Ezra Klein

potent driver of civilizational progress, and we fall into stagnation and decadence when they are thwarted.

That's what I understand them to be saying.

When you talk to them, I mean, is that what you hear or is that a misread?

I think it's worth dwelling on this for a minute.

And I've had Richard Reeves on the show who's written a lot and done a lot of work on this.

One place a lot of these ideas have magnetized towards because it acts as a genuine, true justification for the idea of something being wrong.

is that there is something going wrong for men and boys.

I mean, we talked a few minutes ago about falls in testosterone and sperm quality.

I mean, that's measurable and strange, and it's been going on for many decades now, and we should, I think, think about it and worry about it.

But you also have...

Men's wage is not doing great.

You have girls performing much better than boys in high school, much more likely to enroll in college.

Men today are five times likelier than in the 90s to say they don't have any close friends.

They are four times more likely to die by suicide.

Sometimes this can all get framed as a competitive race with girls, as if it would be fine if both genders were dying by suicide at the same rate.

But that's not the way I think about it, that there is—boys are not doing great on their own terms.

And the sense that, you know, perhaps society's evolved in a way, whether that is in terms of the chemical soup and the microplastics that we're all exposed to from childhood now all the way up to the structure of school, the structure of the workplace—

The idea that it is more recently evolved in a way that is not good for boys and men, it's not a crazy thought.

And I think it's something worth, you know, when you look at this data, taking seriously.

interesting dimension in a bunch of these books where it does feel to me you're watching both in these books actually and in culture broadly men import what has more traditionally been a huge problem for women and girls really quite rapidly which is this obsession with unrealizable body aesthetics