of the spirit, some parents are uncomfortable." And he goes on, "When I'm speaking to parents and I say something like, 'For some girls, life is about more than just mind and body, the core of their identity is all about the spiritual journey,' I see some parents grow visibly restless.

It's easy to understand why. 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, some of these parents were themselves teenagers who rebelled against their own parents' attempts to indoctrinate them into a particular religion. Often, they don't see the point of religious involvement or even spiritual engagement in the 21st century." And he goes on and he talks about how girls develop in their spirit and gives various examples.

And here's a subsection called "A Community of Girls and Women." "A community of girls and women. Community matters. The kind of community in which your daughter engages will shape the person she becomes. In chapter two, I described how a girl growing up 40 or 50 years ago was more likely to be involved in communities that included adult women, whether at church, in her extended family, in a sewing circle, or just sitting on her neighbor's front porch.

Today, a girl's community is more likely to consist primarily of other girls her own age. That means girls talking mostly with other girls, but girl talk can be toxic to girls, even when they don't mean it to be. When girls talk with one another, the most popular topics tend to include their own personal problems.

That's as true of nine-year-old girls as it is of 19-year-old women. All too often, the sharing and self-disclosure can spin into an obsessive rehash of negative emotion. As the old saying goes, "Rolling in the mud is not the best way of getting clean." "When girls are talking about these problems, it probably feels good to get that level of support and validation," says Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri.

"But they are not putting two and two together, that actually this excessive talking can make them feel worse." Dr. Rose and her colleagues call this phenomenon "co-rumination." It seems to be increasingly common among girls today, but remains rare among boys. The essence of co-rumination is that talking with same-age peers about personal problems makes girls more anxious.

Tessa Lee Thomas, 13 years old, gave a reporter an example of how it can happen. "Sometimes we get into disagreements, and we have to settle them. My friends think that my other friend did something wrong, but she didn't do something wrong. Sometimes it makes the situation worse than where we were when we began.

It spiraled into something bigger than it was." That's what can happen when girls counsel other girls, because girls providing counsel to same-age girls isn't the right kind of community. The right kind of community bridges the generations, connecting girls with women. The right kind of community involves girls learning from women their mother's age and their grandmother's age.

Older women can provide your daughter with mature context and perspective. Girls who are the same age as your daughter can't do that. It doesn't have to be anything formal or structured. Sophia was a high school girl working part-time as a receptionist at a medical clinic when she told me how much she valued the opinions and support provided by her co-workers at the clinic, all of whom are adult women.

She had a huge crush on a guy at her high school, and he was taking advantage of her. The other girls at the high school saw nothing wrong with what was going on. In fact, they envied her because he was popular and athletic, and he wasn't being physically intimate with anybody else.

But he wasn't making any promises to her either. When she told the older women in her office about it, they offered a different perspective. Quote, "If you act like a doormat, don't be surprised when he steps all over you," one of them told her. Quote, "If you let him treat you like a piece of meat, don't be surprised if he chews you up and spits you out," said another older woman.

Sophia broke off the relationship, if you could call a series of late-night booty calls a relationship. He wasn't phased at all. He was like, "Okay, whatever. I was getting tired of it anyhow." I think he said that just to be mean, but it proves that the women at work were right.

He wasn't serious about us, about having a relationship. He was just using me. How does a girl become a woman? What does it mean to be a "real" woman? These are questions that almost every enduring culture has answered by providing a community of women to show girls the way.

I'm not talking only about mothers teaching their daughters, but about a community of women teaching the girls. We used to have many such communities in the United States, formal and informal. Quilting circles, sewing circles, all-female Bible study groups, all-female book clubs, Girl Scout troops, the variety of women's clubs that operated in association with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and so forth.

Remnants of such groups still exist, but girls today are much more likely to hang out with other girls their age than they are to mix socially with women their parents' age. I'm going to insert Joshua's snide comment. Because their mothers are all at work and don't have time to facilitate the cultural groups that they should be facilitating, because their mothers are all busy at their jobs.

Forgive the snide comment. Girls teaching same-age girls what it means to be a woman is a new phenomenon in human history. It's equivalent to the blind leading the blind. Teenage girls don't have the wisdom, experience, and perspective that a 35-year-old woman or a 65-year-old woman can provide. Many cultures have rituals to mark a girl's passage into womanhood.

The Quinceañera in many Spanish-speaking cultures, the relatively recent emergence of the bat mitzvah in many Jewish communities today, and Kenalda'a among the Navajo are three examples. But as the demise of the early 20th century debutante ball illustrates, these coming-of-age rituals for girls can be empty or even counterproductive if the focus shifts from identity to surface, from a focus on who you are to a focus on how you look.

And even with the best of intentions, a one-day ritual like a bat mitzvah or Quinceañera isn't enough. One day or one week isn't enough. Girls need a community that lasts. Some girls' schools understand this. A girls' school can easily provide an authentic community of girls and women, as long as the leadership of the school understands the reality that the school's mission must go beyond academics.

Men may be fine for teaching girls English or Spanish or mathematics or social studies. Indeed, some of the most effective and most popular teachers I have met at girls' schools have been men. But only a woman can teach girls what it means to be a woman, how each girl must figure out for herself how she will express and balance her inner feminine and her inner masculine.

I have visited a number of girls' schools, such as Lauriston in Australia, Oakcrest School in Virginia, and the Pace Center in Orlando, that consciously, thoughtfully, and intentionally provide that community of women for girls. But the great majority of girls attend a co-ed school. You can't expect most co-ed schools to have much interest in creating all-female communities.

You may have to take the lead yourself. You need to create an alternative counterculture in which it's cool for girls to spend time in a community of women. If your daughter attends a co-ed school, then you might look to your church or synagogue or mosque to provide that community.

If you don't belong to a local church or synagogue or mosque, consider joining one. Not for your sake, but for your daughter's. If your church or synagogue or mosque doesn't offer an all-female religious retreat, try to organize one. Remind the leaders of your congregation that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam each have long traditions of celebrating all-female religious communions in community.

No men allowed. Most churches and synagogues and mosques in North America offer youth groups for children and teenagers. These groups are usually co-ed and stratified by age. A typical youth group activity nowadays is a pizza party or an outing to the bowling alley for all the ninth grade girls and boys together.

But everything we've learned suggests that a better approach might be to offer a single sex group, not stratified by age. In fact, it might be time to rethink the whole idea of the church youth group or synagogue youth group or Muslim youth group. These groups should not be about teens hanging out with teens.

If teens want to hang out with teens, most of them don't need any help from the church or the synagogue or the mosque. The church or synagogue or mosque should offer opportunities for activities that the kids can't easily arrange by themselves. For example, an all-female hiking trip along a stretch of the Appalachian Trail or an all-female canoe trip with girls from age 11 on up to grandmothers.

You don't have to tie into an established organization or religious group to do this. Organize a get-together with half a dozen girls and at least two adult women. You might create a sewing circle if you or a friend of yours knows how to sew. You could organize a once-a-month cooking or baking club with the club meeting at a different girl's house each month.

In December, you make holiday treats. In the summer, you make slushies and smoothies, something different each season. My wife, my daughter, and I recently visited my brother's family in Shaker Heights, Ohio. When my brother's wife, Linda, heard that my daughter, Sarah, likes to knit, Linda invited Sarah to come with her to a little shop in Shaker called Around the Table Yarns.

When Sarah entered the shop, she encountered a single large table with women of all different ages, including one other teenage girl seated around the table. One grandmother was knitting an elephant for her grandchild. The room was lined with cubbyholes filled with skeins of yarn for sale, from inexpensive cotton thread to luxurious cashmere.

But you don't have to pay anything or buy anything in order to sit at the table and knit. Anybody is welcome to come in and sit down, as long as you want to knit. The two owners, Pam and Beth, will be happy to help you with any problems you're having with your knitting project.

No charge. Linda told me later, "I've made so many friends there. I meet someone new almost every time I go. You can talk about your kids, your family, your vacation plans. Nobody looks at their phones. We're really just enjoying each other. At Starbucks, everybody is looking at their phone, or they're talking to the one person they brought with them.

At this shop, people are sitting around the table and talking. With everybody. That's what the place is for. Sometimes people bring in home-baked cookies to share. It's a relaxed place to create bonds across generations, where a 13-year-old girl like my daughter can easily strike up a conversation with a 74-year-old grandmother, and everybody's having a good time.

If sewing, knitting, and baking seem gender-stereotyped to you, then come up with something else. Maybe a backcountry hiking or fishing trip. It's not about the activity. The sewing, the knitting, and the baking are only an excuse to get women and girls together, to create an opportunity for connection. Your group should bridge the generations.

That means ideally involving not just other parents, but also grandparents. Encourage your daughter to develop friendships with women your age and your mother's age. Sometimes we just need to rediscover old ways of connecting girls with women. Sewing circles were never primarily about sewing. They were about women and girls helping each other, which included helping girls to negotiate the transitions through adolescence and into womanhood.

The challenges are different today, of course, but the value of a mature adult perspective hasn't changed. Your daughter may know more than you do about how to upload videos from a cell phone to a YouTube channel, but you know more than she does about how alcohol affects the behavior of teenage boys.

She needs your perspective and the perspective of other adults your age and older. Don't let your daughter fall into the trap of thinking that her knowledge is a substitute for your wisdom. As Bly and Woodman observed, the average 12-year-old girl today knows more about the varieties of human sexual experience than the average 60-year-old knew in 1890, for example, regarding oral sex and anal intercourse.

But knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. Most girls today don't fully understand the harm that sex can do to a girl, to her spirit, if it's sex at the wrong time in her life or sex with the wrong person. That understanding is not a matter of knowledge.

It's a matter of wisdom. Very few 12-year-old girls, or boys, have that wisdom, and it can't easily be taught in a sex education class. That's why they need you and other adults your age. I was discussing this topic with Rev. Alan James, who has hosted me on several speaking engagements in Minnesota.

When Rev. James was pastor of the Small Presbyterian Church in Maple Plain, Minnesota, he helped to organize summer canoeing trips, girls with women, and separate trips for boys and men. In a typical trip, eight girls and eight women would gather at the headwaters of the Namakagon River in Wisconsin.

They would canoe down the Namakagon to the St. Croix River, which divides Wisconsin from Minnesota. That canoe ride is on the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, managed by the National Park Service, and the Park Service maintains many beautiful campsites accessible only from the river. A typical trip begins with one girl paired with one woman, and together they canoe to the first stop, about two hours downriver.

They pull the canoe off the river at the designated campsite and wait for the other pairs to join them. They all make lunch together. Then the girl gets back in the canoe with a different woman for another two-hour trip downriver. They pull off the river at the next campsite, where they gather brush and prepare a campfire.

All the girls and women then cook supper together. They sit around the campfire, tell stories, sing songs. Then they go to sleep in their tents, three days and two nights. Each two-hour trek downriver, the girl is paired with a different woman. Two hours in a canoe on a quiet, beautiful river is a great opportunity for a girl to talk to a woman, to listen to a woman, and to learn from a woman.

Rev. James told me that the river excursions were very popular in his day, but that his former church no longer offers them. He isn't sure why. I think I know why. Parents today are less likely than parents in previous generations to tell their daughter what the daughter will be doing this summer.

Instead, today's parents are more likely to ask the daughter what the daughter wants to do. And very few girls today will answer, "Well, what I'd really like to do is spend three days canoeing down the Namakagon River with some random group of women from the church who I don't even know." Instead, the girl says, "I'd like to do the summer session at Stanford University for top high school students.

I think that would look great on my college application." Or she says, "I'd like to go to the summer intensive field hockey program. I think it would improve my chances of getting a scholarship at an NCAA Division I program. I'm thinking UConn." Or she says, "I want to work on my YouTube channel.

I want to be the next JoJo Siwa." If you don't know who JoJo Siwa is, you might start by watching her YouTube channel, YouTube video Boomerang, which she made at 12 years of age and which has had over 840 million views on YouTube. These experiences at Stanford, at the hockey field camp, or in the bedroom making a YouTube video are very different from one another.

What they have in common is an emphasis on performance, on impressing other people with how amazing you are. None of them invites or requires a spiritual journey. None of them will nurture your girl's core sense of identity, her sense of who she is as something separate from what she does.

Contemporary North American popular culture does not value bonds across generations. There are very few shows on broadcast or cable TV, very few popular videos on YouTube that portray their value and significance. That means you can't wait for your daughter to ask for an activity that nurtures and promotes intergenerational bonds.

You have to find such an activity, creating it from scratch if necessary, and then offer it to her. That's what Yolanda Zhang did. She created a program called Girl Strong, specifically to grow these bonds across generations. Her program has five components, or pillars. One of the five pillars is a weekend overnight mother-daughter retreat at Albion Hills Conservation Park, about an hour's drive northwest of Toronto.

The weekend includes a ropes course where girls have to work as a team with their moms to walk along ropes suspended midair, building shelter and starting a fire using materials nearby, using a rope swing to get from one platform to another, and so forth. Parents are enthusiastic about Zhang's program.

One mother described how the program has "done wonders for my daughter. Her teachers at school have all remarked at how much she is coming out of her shell." Another mom reports how her daughter, since participating in the mother-daughter weekend, now amazes her with her ability to speak confidently in front of strangers.

One weekend won't change everything, but it's a start. And not every parent can be a Yolanda Zhang, but you must try to find a program like hers for your daughter. "If we choose, we can accept our unique place in history," wrote Bly and Woodman. For the first time in history, there is a general international consensus among educated people that girls and women have a fundamental right to equal opportunity.

For the past three decades, most of us have assumed that the best way to ensure equal opportunity is to pretend that girls and women are more or less the same as boys and men, that we should instruct them in the same sports in the same way and that they have the same spiritual needs.

That assumption hasn't worked very well. In matters of the spirit, as in athletics, simply lifting the strategies that have been used for boys and applying them to girls in gender-blind fashion doesn't work well for many girls. We have to recognize that girls need girl-specific interventions. Sewing circles might not be the best way to engage boys in a community of men, but I'm hearing about some communities where it seems to be a great idea for girls.

If girls are not healthy spiritually, they may find themselves not so much living as performing. I discussed in Chapter 2 how easily this can happen in the era of social media. The technology of social networking sites and texting make it easy for girls to think they are living their own lives, when in fact they are really putting on a show for their peers.

Even back in the 1990s, years before modern social media even existed, Marion Woodman wrote that most girls "have been performing since they were tiny children. They don't know that there's any other way to live except for the voice inside that's saying, 'If this is it, it's not worth living.' Today, that problem is more severe." I would encourage you to read Girls on the Edge.

It's a great book. But the point is, absolutely. Women need women-only clubs, just like men need men-only clubs. I would love to be living next to that knitting shop, and I would be getting my wife and daughter in there as often as possible. I do now. Every single time there's any conceivable female event, my wife has a little club.

She calls it Book Club. But they don't actually read any books. It started as a book club around one book, and then it just turned into a group of women who got together regularly, and they don't read books, but they still call it Book Club. But it's just a way of girls getting together.

And this is really, really important. And it's doable to create in an ad hoc basis. If you have a healthy church or a healthy homeschool co-op or a healthy community, then naturally women who are wise understand we need this. My sisters always did it by hosting tea parties, and they would regularly host a tea party, and you get everyone from the 85-year-old to the 5-year-old all together to drink tea.

And so you try to find a female version of that. And men need it just as much. The problem is, as I said in a different episode, those places have disappeared. The closest I can come up with is a cigar lounge. I love going to cigar lounges, primarily because they're one of the very few male-dominated places I can find.

I used to go to a barbershop in Florida, and the barbershop was for years – it was a traditional men's barbershop. There were no female barbers, and it was all men, all male patrons. And occasionally a woman would come in with her child and cut the baby's hair, the child's hair, but it was all men.

That was the barbershop I grew up being taken to by my dad, and it was great. And then in comes a woman barber. Okay, fine. Women are perfectly capable of cutting men's hair. They do a great job. They probably do a better job, for all I know. But it destroys the environment.

And then the woman has her female clients and the male clients, and I don't go to the barbershop anymore. It's gone. And so this is what has happened, is that it used to be that men had places to go, and they were respected. And then women said, "Men can't have places.

I got to get in there, because they're going to have a good old boys club, and I'm going to be out." And now men are falling apart, because they don't have places. And all of everything that was written by Dr. Sacks for girls is every bit as valid for men.

Men have to have those environments in order for us, as mature men, to train and correct and help facilitate the growth of our boys. That's what men do. Men need that. And women need it too. From time to time, I speak in council with single mothers who have sons.

A single mom desperately needs there to exist men's groups, where men in a positive environment are going to bring those boys in and bring them in. And so this can be done. And traditionally, it has been done in positive ways. And it can still be done, just not formally.

So in a church, and I grew up in a church, and we had our church meetings, but then we had a men's prayer meeting. So once a week, every week, we'd get together very early in the morning, and we'd pray for an hour or two, and then we'd have breakfast together.

And it was just men. And we would have men's leadership meetings and things like that. And today, I look back and I realize how important those things are. They're fundamental to the flourishing of men. And they're fundamental to the flourishing of women as well. So then your next question.

What about the men-only clubs, strip clubs, gyms, ball fields, bars, where damage arises from these locations and interactions? For example, my husband is prone to over-drinking, yet wants to spend time with guys, and this tends towards bars and drinking activity. Is this a valuable activity? Well, first of all, I would point out that none of those are men-only clubs.

A strip club, by definition, is not a men-only club. It's a strip club where there are naked women and men. And then today, as I understand, there are lots of women who go to those as well. These are obviously leeches on society. Any sane and healthy society should obviously eradicate these institutions, and they should be gotten rid of.

They're not healthy, they're destructive, and they destroy men. Now, gyms or ball fields, where do you find a male-only gym? If it could be done legally, I know lots of men who would happily pay double or triple to go to a male-only gym, just for the chance to work out without women constantly around, especially in today's scantily clad culture.

Men and fathers want to go to the gym to work out. So it can be achieved a little bit with having a super gritty gym. If you find a really, really gritty gym that's just repulsive to women because it's ugly and it's dirty and there's concrete and there's rust, then that's one way that men try to create things that repel women.

But most modern gyms, there's no chance. They're not a male-only space. So I can't even answer the question. Bars are not male-only. I don't know of a bar that is male-only. If it were, my guess is there'd probably be – I mean, I don't have any evidence for this, let me not go beyond what I can say, but a male-only environment is probably a healthier drinking environment than a mixed-sex bar because men are not trying to drink to screw up their courage, to suppress their inhibitions to go and approach that woman.

They don't fall into such nasty things. I am not in any way saying that men don't have toxic traits and sin that happens in men's cultures. There's all kinds of bad things that can happen in a male-only environment, but probably not so many as you might think that would happen in an exclusively male-only environment.

So I'm not arguing for entirely separate lives, but men do need these places. And what's interesting is that a lot of times the damaging effects are caused by men's lack of spiritual development. So for example, let me give a simple example. I grew up in a very mature, very masculine environment.

I have strong relationships and the ability to talk extensively with other men without any problem. Just for context, one time I drove from Florida to Tennessee to attend a conference and I invited my dad along and he just came along just so we could spend the time in the car to talk.

So we drove from West Palm Beach, Florida to Nashville, Tennessee, which I don't remember how long that drive is, but it's a long time. And we talked nonstop on the way up. We didn't listen to music. We didn't listen to podcasts. We talked for whatever it was, 14 hours straight.

And then we attended the conference. We ate every meal together at the conference and talked there. And then we drove home and we talked for 16 hours straight on the way home. No problem whatsoever talking. I would have no problem with the men that I grew up in, the men in the church.

Most of my relationships saying to people, "Hey, let's go and let's go and talk." So for me, saying to someone, "Let's get together for fellowship" is a totally normal thing that I'm happy to do with men. Let's get together for fellowship. We don't need any excuses. We don't need any crutches.

I don't need any excuse or crutch to say that. There's a lot of men who are very spiritually underdeveloped. They don't have the ability to do that. So they need a crutch. And Joshua's theory on coffee, cigars, and alcohol are that these are excuses that men use to say to another man, "Hey, let's spend some time together." But it's easier.

It takes quite a lot of maturity to say, "Let's go and fellowship for an hour or two." It's much easier to say, "Let's have a coffee" or "Let's go and have a drink." That's what men are desperate for a lot of times when they go drinking. They go to the bar because they're trying to have some conversations.

And I don't think that these things are necessarily bad things. So I don't usually employ the language of, "Let's go fellowship for an hour." I do that with my dad. But, you know, we'll have a glass of water and sit down. But I don't say to him, "Let's go and have a beer together." But I do say that to men, "Let's go and have a drink.

Let's go and have a cigar." Because these are tools that facilitate conversation and fellowship, which is what people are looking for. So what I would say is that if someone is prone to over-drinking, then they shouldn't drink. That's a separate conversation. But there's probably a better chance of getting rid of the drinking by having a good opportunity for there to be some kind of club that existed, a men's-only club.

Not a strip club with naked women, but a true men's-only club. And if you see where guys do this, again, they do it in a cigar bar or a game lounge or a pool hall, something like that. The men go there not because they're looking for the alcohol. They're looking for the camaraderie and the companionship.

I hope this is useful. I'm investing my time into this because I care. I hope it's useful to you. The next question I'm going to answer more quickly. "What do you do with your listeners who have no ability to benefit from the teachings that are men-focused?" I encourage those listeners to go somewhere else and find something else that is useful.

That's what you have to do. What I would say, however, is that even if you are a woman, you will probably learn something from what I have to say because I am consciously not filtering myself to appeal to a male/female crowd. I generally try to imagine myself speaking to a man and try to speak the way I would speak to men, knowing that women can listen in.

And that's totally fine. So what I would say is that you will hear something different from me because I'm trying to speak as truthfully and in as non-censored a way as I possibly can, rather than trying to curtail my words to speak to women, which is generally what men will do.

Men don't enjoy conflict and they don't enjoy conflict with women. So what they generally will do is they will censor their speech and the things that they say to women. They won't say what they think. They won't say what they believe. It's easier to say something patronizing so the woman will leave you alone and then resort to silence.

That's a normal way that men handle women. So what I would say is you listen and you ask me questions, which is smart, and I'm trying to give you the truth as I best understand it, as best I'm able to. Then you say, "What about the male listeners who have daughters?

How do you speak to them to help their daughters and be invested in their development?" As much as I possibly can, I care about the issues enormously. That's why I'm spending time on it. My observation is we are some—I was going to say much more in tune. Let me just modify that and say we've spent a lot of time on trying to help our daughters flourish.

That's well and good and right, and maybe that corrective action was necessary. I'm totally open to that. Our boys are not flourishing right now. They are dying. In many cases, literally. If we want to have a future for our culture and our society and our community, we have a lot of work to do.

That's why I'm talking about it. I care about women enormously. I care about the success of women. I'm particularly burdened that we're not talking to men and about men and their problems. I am astonished—I'll use just an example, the Andrew Tate phenomenon. I am astonished at how many women are surprised at the appeal of a man like Andrew Tate.

It should be obvious. Any guy like me who's a millennial, grew up in the culture we grew up in, I'm not astonished at all about the appeal of Andrew Tate. I understand the appeal viscerally. I'm not astonished at all at the appeal of the Incel movement and the Red Pill people.

I understand these things very, very viscerally. I also happen to think that the solutions recommended by these movements are wrong, harmful and destructive, and aren't going to produce any good outcomes. So, if I see that, then I have a responsibility as a man to try to come up to understand the problems, to empathize with them, and then try to chart an alternative course that I think is healthier, and time and results will prove.

I conclude with the final question. What about the young men who damage society in the name of power/vanity? Why glorify them in this podcast episode, number 1016? I don't know that I glorified them. I'm not sure exactly who you were responding to. So, if I glorified somebody who is damaging society in the name of power and vanity, then I apologize for that, because I don't ever wish to glorify people who are damaging society in the name of power and vanity.

I desire to confront those people and take them down, and I've demonstrated in various ways in my life that I'm committed to do that, even at personal harm. So, if I did that, I'm not sure what you're alluding to, then I do apologize for that, because I never want to do that.

So, you can tell me how I did that in that particular podcast episode. However, what I would say is, if you want to have the young men who are damaging society in the name of power and vanity controlled, taken out, and put in their place, you aren't going to do it.

It's going to be the men who do it. I can't think of any example in which that I could draw to bear to say, "Here is how a woman has taken control of young men who are damaging society." That difficult and distasteful work can probably only be done by men.

It will probably be done by men whose wives are bending their ear and making sure they see what's happening, and that's the best expression for women, but if you're going to take out those young men, it's probably going to be mature men who do that. To me, that's important.

So, if you want to have mature men who take out young men who are damaging society, then we've got to work really hard on cultivating the young men. Let me give a very graphic and very sad example of this that kind of demonstrates the destruction that we see. You asked earlier in your questions, and you said, "Do you want men caring for your daughter, wife?" And I answered all those questions.

"Do you want men in positions of risk?" I would also say we have a duty to protect women, and when men protect women, it's not because they're always trying to subjugate women. It's because they want to protect women. My brother sent me a link to an article yesterday of a story I hadn't heard of previously, a horrific story.

It happened a few years ago in West Palm Beach, Florida. There was a therapist, a female therapist, who went to the house of a patient of hers who she was providing psychiatric treatment for. This young man, a disturbed young man for whom she was providing psychiatric treatment for, kidnapped her, raped her, and tortured her over the duration of a period of about 12 to 15 hours, something like that, if I've got my facts straight.

The police were called to the house. There was a catastrophic breakdown of policing procedure because the deputies knocked on the house and tried to figure out what was going on, and the man had put up black plastic tablecloths covering the windows so nothing could be seen. While the police were outside the house, the woman successfully screamed, and they heard the scream, and they dealt with the scream, but they went on and on trying to figure out whether they should go in, whether they shouldn't go in, and eventually the female therapist who was locked in the house, her girlfriend had gotten concerned about her and knew where she was and finally convinced the police that her car was in the driveway and they should go in.

So they went in the door, they walk in the door. The guy is standing there with a knife at this woman's throat. One of the police officers shot the guy in the head. He ultimately survived, later pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him. A horrific story, but an example to say what kind of sane society would ever approve of sending a female psychiatric mental health counselor, therapist, whatever it's called, to the house of a mentally disturbed young man.

I'm glad that the victim's girlfriend followed through and finally convinced the police to finally enter the problem. I'm grateful for that. It's insane that the victim's girlfriend would ever allow her girlfriend to be in a situation like that. That is a decisional relationship dynamic that is incomprehensible to me.

I would never permit my wife to be in a situation like that. I would never permit my daughter to be in a situation like that. I would go across the world to stop any woman in my life from being in a situation like that. You recall my earlier discomfort with the idea of a female counselor or psychiatrist.

There's probably many great ones out there. This one, however, for a counselor to show that lack of judgment is incomprehensible to me. I hope that she's able to recover from her injuries. I wish deeply for justice to be done to the evil man who has harmed her. He is in no way to be his crime and his evil is in no way made less evil because of her poor decision making.

I wish for him to be executed for his crime. My point is simply we play with cultural norms at our peril. And when we change them, we had better understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. And a culture that ultimately sends a female mental health counselor unaccompanied to the house of a mentally disturbed young man is a culture that does not wish to continue to live.

It's a culture that has already agreed to its own end and it's just a matter of time. That's the flip side. That's the flip side. And right now we're in an extreme counter-reaction scenario. Men have pretty well lost their will to protect women at the moment, speaking broadly. Not all.

Not in all circumstances. Society has lost its will to protect women. There are probably no easy answers. I mean, let me say that with more confidence. There are no easy answers in this. There are opportunities for abuse on all sides. There are opportunities for abuse towards men, towards women.

We cannot let the extreme factions of our society be the ones to say, to control the dominant narrative. Thoughtful, intelligent men and women like you and me, we are the ones who need to be talking about these things soberly, openly, forthrightly, bristling our way through the arrows of the internet if we want our societies to succeed and to flourish.

We all want our boys and our girls to flourish. They're not flourishing at the moment and we got to figure out why. We can't just accept the fact that probably the top 20% are going to flourish no matter what, we need to focus on that middle 60% that we can save, that we can improve with a strong, rational society.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. Those are my answers to your questions. Don't argue against a straw man. A man who says that women should be honored and appreciated for their contributions as mothers and their contributions in the home is not saying anything more than that. Don't fight against the straw man that somehow a guy who says that is saying that he wants women to be ignorant and not know how to read.

That's another culture. That's not mine. I would like to end that culture, but I would like to not replace it with the culture that has countless TikTok videos of women crying unconsolably because of the nightmare that they're living through with their own unrequited hopes and dreams. We can do better, and I hope that we can figure out some new pathways in the future to deal with, be appreciative for all the problems in the past that our cultures and societies have solved, but let's solve the ones that are facing us in the face today.

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