transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:12] Hello and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A few notes, we've got tickets on sale now for everybody. For our live events in California, May 20th in San Diego, May 21st in Los Angeles, I'm working on some fun stuff for you all. So please, if you're in Southern California, come hang out. If you wanna make a trip to beautiful Southern California, what better time than May? I hope to see you all there. I've got a fun double header for you today that are about a couple of niche topics. If you just want straight politics, Trump porn, that's gross, but you know what I mean. The next level, always out on Tuesday nights, or we're trying to make it always out on Tuesday nights. Make sure to check that out in your podcast feed of Choice. In segment two, we've got Jordan Ritter Conn. He's got a new book out, American Men. It's talking about the travails of men in our culture right now. It's bleak, but he's a great writer and it's really sweet. So we're going to hash that out in segment two. But up first, she's the co-host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, which I have been binging on because the news is horrible. And when the economic news is horrible, I always like to turn to my friends at Odd Lots. It's Tracy Alloway. How are you doing, girl?

Speaker 2:
[01:28] I'm good, thanks. That's fine, by the way. We're used to people binge listening to Odd Lots episodes when the world is falling apart. So all good. I kind of want to talk about the men though.

Speaker 1:
[01:37] You want to talk about the men?

Speaker 2:
[01:38] Let's just talk about the men.

Speaker 1:
[01:40] Do you have thoughts about men and what's happening with the men? I mean, it doesn't seem great.

Speaker 2:
[01:44] The men can always be improved. That's what I say.

Speaker 1:
[01:47] Men need to be improved. It feels like a lot of times away from doing things that are fulfilling to their life and being in communion with other men and instead replacing that with a lot of time betting on the cal she.

Speaker 2:
[02:01] Listening to podcasts.

Speaker 1:
[02:03] Podcast is good. That's fulfilling. That's nourishing. I'm talking about maybe, I don't know, gambling on what Donald Trump is going to say on Squawk Box today. Whether Donald Trump is going to use the word Hormuz on Squawk Box today, gambling on that, that seems less healthy.

Speaker 2:
[02:20] Yeah. I would say prediction markets are not a substitute for a viable social network. Men should work on those relationships.

Speaker 1:
[02:28] They should. Thank you, Tracy. We're trying to model that here at The Bulwark Podcast. Trump is on, was on the Squawk Box this morning and it's like, he does a call in at 830 right before the markets open. And it is pretty wild. The extent to which a job owning the market is, is driving war and peace negotiations. I've never really seen anything like it. There's the old line about weekend wars. I don't think this is what they meant, which was just that we had fight literal wars while the markets were closed. But it seems to be working for him kind of on the margins. I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 2:
[03:04] I mean, you're definitely seeing that sort of pattern of impact on the market where the expectation is that he announces something along the lines of talks or some sort of ceasefire agreement on a Friday before the weekend. And then over the weekend, the bad news actually hits. And then on Monday, the markets open lower. I guess the question is how long that pattern can continue without the talks actually materializing into a durable agreement of some sort. But yeah, the market moves have been crazy. So I was looking at a chart yesterday. Apparently we've had three weeks now where the S&P 500 has rallied over 3% per week. That's something that's happened seven times since 1928. So this is really unusual. Like the speed of the moves that we are seeing in markets are I think what a lot of investors are struggling to get their heads around right now. Because it used to be, if you were an investor, you were used to bad news comes out, the market plunges really, really quickly, and then it takes a while to dig yourself out of that hole and climb the proverbial wall of worry is what we used to call it. Now, we're seeing markets just recover almost instantaneously. And so the velocity of those moves have been really unexpected for a lot of market participants.

Speaker 1:
[04:26] Well, how much of this do you think is manipulation versus just something different?

Speaker 2:
[04:31] Manipulation?

Speaker 1:
[04:32] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:33] I mean, look, it's hard. We've all seen the same stats about what's going on in prediction markets, right? Big accounts that are putting on bets. I know they don't like to call them bets. Putting on event contracts very close to news breaking.

Speaker 1:
[04:47] I'm sorry. I thought it was just the wokes that made us do certain words. Now it's the prediction market bros that are doing politically correct language. We can't call it what it is.

Speaker 2:
[04:55] We're just following CFTC regulations. The CFTC says these are event contracts, so I'm going with that language. But I've seen the same things you have. I mean, it's hard to know how much of this is deliberate, sort of day-to-day manipulation versus how much of it is just part of a general Trump jawboning strategy where he's trying to manage what would otherwise be some serious market fallout from a kinetic war in the Middle East.

Speaker 1:
[05:23] JVL's theory on this, my colleague in the Triad last week, was that we have a madman theory of the stock market, that the madman theory of foreign policy didn't really work because eventually people smell the bluffs. But it does work in the stock market for this reason. He says that the more intensely speculative a market is, the more it views chaos as an opportunity instead of a risk. When stability is the norm, chaos is an outlier, so it presents risk. But when chaos is the baseline, there's no inherent risk to it and any outbreak of normalcy creates an opportunity for growth and optimism.

Speaker 2:
[05:54] I like that.

Speaker 1:
[05:55] That's his theory of the case.

Speaker 2:
[05:56] I like that. The other framing I've seen, and it's sort of similar along those lines, is you know how investors, when a company reports results, you'll get earnings before taxes and depreciation and interest and all of that. I've seen people talk about earnings before the Trump factor, which is basically that chaos that you're talking about. Like if the chaos is so unpredictable, and if the headlines are changing on a day-to-day, if not hour by hour, minute by minute basis, all you can kind of do is try to look through some of that and think about what earnings would look like without that cloud of chaos sort of obscuring them.

Speaker 1:
[06:34] Here's a counterpoint from your colleague at Stalwart, Joe Weisenthal. He posted a meme that I liked. I'm sorry to compliment him when we're with you. But I'm going to read from the main.

Speaker 2:
[06:45] I'll try not to take it personally.

Speaker 1:
[06:46] I'm going to read from the main. I don't know if you have that rivalry. It would hurt my feelings if I was on someone else's podcast. They're like, I want to tell you about something Sarah Longwell said recently that I really liked. But anyway, so I apologize. But too good not to share. It was mean about these people talking to parties. One person is talking to the other and they say they don't know the straight of hormones isn't actually open, that the prices on the screen don't represent the two situations in the commodity markets. That even if the war comes to an end, we're looking at an environment where inflation is already higher than the Fed's target, meaning rate cuts are off the table. And this is before we get to the fact that deficits are rising when combined with increased trade frictions and we're creating a structurally greater inflationary picture. And therefore, we're facing the most stagflationary environment over 50 years. There's more, but that's just the more I listen to your show. Like this is what I come away with. I'm like, I don't like Trump. And so at some level, I do want things to go badly, but I'm not wishing for the economy to go bad. But I just you just look at what is happening. And I don't understand why like that perspective lays good, which is like even if the straight gets opened right after we get off this show and it's open for good, like there was still all of this disruption that is auguring poorly for the next few months, but the investing market doesn't seem to see it that way.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] Joe likes to make fun of rational takes on the market. I think the guy at the party has a very rational take on the market. Like I'm all in favor of sincere, basic analysis on Twitter, and that is some sincere, basic, accurate analysis. I would argue which is we haven't seen all of impacts flow through into global markets just yet. I mean, just a week ago, we still had ships that had the last loads of Middle East oil that were making deliveries, right? So again, like we are waiting to see the full impact of this. We've already seen some demand destruction, mostly in emerging market countries like Bangladesh, maybe Thailand that aren't necessarily going to resonate with Americans just yet. But it is an undeniable fact that 20 percent of the world's oil and gas supply has been disrupted for the past six or seven weeks. We've seen critical damage to a bunch of oil and gas facilities in the Middle East, that in some cases is going to take years to fully repair. Qatar came out and talked about one of its oil and gas fields was going to take three to five years to actually fix. That is just inevitably going to have to translate into higher prices. The wild card, I guess, is the supply response from the US. Are we actually going to see a bunch of drillers try to make up that lost production over here? We've been doing a bunch of episodes on this. I'm sure you've been listening. I hope you've been listening. We spoke to Jack McClendon. He's the CEO of a small oil producer in the US yesterday. He pointed out there's a fundamental tension here, which is number one, you don't know how long the Iran situation is going to last. You could wake up tomorrow and if there's some agreement reached, then oil prices immediately plunge lower, which means that they don't have incentive to immediately ramp up production. There's also a fundamental tension within the Trump administration itself, which is they keep talking about how they want everyone to drill oil but at the same time, they want lower gas prices. If the drillers don't see profit in encouraging that additional supply, they're not going to start those new projects. I have yet to see the administration really square those two goals.

Speaker 1:
[10:19] All this stuff takes time too. On the margins, we could put out more oil here, but to the degree of what is being disrupted, there's just basic supply chain limitations of ports, capabilities, etc. You go down the list.

Speaker 2:
[10:37] Oh, absolutely. This is another thing that came up with Jack McClendon, which is this idea that even if you want to start new oil rigs at the moment, a lot of the prices for the components to actually build those drills have gone up because of tariffs. In fact, if you look at, I'm looking at it right now, the Baker Hughes oil and gas index on my trustee Bloomberg, that thing has been moving sideways basically since mid 2025. In recent weeks, when we've had that big oil spike, and you might have expected some sort of supply response from US drillers, it actually fell by three last week. So here we are.

Speaker 1:
[11:16] Another gap that you were pointing out is between the fertilizer inflation costs and the lag in food inflation that we've seen. I learned about urea from your guys' podcast, which is coming from the Middle East, and how that impacts fertilizer and how fertilizer costs go up. The Secretary of Ag, I saw this, was saying like, well, this isn't that big of a deal because 80 percent of the fertilizer for the season has already been bought. But then the Farm Bureau, which is pretty Trump-friendly, went out and did a survey that they put out publicly, I think, to pressure for a bailout or something, and basically said that is wrong. In the Midwest, 67 percent was the highest, but in other parts of the country, the majority had not bought fertilizer yet. And so you would assume that that increase is going to yield increase in grocery prices.

Speaker 2:
[12:04] Yeah. The fertilizer story I find really interesting, and I've seen the same figures as you, and they seem contradictory at times. I'm not entirely sure what to make of where exactly we are in the planting season. But again, even if you set aside this particular planting season, there's a broader problem here, which is America is not the only food producing nation in the world. And there are a lot of other countries out there that have different planting seasons, and they're going to want the same fertilizer for their particular crops. And where are they going to get it if they can't get it from the Middle East? Well, China, which is a big fertilizer producer, has tightened up its export controls, because it's concerned about keeping enough supply at home for its own food production. And meanwhile, the US., if you look at US prices for fertilizer at the moment, they are trading at a huge discount to what normally comes out of the Middle East. So US fertilizer is really cheap at the moment, compared to everything else available in the world. Again, because most of the supply has been cut off because of the Iran situation. So a lot of those food producers are going to start coming to the US for their fertilizer needs. And there's actually a Reuters story out today talking about US fertilizer companies selling more internationally. So even if the US has its own supply of fertilizer that is maybe keeping US farmers somewhat insulated from what's happening in the Middle East right now, that doesn't mean that prices aren't going to increase in the future as we see other countries scrambling to get supplies. One other interesting thing here, I got to say, I find all the corporate behavior in this particular environment really fascinating. There's a big US fertilizer producer called CF Industries, and they actually put out a statement talking about everything they're trying to do in the context of this fertilizer crisis. And one of the things they explicitly said was, we are going to give up the ability to sell a bunch of US fertilizer at a huge, huge premium to international customers. We're going to keep it all at home for US farmers. So there's an element of politics that's coming into here. And it's also kind of similar to what...

Speaker 1:
[14:11] Maybe greedflation is real. After all, I've heard the greedflation was not real. But if the fertilizer companies can avoid the greed, maybe other companies could too.

Speaker 2:
[14:20] Well, we can talk about the exact motivations. I'm sure they'll win a bunch of fans from some US farmers. But what do their shareholders think if they're explicitly forgoing the ability to make money in order to keep US farmers happy?

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 1:
[15:32] Speaking of big corporate behavior, I want to ask you about two other things really quick. On Squawkbox, Andrew Ross working asked Trump about how some of the big companies, particularly the big tech companies are not seeking reimbursements for the tariffs, even though they can get them because of the Supreme Court ruling. He said that they're not doing this because they're worried to offend Trump. Trump replied that the people doing that are very smart and he'll remember them. So he's thrilled if American companies aren't taking money that was wrongly garnished from them back.

Speaker 2:
[16:04] It's a very weird style of political capitalism, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[16:09] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[16:10] Is it capitalism?

Speaker 1:
[16:11] Is that what capitalism is?

Speaker 2:
[16:12] Politically tinged capitalism. I mean, he was also talking about spirit, right? And this idea that maybe the US government would support spirit in some way. It wouldn't be the first time that the US government bailed out an airline. That's for sure, but it certainly has different political undertones in the current administration.

Speaker 1:
[16:30] Yeah. I guess I would just say that the government wrongfully seizing money from companies and then not giving it back to them because they're threatening the companies. It doesn't really feel like free market capitalism. I feel like there's another word that a lot of the Wall Street Journal types. I think Joe Kernan would call that something else if it was Obama seizing money from companies and then threatening them if they were going to take it back. Just my opinion. I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[16:57] I mean, I will just say I remember specifically paying a tariff on a vintage item that came from Spain. So, it's not even something that I could necessarily buy in the US. It's an old item. And the mailman turns up at my door and says, like, I need a check for 50 bucks or you can pay me in cash. That money is never coming back to me specifically.

Speaker 1:
[17:19] How?

Speaker 2:
[17:20] I have no idea. It seems like they're not even instituting a system for individual payers to actually get any money back. I don't even think it's recorded as like paid probably. I can't even imagine what the systems look like for actually recording all of this stuff.

Speaker 1:
[17:35] I have a few rebates. I want to. We also have in suck up corporate world, Tim Cook stepped aside at Apple. The president put out a very lengthy statement about how he's always been a big fan of Tim Cook, about how excited he was of the head of Apple calling to kiss my ass, and how that was really smart of him and other CEOs should do that. He's actually better than Steve Jobs. That's an interesting valedictory for the president to Tim Cook. I assume that this is just a pretty standard transition with Apple, and Tim Cook wants to enjoy his time on yachts and stuff. I don't know if you have any takes on the Apple transition.

Speaker 2:
[18:17] I don't have any good takes on the Apple transition. But when you read those sorts of statements, and we talk about what capitalism actually is and what it looks like, it does seem to devolve into something that looks a lot more like a patronage system than free market capitalism.

Speaker 1:
[18:32] You guys do fun niche stuff. Is there anything else out there you're watching, or you have a show coming up we should look for, or something in the market people should be keeping their eye on?

Speaker 2:
[18:41] Oh, well, just going back to the sort of broad outline of the impacts of the Strait of Hormuz closure, we have a great episode coming out with oil historian Dan Jurgen later this week. He's the guy that wrote the book on energy history called The Prize. And he does a really good job of explaining why even if the strait is opened tomorrow, we're not really going back to the previous energy world. We just can't. This is sort of like one of those the toothpaste can't be put in the bottle kind of moments where every government on earth has realized how unpredictable geopolitics is at the moment. Every country on earth that has the monetary ability to do so will be trying to rebuild its own stockpiles of energy for future, unforeseeable, unpredictable events. So it does feel like we're-

Speaker 1:
[19:31] That's interesting.

Speaker 2:
[19:32] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:33] Because right-wing MAGA podcaster Clay Travis challenged me to a $1 million bet that gas prices will be lower next April than they were before the war started. I feel like I would win that bet. I don't have a million dollars to throw around now. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts?

Speaker 2:
[19:54] I feel like there's going to be a longer-term structural bid for oil going forward. I just don't see how there can't be. The US is using some of its strategic petroleum reserve through this crisis. China has built this big strategic petroleum reserve as well, and again, they're using it during this crisis. They're going to want to top those up as soon as possible, I would imagine. The same for every other country that's gone through this shock. So this idea of governments really stockpiling crucial commodities and products, I don't think it's going away anytime soon. We've had six years now of talking about unpredictable choke points. First with the pandemic, where we all sort of woke up to these supply chain vulnerabilities, and now with the straight of Hormuz closure, I just don't think it's going away. And that's a long-term underpinning on stockpiling, it's a long-term upward pressure on inflation.

Speaker 1:
[20:52] All commodities products, yeah. It has to be. The thing that worries me most about the bet is that we end up, that the earnest guy at the party thing comes true, and then we end up in stagflation, then we end up in a recession, and the market crashes. And I lose the bet, and I lose the million dollars because we're in a recession, and that would really be a Pyrrhic loss in a lot of ways. So I don't know. I'll probably stick away. But if any listener wants to take the bet for me, they can. Tracy, I really appreciate you. I hope you don't feel guilty at all that bad news means your downloads go up. I want you to free yourself of that if you have those feelings.

Speaker 2:
[21:27] Our download figures are correlated with the VIX, or at least they used to be because the VIX isn't actually moving that much anymore either. But yeah, it's a pattern that we've come to recognize and we're okay with it. We're just happy that we're able to elucidate some of these hidden corners of the global economy during a crisis. And if that's what it takes to get people interested in things like urea and helium prices, it's all right with me.

Speaker 1:
[21:52] We appreciate your elucidation. All right, that's Tracy Alloway. The podcast is Odd Lots. Up next, Jordan Ritter Conn. Estate planning. It's not something anybody's so excited to think about, and it can be a little intimidating, but I gotta tell you, it's a relief to know your family's future is protected no matter what happens, and it's easier than ever, thanks to our friends at Trust and Will. Trust and Will offers affordable attorney design to state plans online that you can create in as little as 30 minutes. I don't like paperwork. I get the question all the time, Tim, how are you content maxing? And I said, well, there's some things I'm not doing. I don't iron. That's why my shirts are all wrinkled, okay? I don't like doing paperwork. Other people are carrying the load on that, and I just appreciate them. I'm not playing NBA 2K like I used to. It's really sad. That's lost time. And so when it comes to something like this, it's like, I'm sorry, Trust and Will, this falls into the I don't do paperwork bucket. But it's so easy. So it's barely paperwork, 30 minutes. You can get it done, secured. If you're like me and you're not doing this because you don't like paperwork, that's dumb. Go to Trust and Will. They'll make it as easy as possible. Trust and Will, affordable estate plans, priceless peace of mind. Go to trustandwill.com/bulwark and get 20% off. That's trustandwill.com/bulwark to get your 20% off. trustandwill.com/bulwark. All right, he's a features writer for The Ringer. His 2021 book, The Road from Raqqa, About Two Syrian Brothers was one of my favorite pandemic reads in my bed in Oakland. Now he's the author of a brand new book, American Men, out today. It's Jordan Ritter Conn. What's up, bro?

Speaker 4:
[23:43] How's it going, man? Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[23:45] American Men. All right. Well, you've entered the podcast arena. The book is out today. This is your first day of podcasting about it. I feel compelled to ask you about your book, American Men. What is a man?

Speaker 4:
[24:04] A big question that doesn't have an easy answer. A big question. One that I more wanted to explore rather than trying to answer explicitly. What this book is, is a book that weaves together the stories of four men who are very, very different, come from different parts of the country, very different experiences as they wrestle with things that we all wrestle with, they wrestle with that specific question of who they are as men, what it means to be a man, and come up against their own feelings of inadequacy against that definition and try to navigate that feeling of inadequacy and ways to work for them.

Speaker 1:
[24:40] The four men you picked, it was interesting to see how weaves through the themes of the challenges facing men right now through these four stories. We had Gideon as a West Point graduate, leaving the military and dealing with that. We had a poor, underemployed black trans man, Nate, in Ohio, and thinking about what his story is like and what manhood and fatherhood eventually is for him. Then you had Ryan, a gay Native American, who liked to get in bar fights. Obviously, my favorite character and Joseph, a married law student from Alabama who moved to the Pacific Northwest and had all these emotional problems. I guess I'm just wondering, you talked to a bunch of people for this. You're trying to tease out certain themes. What was it about that interconnected these four stories for you?

Speaker 4:
[25:28] Yeah. I set out to write something that was really, really intimate into several men's lives. I wanted to find, A, men that were willing to open up in the ways that would require, but B, men whose stories would really complement each other. I did have the belief and still do have the belief that everyone's story is really, really interesting if they're willing to look at some of the uglier pieces of it, some of the pieces of it that they might be a bit afraid of. So it was about finding men who were willing to do that, but also who fit together. There were a few different themes that I feel like touch on conversations around masculinity in this country that I wanted to make sure were present in their stories. I wanted someone with some sort of relationship to violence. That's so often what comes up quickly when we talk about men in this country. Like you mentioned, Ryan is a gay man who a lot of his story, he's struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, with who he is and also dealing with the fact that he really likes to beat people up. He'd been bullied a lot as a kid and he snaps as an adult outside a bar one night and likes it. So he's both trying to find a romantic partnership, trying to find a relationship with men that is tender, loving, caring, while also wanting to craving that kind of violence at times. I wanted men who had been in the military. I mean, that's such a big part of how we talk about masculinity in this country. So one of them, Gideon, is a West Point graduate, another Joseph serves in Iraq as an enlistee. I wanted to tell the story of a trans man and I wanted to tell the story of a trans man in a pocket of the US where you might expect trans people to not really find love and care and acceptance. And Nate is a trans man in Youngstown, Ohio, a town outside Youngstown. And the story follows him as he goes through his transition and as he tries to find economic security there. I wanted a story of someone who had some relationship to the evangelical church because that's another way in which masculinity is, I don't know, just on full display in a very particular way. And Joseph, the man who's dealing with the effects of childhood sexual trauma, is also someone who's coming out of the world of evangelicalism and trying to figure out his relationship to that world. It's impossible to take four lives and really fully survey masculinity in this country, but I wanted to do the best I could with four stories that were very different.

Speaker 1:
[27:55] Yeah. Let's talk about the evangelism part of it, or evangelicalism of it. You started the book like this, this is part of your story and background as well. I opened it up on the airplane on the way to Coachella with my husband. Another story of masculinity. We sat next to him on the plane, opened up the book and it begins like this. Every Saturday night when I was in high school, I sat in a room with a half dozen other teenage boys, and I announced whether I had made it through the week without masturbating. That is true. I was like, all right, we're diving right in. I also left it out in the rain, so it's already a beat up copy of it.

Speaker 4:
[28:29] It's weather. It's nice.

Speaker 1:
[28:31] It's clear that you started there to frame this up also with your experience and thinking about manhood through that Christian right frame, and you went to school at a Christian university. I'm just wondering how much that trajectory intersects with where we are now.

Speaker 4:
[28:53] Yeah, a lot. I grew up in an evangelical Christian context, like you mentioned. My parents were both from the Church of God, which is this Pentecostal denomination. I grew up around a lot of speaking in tongues, a lot of running the aisles, a lot of people fainting at the altar call, that sort of thing.

Speaker 1:
[29:10] Have you spoken in tongues?

Speaker 4:
[29:12] I have not. I've attempted. I've hoped the spirit would overtake me as a 12-year-old kind of yearning for that experience. It didn't happen, it didn't happen. But I will say...

Speaker 1:
[29:24] You never know.

Speaker 4:
[29:25] Yeah. As an adult, I've spent a lot of time in like, you know, kind of like Episcopal churches, like liturgical Methodist churches, like more kind of lefty progressive churches. And I've also, as a journalist, spent time in a snake handling church. And that felt much more familiar to me in terms of my childhood experiences than any of the nice crunchy lefty churches that I've been happy to be a member of and am now. But one thing I'll say about the evangelical experience is like, you see men talking in some ways with vulnerability about their lives. It's under the guise of like trying not to sin. And for me as a teenager, as I write about in that book, I was in this Bible study where we would go around the room announcing ways in which we had sinned that week and trying to be better the next week. And the first question every single week was, did you masturbate? That led to a lot of shame around sex that I've spent some time unpacking. But it also put me in this place where I was really open and vulnerable with other guys as a teenage boy, and I've followed that into adulthood. And I think paired with that is just this often bombastic performance of man as leader, man as you have to be the head of the household. In every possible way, I was certainly taught from a young age, not really by my parents, just by the waters I was swimming in, that you have to lead your household someday, that you have to be a man who other people will follow. I think that often sets us up for relationship structures that are not really great for us and not really great for the other people we're in relationship with. It certainly sets us up for a sense of entitlement as to where our place should be in any hierarchy.

Speaker 1:
[31:13] I'm wondering how you see that tension and that change developing over time from when we were growing up, like we're both kind of elder millennials versus like now, and like what you're seeing in the younger, like Christian right church. I went to a TPUSA conference about a year ago now, and I was struck by, on the main stage it was all this like political speech, all of the stuff that you would expect from the Charlie Kirk crowd. But then they had like side sessions, like breakout sessions that were about faith. I went and sat through a couple of those. You would sit in them and that tension that you talked about is just on display so intensely. It's like half of the conversation is about being a better person, and being in service to others, and taking responsibility. Then the other half of it is a lot of the culture war, masculine bravado, being the man of the house, all this stuff that, and then some obviously negative and hateful attitude towards LGBT people or immigrants or whatever. Those two elements are living together. I remember I would be sitting in there and feeling moments of, there's a kernel of something here that could maybe be positive for the people in the room, but is overshadowed by the culture war element. I feel like that has been exacerbated recently. I feel like that tension was always there, but it's particularly acute now, but you lived it. How do you agree with that or no? Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[32:51] I know a lot of ex-evangelicals in my social circles these days, and sometimes we're so traumatized by the negative pieces of that experience that we don't want to remember what we at one point were really connected to in it. We don't want to admit out loud the ways in which there are pieces of it that are really not only appealing, but also nurturing. I think we are at this moment in our culture kind of starved for structures that foster, pushing each other, being in community with other people, pushing them to try to be the best version of themselves. And at its best, that is what religion can do and often does. And that's present in those settings. It's present in settings where there are sermons being preached in the pulpit that I would find pretty abhorrent, but there's still this, there is someone trying to hold you accountable to be the best version of yourself. And I do think we're seeing data showing young men making a turn back toward religion after years of religious activity being in decline. And I think that that's a huge reason why, that there is a craving for structures of community, structures of accountability and going to a place once a week where you're trying to tell each other or work on being a better person is really appealing.

Speaker 1:
[34:12] Talk to me about those ex-evangelical communities, because I think about this, it's like on the one hand, you see the benefit of that. And you talk a lot in this book about loneliness. Obviously, there's this epidemic of loneliness that's showing up, and the data, the anic data, we all see it. So you can see the benefit of having a positive structure or force for young men to get together and work through all this stuff. But that's not really very visible in the culture. What you instead have are gatherings that have a lot more of the pernicious elements to it, whether it's the right-wing evangelical crowd, or Andrew Tate-ism, or Greuper-ism. What do you feel like is the disconnect there? Is it just that the libs are too soft, and there's nothing we can do about it? Or how do we find positive, nurturing, structural, masculine, organizational outfits?

Speaker 4:
[35:18] My general sense is that people talk a lot about it, whether we're in a crisis of masculinity. I think we're in a crisis period of people being increasingly dislocated and isolated and disconnected from one another, and we're siloed off in a culture that makes us less empathetic, less eager to engage with the full humanity of other people. What comes out is what has often come out, which is men grasping toward their basest impulses, grasping toward things that are dehumanizing to other people, that are subjugating other people. When you have a sense that you should be powerful, that you should be on top and you have moments where you feel disempowered, often men grasp for something that's really awful and gross. And so I do think that a lot of what we're talking about is kind of as much a technological problem as anything. It's just the fact that there are these companies that benefit from these kinds of images and messages that draw a strong reaction kind of being beamed around the world in everyone's pocket all the time. It's not good for anyone. But I think we're talking about very old problems mapped on to new technologies.

Speaker 1:
[36:34] Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, another change in addition to the technology is just the way the American economy has developed has offered a lot of more opportunity for women, like the cultural manner in which it's been a good thing, like the way that the culture has changed, more women going to college, more women going to the workforce before, all this sort of stuff. And now as we get into the types of industries where people are succeeding in the white collar parts of the economy, you have a lot more women college grads and a lot more men struggling economically. And I do think that in the past, a lot of men were finding this kind of structure that we're talking about in community in a way that is fulfilling in the workplace, right, in their job. And when you write about this in the book, I mean, like a lot of these folks are struggling. Obviously, Nate is really struggling economically. Joseph goes from Alabama to Washington and goes through a period where there's huge economic strain. And really all of them go through periods of huge economic strain. And I think that navigating the modern economy has sort of layered on particularly in certain demographics, and kind of like exacerbated these problems.

Speaker 4:
[37:51] Yeah. I mean, we hear a lot, we talk a lot about how men are falling behind. But really, a lot of big part of that story is just advances that women have made over a period of decades. And so you have that paired with still so many people hanging on to this image of being the provider, this desire to be a provider. There's kind of a simplicity to that. There's like a clarity of, if I fill this role, I am a person who has worth. It's a very simple way just to feel like you matter. And as families have become structured in ways where that's not really the case, as the economy, wages aren't keeping up with inflation, the story that's been continuing for decades now, jobs like manufacturing, that sort of thing, have been in decline for a long time. You have a lot of men who are kind of grasping for ways to feel like they have worth, grasping for ways to feel like they matter when the simplest, easiest way to do that is not really as easy to obtain as it once was. And so I think there's a sense of often just being a bit of drift. I mean, there are times when I care about that stuff. Like as much as I try to tell myself that it's not like, I want to be making sure that I'm providing for a family. And there's a man in this book, Gideon, who is kind of like the tall, handsome, West Point grad, baseball star. He's married twice in the book. But in his second marriage, it takes him years to kind of come to realize that his wife married him for the fact that he's kind, curious, empathetic, good listener, caring of their children. He just doesn't want to believe it. He thinks that he kind of exists as someone who's supposed to achieve, as someone who is supposed to provide, and it kind of leads to this real crisis of identity for him. Because it's a much more complicated thing to find your way to being in people's lives in a way that contributes to them through kind of who you are as a person, not just what you provide.

Speaker 1:
[39:43] These things are all in connection to each other in the sense of, if you don't have that confidence that comes from being a provider of that feeling of worth, right? Another thing you read about in the book is a lot of men have fewer and fewer friendships as they get older. You see this in the data too. I mean, Gideon is the character you just talked about at one point. He's having suicidal thoughts and only has two good friends, and he calls both of them and neither of them answer and kind of realizes that they just don't talk that much anymore. And so if you have this crisis of self-worth, if you don't have community or fellowship to lean on, and then you're relying on devices of whatever it is in your phone, whether that be the porn or the gambling apps, or you're drinking, it's just this cycle that people get into. I guess the one question for you is kind of how, living the lives of all these men, do you feel like that is, how can that be intercepted? In what ways can that be resolved? It's easy to be like, well, if you get a good job and start feeling self-confidence, or you go out and join a softball team and meet friends, it's kind of like, but in one of those areas, I feel like something has to be remediated or things just spiral.

Speaker 4:
[40:57] You know, I think a lot of what we talked about when it comes to these larger structures that have kind of upheld those relationships, the decline of those has been just a really big problem. Religion has certainly filled that role, but like you said, the workplace, like just being in person with your co-workers, is a huge piece of that. The military functions that way for two of the men in this book at times. You know, sports teams, things like just a beer league, softball team, like you mentioned. And I'm kind of curious to hear what you think about this, because you strike me as someone who is really, really good. It's kind of making and maintaining friendships, and that's just always been kind of natural for you. But often...

Speaker 1:
[41:37] I have a lot of pals, thanks.

Speaker 4:
[41:38] Yeah. Often, we're just not good at it. Like, we're just not. And it's largely, I guess, the ways that we're socialized. But the simple, dumb vulnerability that comes from just reaching out to a person and saying, like, hey, I'd like to meet up for a drink, or I'd like to go play around the golf, or do whatever that thing is that you do, we often just struggle to do that, struggle to kind of check back in with that person we haven't heard from in a long while. The number of men who will say things like, you know, I saw so-and-so for the first time in 15 years, and we just picked up right where we left off. It was like no time had passed. And it's like, well, what have you been doing over those 15 years? Like you couldn't just have that feeling a few more times over the course of that period of time. I do think that some of it is just kind of interpersonally, not on a structural or policy level, just interpersonally trying to work our way toward reaching out to each other, toward treating this part of our lives like it matters. I think we can be good at treating our jobs like they matter, our marriages and families like they matter, even like our physical health like they matter. I mean, Gen Z like very much is prioritizing kind of physical health. But we don't treat this part of our lives like it matters. And it's a huge, huge piece of having a well-rounded, meaningful life.

Speaker 1:
[42:57] Yeah, I sometimes feel bad when I give advice on this stuff because I can extrovert and this is easy for me. I understand that it's harder for some people. But what I want people to know is that other people want to hang out with you. Other people are in your boat and want socialization. Like humans want socialization and you get in your head, like it's going to be a hassle. I'm going to ask that. I think back to my grandparents. And on both sides, like both my grandfathers just like had a poker club. And they met every week or every other week. And I was just like, that's what we did on Thursday nights. And I don't know for some people, for some reason I think people feel like that is an imposition now to like go schedule that sort of thing, which I don't understand why. I don't know why not. I was laughing with one of my friends in town this weekend about this where he was like, he's like, other people at work tell me that it seems like I go out a lot. And they're like, how do you do that? And he's like, I just do it. Like, what do you do between 8 and 10 o'clock at night? And they're like, well, I'm scrolling on my phone and doing laundry. And it's like, well, maybe you go meet a friend instead, you know? And I think that like actually like a lot of things in life, like you say, like prioritizing it and trying it like really matters. But it's, I think it becomes hard once it's lost to regain. And I, you know, I see this in my life. Like once you stop doing it and get into your interior life, like on your phone, in your apartment, and you get sad, then it becomes harder and harder to break out of it. And I think that that is, like I was saying, I think that there's kind of this intersecting issue. And you see it with people who like feel unfulfilled in their work life, unfulfilled in their marriage, or if they don't have one, don't have friends, and then it's easy to just kind of get into computer life after that.

Speaker 4:
[44:37] So over the course of the time I was working on this book, I also work full time at The Ringer. I also had a child. I have a son who's almost three. I kind of looked up at the end of it and realized that a lot of my friendships had kind of atrophied and it was entirely my fault. I'd just been kind of consumed by other things. I was kind of like, well, I'm about to be putting out this book about masculinity. There's a lot of talk about loneliness among men. I should probably do some fucking work to make sure that I'm not one of the lonely men. Yeah. So I spent a lot of time kind of just doing that stuff, just reaching back out to people I hadn't talked to in a long time. When I would meet someone, someone new, there's the dad playground circuit, which it's not my natural kind of place. Yeah. I don't do great there. My wife is so good at it. I'm just not, and I think that's a pretty common dynamic too. But I did things like I started a book club with some other guys. Just like we're going to get together once a month, we're going to read this book and we're going to talk about it. That pretty quickly, it was guys who I knew individually, but they'd never met each other. It pretty quickly became like talked about pretty intimate stuff, just because when you have the structure and proximity of like we are going to be together once a month. Talking about books leads to talking about other stuff. That really helps. But it does come back to just like telling yourself like, I just got to do it. This stuff matters.

Speaker 1:
[46:04] You have to prioritize it like you try other stuff. Yeah. I mean, I feel like you're putting a lot of pressure on people by making them talk about intimate stuff. I mean, you work at the ringer, bro. You can just talk about like the vols. You can just talk about, you can start with sports or whatever. Don't intimidate people. So you started this book, like you said, many years ago, and there's been a lot of stuff that's changed since these characters were coming of age. I'm just wondering how you think the book intersects with some of the things in the news now, particularly I'm thinking of the prediction market boom, crypto, and now the looks maxing trends that you were referencing earlier with the young men that are bone smashing their faces in order to looking at some more so that girls like them, or maybe not even girls like them. I don't know. At some level, as all this stuff is popping up, you got to be like, man, like the book, you could almost have a full post book that covers how the themes of it are echoing and what's happening now.

Speaker 4:
[47:06] Yeah. I think the, I don't know, the looks maxing thing to me is like, kind of intersects with some of the stuff we've already been talking about. It's on one hand, it's another way to answer this kind of very old problem, which is just men feeling inadequate and not knowing what to do with it. Feeling like we all kind of inherit this idea of who we're supposed to be. We all at some point kind of fall short of that. And how we kind of navigate that in some ways kind of defines our relationship to masculinity. The looks maxing thing is one way to attempt to bridge that gap. I think a lot of the messaging online to young men is telling them different ways in which they can kind of bridge that gap. If you just work harder in the gym, if you work harder in your career, if you work harder at learning how to talk to women, then your inadequacies will be erased and you will have everything that you want. And I think it's great to work harder. I think men respond to messaging that emphasizes an internal locus of control, like the sense that you have some agency, some power over the future of your life. I think that's important. But also, that feeling is not going to just vanish because you're the optimized version of yourself, or you're the hottest possible version of yourself. But I also think the looks maxing thing connects to the provider conversation. The fact that there was historically this very simple way to feel like you have worth, to feel like you're going to be attractive to a potential partner. And as the economy has changed in ways that have made that a bit more difficult to obtain, it's like, what are the other ways? Now, some of those ways could be, become someone who's a bit easier to get along with, become someone who's a bit more considerate, a bit more thoughtful. But it could also just be, get hotter. And so I think that's what a lot of guys are trying.

Speaker 1:
[48:56] For somebody who's went through midlife crisis therapy, I would just like to say bluntly that you have to, what's the RuPaul line? If you don't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love anybody else? Unfortunately, you can't rely on external compliments and support for resolving those feelings of inadequacy. You've got to be happy with yourself. And I do think that that's something that clavicular is going to end up having to find out. I wonder what you say, like the ringer is a little lib coded, we can say. You've already mentioned you're in ex-evangelical circles, which is pretty lib coded.

Speaker 4:
[49:30] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[49:30] Based on some of your other writing, what do you say to kind of the intersectional libs in your life that say, oh, poor men. There are all these other groups that have dealt with this for generations, and marginalized groups have all these challenges, and men go through a slightly rockier period, and now everybody is talking about their needs again. How do you address that, the mindset, which I know that you've heard?

Speaker 4:
[49:59] Yeah. I think for one, we're half the population. We're a pretty big group of people. It's probably worth considering our inner lives. I also think this book talks about a lot of things that men ourselves don't really like to talk about, so it's less demanding more attention from others than it is digging into stuff that we are often the reason why it's not really discussed. Over the years, I've been working on this. As I told people what I was doing, the demographic that was most likely to be excited and interested were millennial and Gen X women, usually if they have kids, especially if they have sons.

Speaker 1:
[50:37] Because they see it.

Speaker 4:
[50:38] Yeah, yeah. With men, it was all over the map, how they would respond. Some were very, very skeptical, and it was the first time that they'd ever thought about the idea of masculinity. Others were really interested. Gen Z women, for the most part, when it has come up, are just like, I'm very happy for you. I will not be reading this book, which I get.

Speaker 1:
[50:59] No, it makes sense, and it's moms. Yeah. Moms, boys see it. Like they see it, right? Because they've grown up, they've lived through it, and they've seen the frailties of men already in their lives, but they see the ways in which things are getting worse right now. I hear it all the time.

Speaker 4:
[51:16] And I just think everyone in their lives knows a boy, or has known a little boy, and it's hard to kind of imagine the little boy that you know in your life alongside some of the more negative feelings you might have toward men. And so, like, wanting to imagine a world in which that boy that you know and care about can grow up and be kind of the fullest, you know, kind of most human, like, most socially connected, caring version of himself, I think is something that people want.

Speaker 1:
[51:50] I want to talk about one of your other stories recently. It's kind of over-sexed. Intersexually, it's one of the characters, as a man, I'd like to hear a little bit more about, which is Daniel. You wrote for The Ringer Inside the Hidden Network of Resistance in Minneapolis. Obviously, we're covering this a bunch on the pod at the time. But I was struck in particular by this one story of Daniel who's from Venezuela. He spent 36 days in detention, some at the Whipple building. His family found an attorney taking his case, but he heard nothing for weeks. He sat in a cell, only one small window facing the hallway. He felt like a criminal. He's not a criminal. He'd been here as a legal resident with a work permit. Can you talk about that story and everything else that you saw when you were reporting this out in Minneapolis?

Speaker 4:
[52:34] I was in Minneapolis for about 10 days. During the height of everything that was going on immediately after Alex Prady's shooting, I went there. I wrote mostly about the lives of people who were hiding, who were sheltering in their homes away from ICE. The thing about it that most struck me was just the sense of interconnectedness among the people in that community. We've talked a lot in this conversation about social isolation and lack of community, and I haven't seen a more robust expression of community than I did when I was there.

Speaker 1:
[53:19] Well, so this is what I was going to ask you next. We'll come back to Daniel. Just because I felt that way too. There was this tension between the book that I was reading and that story that you read. I'm just wondering what your observation was on that. Is it something about how, JBL says this, you hear people sometimes say that a lot of these problems that we're talking about, about loneliness and addiction, etc., are related to societal decadence. Things are going so well that you have time for these other problems versus past eras where it's like you went to work every day, you're tired when you went home, your kids go to bed and you clean the house, then you did it again, and like life, and that kind of this societal decadence has led to some of these problems. And there's an interesting data point for that in Minneapolis, that you see like a city going through this crisis, like really coming together and not isolating or turning on one another. And I'm just kind of wondering how you mesh those two narratives and two types of reporting you did.

Speaker 4:
[54:19] You know, I think that what you said about societal decadence is really interesting because I do think that crisis pulls people together, obviously. I don't know. I think like the lesson I took away is that people really want to care about each other. People really want to be together, to do something for someone else, and to find ways to kind of be more connected to the people around them. And sometimes some sort of intense strain, whether it be interpersonal or societal, can be the thing that kind of forces you into that kind of action. And right now, like you said, it's so easy to be disconnected. It's so easy to not be relying on anyone else. It's so easy to get a facsimile of the things that we actually need and care about. Something that feels like community, that feels like connection, but isn't really that thing, something that feels like sex, but isn't really that thing. And what happened in Minneapolis is people needed that thing. They needed to show up for other people in real and meaningful ways, and they did so. I don't know, it was just incredibly moving. Honestly, it was frigid, freezing fucking cold. And I'm just walking around that city, going and meeting these people in homes and churches and out of protests everywhere, and just constantly moved by some random story that I'm hearing of the way that a mom is checking on the mothers of her kids' classmates who are hiding in their homes, of a retiree who's driving around groceries and taking people to the hospital. And I don't know, it was just a remarkable reminder of what humans and Americans are capable of. I hate that it takes something so monstrous and so kind of craven on the part of our government to bring that out. But I hope that it's something that we can kind of find our way toward in settings that don't feel quite as dire as it did there.

Speaker 1:
[56:23] And Daniel, who we mentioned had been in detention, I was just struck by the scene where he's speaking to Teresa, this local pastor, about how to rebuild his life and how to move forward. And you have his story having been wrongfully detained for a month and a half, and then you have Teresa, who has sharpied under her arm, her legal resident number and her lawyer's phone number, both of which she had memorized, but she put them on her arm for fear that if she was incapacitated or knocked out or something during a protest, that people would be able to contact representation from her. And it's just crazy. It feels like something that's not even from this country.

Speaker 4:
[57:06] Yeah, really dystopian. I mean, like you said, not the sort of thing that you imagine happening in the United States of America. When I was there, I was there with a friend, a photojournalist who mostly covers wars, who I'd last seen in like southern Turkey and we were reporting on things related to Syria. And she couldn't believe that she was in Minneapolis because that was where the story that most needed her skill set was happening in the world. It was pretty shocking to see up close and still, to be honest, a little shaken by some of the memories from my time there.

Speaker 1:
[57:41] Then just finally on the Syria point, I was curious, I mean, so much has happened there. Obviously, there's been another coup, another regime change. Now, we've got some Syrian billionaires from Qatar who are trying to do buy Syria, where they're working with Jared Kushner, our president's son-in-law slash lead negotiator on all war matters. And they're talking about putting a Trump golf course in Syria. I'm just like, it's such a strange world. I mean, your story followed these two brothers, like one that had stayed in Syria, one that had come to America. I'm just wondering if you have any postscript for us from your time there and what you're seeing in the region now.

Speaker 4:
[58:21] So again, as someone who's not really a Syria or Middle East expert, but knows a lot of people from there and has written about their lives, what I hear is just so much relief that Assad has gone and cautious optimism and patience for what might come next. Certainly not all the way bought in. So the infrastructure there is still totally destroyed. I mean, there's a reason why it's being discussed for this kind of development, because right now there's just nothing there. A lot of places are still pretty uninhabitable. But the fact that this family that tormented so many people for so long is no longer in power. That the fact that I think that the new president seemed a bit more, like their impression of him is that he's a bit more pragmatic than they imagined. He would be a little bit less of an ideologue. So I think there is patience and cautious optimism while very much feeling like it's still, there is a long, long, long way to go and there's no certainty that they will get there.

Speaker 1:
[59:23] It's a really beautiful book. Folks should go read it. They should get both of them. The Road from Raqqa from 2021, and then American Men, which I have right here, all mangled from a New Orleans rainstorm out today. Jordan, I appreciate you, brother. Good luck on the book tour. We'll be talking to you again soon.

Speaker 4:
[59:38] Thank you so much, John.

Speaker 1:
[59:40] Thanks so much to Tracy Alloway and to Jordan Ritter Conn. We will be back tomorrow. Still working out who we're gonna be talking to, but it's gonna be good. It's always good. Bangers only here. We'll see y'all then. Appreciate you. Peace. The Bulwark Podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.