Charles Bethea

It's pretty thin.

It's just sort of a demand that they man up.

Yeah, and let's quickly, if it's okay, remind ourselves, these guys at the bottom, as Richard Reeves and other scholars have made clear, they're making less money as a percentage of overall family income than men were four decades ago.

They're not as likely to go to college.

They're five times likelier than they were in the 90s to not have any close friends.

They're not likely to receive mental health treatment.

They're very likely to die by suicide.

These are the guys who are coming across these videos, guys like Watson and Tate.

And I think they see them as kind of avatars, the same way that disillusioned, let's say, rural white voters in the middle of the country in red states see Trump as a kind of an avatar.

It's like we don't expect much out of life, but it's kind of nice to have

This sort of heroic version of us out there sort of like yelling at the things that we don't like.

That's one way I think to see the possible service that these influencers are offering these men.

But it falls so far short of anything like the sort of therapy adjacent approach that I saw at Rise.

Yeah, so my mind was swimming, to be honest, when I came home from Rise after those three days of camping out with these guys and trying to sort out what was silly, what was potentially smart, what was surprising, what was predictable.

And I had the good fortune of sitting down.

Actually, in the hours immediately after leaving, I went back to Charlottesville, and I sat down with a newish friend who teaches college-level anthropology.

And he mentioned to me an essay by a French anthropologist who's apparently quite famous, but I confess I did not know, Claude Levi Strauss.

And this essay was written in the middle of the 20th century called The Effectiveness of Symbols.

It's a very difficult essay, far beyond my own area of expertise, but the very basic point is

as it pertains to therapeutically adjacent men's development programs, as how I would describe them like RISE, is that most people need a familiar language to work through their own problems on their own terms.