Several weeks ago, I was seized by an inexplicable urge to buy a globe for my home office. Don’t know where it came from. I had been sitting at my desk, ruminating on an article, when I looked around, noticed my lack of a globe, and thought: I need a globe.

On a lark, I posted a note on Substack confessing my inexplicable urge to buy a globe for my home office. I called it the male urge to own a globe. Half-joking, but also very serious. The note went Substack viral. Tons of guys chimed in: Yes. Same. I’ve wanted one for years. My grandfather had one. Globes are cool as hell.

Seeing the universal male desire to own a globe ratcheted up my own. As the founder of the Art of Manliness, I had to live up to this masculine imperative. It was Girardian mimetic globe desire.

On that very same day that I scribbled my memo about men and globes on Substack Notes, I was watching The Firm (also a great 90s Dad Novel) during my Zone 2 cardio session. There’s a scene where Tom Cruise, playing the young hotshot law grad Mitch McDeere, is setting up his office. Next to his desk, amidst shelves of leather-bound legal case books, sits a large, handsome globe.

That cemented it. This was a sign. I needed to get a globe. That day. Immediately. Resistance was futile.

So I went on eBay and bought a globe.

Follow me on Substack Notes; it’s the only kind of “social media” I personally interact with, because it’s fun instead of being soul-destroying and productive of the urge to repeatedly jam a fork in your eye.

Specifically, I tracked down the exact globe I’d had as a kid in the 1980s. A sepia-toned one with topographically raised mountain ranges that you can run your fingers over. The USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries are on there. So is Zaire.

My globe now sits on a table in my office and looks majestic.

My globe. It fits very well with the other handsome furnishings in my home office.

What a rush.

This whole experience left me with the question: What makes a globe so damn appealing? Especially to men?

So I dug into the history of globes. Combining that history with my knowledge of the male psyche based on my own experience as a man and nearly 20 years researching, thinking, and writing about manliness, I’ve developed a few speculative theories about men and globes.

Here is my report.

A Brief History of the Globe

Globes are ancient. The Greeks figured out the Earth was round by the 3rd century B.C., and an ancient Greek dude named Crates of Mallus is credited with making the first terrestrial globe around 150 B.C. When he moved to Rome, he showed the Romans his cool invention, and the Romans started making globes. Sadly, none of those ancient globes survived. There’s a famous 2nd-century Roman sculpture called “Farnese Atlas” that depicts the titan Atlas hoisting a celestial globe (a globe of the stars) on his shoulders. There’s your first masculine-globe combo in the West.

The Middle Ages were a fallow period for European globe-making, but Islamic and Chinese scholars kept the craft alive. The earliest surviving terrestrial globe, the Erdapfel — German for “Earth Apple” — was built in 1492 by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg. (Conspicuously, it has no Americas. Columbus was just then setting sail on the ocean blue.) From that point forward, globe-making exploded in Europe with the Age of Exploration. Globes were useful things to have when you were charting the watery sphere we call home. Every major voyage produced new data, which meant globes needed to be regularly updated and new ones released.

Thanks to their association with exploration and conquest, globes became a symbol of power and wealth among the European hoity-toity. Even rich families who didn’t have anything to do with sea exploration wanted a globe in their homes.

The Netherlands became the epicenter of the globe manufacturing industry, beginning in the late 16th century. Workshops in Amsterdam run by a few artisan families were churning out matched pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes for the libraries of European nobility.

A gentleman’s pocket globe

In the 18th century, the English took the baton in globe making and made them more scientific. Instead of being seen as ornamental pieces that you would keep in your home to signal your wealth and status, the globe was seen as a mathematical instrument. Gentlemen of letters and science would often keep a “pocket globe” in their coat pockets that they could whip out when pondering geography.

Industrialization and mass production in the 19th and 20th centuries allowed the globe to become a staple in middle-class homes and schools in America. Spinning the globe and stopping it with your finger to see where you’d live in the future became a rite of passage for bored children.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, globes experienced a decline in the West thanks to Google Maps. Why have a physical globe when you can see a high-resolution globe on your screen for free? Also, globes are bulky and expensive to ship, so a lot of cash-strapped schools gave up on buying new globes to save money. Globes moved from being a democratic tool of learning and curiosity back to being sophistication-signaling ornaments in well-to-do homes.

Why Famous Men Posed with Globes

If you look at portraits of powerful men from the past four centuries, you’ll notice that there’s often a globe in the picture. European royalty during the Age of Empires would hold globes to symbolize their global dominion. Democratic leaders like Teddy Roosevelt posed with globes to project their influence on international affairs. Shipping magnates and corporate CEOs would pose with globes to symbolize the worldwide reach of their enterprises.

This globe portraiture descends directly from a type of portraiture in which ancient and medieval royalty would be depicted holding an orb with a cross on top of it. This orb was called a globus cruciger. Monarchs held these during coronation ceremonies. It signified dominion over the temporal world. When painters started swapping the globus cruciger for an actual terrestrial globe sometime in the 16th century, the symbolism stayed the same. I rule the world! Such a power move.

By the mid-20th century, the globe had taken on a slightly different meaning. It conveyed global strategizing. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services commissioned a pair of enormous 50-inch globes for FDR and Churchill (often called “Churchill Globes”) so the two men could see the war as a single, planet-spanning theater. There are photos of Churchill bent over his globe, calipers in hand, measuring distances between continents. The globe gave him an astronaut’s perspective of World War decades before the first astronaut.

So What’s the Appeal of Globes to Men?

Alright. So globes have been a symbol of power and a tool for exploration and strategizing. These two ideas, I think, can explain the male urge to own a globe. Here are my two speculative theories as to how:

Theory One: Testosterone. Some studies have shown that men, on average, score higher on tests of spatial navigation, mental rotation, and route-learning, and have a higher desire to explore unknown territories than women. And these differences are often attributed to the higher testosterone levels in men. These conclusions are nuanced, and there’s probably more going on than just testosterone that results in these differences, but testosterone does seem to play a role. Even when women receive testosterone supplementation, they often see a rise in their spatial scores and their desire to explore new places.

So maybe the fact that men have more testosterone than women explains the male pull to globes, which fire the imagination for charting a course and journeying somewhere new.

Theory Two: The King Archetype. In his book, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, the Jungian analyst Robert Moore argued that the mature masculine psyche organizes itself around four archetypes. Of them, the King is the one concerned with order, stewardship, and the blessing of one’s realm. The King doesn’t conquer for the sake of conquest. That’s the Tyrant, the King’s shadow. The mature King surveys his domain so he can tend it. He keeps a wide view so he can act with prudence and justice.

While I’m skeptical of Jungian archetypes (I may need to write an article about this one day), I do think that, when used in moderation, they can be helpful prompts for reflection. Perhaps a globe in a man’s office is a subtle invocation of that Jungian King archetype. It’s a moral reminder to a man to think of the whole, to establish and maintain order, and to use power with justice and mercy.

Theory Three: Globes Just Look Cool. Maybe it’s the T, or maybe it’s the King archetype existing in our Jungian collective consciousness that can explain the male urge to own a globe. Even if those theories don’t explain the urge, I think my final one can: globes just look cool. You get to see the Earth in its totality — as the Blue Marble in space that it is — right in your own home. You can find ones that are a bit more artistic. They’re in sepia tones. They make you feel like you’re Indiana Jones flying a plane with a red line tracing your path as you make your way to archeological adventures around the world. And that feels cool.

So my 1980s globe sits here in my office. I’m looking at it right now. Seems like it has always been there. Every so often, I go and trace my fingers across its bumpy face and look for old Cold War-era countries that no longer exist. I’ll even give it a spin and let my finger stop it on a random spot. Usually, it’s the Pacific Ocean. I hope that doesn’t mean I’m going to end up a castaway like Louis Zamperini.

Why do I love this thing? Maybe it’s the testosterone. Maybe it’s the King archetype. Maybe I just want to feel like Indiana Jones for thirty seconds between emails. Whatever it is, I’m glad I acted on the male urge to own a globe.

Go wander over to eBay and search for “globe.” You’ll find one that will satisfy your own urge.

Impetus virilis globum possidendi.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control — getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative — a male-specific counseling center — and the author of Boys Will Be Men: 8 Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift. As a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30, Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked-out and developed a clear, experience-honed framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose.

In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men, and how his approach — which is rooted more in action than in talk — can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men, and how to give them the drive, accountability, and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life “brick by brick” and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man
• AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood
• AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man
• AoM Podcast #886: What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men
• AoM Article: Get Your Son Out of His Bedroom
• AoM Article: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control, getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative, a male specific counseling center and the author of Boys Will Be Men: Eight Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift as a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30. Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked out and developed a clear experience and home framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose. In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men and how his approach, which is rooted more in action than in talk, can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men and how to give them the drive accountability and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life brick by brick and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/boysandmen.

Alright, Vincent Benevento, welcome to the show. 

Vincent Benevento:

Great to be here man. Thank you and happy to be on for sure.

Brett McKay:

So you are a therapist that specializes in working with men between the ages of 16 and 30. How’d you end up working with this demographic?

Vincent Benevento:

So if my wife was on the show next to me, she would say that it all worked out. This is the only thing I’m good at. You know what I mean? So I found my way to something that people would say that I’ve done relatively well. But I mean, the truth was like many people in this field, I have my own story. So I was a lost and wayward young man. I was a guy who struggled with addiction. I was a guy who struggled with pretty profound mental health challenges, came from a broken home, dealt with divorce. My dad came out when I was young, so I had some stuff and my stuff is different than everybody’s stuff, but I had some stuff that required that I had to do some personal work at a pretty young age, and so I needed support. I was very resistant to receiving it personally, mostly because I wasn’t ready to do the work, but I really couldn’t find anything that spoke to me in terms of what I felt engaged to do. And so I started puzzling and being curious around what kinds of things young men would be open to and willing to do. And years later came up with some stuff that has been useful when supporting young men trying to get their lives on track.

Brett McKay:

One of the things you argue at the very beginning of the book is that talk therapy is largely useless for men between the ages of 16 and 30. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, and a pretty bold statement from a therapist of 12 plus years or 15 plus years, whatever it’s been, 15 total, 12 as a licensed practitioner. And so yeah, it’s bold claim, but I stand by it. I mean, I think young men especially don’t have a lot of rich life experience to process through and to pick apart in ways that more mature individuals do. And so I think part of what we practice and preach is the notion that therapy or the therapeutic support process for young men should be much more about doing and not talking. For men and young men in general, this is a generalization but usually true, learn better from doing. And so men, because they learn through experience, gravitate towards frameworks like mentorship and coaching as opposed to traditional talk therapy, which tends to be a little more nebulous.

So we try to impress upon the guys we work with, the setting of small goals, the step work in achieving those goals, the literal experience of going out into the community and doing a thing can be a little more impactful than sitting and talking about something that someone may or may not do in the week in between sessions and just in addition and sort of separately, I think back to when I was 16 and pissed off and I didn’t have the emotional fluency to talk about my issues in the way that I do now. And I would contend that men, as we know, and young men are typically slower to mature than their female counterparts and particularly within the emotional realm. And so I think I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling till years and years later and hours of work in therapy. And so I think if somebody’s not engaged in that kind of process of self-discovery, it may be more productive and beneficial to do a thing rather than talking about a thing that you might not do.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So your approach is a little less conversation, a little more action with these young guys. 

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. For sure.

Brett McKay:

Something you describe in the book is in your career you’ve encountered two types of young men. The first type of guy is acting out, doing dangerous stuff, maybe has an addiction, is drinking, getting into fights. The second type of guy is pretty much the way he described him is anesthetized. He just doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to sit at home. And you argue that the second type of guy is harder to work with. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. So on first blush, it seems almost unreasonable to make that assertion. I mean, the second guy is just kind of not doing a lot. He’s not doing anything dangerous, he’s not doing anything risky. He’s not a danger to himself, not a danger to others. So how could that guy possibly be more difficult? I think back to when I was the first kind of guy. I was the fighting, drinking, driving, acting out, getting into trouble, but just oppositional externalizing kind of guy. When I go back 25 years to when I was that kind of guy, I was a mess, but there was energy and momentum associated with that mess. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, I had a car that I paid for money that I saved through my job. I was going to college. So there is progression personally and there’s goals that are being set and achieved and that guy’s doing stuff. He may be doing the wrong stuff, but he’s doing stuff nonetheless. 

The second guy isn’t really doing anything. And this is the curious phenomenon that I talk about a lot in the book. It’s like this sort of, I call him the second wave. I saw the first kind of guy 15 years ago when I started my business and now we see the second profile of just anxious, isolative, apathetic, highly dependent young men who are not seeking to individuate in any way, shape or form. They’re not excited to go get a job. We have guys who don’t want to get their license. They’d literally rather have their mother drive them around in the car because they’re so anxious about driving a car that they can’t even consider the notion of having their own vehicle and taking themselves to and fro. And so the first kind of guy at least was doing a lot of stuff and was busy in the world and had energy and it was misdirected, but you could direct it. It’s very difficult with this sort of second wave to cultivate an active process with a guy who’s so inert. And this is where we have to move in the direction of really connecting with an interest and connecting with the soul of that person to get them engaged in something that they care about so that we can start moving them in any direction whatsoever.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed this as well in my work with young men. So I’ve coached flag football, I’m a leader at my church’s young men’s group. I remember in flag football you’d see those two types of guys. One guy was super aggressive, had just that kind of killer instinct, but he kind of messed stuff up, but I could work with that. It’s like, oh, he’s got this energy, I can direct that. We can refine his skill and he’ll get better. Then you have the kid who just inert had no drive at all and it’s just like, I can’t work with this. And then in church you see the same sort of thing kids where it doesn’t matter what it is, they’ll be engaged, they’re excited, even if they think the activity we’re doing is kind of boring, they’ll try to make something out of it. And then you have the boys where it’s just like it’s pulling teeth. You do everything you can to get them engaged and they’re just like me. It’s so hard. So they lack that. The Romans called it thumos for that fire in the belly, that drive. And I’m seeing it more and more in young men as you are. What do you think is going on with this younger generation? You talk about how you see this a lot in Gen Z guys. What do you think is going on where you’re seeing this lack of thumos in drive in young men?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think it’s a crockpot filled with a bunch of different things that make it hard to do this work with young men and make it hard to connect with people in general. I think there’s a tech piece for sure. There’s a tech piece and a subsequent isolative piece in association with that. We see a lot of skill erosion. So as everything has become both automated and immediately accessible, we can have things done for us rather than do things ourselves. And so the old example that I used to give was not so long ago in the early two thousands, I used to know how to get places and now I just don’t because I just throw it in the Waze just like everybody else and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going anymore. And so that’s one very small detail of the day in which we live where we’re not exercising our brain, we’re not exploring, we’re not engaging with our surroundings, we’re just passively moving through our day.

And that happens more readily than we would care to admit. There’s an instant gratification piece where I’m hungry and so I just ordered dominoes and they send me 44 ounce coke and a pepperoni pizza for with the fee is $31 and I just swipe that or my parents swipe that. And there’s no reward-based system where you do a task and you get a reward and then you can subsequently use it for whatever purposes you see fit. So there’s not a lot of delayed gratification and sequencing and work that goes into achieving goals. And I just think more broadly, because we’re so flooded with information and information that scares us, this pervasive culture of fear that we live in has raised the stakes in terms of the cumulative anxiety that we all experience as people, but specifically young men. And so young men are not excited to go get their first car and drive fast.

They used to. Now I’m not saying that that’s behavior that we should relish upon our boys, but boys used to be excited about getting their car and shining it up and driving around fast. They’re not excited about that anymore. They’re scared and they’re scared of things like that. And they’re scared of talking to a girl and they’re scared of getting a phone number and they’re scared of going on a date, which is why they watch porn and lock themselves in their room incessantly. And so this fear that is pervasive in our young men has caused us to opt out of taking healthy risks. I’m not talking about inappropriate risks, like the risks that I took when I was a younger man. I’m talking about healthy risks, age appropriate developmental risks, and that I think has robbed us of some of the heart work and the soul work that is really important to being a young man.

Brett McKay:

You also talk about how parents might’ve unintentionally contributed to creating this second type of young man. What’s going on there you think?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think it comes from a good place, and I’ve seen over the course of 15 to 20 years of doing this work, 15 years of running my own business, 20 years in mental health in general, I have seen parents’ awareness of mental health skyrocket. Parents are knowledgeable, they understand the resources, they speak the language. They even understand basic symptomology, even parents who haven’t been through or around therapy with a kid or have had a kid with mental health challenges. Your baseline parent understands and speaks the language of mental health. That was not the case when I first started. And so that has bore a lot of fruit in terms of the way we engage with our kids emotionally, but also just in terms of how you triage an issue in a situation. So it certainly comes from a good place. I think the unintended consequence is we pathologize, right?

We pathologize a lot of behavior, parents pathologize. And so if your kid is acting out, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s got a mood disorder, and those things may very well in fact be the case. And so far be it for me to say in all situations that’s not true. But sometimes he’s just not accountable to his behaviors or sometimes he’s acting out and being manipulative or sometimes he just doesn’t feel like doing it and he goes in his room and he games for seven hours instead because he has the autonomy to do so and there aren’t the checks and balances in the system that will make it so that he can’t do those things. And so I don’t think that mental health is always the reason why someone is struggling. And I think parents jump to conclusions sometimes around pointing a finger at their son’s pathology as being the rationale for what’s happening when in fact a behavioral approach can yield better fruit.

Brett McKay:

And going back to the idea of anxiety, I think a lot of parents are anxious these days for their kids because I mean life in the 21st century, it is pretty complicated and complex. And for sure there this anxiety that, oh, my kid is not going to be able to make it. There’s a lot more you have to do to establish yourself in the world economically. So a lot of parents are like, I’m just going to do this for my kid. I remember when I went to college, and here’s a great example, when I went to college, my parents were like, oh, you want to go to college? Great. And that was it. I had to fill out all the forms and I was like, dad, I need this IRS stuff for the FAFSA thing. And they’re like, okay, here you go. But I had to do it on my own. It wasn’t like they were holding my hand. And then I see parents, my peers today who’ve got kids going to college, they’re doing all this stuff to get their kid into college, signing up for these prep classes, doing these elaborate college tours, helping them refine their essays. And I’m thinking that did not happen 20, 30 years ago.

Vincent Benevento:

Not even close. No, not even close. And talk about, it’s a really good call by you, Brett, but talk about contributing factors to the collective anxiety. I remember filling out those applications literally in pencil at my dining room table in the year 1998, so it’s not that long ago. And I did ’em all by myself. And there was no private SAT tutor and there was no educational consultant to pick my colleges for me. And no one filled out my FAFSA stuff. I did it first kid sink or swim, figure it out, go to college. So the world is just not that way. And I mean, listen, I know a lot of people in this space, they do extraordinary work in this space, the college space, the private university space, and the game that is getting your kid into the best school humanly possible to set ’em up on a trajectory for life.

And what I can tell you is the emotional pressure that kids experience as a result of this conveyor belt that has been socially constructed for them, whether they fall alongside it or not. And by the way, I got kids who mostly don’t fall on that conveyor belt and are trying to be shoehorned into it has a lot of challenging consequences for kids and for families. And I see a lot of kids who parents elect to send them to college because there’s no other option. You have to drive around with a sticker on the back of your car that says where junior’s going to college, whether they should be going to college or not. And so I get a lot of parents who call me in November the following semester and say, Hey, he didn’t make it. What do we do now? And I don’t think that the college is for everybody, and you have to go to a top 50 school framework is not one that every single person should subscribe to. Not every parent, not every kid. And I think the people who are having awareness of that in advance are far better suited than the people who are learning that lesson on the backside.

Brett McKay:

And then when parents do, because it comes from a good place again, they want to help their kids succeed.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure.

Brett McKay:

But when they do that stuff for their kids, sort of the unspoken messages, you can’t do this. I got to take care of it. And then that just carries over to other areas they like, well, yeah, you can’t get a job on your own. I got to pull some levers to do that for you. So it just disempowers these young men who are already disempowered.

Vincent Benevento:

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And the job example is a perfect example because most of the people, I mean, I’m in Westport, I’m in Westchester, I’m in West Hartford, Connecticut, like pretty affluent pockets with a lot of high profile, high influence people. And so when their kid is struggling, usually dad will come into the center and say, Hey, I’m going to get my kid a job and such and such, what do you think? And I say, don’t you dare get your kid a job. Instead, let’s support him in the process of him finding it for himself and navigating and figuring out where his strengths are and where his weaknesses lie. And that’ll position us much better to help him down the line than it will if we just scoop something up and put it in his bread basket.

Brett McKay:

So in your book, you’ve laid out several principles that guide your approach to helping young men that come to your clinics, these sort of disengaged young guys. I want to walk through some of these. The first one is brick by brick. And this is about helping young men build a life for themselves. Why is this the first principle in your philosophy?

Vincent Benevento:

Because I think that to do anything of substance in your life, men have to commit themselves to a long focused approach. And I think the world sends quick fix messages. The world sends messages around both instant gratification and overnight celebrity. I’m advocating a different message. I’m advocating that anything I’ve ever built, whether it’s been my marriage or my relationships with my kids or my business or meaningful relationships, any of those things that matter to me deeply were patient in their growth process, were things that were step by step one after the next, next, next. Were filled with trial and iteration and reset and debriefing and learning. We’re messy at times and we’re not a straight line, none of them. And I think that’s the case. When you build something of substance across life, you don’t usually finish exactly the way that you start. And when you make a blueprint for something, typically there’s unforeseen challenges that come up along the way. And as long as you keep working step-by-step, day by day, brick by brick, it’s a good mantra to set you up for success in whatever you’re doing.

Brett McKay:

So how do you help a young man start becoming a builder? So a young man who can look for a job, find a job, apply to college by themselves, build a relationship. How do you help a young man who just hasn’t done that before? He’s one of those passive anesthetized type young men.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you begin with the acknowledgement that at some point every person hadn’t done it. So me, you everybody, we all had to get started somewhere. And so for me, I get really excited about vision work. And what I mean by that is helping a young man get excited about crafting a vision for where he wants to go, young man or man, because we see people as young as 14 and we see guys into their early thirties crafting, co crafting, leading, sharing a vision for what ignites you, what feels right, what have you felt purpose in doing, what have you done that’s been exciting for you, and just dream boarding it and vision crafting and helping them get excited. One, because if this is their first blush with mental health supports, it debunks their preconceived notions about what it is. I want a guy coming into my office and feeling good enough that he wants to come back the next time of his own accord.

And typically this kind of vision work will draw them in that way. And so we start with vision crafting and developing a sense for where you want to go and what you want to do and what you want to be. And from there we get tangible, we do research, we answer questions, we go out and we learn through experience and service and shadowing and job acquisition and all these different processes, and we teach and instruct and we fill in the gaps as needed. So it starts very broad and very opaque to just cultivate enthusiasm, and then we get down to it sort of step-by-step brick by brick.

Brett McKay:

So that’s that action part. You’re not just having a weekly session where you’re talking about things.

Vincent Benevento:

No.

Brett McKay:

Maybe you have that session to lay out the vision, but then you’re going to assign this guy homework and then there’s going to be follow ups. Like did you get that application? Yes. Okay. Did you fill it out and turn in the application? I mean, that’s what it is. It’s a lot of coaching and mentoring

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, and it’s positioning a guy to be better off than when he started. And I don’t just mean broadly around the process, I mean in that hour, part of what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get you farther in the hour. You come see me that week than you were when you came in. So you come when you go see Vince and you think to yourself, wow, we’re going to get a lot of stuff done today. So one of my favorite processes to do with a guy, and it seems so simple, is to come in and work with a guy who’s never had a resume before, a young kid, 15, 16, 17, now sometimes 18 years old. But listen, let’s bang out your resume and literally hand the kit of paper that reflects to him everything he’s done in his life to walk out of that session.

And it doesn’t have to be sexy and it doesn’t have to light the world on fire. And I’d started doing this 15 years ago, and I know you could throw it in your chat, GBT, you could do it in two seconds, but the co-constructing of that process to build what you’ve done and to reflect to you what you’ve done so you can hand it to your parents and be proud of it, or you could put it in somebody’s hands and go look for a job. Now that’s actually reflecting to you self-worth about your own achievements and positioning you to get excited about the next thing we’re going to do next week. So that’s just one example, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s a very simple exercise that denotes how we get kids moving forward in that very tangible way.

Brett McKay:

I think if you’re a mentor or a parent, you can start doing this with your kids now. Take those basic life skills that you just take for granted and then actively, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a resume. We’re going to, I did this with my kids. They wanted a bank account. I was like, okay, let’s go to the bank. And I made them talk to the bank teller.

Vincent Benevento:

I love that.

Brett McKay:

You’re going to have to figure this out. And I say, here’s all the stuff you need to get your social security number. You have all this information. And I mean, the thing is, this stuff can be tedious and it’s boring, but it’s important work

Vincent Benevento:

A hundred percent. And I mean, I even think about when my kids were young, we’d go out to dinner and I remember watching people, their kids were like 10 and they would order for their kids in the restaurant. And when my kids were five, four, and two, they were ordering food for themselves just because building that requisite skill is essential for everything. You need to have a conversation with somebody, look ’em in the eye, and to whatever extent is age appropriate, engage with another human being. Right now, the hardest part is the consistent and persistent commitment on behalf of the parents because you’re going to get resistance very often. It’s so much easier to just opt out on one or two or three occasions, and then a habit that you’re trying to cultivate gets extinguished because you don’t consistently curate it. So the bank example that you gave, it’s fantastic. We should be trying to impart these life lessons and skills to our kids beginning as young as is appropriate. It just takes a lot of energy to do that over time.

Brett McKay:

Here’s another example. This is with my daughter. She’s 12 and she got this bad grade on an assignment and she thought, I did the work. I don’t agree with the teacher. And she was really upset and she asked Dad, can you email? I’m like, no, I’m not doing that. And she says, well, I’m just going to write him an email. I was like, no, you’re not going to write an email. I want you tomorrow to have a conversation with him. That night we roleplayed it. I was like, I’m going to be your teacher and you’re going to be, you talk about how you’re going to approach this without getting emotional and accusatory, and we workshoped it, and then she did it. She had this tough conversation with an authority figure challenging him on a grade, and it worked out great. He saw, okay, I messed up there. It was really productive and I was really proud of her, and I could see that she was proud of herself that she did that. Right?

Vincent Benevento:

No, yeah. And that’s how you build esteem. Esteem and purpose and self-belief is cultivated by kids doing for themselves independently with support and with guidance. But had you written the email to the teacher, you’re robbing your daughter of that rep. And part of what we’re always trying to do with parents is helping them support but not do for and enable.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s brick by brick. So just start helping these young people, young men in particular start doing things on their own and it’s going to take a lot of support, but that’s important. The second principle is name it to tame it. What do you mean by that?

Vincent Benevento:

Being radically honest with yourself about your strengths, but also your challenges. And I’m speaking mostly in terms of the realm of mental health diagnosis and stigma. I’m pretty transparent in the book around my own struggles with substance use and my mood, and I’ve had a diagnosed mood disorder since I was 19 years old. I was hospitalized for it when I was 19 years old, and I was an alcoholic for years prior and years post until I was able to kind of clean my life up and get my act together. But it was really my ability to acknowledge and come to grips with those two diagnoses that were the prescription for me getting well and the acknowledgement of the limitations I now faced as a 19-year-old kid in college who was a substance user, who needed to figure out how to manage my life. It was those limitations that actually provided me with freedom and helped me relearn how to exist as a human being in the world. And so that was a very difficult process, that was shameful and humbling for me. But to come to terms in an honest way, which occurred over a series of years, gave me information, helped me take the right steps, helped me understand my boundaries, things that I can do shouldn’t do, and positioned me to be successful really for the rest of my life, truth be told.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you’re primarily focusing on working with young men who have a diagnosed mental health issue. But I think this is applicable, even if a young man doesn’t have a mental health problem, like you said earlier, a lot of young men, you can call them emotionally illiterate, they have these emotions, but they don’t know what they are. And because they don’t know what they are, they don’t know how to manage them. And so helping young men learn how to recognize, okay, I’m feeling frustrated. I might think it’s anger, it’s not anger, it’s just more of a frustration when you frame it like that, it’s like, okay, I can do something about that now. Or I do this a lot with young kids who are feeling scared, nervous about something. A lot of ’em will say, I’m just really anxious. And I’m like, no, hey, look. Yeah, you’re nervous, but that’s good. It’s not like something bad’s happening to you, it’s just getting you ready to take on this challenge of like, oh, okay. Yeah, that reframe helps them be more proactive with life.

Vincent Benevento:

And those clarifying questions, Brett, I think are super important. So okay, you’re angry. What does that look like for you? How does your anger show up in different situations? Are you blowing holes through the wall? Are you yelling at mom? Are you swearing? Are you not doing your homework? What do you do when you’re angry? And from there, we can develop ways to address that in different fashions depending upon how it shows up. But I think like you said, also, it’s the emotional fluency piece. Guys don’t understand basic emotions besides sadness, which they typically can’t articulate and anger. So I mean, I remember being a guy at 19 years old who was so confounded with my emotional world and so limited in my ability to articulate it, that I just showed up as angry literally all the time. And I think it was essential for me to become better equipped at communicating where I was emotionally, right? I’m ashamed because I’m fearful, because I’m sad, because I’m lonely, because these are all nuanced offshoots of anger that boys and young men and men experience, but naming them well and naming them precisely again gives the prescription about how to approach the solution going forward.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s like a Rumpelstiltskin, remember that story? Once you know his name, you have power over him. It’s the same thing with your emotions.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay:

Once you name, it’s like you have power over it.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So it is just all about helping these young men become more emotionally literate and not confuse maybe frustration or shame or anxiety for anger, because I think that’s what a lot of young guys do. Whenever they feel those things, they express it through anger. It’s probably not anger, it’s something else, but help them understand that and those messier

Vincent Benevento:

Ones, the fear and the shame and the hurt and the regret. Those emotions that are dirty words to boys and young men, giving yourself permission to hold the ability to articulate that and to communicate it. And I think this is where parents can move mountains in their ability to model that in a healthy way for their kids in a setting of difficulty or challenge or conflict in the home. When you are fighting in front of your son, how do you speak to your spouse? How do you speak to your son? How do you speak to your daughter? And what do you do to communicate your own emotional response in the moment? These are the ways that parents can do incredible things to support their kid moving more towards emotional fluency.

Brett McKay:

Another principle that you have in your philosophy towards helping young men is you got to help them find their wild. Why is tapping into your, well, first off, what do you mean by your wild? What is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Wild for me is a rejuvenation of the soul. And I think about it as losing it, right? So it’s becoming reacquainted with the things that make us feel alive. I think there’s a very primal natural peace that is deconditioned out of us as men, as we move through life and as we move from young men, competitive, moving through physical prowess, activities that cause us to evaluate ourselves against other people and compete in large groups or packs. When you’re driving around a minivan, doing a Girl Scout cookie drive and reporting to the same cubicle for 10 hours a day, five days a week, those things are the opposite of wild. So I think that as the lifespan continues, and I talk to guys in their thirties, forties, and fifties all the time, they just don’t feel alive and they feel bored and they feel underappreciated and they feel like their value is waning and they’re not alive. And I think the process of finding your wild is re-engaging with your soul and finding the things that used to make you feel alive again.

Brett McKay:

How do you do that? So this is for older guys, we’ll talk about helping young guys find their wild. But let’s say you’re a middle aged guy and you’re feeling just kind of that middle aged burnout, malaise. How do you capture that wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Again, I think it takes effort. I think it takes effort. So you have to seek it. You have to plan a trip with your kid and go ice fishing somewhere. You have to finally stop complaining about the job that you hate and develop a strategy and walk out and start again. You have to take your wife on a getaway to an island that you plan because she plans literally everything. You have to make plans with a guy and go away. You have to try a new hobby and do a new thing. You have to put yourself out there. And so I think a lot of the men that I talk to are highly isolated and they go through their routine and they sit in their house and they, particularly in the winter, they are not actively doing new things that cause them to reevaluate the world around them and test themselves to be better. Part of being wild is competing against yourself and testing yourself to see what you have the capacity to do. And that requires planning and time and resources, but I think the yield is worthwhile.

Brett McKay:

What about a young guy, one of these anesthetized young men we’ve been talking about that just have no wild in them, maybe they’ve never found their wild. How do you help them find their wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think when we think about what has been lost in the society that we live in now, it’s this male mentorship, male specific mentorship. So 200 years ago when you decided that you wanted to become a blacksmith, your dad was a blacksmith and your grandfather was a blacksmith, and your great grandfather and his father were also blacksmiths. So you grew up learning everything from them and mentoring under them, which not only showed their favor and their investment in you, but it taught you all the requisite skills that you need to learn. Now, we’ve deconditioned men. They don’t do physical things. Young men, especially young men, are not often doing physical things or many of them can kind of extricate themselves from doing physical things by just doing work behind a screen behind a door. So I think we mentor young men and show them and teach them and reflect our favor and investment in them. We take them literally out into the world, into nature like our predecessors, and sit around and tell stories and blaze a trail and hike and climb and grab a pole and fish and engage in nature to be reacquainted with their physical wild. And we communicate with them in ways where we demonstrate what they have the capacity to do. We teach them a skill, we let them learn a skill, we show them that they are capable of a thing, and they begin to believe in themselves over time by trying new things and succeeding.

Brett McKay:

I think as a mentor, as a father, one thing you do for boys, teenage boys is to expose them to as many different things as possible so that they can find, you talk about this in the books, they can find their thing because a lot of young men, they might not be excited about anything. They haven’t found the thing that excites them, and they might not know they’d be excited about something until they actually try it. So I do think as a parent you might have to sort of nudge kind of like, Hey, you’re going to do this thing even if you don’t think you want to do it because there’s a chance you might like the thing that I’m having you do.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I saw this. We did this. We took some boys rock climbing at church one night, and this one kid, he was kind of a little passive, not confident, and he didn’t think he was going to like it, but then he ended up liking it. He actually signed up for a membership later on. It became like a rock climber. That was great. That’s a perfect example of finding your wild. You have to expose ’em to stuff. You talk about relationships in your book and this idea of mentorship, but also relationships between just having friends, men having friends, and you talk about a lot of the young men you work with, they don’t have any friends. Why are young men so lonely these days? What’s going on there?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s really sad, but the number one reason for referral documented by the client coming into Causeway is to make friends. And we have countless kids who come through the center who set the goal of having one friend. I’m not talking about girlfriend, I’m not talking about boyfriend, I’m talking one friend. And so to me that just speaks to where we stand, where it is difficult for young people to connect authentically with one another. It is easy for people to remain isolated. And so I think we have to work to practice relationship. And I think we see a lot of guys who are marginalized socially and who struggle socially. Guys on the spectrum, guys who have social challenges, guys who’ve been bullied, guys who are depressed and anxious, guys who haven’t had a lot of success in making friends. But our message to them is to find their tribe and find their people and cultivate the relationships from there.

So if it’s an online community of people and those relationships are fostered predominantly online, we can start there and then potentially scale up to person to person engagement from there. If they’re kids who have a specific interest, be it in Legos or in music or in building something out of wood or in fishing or in whatever, there are communities of people who can develop relationships with them, with shared experience, with shared interests, which makes it a lot easier. And so part of where I think mentorship as we do it is effective is we can model those skills that have eroded over time. We can take Junior to grab a cup of coffee down the street and just kick it with him and get him feeling comfortable talking to someone in a public space. We can have him go down to the town green and throw the Frisbee disc around and have him do an activity that he can then do with someone else.

We can have him just walk around the grocery store and chat with somebody and get a sense of what the body language is as we’re watching him so that we can help him read a conversation more effectively. So when we’re doing mentorship with guys who struggle socially, there’s a didactic component where we’re teaching and we’re gap filling, and we’re helping them understand the things that they can do differently through feedback exchange, but there’s a heavy, heavy relational component because we’re leveraging the relationship and the trust that we’ve built with somebody to get them to do a thing that they wouldn’t otherwise try. And I think that’s the difference. Parents struggle with their kids because they can’t just get them off the dock, they can’t get ’em to try the thing. We’re typically successful because we have the quality of the relationship where we can get a kid to buy in and at least try something. And hopefully he’ll like it more than he thought he would.

Brett McKay:

I’ve got a friend, he doesn’t have any sons, but he has a son-in-law, and he noticed the son-in-law didn’t have a lot of male friends, and he’s like, this is a problem. You need to have friends. You’re a young guy, you should have friends. And he’s like, well, I don’t know how to do it. I’m just so busy with work and I just don’t know where to connect with guys. And he says, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to host, we’ll call the mastermind group at my place once a week and just invite some guys, you know, don’t have to be best friends with them, invite them over and we’ll just talk shop, we’ll talk about work, we’ll talk about life. And he has to model. He is this 50-year-old guy, basically. He says, I’m doing remedial work here with these young men. I had to model what it looks like, and it’s a lot of work, but he’s like, it’s paying off. These guys are starting to connect. They’re starting to form some friendships and it’s enriching their lives.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, for sure. And I got to be honest, Brett, I actually did it in my life. So when I started to reevaluate the way in which I was spending my time and I really dialed back my commitment to work, I found out that I was almost spending too much time at the house and started working from home more, and me and my wife were around each other too much. I was around the kids maybe a little too much, and I felt that there was this sort of missing piece for me, and it was in the name of relationship with other guys. And so I just started asking guys to go grab coffee, and it was something that I didn’t do for a decade professionally, and I just started. If I met a guy and I hit it off with him at the ball field or in town, or our wives were friendly, but we never really hung out before, I would just grab coffee with somebody and it got to the point where four or five, six hours a week, I’m just having a coffee with a friend, which is good.

It’s good balance for me as a man. It helps me getting out into the community and meeting and talking to people. It makes me visible. It gives me things to talk about in instances, some of them. It allows me to help somebody and see a need and meet a need. So I think male relationship as guys is something that we must continuously practice, even if we’re decent at it or pretty good at it because the force that the accountability provides is also very important. We need to have other guys reflecting how our decisions feel to them, and it makes us better versions of ourselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah it’s the whole iron sharpens iron.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s right. Yeah. 

Brett McKay:

Well, Vincent, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, appreciate it very much and it has been awesome. Thank you. So you can check us out at our website, causewaycollaborative.com. That’s the organization. I have a personal website, which is sharperformen.com. My Insta is @VinceBeneventolpc, and obviously the book is available on Amazon, and we hope you guys check it out and enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

All right. Well, Vince Benevento, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Vincent Benevento:

Thank you, Brett. Really appreciate the time, man. Thanks.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vince Benevento, the author of the book, Boys Will Be Men. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, sharperformen.com. Also, check out our show notes where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There’s a lot of debate these days about what it means to be a man. But maybe the answer is simpler than we think, and a lot of masculinity just comes down to confident competence. A broad set of know-how. The ability to get stuff done. The capacity to move through the world with purpose and skill.

As someone who’s lived several lives in one, Elliot Ackerman certainly embodies that ethos. He’s a decorated Marine, a former CIA paramilitary officer, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, and now the writer of A Man Should Know, a column at The Free Press that explores the small but significant skills that shape a man’s life.

Today on the show, Elliot and I talk about why young men are struggling, how intention, discipline, and competence can change the way a man carries himself, and a few of the specific skills a man should know — from how to wear a watch to how to give a eulogy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Elliot’s novels
• Elliot’s “A Man Should Know:” columns:
  • How to Introduce Yourself
  • How to Be a Friend
  • How to Own a Watch
• Fields of Fire by James Webb
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• AoM Article: 100 Skills Every Man Should Know
• AoM Skills Archives
• AoM Podcast #307: Make Your Bed, Change the World
• AoM Article: 10 Ways to Be a Better Husband Today
• AoM Article: How to Choose a Watch
• AoM Article: How to Give a Eulogy
• AoM Article: A Eulogy for My Grandfather, William D. Hurst
• The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village by Michael Herzfeld
• AoM Article: MacGyver Manhood and the Art of Masculine Improvisation
• Free Press discount code: subscribe at thefp.com/manliness, and save 10% off your first year

Connect With Elliot Ackerman

• Elliot on IG
• Elliot on X

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. There’s a lot of debate these days about what it means to be a man, but maybe the answer is simpler than we think. And a lot of masculinity just comes down to confident competence, a broad set of know-how, the ability to get stuff done, the capacity to move through the world with purpose and skill. As someone who’s lived several lives in one, Elliot Ackerman certainly embodies that ethos. He’s a decorated Marine, a former CIA paramilitary officer, a national book award nominated novelist, and now the writer of “A man should know” column at the free press that explores the small but significant skills that shape a man’s life. Elliot and I talk about why young men are struggling, how intention, discipline, and competence can change the way a man carries himself. And a few of the specific skills a man should know from how to wear a watch and to how to give eulogy. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/competence. All right, Elliot Ackerman, welcome to the show.

Elliot Ackerman:

Thanks so much for having me on.

Brett McKay:

So you’ve got an interesting background. You’re a Marine who served multiple tours in the Middle East and then Southeast Asia. Then you went on to work as a CIA officer, and now you write literature, you’re a fiction author. Let’s talk about your military career. Why did you join? Was it something where you had a family history of military service or was it something else?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, no, I didn’t have a family history of military service. I guess I’d say there are really three reasons why I joined. I’d say first is I grew up overseas for a while, well, in the UK, but even being in the UK, I think it kind of gave me a little bit of an outsider’s perspective of many of the benefits that we have in our life as Americans, and that made me want to give back and serve. So that was part of it. Another part was I think I wanted a job, whether I was good at my job really mattered and the stakes were high. So I guess in another way, I want to say I wanted responsibility at a young age, and you certainly get that in the military and in the Marine Corps. Then I would say the last thing was I was kind of like that kid who never stopped playing with his GI Joes. I always had this fascination with the military. So when the time came, I think those three forces kind of led me into the Marines.

Brett McKay:

So as a Marine, you earned the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and then after the military you joined the CIA Special Operations Unit as a paramilitary operations officer. And then after that, you transitioned to being a fiction writer. How and why did you make that shift?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, when I was getting out of the service, I searched for about eight years, had a positive experience when they were tough eight years, but my experience was very positive, but it just sort of made the decision that it wasn’t the only thing that I wanted to do with my life. There were other things I wanted to do, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what all of them were. So I got out, I went out working in politics for a couple of years, and a few folks along the way had encouraged me, said, Hey, maybe you should write a book. Have you ever thought about writing a book about some of your experiences? And I didn’t really want to write that type of kind of like a, “Hey bro, there I was” type memoir. That didn’t really seem, I dunno, it wasn’t really my style, but there’d been a lot of books that meant a lot to me when I was heading into the service.

And most of those books actually had been novels, books like Jim Webb’s, Fields of Fire, if you know who Jim Webb is, he was the Secretary of the Navy and a senator. But before that, he was a young marine infantry officer in Vietnam and he wrote a novel about his experiences or books like Tim O’Brien’s, The Things they Carried. So I sort of had this inclination that, okay, I do want to write about my experiences, but I want to try to write a novel about them. And so that got me into writing fiction and I just sort of sat down, wrote one book and then another, and then the rest is history.

Brett McKay:

And so the themes that you write about, are they based around war?

Elliot Ackerman:

I think conflict is a reoccurring theme in many of my books as are other themes like marriage, brotherhood, politics. I’ve certainly written a couple of political thrillers at this point in my career, but yes, oftentimes you’ll find sort of conflict or the aftermath of conflict lurking around. And the pages of my books,

Brett McKay:

Besides Jim Webb and some of these other writers who wrote specifically about war and maybe had a military background, were there any other authors that you looked to for inspiration?

Elliot Ackerman:

I think one of the things that’s remarkable when you look at American letters in particular is how much there is that is written about war. But we don’t necessarily consider a war novel you like Jim Webb’s Field of Fire, that’s a war novel or The Things They Carried or Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn. But you can see war shot through so many of our books. So inspiration for me, sure, for my money, I think the greatest war novel ever written out of the Second World War is The Catcher in the Rye. And a lot of people don’t think of The Catcher in the Rye. There’s a book that’s about war, think of it, a book about this guy named Holden Caulfield, and he is a boarding school kid and he’s wandering around New York City and it’s this sort of novel that’s about youthful disaffectation.

But if you know anything about JD Salinger who wrote The Catcher in the Rye, he landed on D-Day, he fought in the hurricane forest and he liberated the concentration camps. And when you read Catcher in the Rye, a book that’s sort of known for the voice of Holden Caulfield, that voice of that disaffected young man is really the voice of an American veteran. I mean, you can hear how disaffected JD Salinger is in Holden Caulfield’s voice. And the last line of that book is don’t tell anybody anything otherwise you start missing everyone. And that is definitely the voice of a veteran. So for me, many of the writers who also inspire me are ones who found different ways to write about conflict and process conflict like Salinger did.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. Yeah, I never would’ve thought of Catcher on the Rye as a war novel.

Elliot Ackerman:

If you look up on Salinger, you can see the war is sort of all over his writings in a few places. He takes it head on, but mostly he doesn’t. It’s always sort of adjacent. And like Tim O’Brien when he says, he says that he writes about war so that he can write about other things. And I’ve certainly felt that in my work. I mean, when you tell you’re writing about war, it sounds like you’re going to write a book that’s just all about tank movements and aircraft battles in my books. It’s not necessarily what’s going on. The war is there, it’s present, it’s impacting the actions of the characters. But fundamentally, the books are about those characters themselves. And the types of books that I enjoy reading are usually pretty character driven, are not just about the technical aspects of war.

Brett McKay:

You’ve got a new column out at the Free Press, it’s kind of different from what you’ve done with your fiction work. It’s called A Man Should Know. Every week you’re taking on a topic or an idea, a skill that you think a man should know. What was the impetus behind this column?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, I do a lot of work as a journalist. So I write pieces from time to time. Usually my kind of forte is national security stuff, but I was actually, I was at a party and I bumped into Barry Weiss who runs the Free Press, and she and I have known each other for many, many years and I’ve written for her for many, many years. And I was wearing a suit and she said, Hey, that’s a really nice suit. And basically I told her the story behind the suit was that when I left the military and went to go work at the CIA was when I was back in the US I was going to have to wear a suit to work every day. And I had no suits, I had nothing to wear. So my father who had a business career basically said, Hey, it was a gift for you getting out of the Marines.

Go into my closet and pick out three suits and we’ll go to the tailor together and we’ll get them kind of fitted for you so you can wear ’em. And they were really well-made suits. And my father has since passed away unfortunately, but I still wear those suits to this day. So Barry just asked me to write a column for her about why you should wear a suit, why it’s worth putting on a suit and having tailored clothing. So I wrote that column when people seem to like it. And so this series of columns sort of comes out of that. And there’s a lot of conversations about masculinity and what it means to be a man. And I’m not trying to finger wag anyone and tell them how to be a man or that these little things like wearing a suit or how to buy a watch or any of that differentiate you and make you a good man or a bad man.

What I do know is that in my own life’s journey, when I think about so many of the men and women who kind of taught me some of the skills that I just value as a man, they’re often just these little things like my father taking me to the tailor, being like, Hey, I’m going to get this suit cuff for you. Here’s what you need to know when you buy a suit. Here’s the questions to ask. Or a fighter pilot friend of mine who kind of taught me about watches and gave me the theory for the case of, Hey, why it’s worth investing in a nice watch that you’ll wear through your whole life. And so these are all little things that are always framed to me like, Hey, a man should know how to do this. And I think oftentimes we can talk about masculinity with real specific things, little skills that are just passed down from one generation to another. And so that’s sort of what I’m trying to do in this column

Brett McKay:

As I’ve read them, it seems to me like the overarching aim of this column is to encourage competency in men. Why do you think competence is such an important aspect of a man’s sense of self?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, I think it’s definitely competence, Brett. And I’d say in addition with that competence, it’s also intentionality, waking up every day with a plan. What am I going to do today? What am I going to accomplish? How am I going to move the ball forward in my life, whether that’s in my professional life, my personal life, just all of these little things of living with intention. And oftentimes it starts with just with the very small things that we do, you have to be competent in those small things. It’s worth knowing how to just get yourself dressed so you present well, understanding how to introduce yourself to somebody else. If someone invites you over to their home for a meal, understanding how to thank them properly so they know how much you appreciate them having you over. And so often these are little things like we know them when we’re adults and we don’t necessarily know how we know them, but looking at maybe younger people today, I’m like, I wonder if anyone is sitting down with that intentionality and talking to young men and saying like, Hey, this is how you tie a tie. And if someone hasn’t taught you how to tie a tie, I don’t pick up my column. I’ll teach you how. But it’s worth knowing these things

Brett McKay:

And the work I’ve done with the Art of Manliness for almost 20 years now. One thing I’ve noticed is that men, but particularly young men, they want to feel like they’re good at something. They want to feel like they can take care of business. They want to feel like they’re useful. And I mean, I think I’ve seen this, there’s sort of this sense, I think that a lot of men feel like they’re not useful anymore or they don’t have the competency to navigate the world today. And I mean, it really does something to your sense of self and your sense of ability to have an impact on the world. And it’s always amazing when I work with young men and my church and we have Wednesday night activity where we’re just teaching a skill. And for some of these kids, it’s really basic stuff like, man, why didn’t you learn this at home? But when they learn it, their eyes light up. They’re like, oh my gosh, I can do this now. And it changes. It really does. It changes how they approach the world. They walk with a little bit more confidence.

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. And I think that competency, I mean, I put in the word intentionality. Another word I throw out there, just purpose. I mean all of us to be happy in life, every human being, whether you’re a men or a woman, I mean, you need to have a sense of purpose. And men, we derive our purpose a little bit differently. And a lot of times it’s just in these sort of hard technical skills. And so it’s like how you build a fire with a little spark. And sometimes that little spark can be like Admiral McRaven says, just make your bed. Or in my life it’s like, and this is probably a habit from my military days, I work out, I get exercise six days a week, I do a workout. And at this point in my life, I’m no longer doing that because I need to be able to go on special operations missions.

But I do it now just for my psychological wellbeing that once I’ve got that workout done, it’s like I’ve tackled the first hard thing of the day and now I can go do other hard things during the day and accomplish my goals. And at the end of the day of accomplishing goals, some small, some large, I feel a sense of satisfaction. But if you’ve never done that, if you’ve never made that your daily practice, it’s difficult to understand abstractly the benefits of just doing these small things. And a man should know in the column. I’m just sort of identifying some small things that are worth knowing how to do that will probably make you feel better about yourself and help you live a little more intentionality and a little more purpose.

Brett McKay:

As you’ve navigated just rubbing shoulders with different people in your career in the Marines and then your career as a fiction writer, are you seeing something, the wider culture that is maybe contributing to this sense where a lot of younger men in particular don’t feel like they have competence? Have you looked at that big social issue and kind of diagnosed it?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, I mean, I can just say based off anecdotally, and I’m the father of three boys and I also have a daughter, and the way we speak to young men is sometimes different. I think every young person, no matter where they are or who they are, whether they’re a boy, a girl, gay, straight, whatever, they need to be spoken to with intention by someone, and they need to feel like they’re seen. Someone sees who they are and speaks to that version of who they are. And I think for whatever reason, in the last however many years, our culture has shied away from speaking to just young straight dudes with a lot of intentionality. It’s sort of almost become a faux pa to speak that way. And the reciprocal is you’ve got all these young men who are just walking around and no one’s told them how to do all the things they need to know how to do.

People have just sort of expected them to learn it through osmosis and they don’t know how. And it’s causing a lack of confidence. And I would also say a lack of purpose in their lives. So there isn’t one solution for all of this, but I certainly think that speaking to young men with more intentionality in our culture is a good thing, and it’s going to help us produce better men, which is good for everyone, and which is certainly very good for women. I mean, if you’re a feminist, you should really want men to be spoken to with intentionality because you want good men.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I know from my experience as a teenager, I remember there’s always those moments where you had another adult man treat you like an adult man, you were capable of doing adult things, and those moments are transformative. And I think a lot of young men are lacking that. I think a lot of times they’re just being scolded and told, Hey, something’s wrong with you. But I think if we have these higher expectations and expect more and talk to them and treat them as individuals who are capable of doing things, it goes a long way.

Elliot Ackerman:

It sure does. Listen, one thing I got the memo on in a big way in my time in the Marine Corps is how much you can expect of a young person. I mean, I saw 18 and 19, 20-year-old guys taking on huge responsibilities in incredibly stressful situations and doing it with extreme competency. So the idea that young people aren’t ready for these types of responsibilities or just aren’t capable because of their youth is a fallacy. I mean, oftentimes the lack of capability is rooted in a lack of confidence. So how do you start building that confidence? And I think it’s just sort of one little brick at a time, and each one of those bricks is just doing something each day with some type of intention.

Brett McKay:

Going back to the military, I’m always amazed whenever I read these histories of World War II about how 20-year-old kids, they’re like, alright, kid, you’re going to fly this B 17 and you can do it and you can do it. And they did it.

Elliot Ackerman:

I think HW Bush was 21 when he was shot down in the Pacific. Yeah, it’s crazy. So for whatever reason, and we can talk about those reasons, but the sort of the goalposts have moved in terms of what we expect of young people and holding a young man too long in this sort of childlike twilight, it isn’t good for them. They might not be able to articulate it, but they want to have that responsibility. It will make them feel a sense of confidence and happiness that might elude them otherwise.

Brett McKay:

And I think it’s one thing, it’s important to expect great things from young men, but I think what you’re talking about here is that you also have to show them how to do it. You can’t just be like, Hey guy, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you doing this stuff? Well, you got to show them how to do it along the way.

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. And the column I’m writing, a man should know. I mean, listen, do I think the world begins or ends if somebody knows how to pick the right suit? No, I don’t. You know what I mean? Or wear the right watch or tie a bow tie or write a thank you note. No, I don’t. But these are little bits of kindling that if you adopt a few of these things into your life and you’re trying to get your life to have more intentionality in it, that’s how you do it. Just little bits of competence every day. That’s how you get big things done just gradually through little acts of intentionality.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One of my favorite writers is Steven Covey, and he talks about in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, this idea of your circle of influence, which is the things you can control, and then the things outside of that you can’t control. And one of his big ideas is that the way you increase your circle of influence is you do small things, just like the little things you have control over. And then as you do that, your sense of agency and efficacy increases so that you can do bigger and bigger things. And then your circle of influence expands.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yes. And this is not new knowledge. I mean, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, but just because it’s not new knowledge doesn’t mean that there are young people who don’t understand this or know any of these things. And I think as you were talking about the first time someone talked to you when you were younger, like a man that had a big impact on you. And I think for people who are getting left behind or not having those opportunities, they have to sort of find it on their own or look into the culture for it. And I fear the culture hasn’t been doing a good job on that account for quite some time now. But I think for young people, it’s just the little things each day can get you to a really positive result.

Brett McKay:

How did your time in the Marines increase your own feeling of intentionality, competence, and confidence?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, I mean, listen, when I decided I wanted to be a Marine, I was the furthest thing you could imagine from a Marine. I was 17 years old, I had never played a varsity sport. I was like a skater rat who sagged his pants and had long, curly hair almost down to my shoulders. And I sort of had this revelation one summer between my junior and senior year of high school that I wanted to go into the service. This is what I wanted to do with my life. And again, I went to my father and I had the standards, the physical fitness standards that I would need to meet. And I said, this is what I’m going to have to do, and this is what I think I want to do. Going into the Marine Corps, which, oh by the way, it takes a lot of courage to say, you want something that you don’t seem like you’re able to do, right?

Say, I want to be something. I think for young people, it’s tough to actually say what you want, but I managed to say what I want. And we looked at those physical fitness standards and he said, okay, well let’s see where you’re at. And I think I went down, I went either to do pullups pushups and some sit-ups. I could do like seven pushups, no, and maybe 15 sit-ups. And so I sat down with my father. He said, let’s make a workout plan and you need to stick to it. And I did. And every day I made sure, without exception, without excuses that I did those workouts. And day by day by day, I just got stronger. And that transformation for me, that took about six to nine months when I was a teenager, to see that just through each of those little victories every day, the victory being that I did my workout that day and I got stronger, I slowly understood, oh, this is how you accomplish something in life.

You don’t just wake up and magically you’re this thing you want to be. No, it comes with every day just chipping away, chipping away, grinding away at something until you get there. Whether that is becoming a marine, getting your degree writing books, in my case, building a business, it just comes with the consistent practice of small things day by day by day. This idea that excellence is really just a habit. It’s a series of habits all strong together. And in my life, I found that to be very true. And it starts with the little things.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like your service in the Marines, it prepared you for your writing career just by developing that capacity to be disciplined, to be consistent.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah. My wife is a writer too, and I often joke with her that being Marine was a fantastic preparation for being a writer because so much of being a writer is just having the discipline to get your work done every day and work on the projects as much as you need to finish them. And also because so much of being a writer is just suffering, sitting at your laptop trying to figure out how you’re going to put something together. But I think those skills, I know those skills are transferable into all other life pursuits, but they have to be taught, they have to be talked about. Honestly, it’s not something, again, it’s not something that if you’re 13, 14, 15, 16 years old, you’re just going to know how to do. You’ll see the end state. You’ll see someone who’s very successful, maybe out in the media space or wherever in your community, but you’ll have no idea how they got there unless someone sits you down and says, this is how it gets done. And in my experience, the way it gets done is usually just a steady grind of lots of discipline and lots of little victories every day.

Brett McKay:

What about your career at the CIA? Were there skills or mindsets or mental models that you learned there that you’re able to carry over to your writing career?

Elliot Ackerman:

I think one of the things you certainly, you need to know is showing up, but you certainly have to double down on there, is empathy. And what I mean by empathy is sort of your ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes and try to understand the world according to their experiences, even if you don’t agree with them. And unfortunately in our culture today, we seem to increasingly have less and less space to disagree with one another amicably. It’s the idea that there are bad ideas and there are bad people with ideas that usually it’s just a bad idea. The person doesn’t have to be bad as well. So I think having that capacity to, in my case at CIA, yes, sit down and try to understand what’s going through the head of a member of Al-Qaeda and landing at the place, I understand why this person is engaging in these behaviors. I don’t agree with ’em, but I certainly understand how they got there. That has been a skill that has definitely, it helps me as a writer because so much of my job is understanding the characters and their motivations, who I’m writing. But I think that goes for all walks of life. I mean, certainly if you’re in business, you need to understand your customer, you need to understand the people you’re negotiating against, and empathy is crucial, and cultivating a sense of empathy is crucial for being successful in those spheres.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, empathy helps you develop social competency.

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about how competency and intentionality can help a young man’s or a man’s sense of self, their sense of agency, they need stuff done. There’s a lot of talk in the online ether. And then also just talking with friends about the struggles young men are having. I guess all young people are having this problem in the romance department. I have a friend who has been putting on some barn dances at his place. He’s trying to revive dance culture, and he noticed that there’s all these young women at these things and there’s these young guys and they’re just sitting there on the sides with their hands in their pockets, and they’re not asking these girls to dance. And then they’ll go to him and complain about, oh, I’m just dating is so rough out there. And he’s like, you idiot. There are all these great young women here. You could ask to dance, but you’re not doing it. Why aren’t you doing it? He’s like, well, I don’t know how. I said, well, I can show you what I’m getting at here. Do you think competency can help a man’s success in his romantic or family life?

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. And I think just a sense of confidence and the confidence comes from the competency, right? I mean, I was talking a little bit before about getting in shape to go into the Marines. I mean, I can’t overemphasize how much confidence that gave me that when I did the work, I got the result. And that you can have faith, and if you do the work, you get the result. Just like you can have faith in the fact that if you clean yourself up a little bit, you make an effort and you go talk to the girl, you might get a nice result, you might get a date, but you have to kind of find the courage to say, this is what I want. I’m going to go do it. I’m going to put myself out there. And I think that comes from competence, and it comes from confidence as well.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think women are attracted to a guy who can get stuff done. They can take care of business. I remember when my wife and I were first dating, she had to put together something in her apartment, and I came over and I did it. It wasn’t that hard, but I remember she was like, wow, that was really attractive. You being handy. That’s really attractive. And then last year we did this article about how you can be a better husband today. And so I talked to a bunch of different women about what is it about your husband that you really appreciate about him and attracted you to him and still you just love about him. A common occurrence is just like how he just takes care of stuff. He knows how to get stuff done. If I have a problem, he’ll help me fix it. I think that if you’re a young man and you want to increase your success in the romance world, learn skills – wasn’t it Napoleon Dynamite says chicks dig guys with skills or something like that

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, it’s kind of obvious though, right? I mean, it’s very sort of traditional. It’s very, to me, evident that yes, if I’m at home and the sink breaks, I know I’m the guy who’s fixing the sink. I’m not going to come home and have my wife fixing the sink. I mean, she could do it. I’m sure she’d do a fine job, but she doesn’t want to fix the sink. And that might sound that’s very sort of conventional and traditional, but these conventional and traditional divisions of labor evolved that way because for the majority of folks, that’s sort of just what feels natural. Now, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a minority of folks that doesn’t feel natural and they want to do things differently to buy work differently. Hey, that’s totally fine. You do you. But I think what gets confusing for young men is they just dunno what to do.

They don’t know if they’re allowed to just do the traditional thing. So I think part of it is just whether that’s in an interpersonal level or at a societal level, just giving them permission to like, yes, if you’re at the dance buddy, you should probably go ask her to dance. Now she wants to ask you to dance, that’s fine, but you should be the one asking her to dance. And just someone I think needs to tell young men that sometimes I had people tell me that and I appreciated them telling me that and giving me that expectation because then I at least knew what I was supposed to do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, so let’s get the specific skills you talk about because this is fun. I think one thing guys appreciate is talking about skills and how to do things even if they don’t necessarily have to use them in their day-to-day life. Because on the Art of Manliness, the website, we cover lots of skills. We’ve got things like how to escape from a sinking car, probably not have to use that every day in your life, but we also got stuff that you can use in your everyday life, like how to make small talk. Guys just like to talk about all sorts of skills. You mentioned that some of the skills you’ve talked about so far in your columns, they’re small, how to wear a suit, how to introduce yourself. And as you said earlier, it’s not going to make or break you being a man if you don’t know how to do these things, but they add up. And if you do those small things, it kind of creates this snowball effect in your life as you’re going through and deciding which skills to cover, how are you deciding which ones to highlight?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, I think ones that are sort of practical and also have sort of a larger meaning. So one of the columns which just came out, just about watches, why it’s worth investing in a watch that maybe you can have for a while. And I tell the story of my watch, which I got in the Marine Corps and have worn every day for 20 years, and how valuable it is to me. So that has sort of a larger meaning. I think how to introduce yourself was the first column that I wrote, which is about how we carry ourselves in the world, how we interact with other people. The importance of even someone you don’t like, maybe if you have a chance to meet that person, meeting them is good. You might not wind up as friends, but I think in our kind of onscreen culture, we’re so quick to demonize each other. So all of just these little skills that often kind of lead to larger skills or can impact your life in larger ways.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about the watch. Any advice there on selecting a watch?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, I mean there’s certainly many, many options. I think it’s less the specific watch. I think a person should buy a watch that works for their life. So I have a Rolex Explorer too that I bought in 2006 with my combat pay when I was deployed with the Marines of the Middle East, and we pulled into Port and Dubai. I spent most of my combat pay on this watch. But it was a great investment. I’ve had it ever since. And this watch will go down to my son. But I think it’s more just that I would pick something that you think can last that you can take care of and that you’d want to wear enough that through wearing it, you imbue it with more value.

Brett McKay:

Did you wear that Rolex in combat?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s crazy because I think, man, most people think like, man, why would I wear an $8,000 watch in combat?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, you’d be surprised actually. And particularly special operations culture and pilot culture too. Most guys wear nice watches and many of these watches, high end watches, were originally designed for military purposes because the watch I have doesn’t require battery. It’s mechanical. It’s never broken down. And actually a lot of people dunno, this, the face diameter of a Rolex, a maite was made to be the exact same face diameter of a Rolex. So that when you take your mag light and you flash it on the face of your Rolex, it charges up the luminous and dials without any light escaping. So there are lots of little military parallels with some of these higher end watch companies.

Brett McKay:

Okay, I’ve thought about buying a high-end watch. I can never bring myself to do it the most I’ve spent on a watch. I think it’s like $500.

Elliot Ackerman:

And it’s not about a watch. It’s more just about is there something you can have in your life that you carry with you that can be passed down? I bet the person you pass it down to will be very, very grateful that they have.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, and it’s got a story.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, it’s got a story. My wife has two very nice watches though, or her father’s, and they’ll go down to our kids and we’re so glad to have those. So whatever, it’s, it could be a watch, it could be a ring, it could be anything. But just to think as you get older, hey, maybe it’s worth investing a little something in an object that I could pass down.

Brett McKay:

So another skill you talk about is how to be a friend. I think a lot of men don’t think of friendship as a skill. What makes being a friend of skill?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, again, it’s that idea of intentionality. So how do we treat our friends? How do we invest time with our friends? How do we show up for our friends when it’s inconvenient for us, but they might need us? So I write in that piece about one of my best friends, and we met in the Marines, but the way we really keep up is we run together probably a couple times a month early in the morning, about 5:00 AM we’ll go run seven or eight miles. And we’ve been doing this for years. And that is very much like the foundation of our friendship or those runs. And that kind of led me to an observation, actually, my wife made this observation pointed out to me that as men, when we think about how we spend time with one another, the activities we select are typically not like face-to-face activities.

They’re typically activities we can do together. Shoulder to shoulder. Think about it. Okay, I go running with my buddy. What’s this sort of classic father son activity? It’s fishing. You’re shoulder to shoulder when you go fishing. Or I have another friend I play squash with. We shoulder to shoulder when we play squash or even two teenage boys playing video games together. There’s something about shoulder to shoulder activities that feel more natural for men as opposed to sitting across from one another at lunch. So I think it’s understanding the type of activity to suggest with a new friend what’s going to feel natural and something you can keep up. And then also just sort of how over the long haul you make sure that you take really good care of those friendships that mean the most. And I would categorize those as if you called that person at three in the morning with a dead body in your trunk, they’d say, all right, lemme get a shovel. I mean, that’s the type of friend you want to really take good care of because we all need a few of those in our life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think the idea of the importance of being intentional about maintaining friendships is really key. Guys can be bad about that. Just like, oh, it’ll just kind of happen. It’s like, no, it’s not going to happen. Life’s going to happen. And if you don’t make the date or the appointment, you’re never going to see your friend.

Elliot Ackerman:

And I think when you’re younger, it’s tough to know that sometimes because these are new friends. So when you’re older, I can see he and I have been friends for 25 years. Of course I’m going to show up. But when you’ve got a new friend, it’s important to do that work to really build the friendship to, Hey, I’m going to show up for this person even if we’ve only known each other for six months or a year.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Also, I think what makes it hard when you’re older is that you subconsciously still think that making friends will work the same way it did when you were younger. Because when you’re younger, it just kind of happened, right? You’re in high school and college, you’re seeing people all the time. It’s automatic, it’s, it’s built into structure of your life. But then once you hit 30, 40, you got a wife and kids, that’s not going to happen. It’s like the opposite of being built into your life. So you have to make it happen. You have to be deliberate about it.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, you really do. And that goes this idea. You have to find the activities or the way to keep up that friendship. I think oftentimes as men, we’re not that great about it, and we can kind of let these things fall by the wayside when they’re put up against the conflicting obligations of work and family. And in the long work of our lives, particularly when you get older, you don’t want to be in a position where you kind of look around and realize you don’t have any good male friends.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, I guess the key there in making friends is just go and do stuff that you enjoy because guys like doing stuff together. So if it’s Brazilian jujitsu, I know a lot of guys have made friends that way, CrossFit gym. I know a guy who joined a bagpipe band and he plays the bagpipes with these guys regularly. So yeah, start doing stuff. That’s how you make friends.

Elliot Ackerman:

I just did stuff. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So another skill that you’ve talked about is introducing yourself, and that was the article you used to introduce yourself. How do you think a lot of guys fumble this?

Elliot Ackerman:

I think oftentimes it’s not being present in that moment. You kind of introduce yourself to someone. You make some small talk with ’em, they tell you their name. You sort of forget their name over the course of the small talk, and maybe they give you their business card or their contacts and you don’t follow up. You don’t take good care of it. And I think that when introducing yourself to someone, it’s important to make yourself present. Look that person in the eye when they tell you their name. Make an effort to remember their name. Listen actively to them. And if you kind of put your whole self into those conversations, those first moments, you’d be surprised what you can get out of a first meeting that you might not get if you’re just more passive about it.

Brett McKay:

And again, you think you’re just going to learn this stuff, but you got to be intentional about it.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, I mean, someone hands you their business card, hold onto the business card, look down at it, read it, thank them, put it in your pocket again, try to remember their name. Remember what they do. If you’re at a party and you meet someone at the beginning of the party who you like talking to, and then you mingle around and then you leave at the end of the party, go and say, Hey, it was great meeting you. I’ll follow up. I mean, just sort of basic, again, intentionality. Just look at people in the eye shaking their hands. It’s very basic stuff, but sometimes we need to say it out loud to make sure that it’s actually taught.

Brett McKay:

One skill you plan on covering in the future is how to give a eulogy. Have you done that before? Have you given a eulogy? And who was it for if you did?

Elliot Ackerman:

I have. One I gave was for a friend of mine in the Marines who was killed in Afghanistan. So I gave a eulogy at his funeral, and that was the first proper eulogy delivered at a funeral I’d ever had to give. And I was wrestling with what to say. And my wife said to me, she said, well, you know who the eulogy is for, don’t you? And I had to admit that I actually didn’t know who was the audience of this eulogy. And she said, it’s for his children. Just write this for his children. And that really helped me understand, okay, who am I speaking to here? And he had young children, so I was trying to tell them who their dad was when he was lost. So some of these things are things that when you’re going to need to know it, you’re going to want to have already put in a little bit of the work. So it’s part to know how to give a toast. It’s also important to know how to give a eulogy because chances are in each of our lives we might be asked to deliver one of these.

Brett McKay:

I had to give eulogy from my grandfather years ago when he passed away, and I thankfully got that bit of advice about knowing your audience. Sometimes when I’ve heard eulogies, it feels like the people are just writing it for themselves, and I get it, you feel a connection to this person. You want to have your own reminiscence, but you have to realize, no, the eulogy isn’t for you. You got to think about your audience. And that’s everyone in the room. But in particular, it’s the deceased inner circle. So the spouse, their siblings, their best friends, longtime colleagues, especially their children, they all want to hear a remembrance of this person they love. And the other bit of advice I did that helped out a lot was I practice a lot. I just did it over and over again so I could get the cries out because we’ve probably all seen those eulogies where someone just gets choked up with emotion and they just sob and they can’t get through it, which I understand. I’m completely empathetic to that, but I wanted to be sure that I could keep my composure so I could give the eulogy how I wanted to give it. That’s not, I did still get choked up at a few parts, but I tried to keep it together. I got all those big cries out before I actually delivered the final eulogy.

Elliot Ackerman:

No, and I mean, instead, it’s one of the most important and impactful types of public remarks anyone can be asked to offer. So you want to make sure you get it right.

Brett McKay:

So a lot of the skills you’ve talked about so far, you kind of classify them as soft skills. It’s like style, how to dress, how to socialize. Are there any brass tacks, concrete skills you think a guy should know or that you plan on covering?

Elliot Ackerman:

I plan on, some of these are, I don’t know what we put in the category of like brass tacks or not brass tacks, but I mean, I’m going to cover how to travel, I think is an important one. How to pick a book. I don’t know if I’ll necessarily get into how to file your taxes, but I think each of these little skills, they become cumulative. And if you are taking all the little things in your life and executing them with a lot of intention, those will bleed into the larger parts of your life, and you’ll be executing those with intention too.

Brett McKay:

Here’s a question. Do you think improvisation is a skill a man should develop? And if so, how do you develop it?

Elliot Ackerman:

Improvisation in life.

Brett McKay:

In life, yeah, just sort of general improvisation.

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, I think the ability to pivot in your life is very important. So if you’re working at a job and you thought it was going to be great, and suddenly it really isn’t great, and you have to acknowledge that things are not working out, the ability to reinvent oneself, to improvise and move in a different direction is hugely important. And that’s what I would say is a big skill. So someone who’s good at improvisation is probably good at many, many other things that allow them to be good at improvisation. They probably have great imagination. They probably are a good strategic thinker. So those are all big things that we cultivate in small ways. How do you become someone who’s got a great imagination and is a good strategic thinker? Well, you’re probably somebody who reads, so you may want to figure out how to incorporate reading into your day every day. So again, the big things come from the little things, at least in my opinion.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I’m sure you learned improvisation in the Marines’, like stuff never went to plan.

Elliot Ackerman:

Never. And the way you learn improvisation is just sort of repetition. You’ve run the plays enough times that you can improvise off of them. So the moment you actually need to improvise is usually, you never know when that moment’s going to occur, but you have to be prepared. And that preparation just comes from doing the little things every day. Or in the Marine Corps, we’ll call it brilliance in the basics. Brilliance in the basics is what would allow you in a very complex situation to improvise, adapt, and overcome. As we also say in the Marines,

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s like jazz musicians. They’re just constantly doing that wood shedding where they’re just doing their scales over and over again so that they can improvise when they need to.

Elliot Ackerman: 

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

And there’s this idea of improvisation, sort of a manly trait. There’s this great book written, it’s like 30, 40 years ago called The Poetics of Manhood, where this anthropologist goes to this village in Crete, and he looks at their culture of manhood there. And in this culture, they were shepherds. Improvisation was highly valued. You weren’t a man if you didn’t know how to improvise. And the way they improvised it, it could be things like telling a story or telling a joke that was sort of different than what you’d expect. Dancing in a deft way, doing a raid on another village for their sheep with some style. They really wanted to see a guy who could do that. And I think mean in my own life and here in the United States in the 21st century, I always respect a guy who can add a bit of style to the things that they do. You don’t expect it. Or whenever something doesn’t go according to plan, it just rolls off them, like wander on a duck and they just do something else.

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. I mean, in the military, we call that elan.

Brett McKay:

Yes.

Elliot Ackerman:

The units that sort of have that dash to them, and I think that’s fantastic and critically important. I think it’s also important to do something every day that scares you a little bit. If you want practice at improvisation or being able to tackle something that’s a crisis that’s really terrifying. You need to be practiced at overcoming fear little bits every day. So I mean, it doesn’t have to be something that terrifies you. You don’t have to go swim with great white sharks every day, but it just scares you a little bit. I dunno. I woke up this morning and went on a long run and it was freezing out. I really didn’t feel like going on my run this morning, but I did. It scared me a little bit and so much as like I’m like, oh, this is going to be cold and the first 50 minutes are going to hurt, and then you do it and you feel great. I think the repetition, doing things that are hard, doing things that feels frightening and that take you a little bit out of your comfort zone, it’s just critically important to building a fulfilling life where you feel like you’re able to point yourself towards a goal and have the joy of seeing yourself progress and then eventually achieve a goal. And if you aren’t doing those things, chances are you’re probably not feeling a lot of fulfillment in your life, and you’re probably not feeling the type of happiness you deserve to feel.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like you’re encouraging men to be intentional about this skill development. Don’t just wait for, it’s not just going to happen. You have to go out there and make it happen for yourself. You got to deliberately go about learning and practicing new skills.

Elliot Ackerman:

Absolutely. Yeah. You can’t just sit on your couch and think that the job or the girl or anything. It’s going to show up, not you have to go out there and you have to do it for yourself, and you have to be patient. It’s not going to happen in one foul swoop. It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of diligence, but there’s joy in the daily accomplishment of the small tasks that are taking you towards a goal that you believe in and that excites you. I mean, there’s joy in that. I think in some ways that’s the only real joy there is in life. So get after it. Get after it with just the small things.

Brett McKay:

That reminds me of a quote. I’ve said it multiple times on this podcast, but I think it’s really, I like it a lot. That reminds me of what you just said. Nietzsche said, joy is the feeling of power increasing. And by power, he doesn’t mean authoritative power. He means the power to do things in your life. And I think it goes to what you were saying, it just feels awesome when you level up what you’re capable of when you increase your agency.

Elliot Ackerman:

It does. It feels great. It’s also this idea that joy is having something to look forward to, and it’s that idea of increasing power. What you’re looking forward to is the actualization of this goal of yours. People sometimes ask me what it’s finishing and publishing a book. I’m surprised to learn. I actually get a little bit depressed. I feel sad. Obviously I’m happy that I’m done with this piece of work, and the book is out in the world and people are engaging with it. But I feel a sort of sense of emptiness because I no longer have that thing on the horizon I’ve been looking forward to and working toward, and I have to start all over again, and then I start over again. And yeah, the quote yet from Nietzsche, I feel my power growing. The joy growing is I’m like, okay, now I’m working again towards a goal I believe in.

Brett McKay:

So thing about skills as they often degrade, if you don’t use them, how do you keep your own skillset sharp?

Elliot Ackerman:

Well, I’ve built my life and I know sort of the things that I do in my life. I’m a writer. I know the things where I invest my time and trying to be better at my craft. And so I spend the time every day doing that work and my work life that’s writing, reading, dedicating myself to the projects that I’m working on in my personal life. It’s investing in my family relationships and relationships with friends. I mean, those are what I would kind of qualify as my skills, but those are different for anyone. But I think it’s just the daily practice of your profession and your personal life and making sure that you show up as much as you can with your full self each day to do that work, to keep those skills honed and through having those skills honed, you’ll derive a lot of happiness.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you mentioned that you’re a father, you got some kids, is it three boys and a girl?

Elliot Ackerman:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What can fathers do to raise competent children? What are you doing in your own life with your kids?

Elliot Ackerman:

Speak to them with intention. Sit down, try to understand them. Teach them things. Just teach them little things and let them feel their power increasing through learning those little things. And then just pay attention. Pay attention to how they’re growing and talk to them. Try to help them understand what they want. And then my father did for me. When they tell you what they want and say who they are to you, help them find the pathway to become that version of themselves that they crave to be. That’s what my dad did with me when I couldn’t do any pushups or pullups, and he made me a workout plan and said, here’s the pathway. Go walk it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you just got to be intentional about it’s not just going to happen.

Elliot Ackerman:

No, it’s not going to happen.

Brett McKay:

We’ve done that with our kids when they turn 12, they do this year long challenge called the 12-year-old challenge, and each week they’ve got a different challenge. It’s going to push them physically, mentally, they’re going to learn a new skill. So one week they might be reading a specific book. We have them read Man’s Search for Meaning, or they might have to cook dinner for the family, or they might have to make a campfire, memorize a passage, tie knots, stuff like that. My daughter’s doing it right now. My son did it a couple of years ago, and it’s been cool because you can see them experiencing that joy as they figure out how to do something. It’s like, oh, wow, I can actually do this adult thing that I didn’t think I could do.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, that’s the power increasing. But your kids are lucky, and I think there are too many young people and certainly too many young men who might not be getting that degree of intentionality, and they might have to go seek it out themselves, but you can find it yourself just about taking those first steps and sticking.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, and that’s another thing too. If you don’t have kids or even you do have kids, get out there and volunteer. There’s lots of opportunities for grown men to volunteer to work with young people, whether it’s being a coach or a scout leader or whatever. It gives them another touch point with an adult man. They can experience that feeling that I had, like, wow, here’s this adult treating me like an adult and showing me how I can become intentional and competent.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, it’s huge. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Well, Elliot, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Elliot Ackerman:

I’m on social media. You can find me Elliot Ackerman on Instagram and Twitter, and my books are sold wherever books are sold, so I’m pretty easy to find.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Elliot Ackerman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Elliot Ackerman:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Elliot Ackerman. He’s a novelist and the author of the new column at the Free Press called A Man Should Know. If you want to read Elliot’s columns, you can subscribe to the free press at the fp.com/manliness and save 10% off your first year. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/competence refine links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, and make sure check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. 

As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the show, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This week’s episode of the podcast referenced an ancient story: “The Choice of Hercules.” If you’ve never read it, it’s really worth doing so.

The story was set down by Xenophon (430–354 B.C. ), who was an ancient Greek historian and student of the philosopher Socrates. His Memorabilia is a collection of Socratic dialogues which purports to record the defense Socrates made for himself during his trial before the Athenians. While arguing against indolence and for the beneficial effects of labor, Socrates retells “The Choice of Hercules,” a fable that originated with the philosopher Prodicus.

This story was popular throughout the eighteenth century and was frequently studied by young men and depicted by artists. John Adams used it to guide his life and wished to make an illustration of the tale the design for the Great Seal of the new nation. The allegory’s power lies in its ability to convey a profound truth: that there can be no sweet without the bitter, no growth and no true happiness without challenge, effort, and virtue.

The Choice of Hercules

From the Memorabilia

By Xenophon, c. 371 B.C.

When Hercules was in that part of his youth in which it was natural for him to consider what course of life he ought to pursue, he one day retired into a desert, where the silence and solitude of the place very much favored his meditations.

As he was musing on his present condition, and very much perplexed in himself, on the state of life he should choose, he saw two women of a larger stature than ordinary, approaching towards him. One of them had a very noble air, and graceful deportment; her beauty was natural and easy, her person clean and unspotted, her motions and behavior full of modesty, and her raiment was white as snow. The other wanted all the native beauty and proportion of the former; her person was swelled, by luxury and ease, to a size quite disproportioned and uncomely. She had painted her complexion, that it might seem fairer and more ruddy than it really was, and endeavored to appear more graceful than ordinary in her bearing, by a mixture of affectation in all her gestures. She cast her eyes frequently upon herself, then turned them on those that were present, to see whether any one regarded her, and now and then looked on the figure she made in her own shadow.

As they drew nearer, the former continued the same composed pace, while the latter, striving to get before her, ran up to Hercules, and addressed herself to him:

“My dear Hercules,” says she, “I find you are very much divided in your thoughts, upon the way of life that you ought to choose; be my friend, and follow me; I will lead you into the possession of pleasure, and out of the reach of pain, and remove you from all the noise and disquietude of business. The affairs of either peace or war, shall have no power to disturb you. Your whole employment shall be to make your life easy, and to entertain every sense with its proper gratifications. Sumptuous tables, beds of roses, clouds of perfumes, concerts of music, crowds of beauties, are all in readiness to receive you. Come along with me into this region of delights, this world of pleasure, and bid farewell forever, to care, to pain, to business.”

Hercules, hearing the lady talk after this manner, desired to know her name; to which she answered, “My friends, and those who are well acquainted with me, call me Happiness; but my enemies, and those who would injure my reputation, have given me the name of Pleasure.”

By this time the other lady came up, who addressed herself to the young hero in a very different manner.

“Hercules,” says she, “I offer myself to you, because I know you are descended from the gods, and give proofs of that descent by your love to virtue, and application to the studies proper for your age. This makes me hope you will gain, both for yourself and me, an immortal reputation. But, before I invite you into my society and friendship, I will be open and sincere with you, and must lay down this, as an established truth, that there is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor. The gods have set a price upon every real and noble pleasure. If you would gain the favor of the Deity, you must be at the pains of worshiping him: if the friendship of good men, you must study to oblige them: if you would be honored by your country, you must take care to serve it. In short, if you would be eminent in war or peace, you must become master of all the qualifications that can make you so. These are the only terms and conditions upon which I can propose happiness.”

The goddess of Pleasure here broke in upon her discourse: “You see,” said she, “Hercules, by her own confession, the way to her pleasures is long and difficult; whereas, that which I propose is short and easy.” “Alas!” said the other lady, whose visage glowed with passion, made up of scorn and pity, “what are the pleasures you propose? To eat before you are hungry, drink before you are athirst, sleep before you are tired; to gratify your appetites before they are raised. You never heard the most delicious music, which is the praise of one’s own self; nor saw the most beautiful object, which is the work of one’s own hands. Your votaries pass away their youth in a dream of mistaken pleasures, while they are hoarding up anguish, torment, and remorse for old age.”

“As for me, I am the friend of gods and of good men, an agreeable companion to the artisan, a household guardian to the fathers of families, a patron and protector of servants, an associate in all true and generous friendships. The banquets of my votaries are never costly, but always delicious; for none eat and drink at them, who are not invited by hunger and thirst. Their slumbers are sound, and their wakings cheerful. My young men have the pleasure of hearing themselves praised by those who are in years; and those who are in years, of being honored by those who are young. In a word, my followers are favored by the gods, beloved by their acquaintance, esteemed by their country, and after the close of their labors, honored by posterity.”

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

One of my goals this year has been to become a cinephile, so I’ve been working my way through some of the classics that have influenced generations of filmmakers. Recently, I finally got around to watching Seven Samurai.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece has been on my list for a long time. It’s the film that inspired The Magnificent Seven and influenced everything from Star Wars to A Bug’s Life. But even though it’s been imitated countless times, the original still hits the hardest.

The story’s simple: a poor farming village in 16th-century Japan is being terrorized by bandits who plan to return after harvest to steal the villagers’ crops. Desperate and outmatched, the farmers decide to hire a small band of samurai to defend them. They find seven — each with his own personality, flaws, and strengths — and together they train the villagers, fortify the town, and prepare for the inevitable assault.

On the surface, Seven Samurai is an action film about a ragtag group of warriors facing impossible odds. But underneath, it’s a meditation on leadership, honor, humility, and what it means to live by a code.

If you’ve read our earlier piece on the Bushido code, you’ll recognize many of its virtues woven throughout the film. Kurosawa shows what the code looks like in practice.

It’s been a month since I watched the movie, and I’m still thinking about it. But I haven’t been thinking about the action scenes. I’ve been thinking about the life lessons I gleaned from the film.

Here are seven lessons I took away from Seven Samurai:

1. Lead With Humility and Serve Others

The first samurai we meet, Kambei Shimada, will lead the group of samurai defenders and shows what real leadership looks like before he ever picks up a sword. In one of the film’s opening scenes, a child has been kidnapped and taken hostage in a hut. The kidnapper is threatening to kill the child. Instead of going in with guns, I mean swords, a-blazing, Kambei shaves off his topknot — symbol of status and pride for a samurai — to disguise himself as a monk to rescue the child. He didn’t ask anything in return for his services and walked out of the village like a boss.

Throughout the rest of the film, you’ll see him rubbing his head where his topknot used to be. I reckon it was a reminder to him that sometimes to live the Bushido code fully means giving up the outward trappings of prestige.

That moment rescuing the child sets the tone for everything else Kambei does in the story. He leads not by asserting dominance, but by accepting responsibility and serving others. When he recruits the rest of the team, they follow him out of respect for his example, not his rank. He earns their trust through his humility.

2. Sweat More in Preparation, Bleed Less in Battle

Once Kambei agrees to defend the village, the samurai don’t rush into heroics. They spend most of the film preparing — studying the terrain, training the farmers, fortifying walls, digging moats, and mapping out every approach the bandits might take. The villagers think the samurai are just standing around, but Kambei knows what Sun Tzu wrote centuries earlier: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war; defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

When the attack finally comes, the outcome feels inevitable. The bandits charge straight into the traps that the samurai had laid days earlier. Their premeditated preparation beats the enemy’s in-the-moment berserkery.

While we like to think of courage as spontaneous — as a flash of bravery that arises when danger appears — the foundation of bravery is built in advance. The calm you can call up in a crisis will manifest in direct proportion to your readiness to face the challenge.

3. Be a Quiet Professional

My favorite character in the film is Kyūzō. The guy is a certified badass. He barely speaks throughout the movie, but he communicates through his actions. He’s a master at his craft with the sword. His effort looks effortless (the art of wu wei!). When a boastful samurai challenges him to a duel, Kyūzō wins with a single strike, then walks away without gloating.

One character described Kyūzō thusly:

He has the real samurai spirit. He is totally fearless. Yet, at the same time, he is gentle and modest — look how he acted after we went and got that gun. And how he went too — just as though he were going up into the hills to look for mushrooms.

We live in an age that rewards noise over skill. Kyūzō teaches us that there’s power in being a quiet professional. Real mastery is self-evident; when you’re truly good at what you do, you no longer have to announce it.

4. When You Are Strong, I Am Strong

There’s an aphorism in Latin that I love: vales, valeo.

When you are strong, I am strong.

While the seven samurai came from a different culture than the Roman centurions, they embodied this universal principle of teamwork and camaraderie.

The seven samurai come from different backgrounds. Each one has a distinct temperament and personality. One is a war-weary veteran, another a prankster, another a naïve young apprentice. They argue, joke, and occasionally butt heads. But when the bandits attack, they fight as one.

Heihachi, the humble woodchopping samurai, makes a banner for this ragtag group. It consists of six circles and one triangle. The triangle represents the non-samurai, Kikuchiyo ; the six circles represent the actual samurai on the team. It was a symbol of their unity.

You can’t win life’s battles alone. The trick is finding the right men to stand beside you and being the kind of man they can count on.

And what’s interesting is that as you make others strong, you make yourself strong. As Kambei puts it, “By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

Vales, valeo.

5. Honor Is Earned

Kikuchiyo, the film’s comic relief and erratic trickster, is a fraud. He carries a fake samurai pedigree, hiding the fact that he’s the son of lowly farmers — the very people the samurai are hired to protect.

But he desperately wants to be a samurai. He wants to prove himself worthy of honor in a world that says he can’t have it. Kambei sees the unbridled thumos in Kikuchiyo and, instead of rejecting him for not being a true samurai, brings him into his fold to help direct that energy toward something bigger than himself. By the end, Kikuchiyo earns his spurs, so to speak, by living the code of the samurai. He dies defending the village, becoming the samurai he so desperately wanted to be. Rather than letting his past define his life, he creates his legacy through his noble actions.

6. Keep Your Sense of Humor (Especially Under Strain)

One of the things you’ll notice throughout the film is that even in the most stressful moments, the samurai are laughing. Humor was an important part of maintaining morale.

Heihachi, the woodchopping samurai, is typically the source of that laughter. He isn’t the strongest fighter, but he’s indispensable. When everyone is grim-faced and exhausted, he cracks a joke or hums a tune to boost everyone’s spirits.

When you’re staring down impossible odds, a little levity can save your sanity. Nietzsche famously said that the spirit of gravity, of taking things too seriously, can hobble your ability to act nobly. Strength without levity is fragile and stiff. Humor makes you more flexible. Laughter elevates.

7. Live for Honor and Purpose, Not for Reward

At the film’s end, though the villagers are safe, four samurai have fallen. Kambei looks at their graves and says quietly, “This is the nature of our trade. We always lose.”

The samurai fought not for glory but for honor. They were tragic heroes. They fought even when they knew they’d inevitably incur casualties.

In a world that measures everything by return on investment, Seven Samurai shows us that some things are worth doing simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Final Reflections

Weeks after seeing this film, I still catch myself thinking about Kambei rubbing his shaved head or Kyūzō silently taking care of business. And it makes me want to be more disciplined, more humble, more useful.

I can see why Kurosawa’s story has been copied so many times. It’s about sacrifice, teamwork, and redemption. The samurai fight and die for people who can’t pay them or do anything else for them. They do good because it is good. It’s an ennobling film.

So if you haven’t seen Seven Samurai, make time for it. It’s long and slow by modern standards, but absolutely worth it. You’ll walk away wanting to be a better man.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was virtus — the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence.

Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book The Code of Man, first published twenty years ago and now released in a new edition. Today on the show, Waller, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that, in his view, form the classical code of manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Waller’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #104 — The Code of Man With Waller Newell
• AoM Article: What Is Manliness?
• AoM series on the origins and nature of manhood
• AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man
• AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood
• AoM Article: Got Thumos?
• AoM Article: What Is a Man? The Allegory of the Chariot
• AoM Podcast #871: Jane Austen for Dudes
• Sunday Firesides: Climb the Ladder of Love

Connect With Waller Newell

• Waller’s website
• Waller’s faculty page

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence. Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book, The Code of Man. First published 20 years ago and now released in the new edition. Newell, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that in his view form the classical code of Manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman. 

Waller Newell, welcome back to the show. 

Waller Newell: 

Good to be with you. 

Brett McKay: 

So you published the book, The Code of Man 20 years ago. We had you on the show to discuss it a decade back. It’s been 10 years. You’ve recently released an updated version of the book. What first prompted you to write this book 20 years ago? And then what do you think has changed in the cultural conversation about manhood in the 20 years since it’s been published that you thought it warranted an update?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think the minor reason in a way to republish it was simply that it had been out of print, and I had dozens and dozens of people asking me how can I get hold of it? So for that reason alone, I thought it was worth relaunching. But the more important thing is that in the intervening years, the whole debate over the meaning of masculinity and the distinction between true manliness and toxic masculinity as it’s called, has grown ever more intense. In the last election, for example, it was a very hot topic, and so I thought, well, this really is a good time to revisit what I think the true meaning of manliness is in contrast with toxic masculinity.

Brett McKay:

And you’re coming at this, you’re a political philosophy professor, political scientist. That’s what you do. So you’re coming at it through that angle, looking at classical culture and how it can give us insights about masculinity and manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. In fact, I really began my interest in this topic because my scholarship had been very much concerned with the notion of honor seeking what it means to pursue honor. And a journalist friend of mine actually said, a lot of people out there are interested in these sorts of topics, not just academics or scholars. Why don’t you try and branch out and reach a general audience? And so that’s what I did.

Brett McKay:

So let’s start off with a Socratic question. We’re going to do definitions. Socrates always said you got to start with definitions. How do you define manliness?

Waller Newell:

Would you mind me if I quote myself from the book? 

Brett McKay:

Go right ahead.

Waller Newell:

I think I can sum it up in a few lines. My view of this debate is that what is now called toxic masculinity is a perverse and destructive force that is in fact the direct opposite of the traditional western classical and biblical understanding of true manliness, which is premised on the need for virtuous behavior that could never violate anyone’s rights of freedom, least of all that of women, and instead defined manly virtue as the moderate gentlemanly and gallant treatment of others. That’s about the best I can do. That’s sort of my whole argument really is there in that few sentences.

Brett McKay:

And why do you go back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans and even the Bible for your idea of manliness?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think we have to begin with those moorings in tradition, however shaky they may have become. To the extent that we can fashion a new way of approaching manliness in the present, I think it’s got to at least begin in those older roots. It might not rest content with those older roots, but I think that’s your starting point. And I think we should also bear in mind that these classical teachings, although there are thousands of years old, have really been widespread in their influence in the West, I would say certainly up until the 19th century, even into the 20th century, I was thinking for example of Winston Churchill, he never went to a university, which I think by the way was one of the key ingredients to his success as a statesman, that he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but he was interested in the classics and he read them in translation.

So he too had that appetite for the older way of looking at things. As for the biblical approach, I think again, that those roots are so deep in us still even today, that we really have to explore what the biblical understanding of manliness is. And of course, the extent to which it isn’t simply harmonious with the classical philosophical understanding. That’s why I treated the issue of revelation in the section on pride, because in a way, the difference between the biblical approach and the classical approach can be summed up in the fact that for the classics, pride was one of the supreme human manly virtues. Whereas in the biblical tradition, of course, that’s very much called into question. Christianity, I think would argue that compassion is really, the chief virtue should be the chief virtue of a true man. And pride is actually something to be avoided. And I think out of that tension, something creative can emerge. I’m not sure that those alternatives can ultimately even be reconciled, but we have to sort of face them even to the extent to which they conflict with one another.

Brett McKay:

Something I’ve noticed in my own readings of the classics and also the biblical tradition, is that there’s a lot of insights there on what to do about what we call toxic masculinity. You see a lot of people talking about what can we do about this issue of these young men who are just unmoored and acting in incredibly inappropriate ways? And I’m like, just read the Iliad. I mean, you can make a case. It’s about toxic masculinity. You’re dealing with hubris and rage and unbridled ambition. If you look at the life of Alcibiades, there’s a case study in what unbridled ambition can do. The Bible is constantly talking about what can we do to harness or bridle those masculine passions and use them in a productive way instead of them becoming destructive.

Waller Newell:

That’s right. A lot of my other scholarship has been on the theme of tyranny and the history of tyranny, ancient and modern as a theme in political thought. And the way that goes together with manliness is that for the classics and for later traditions as well, tyranny in a way is the deepest perversion of manliness. It’s a distortion of what true manliness should be, and its derailment into a kind of lust for power and domination over others. Whereas I think the whole point of the traditional approach to manliness would be that those potentially tyrannical energies should be sublimated and redirected toward the honorable service of the common good. So you want to nip people like Alcibiades in the bud and turn them in a more constructive direction. And yes, I think I agree with you completely about Homer. If you look at the contrast between Achilles and Odysseus as they’re presented by Homer, in a way, Achilles is everything that you should not emulate because he is terribly narcissistic.

He’s totally self-absorbed, even though he in fact has a family back home, a wife and children. I think Homer deliberately presents him in the Iliad as if he is always by himself. He’s always isolated from others and angry at them. Odysseus by contrast, is very much enveloped in his love of family life. His whole voyage is the desire to get back home to his wife and son. And I think in Homer’s view, Odysseus is meant to be the more admirable character. He isn’t simply ambitious. He doesn’t simply use brute force. Homer says that he is the ultimate prudent man, the Fran Moss, and that he uses his mind whenever he can rather than brute strength. And so I think of the two models, Homer himself is pointing us toward Odysseus and really not so much toward Achilles. As you know, the very first word of the Iliad is rage, and it’s the rage of Achilles that sets the whole Iliad in motion.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned for the Greeks and the Romans, manliness seemed to be about the development of certain virtues. What were some of those virtues that they thought a man had to develop to become a manly man?

Waller Newell:

Well, in a way, I was trying to suggest that with my own five headings of love, courage, pride, family, country, I think those comprehend a lot of the virtues that were important to the classical thinkers for living a kind of integrated life. The notion of virtue that the classics had was very much one of integrity, meaning a sort of unity of strength devoted to living a good life, serving the common good.

Brett McKay:

How has the biblical tradition, what was their idea? What were the virtues that they thought you needed to develop in order to become this integrated man you’re talking about?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, to me, that really all comes down to the difference between say Aristotle and Saint Augustine. On the question of pride versus humility. It’s a very striking contrast because for Aristotle, humility is actually a vice in the sense that a man who does not lay claim to honors to which he’s entitled, actually has a flawed character For Augustine, I think it’s the exact opposite, that he would say that humility is necessary to live a happy life, meaning to live a godly life. So there is a real divergence there. And I think that with a lot of these problems with time and age, I’ve come to realize that they just might not be ultimately harmonious, if you know what I mean. We might just have to live with the possibility that they can’t be reconciled with one another.

Brett McKay:

We will talk more about that tension between the biblical tradition and the classical tradition when we go more into detail about pride. But yeah, I agree with you. For the Art of manliness, one of the guiding principles is to bring back this classical idea of manliness, where it meant becoming a man of virtue in the development of these different positive virtues. And one thing people often push back against, and I understand the pushback is, okay, well if manliness is about the development of virtue, what does that mean for women who also develop these virtues? Yeah, these virtues that we’re talking about, courage, pride, family, humility, these are universal. So what does that mean for women who develop these virtues? Is that womanliness, is that what you’d call it?

Waller Newell:

I agree with you completely that men and women share the same aims and that my suggestion of what those should be would apply both to men and women. That said, though, I think that although men and women are pursuing the same aims, they do so along somewhat different paths. We know from, I think pretty solidly established empirical research that men and women tend to lean towards certain occupations more than others. And so I think we can combine the universalism of those goals with a recognition of the fact that temperamentally and psychologically men and women may be pursuing different roots to that same outcome.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d agree with you. We all have the same aims, but we’ll get through different ways based on our temperaments or natural proclivities. I’ve always thought of it as in terms of music, so like a tuba and a flute can play the same notes of music, but they make different sounds. So men and women both pursue virtue, but the result makes different kinds of music and we need both.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

One thing you write in this book, and it struck me when I first read it 10 plus years ago, and I was really hit by it when I read it again, is that Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, men who lived a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, they had more in common with Homer than they do with us. What do you mean by that?

Waller Newell:

I think what I mainly meant was simply that their life had a kind of grandeur of scope that we would associate with ancient heroism. They really were truly towering figures. And so in that sense, I think it’s apt to compare them to heroic heroes out of the pages of Homer.

Brett McKay:

And also too, I think you mentioned earlier Churchill, even though he didn’t go to college, he was steeped in this classical education that gave him this notion of classical manhood that you’re talking about in this book. Same with Theodore Roosevelt, and same with the founding fathers. And today that education doesn’t really exist in our schools or even our universities.

Waller Newell:

No, that’s very true. I mean, in the case of Churchill, as I said, he sort of came to this on his own. His comment about reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, was that this simply described the people that he knew in his own social circle. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt had a superb formal education, which included reading Latin and Greek in the original. And so he drew directly upon the wellspring of these classical teachings about the virtues. And as you know from his writings, he is a superb interpreter of those virtues and how they should contribute to democratic manhood in the present. Think two of the American founders, by the way, the American founders who attended university like Jefferson, they were deeply steeped in the classics. They read all of the great ancient thinkers, historians, poets, and they also read important modern thinkers like Montesquieu and Locke. So even though they were in a way servants of an egalitarian society, they believed, if anything, that the ruling class of that society must be made up of liberally educated gentlemen.

Brett McKay:

Something I’m struck by when I read books or letters from the founding era, particularly when they’re describing George Washington, they always talk about the manliness of George Washington. And if you were to read that in the 21st century in 2025, not knowing about this classical notion of masculinity or manhood, you think manliness of George. What did that mean? Was he big and burly and did he just tear stuff up? And he was a great fighter, but for those individuals who lived during that time, when they said the manliness of George Washington, they knew that actually had some deeper, broader significance. It meant that this was a man who was, as you said, integrated. He developed the whole man.

Waller Newell:

Yes, that’s right. He had the refinement of a gentleman, and yet he was also courageous without limit, really, and self-reliant and encouraged those same qualities in others. One of my favorite references to Washington was by the great English wig leader, Charles James Fox, who wrote a wonderful encomium to Washington saying that this is a man who seems to have den right out of the pages of Plutarch. I think we all know that the American founding was very much caught up in a kind of Roman spirit, that in a way they thought they were reviving a new order of the ages that previously it had been Rome, now it was going to be America and the United States. Another anecdote that I think is very revealing about Washington is that when his troops were camping at Valley Forge under very difficult conditions, Washington actually had a troop stage, a very famous play about the life of Cato and how Cato committed suicide rather than give into the offer of clemency by Julius Caesar. In other words, even under the terrible conditions of Valley Forge, Washington in effect staged the civics lesson for his own troops.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned in your book you focus on five particular virtues, and each of these virtues have sub virtues that you might need to develop to develop that virtue, and you picked love, courage, pride, family and country or patriotism. We’re going to talk more about these virtues in detail here in a moment, but one thing I want to talk about in the beginning of the book, you make the case that another part of manliness in this classical notion is that it’s the balance of reason and passion, and you use Plato’s allegory of the chariot to describe that balance. For those who aren’t familiar with the allegory, can you walk us through it?

Waller Newell:

Yes. Basically, it’s an image based on a chariot with a charioteer and two powerful horses. And in the analogy, the chariot here represents the mind or the intellect, which has to guide the chariot in its celestial ride through the heavens. The horses represent the power of human passion, both erotic and ambitious, vicious. And if the horses get out of the control of the charioteer, they’re going to plunge the chariot downward into the world of chaos below. So that’s why the mind has to govern the passions, but by the same token, without the energy and power of those horses, the chariot isn’t going anywhere. The chariot here by himself is not enough. The mind is not enough. There has to be a symbiotic interaction between the mind and the passions in which the passions are sublimated and placed at the service of reason. So that’s what I was trying to convey there. There has to be this harmony of the mind and the passions, even though the mind in a certain way has to be in the driver’s seat.

Brett McKay:

How do you think we’ve lost sight of that balance in our discourse about manhood today?

Waller Newell:

Well, this takes me to one of my favorite comparisons, which is Fight Club, the novel and the movie. Because I think what you see there is the tension between what I call the wimp and the beast, which sums up the modern dilemma of masculinity. On the one hand, you’ve got the character played by Ed Norton, who is a kind of pouch carrying IKEA furniture, buying self-help group, attending mail. He wants to be the new male that he thinks is required of him by feminism, but then he takes all of the energies that he thereby represses natural masculine energies, and they get shifted to his alter ego, the character played by Brad Pitt, who is a kind of macho fascist. And I think that I’ve observed, and others have confirmed this to me, teachers I know young men today when faced between the choice between the wimp and the beast, believe that in order to be manly, they have to act out the Brad Pitt side of the coin, meaning that they identify manliness with macho aggressiveness. And I think that really sums up the dilemma because rather than a harmony between the mind of the passions, you’ve got a complete contradiction between the mind, which has now been turned into something wan and weak. On the other hand, the passions have been left to become monstrous.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s interesting in 2025 with digital technology, I’m talking social media, YouTube, video games, I think you see instances of those passions of unbridled masculine passion. You see it in the real world in the terms of violence and sexual violence, but you also see it online as well, like some of the discourse you see in some of these internet subcultures that are populated by young men. It can be very pornographic, very violent, it’s very aggressive, but not in a healthy way. And so you’re seeing different outlets for that unbridled beast type you’re talking about.

Waller Newell:

Yes. And some video games, of course, are incredibly violent and simply blood drenched in violence. And I think that people are coming to think that living online is just an unhealthy experience for people in general, and particularly young men, because in a way it isolates them from any kind of wider human context. They think they’re in touch with other people, but they’re really just shouting into a void, and that tempts them to simply abandon all self-restraint and prudence and indulge themselves in really the most wicked of sentiments.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think there’s something about embodying those passions. Those passions are part of the body, and if you don’t keep them there, they’re going and you kind of let ’em out in the digital ether. It’s like almost they get distorted somehow. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors and now back to the show. So let’s dig into the virtues that you highlight in the Code of Man. So again, those are love, courage, pride, family and country. And you started with love first. Why start with love?

Waller Newell:

I began with love because it’s the most deeply personal of the virtues and getting to know my students, my male students, their quandaries about manliness, things like ancient virtue were rather distant from them, but love was something that touched them right now immediately in the present. And so I felt that beginning with the theme of love was a way that young men could be drawn in at a level that they could already relate to, whereas as I said, notions about civic virtue and civic freedom, citizenship, those were rather more remote concerns. But I thought that starting with the personal one could then branch out into these more public other regarding virtues.

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting is your approach of using love as an entry point into manliness or philosophy or virtue. This isn’t new. Plato did the same thing, or Socrates did the same thing in the symposium.

Waller Newell:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

So what can Plato’s Symposium teach us about how love can lead us to true manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think two things. First of all, the symposium teaches that when we love another person, it isn’t simply a bodily love. What we’re truly in love with is the nobility in their character. And that means that we have a motivation to perfect ourselves. We want to earn the admiration of the beloved by displaying our own capacity to strive for nobility. I think that’s the core of Plato’s teaching there. You can find a similar version of this in Castile, the courtier. He makes essentially the same argument that love is a matter of longing for the nobility in the beloved and wishing to win the beloveds affection in return by showing that your are capable of striving for that nobility yourself.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve always really liked Plato’s idea of love as a ladder. So your love for a particular person can lead to a love of beauty overall, and then to loving knowledge and then to loving truth so it can point your perspective higher. So yeah, so loving a particular person can lead to loving virtue. How do you think our idea of love has changed in the modern West, and then how do you think that change has made it harder for love to be an on-ramp into noble manhood?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think as has frequently been observed that the divorce culture in a way whose duration is considerable at this point, made love about what was immediately satisfying for me and encouraged the notion of no fault divorce, meaning that if you as an individual were somehow not satisfied for whatever reason, then you should move on. And I think that this really undermined the notion that previous generations had, like my parents, for example, that even if you are not entirely happy in your married life, that you had a duty to your children to keep things together. Hopefully in the long run, you might reach some kind of better accommodation with your partner. So I think that’s had a big effect on why we can no longer make these appeals to duty when it comes to marital life. Although we’re told that the divorce rate is slowly but surely beginning to decline, and it appears as if people have taken a second look at the institution of marriage and thought maybe it is worth persevering and not expecting every single one of our own demands or desires to be satisfied.

Brett McKay:

The Greek word for love is eros or eros, however you want to pronounce it. And there’s different types of eros. There’s a carnal eros, like the bodily pleasures. You’re attracted to the person physically, but then as you said, there’s an eros that’s more noble you care about and love the person the other that inspires you to live up to a nobility. And I think you make the case that our version of eros in the 21st century has shifted more towards that more carnal eros. And again, the Greeks say carnal eros is fine. You need that. It’s a part of being human, but you don’t want to make it the soul thing in your erotic arsenal. And also, I think something that’s happened too in the 20th and 21st century is that we’ve kind of turned eros on ourselves. It’s a self-love. What can I do for myself? How can I make myself good. And instead of it being directed towards the other.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s right. And it’s interesting that in colloquial Greek aeros isn’t necessarily even restricted to love between two people. For instance, Dima in the symposium says that the most distinctive human trait is the aeros for honor. This is what sets human beings apart. And for instance, there is an ancient Greek statue of aeros, which depicts it as a warrior. So it’s a word that’s almost untranslatable because it has all of these nuances, and you just have to consider what context you’re in to try and fill that with content.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like part of helping young men use love as a step into noble manhood. It seems like we have to kind of educate the moral sense of love, I think, is it Augustine that talked about getting your loves in order? You have to know what are the good things to love?

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s certainly true. And I think you could look at Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice, where it’s fair to say that Mr. Darcy comes to believe that he must perfect himself in order to deserve the love of Elizabeth. And that’s a lesson that he doesn’t take too readily. But he does realize that he does have to, in a way, make himself admirable in her eyes, that it’s not just automatic that everyone admires him. And so I think that literature can be another way in which people are educated to understand love as something more than physical desire.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I love reading Jane Austen. We did a podcast a long time ago, with a Jane Austen scholar about why men should read Jane Austen, and that’s one of the reasons. It’s to educate your moral sense and how you can learn to balance the passion of love, but also learning to love with reason as well. You don’t want to go too far into passion, but you also don’t want to be too heady about it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. Like the novel Sense and Sensibility. Sensibility means the romantic kind of love inspired by Rousseau and Sir Walter Scott as opposed to a more old fashioned levelheaded approach to love and marriage. Like many men, I used to dismiss Jane Austen as just a woman’s writer, but my wife convinced me to read her, and I just love her novels. For one thing, she is just uproariously funny. She is such a comical genius, right? Every page, there’s a laugh.

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. And I think she is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, if you read closely enough.

Waller Newell:

Oh, very much so. Yes. Leo Strauss, the great political theory scholar, once remarked that if you wanted a taste for the classics, you’d be fortunate to be born with a taste for Jane Austin, because that would open the door for you back to ancient writers like Aristotle and Xenophon.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s love. Love is the step into noble manhood. It can inspire us to develop these more public facing virtues. The virtue you talk about next is courage. How did the ancients define courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, they defined it in many different ways. Of course, the baseline definition would be physical courage in combat. Aristotle, for example. Interestingly remarks that in order to be courageous, you must possess fear. If you are not full of fear at the prospect of bodily harm in battle, then you’re never going to be able to rise above that and experience the virtue of courage. But then of course, there’s courage for the sake of the common good, the courage of the citizen. If you think of a classical work like the dream of Skipio by Cicero, he very much makes the point that yes, physical courage is the important baseline meaning of courage. Battlefield courage is very important too. But higher than that is public service and the life of the mind.

Brett McKay:

One thing you talk about that the ancients believed in order to develop courage, one of these sub virtues you had to develop or maybe a characteristic is thumos. What is thumos and how does it relate to the cultivation of courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, Plato is really the most illuminating here about Thumos. Thumos is really the seat in the soul of all aggressive, belligerent passions. And it can therefore be very destructive. It can culminate in the desire to exploit other people. That’s why as republic is it’s almost, its central theme, is the need to educate thumos and shape it, draw it away from those temptations, and turn it into a vigorous pursuit of serving the common good, whose reward is the honor you receive from your fellow citizens.

Brett McKay:

So thumos is this sort of aggression that can be used for good or bad. It depends on how you harness it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. Anger is a facet of thumos.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something that I’ve noticed with the young men that I’ve worked with for the past over 10 years, there are some young men who are very thematic. They play sports, and they’re kind of directing it towards a positive end. They’re very active in their academics. They’re using that drive to do well in school. And then you see these extremes where you have these young men who are very thematic, but they’re not directing it towards anything, and it becomes chaotic. But then I see a lot of young men who just, they lack thumos. They just seem listless and just almost anesthetized. Have you noticed that as well?

Waller Newell:

I certainly have noticed it.

Brett McKay:

So how do you think we can help nurture healthy thumos and young men, and even men who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, I think that we should not attempt to extend to boys the same kind of learning that is extended to women and girls. In other words, frequently now in education, girls are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish. And that’s good. They should be encouraged to do that. But boys are often encouraged to not express themselves in the ways that come naturally to them. Girls, for example, there’s evidence that shows this are better team players. They work more harmoniously in groups than boys do. So I think that we ought to encourage boys to express that natural energy, that natural competitive energy, even a degree of aggressiveness in competition. And that would mean we have to really rethink the way that education is being done.

Brett McKay:

And I also think it’s helpful to give young men books, films where you see healthy thumos in play, and a lot of young men, they’re not getting that in schools. Like I said, that sort of classical education is not there anymore. They’re not reading the Odyssey, they’re not reading The Count of Monte Cristo. They’re not reading these books where you see this thumos and how it can play out in both positive and negative ways.

Waller Newell:

I think so too. And one way in which I’ve changed my approach to teaching over the years is that I now encourage not only the best books or the great books, but what I call the next best books, meaning to say history, biography, literature, art, dealing with the themes of civic virtue, honor, ambition, that people need to know something about the history of statesmanship, the history of honor seeking. So as I said, I think the more that young people can be steeped in the biographies of great statesmen in narrative history about great conflicts, that this is all to the good, but as to how this is going to be institutionalized in the formal education system, in a way I’m at a loss. I think some of it’s got to come through informal educational circles, reading groups, online discussions, programs like the Tocqueville Project in the United States that deliberately do not offer courses for university credit, but simply give students an away year in which they can steep themselves in the classics and in these books about history, biography, culture, and so on. The hope is that when they then return to the university to resume their formal education, they will somehow choose courses that are most likely to give this kind of education or encourage their own professors to teach these kinds of subjects.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a parent of a young man, encourage them to read those classics that you’re talking about. Biographies and things like that. I mean, I’m doing that with my own son. He just finished the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he’s moving on to the count of Monte Cristo, and he loves it. And I think young men, they’re hungry for it. And if you just present it to them in a way that’s palatable, they’ll just eat it up.

Waller Newell:

I find that when I teach these books that the average young person almost take to it spontaneously. I mean, all you have to do is facilitate. They’re being able to read those books. They kind of sell themselves. You don’t really have to sell them. They sell themselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright. So is that drive, that aggression that allows you to be courageous. So whenever you’re feeling fear, you can call upon your thumos to overcome that fear, but then you’re going to want to balance that with reason, because you don’t want to be reckless with your courage. How do courage and love work together as virtues?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think at the most fundamental level, that if you love another person, then you are going to be courageous on their behalf. You’re going to want to protect them and to help them bring about their own self-fulfillment.

Brett McKay:

Right? And so then I think the argument that you make is that using that courage because you love someone else, like your family that’s close to you, you can then extend that in your social circle to family, to community, to state to country.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. I think that was one of Aristotle’s great teachings in the Nicomachean ethics, that people have to begin feeling affection for their fellow family members. This was his criticism of Plato’s Republic for abolishing the family for Aristotle. All of us learn to feel affection first for our fellow family members. Then we can extend that feeling of friendliness outward to our fellow citizens. So the family in a way, is an incubator for the wider political and civic virtues.

Brett McKay:

It’s a school of virtue.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned that these virtues can be perverted, love can be perverted. How have you seen courage be perverted in the modern day?

Waller Newell:

Well, I mean, again, to refer to Aristotle, courage is a mean between cowardice and mad daring and all of those virtues, it’s closer to one extreme than the other. Courage is actually closer to mad daring than it is to coward us. So one always has to be aware or on guard against the fact that your own virtue could actually be taken too far and become something harmful to others and to yourself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s move on to pride. We mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of tension between the classical view and the biblical view. In the chapter on pride, you say that pride is the central issue in the search for a code of man. Why is that?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a way, as Aristotle says, it’s the ornament of all the virtues that in a certain sense, being able to exercise the virtues of love and courage and family life would be a kind of as scent to the position that he describes as greatness of soul. Megalopsychia often gets translated as pride that for him is the crown of all the moral virtues. They all sort of come together and reach that pinnacle.

Brett McKay:

So what does a classical, virtuous, prideful man look like? How do they carry themselves? What do they think of themselves?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, they never deed to treat inferiors cruelly because that would be beneath them. It would show that they needed the recognition of people not on their own level. And so they would not dene to do that. They reserved their sense of outrage to people on their own level who offend them. The other thing that he says is characteristic of pride is that people who serve in public life who possess this virtue only want to deal with truly great affairs matters of life and death for a country, national emergencies. That’s why I think you could say someone like Winston Churchill was really the embodiment of what the classical thinkers meant by pride. Because without World War II, Churchill’s political career would’ve been rather spotty. I’m not sure that absent the great challenge of the war that he would be remembered as a particularly outstanding politician. The same is true of Abraham Lincoln. His record before the Civil War in the minds of many people, was somewhat open to question, open to accusations of dishonor or being a kind of for sale type politician for sale to others. It was only the grand struggle of the Civil War in which he was able to find himself and operate on a scale that brought out everything that was best in him.

Brett McKay:

One thing too, that you notice with these prideful men in the classical sense, they’re also extremely ambitious. I think Abraham Lincoln even said, I’m very ambitious. He said, I want public office. Same with Churchill. He wanted to be the guy in charge of World War II, and he believed he was destined to be in that role. George Patton, same sort of thing. I think he actually thought he was reincarnated. He lived another life where he was a Greek general. But yeah, he was incredibly ambitious as well. Yeah.

Waller Newell:

Again, I mean they really only flower when placed in a position to be in charge of the greatest affairs of state during times of national app peril. There’s a great passage in Churchill’s memoirs of World War II where he talks about the day he was appointed Prime Minister to succeed Chamberlain. And he basically said that that night I slept soundly for the first time in years because I knew the situation pretty well, and I was pretty sure that I was up to dealing with it.

Brett McKay:

So not all of us are going to be Lincoln’s or Washington’s or Churchills. So what does a manly, virtuous pride look like for just a regular guy?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, I think in everyday life, not to treat other people with disdain, particularly people who are in a less advantageous situation than oneself, that one should avoid at all costs. Any display of cruelty or sort of cheap hottiness toward others, gloating over oneself in the eyes of others. Pride has a lot to do with self-restraint, not boasting, not demanding that other people praise you. Just let your works and thoughts speak for themselves.

Brett McKay:

Another part of healthy pride for Aristotle was striving for excellence in accordance with virtue. So healthy pride was only justified if it rested on real achievements. So if you wanted to be a great sold man, you had to continually be aiming at noble deeds worthy of honor. But in the modern world, and particularly the modern West, we’re pretty ambivalent about pride. It’s like do aim for great things, but don’t get too big for your britches. Why are we so conflicted about pride?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think again, it really is a fundamental conflict of values between religious revelation and a kind of secular approach to secular, political and civic psychology. That anyone who has been raised with a religious background, which is certainly true of me, it’s drilled into you from very early on, that pride is a vice that should be avoided. I think somewhat unreasonably, theologians like Saint Augustine immediately equate pride with vainglory and oppressive treatment of others. I don’t think that’s warranted, but it’s also a very, very strong content in all three of the major monotheistic faiths and not merely them that pride is something to be avoided. Humility is to be preferred.

Brett McKay:

So I think you mentioned earlier that we’re probably not going to be able to square this, but do you think there is a way we can live with that tension

Waller Newell:

Only just by living with it? I mean, I’m happy to let the contradiction reign within me. I don’t think there’s a synthesis whereby we can say we’ve got the best of both worlds. It’s just a tension. And I think a lot of psychological depth comes from recognizing those tensions and accepting the fact that there may not be a magic solution.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the family as a path to manhood. Why do you think family is a path to manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a certain way, family life draws on the other virtues that I discussed previously, that to have a successful family life, you need those qualities of love, courage, and a sense of honor. So the family in a way, draws upon all of those virtues of character, I think.

Brett McKay:

And then you can practice them. As we said, the family’s a school of virtue. 

Waller Newell:

That’s right. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

And then you gave examples and counter examples from the classical tradition of what a good family man can look like. You did. The contrast between Achilles and Odysseus. Odysseus is that family man who he’s just trying to get back to his family. And then Hector and Achilles is another one. You also talk about insights that Aristotle has about being a husband and a father. What does he tell us about those roles?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, it’s often a kind of veiled or open critique of Plato, but he does say that the relationship between a husband and a wife should never be one of simply commanding obedience from the wife that a marriage should be a partnership between the husband and the wife, one in which they cooperate to raise their children to be virtuous. So I think this notion of marriage as friendship was very much shaped by Aristotle. And so by the time you get to say the Roman Republic, you find famous couples like Brutus and his wife Porsche, who embodied this kind of friendship. It’s not simply her serving him, he philosophizes, but so does she. They’re both stoic philosophers. When he embarks upon his perilous journey against Julius Caesar, she wants to join him. She wants to share his dangers. So I think that Aristotle did a great deal toward humanizing the concept of marriage and family life, making the marriage a kind of equal partnership.

Brett McKay:

And you see that a bit in the Odyssey with Penelope. Odysseus. Homer describes them as being of one mind. They think the same. They see the world as the same. They’re both sneaky Odysseus with his different tricks, and Penelope with the trick of weaving the funeral cloak, they’re of one mind. They had that really close friendship.

Waller Newell:

Well, and I find it interesting too, that on his way home, Odysseus is accompanied by Athena, who is not only the goddess of wisdom, but a woman. I think part of what Homer is implying there is that there’s a way in which a man’s character has to tap into some female traits. The fact that Odysseus is characterized more by his mental prudence, by his reliance on rhetoric and craft, trying to avoid open physical conflict when he can. I think that’s why there’s a sort of partnership from the very beginning between him and Athena. And then as you said, when he gets back and in the course of his journey home, we also find that his wife back in Ithaca has a number of the same traits that he does.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the last path to manliness is country. And this is where you talk about patriotism. Patriotism gets a bad rap these days, but I think it’s because our idea of patriotism has been bastardized. It’s been perverted. So let’s talk about what the ancients thought about patriotism. How did they define it?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think they define it, and this I think would be something we would still recognize immediately, that patriotism is not uncritical and unswerving loyalty to your country. No matter what it does, there has to be a built in capacity for dissent and freedom of expression. So I think that would be the first thing that citizenship has to be responsible. It can’t just be blind patriotism or conformity.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you love your country, but you love it enough where you’ll push back and criticize it when it’s warranted. What’s interesting too, for the classical thinkers to be a man, Aristotle talks about this, to be a man, you had to be active in public life. You couldn’t just retreat to your home. You had to take part in political life. And that might not mean you run for office necessarily, but you’re aware of what’s going on. You’re active in your community, you’re voting, and also you have to think about politics. I mean, not just in terms of partisan politics, but political life embraces the volunteer groups. You belong to your church, those sorts of things too. So you need to be active in that as well.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, and I just want to add, if I may, that I think that any version of globalization, whether of the left or the right, the globalization of the right, which sees the world as one single economy or the globalization of the left, which sees a kind of postmodernist society perhaps without private property. To me, this is really the death of patriotism in any constructive sense. I think that patriotism requires the nation state, and the nation states differ from one another. In many ways. You can say that modern nation states have the same general institutional frameworks, the same kinds of constitution, independent judiciary rights, division of powers. But on another level, each nation state is pursuing its own historical pathway. Americans, Frenchmen, British Italians, including newcomers in their midst, they are pursuing their own distinct pathway. And I think that patriotism has to be grounded in the context of the particular nation state in which you have grown up or in which you live. So I’m totally against the notion that there’s something unethical about borders. I think there have to be borders.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So some people will say, well, borders are arbitrary. This idea of a nation state, it’s a 17th century creation, and we’re beyond that now because we’re all connected via the internet. So maybe we don’t need that anymore. It sounds like in order for you to have a patriotism and really love your fellow countrymen or the people around you, it sounds like you need a nation state.

Waller Newell:

I think so. Again, not in a narrow, totally inward looking way. I think at its best, the nation state should be a window on the whole world, especially through its educational institutions. But I still think at the end of the day, you can’t be loyal to the globe. I think that you have to be loyal to a particular society with its own traditions.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned Tocqueville in this section on patriotism or love of country as providing some insights, maybe particularly for Americans on what healthy patriotism looks like. What can we learn from Tocqueville?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think Tocqueville shared the concern that Rousseau had originally expressed that the problem with modern democratization and the spread of modern economic prosperity would be that it might undermine the individual’s feeling of obligation to participate in civic life and just fall back on endless material pleasures. So I think Tocqueville was trying to find tendencies in America as he experienced it, that would somehow slow down or halt that process of total economic homogenization. And so he praised local self-government, the different states, the local townships that these were, in a way, incubators of citizenship in the more old fashioned sense, where your citizenship is primarily about a local community.

Brett McKay:

So anything that men can do to develop a virtuous patriotism today,

Waller Newell:

Again, I think it’s a matter of somehow being exposed or finding a way of being exposed to this pedigree of writings about the virtues and about the manly virtues, the traditional meaning of manly virtue. There are books available on this as to how one finds that in one’s own formal educational experience. While there are of course, places like the University of Austin, the University of Texas at Austin, where they are attempting to create institutes that combine liberal education with civics education. And so I think there is hope for the future here. Clemson College is another, Mercer Colleges another. These programs are beginning to spring up where you combine an interest in the canon of the great books with an interest in what you might call applied citizenship, the history of civics, and the need to know something about the founding principles of your regime. So I guess the most promising thing on the horizon would be that those institutions continue to proliferate and offer an alternative to the more conventional educational approach.

Brett McKay:

And I think another thing too is to just start practicing noble patriotism. Like I said earlier, just get involved in your community. Start small. Tocqueville talked about this. Just get involved with your kids’ school. Get involved with the booster club of your kids’ sports teams, because it’s where you learn how to work with other people. You learn how to deal with the frustrations of dealing with other people. They’re like these sort of little laboratories of democracy, and maybe that leads to getting involved in higher levels of governance, but you got to start small. You got to start somewhere.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s especially true of education. I mean, I know a lot of teachers, and I think sometimes we tend to put everything on them or expect them to do everything as far as educating their children, but they can’t assume sole responsibility for that. Most of them are very conscientious in my experience. But the parents really do need to be in the driver’s seat about guiding their children in cooperation with their teachers through school.

Brett McKay:

So after decades of studying and writing about manliness and thinking about it, is there one particular lesson from that tradition that has most shaped your life?

Waller Newell:

I would say that I’m not pessimistic about the future of manliness, if that’s an answer, because in my view, human nature does not change. And the yearning of young men for a satisfying way of living does not go away. If anything, I think it’s possibly intensifying at the present time. So I guess what I’ve learned is to be hopeful and to be persevering because I don’t think there are grounds for despair.

Brett McKay:

I love that how you’re not pessimistic, because there’s a lot of pessimism today about masculinity, and I think what we need more of is some thumotic optimism about masculinity or manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yes, I do too. I mean, Theo certainly has a rule in civic spiritedness, and we shouldn’t be afraid to display that.

Brett McKay:

Well, Waller, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Waller Newell:

I’ve had a great time as far as your question goes. The best place would be my website, which is www.wallernewell.com, all lowercase. That’s basically got links to all of my books, reviews of my books, my own publications, my whole cv. So if anyone wants to know more about me and what I do, that would be the place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Waller Newell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Waller Newell:

Thanks very much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Waller Newell, he’s the author of the book, The Code of Man. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, wallernewell.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we think about affairs of honor in 19th-century America, our minds typically bring up images of well-dressed gentlemen facing each other at dawn, pistols gleaming in the morning light. The duel — with its elaborate codes, precise choreography, and aristocratic flourishes — has captured our collective imagination as the quintessential way men settled disputes of honor in the past.

But there was another tradition of honor running parallel to the gentleman’s duel — one that was far more brutal, common, and chaotic: the rough and tumble.

You’ll often hear biologists talk about how mammals — including humans — engage in “rough and tumble play.” Rough and tumble play is cute. It’s roughhousing.

But the rough and tumble in 19th-century America was the opposite of cute.

It was a no-holds-barred style of fighting where pretty much anything went. The goal was to disfigure your opponent permanently. We’re talking about gouging out eyes, biting off ears and noses, and fish hooking someone until their cheek tore.

I first came across the practice of rough and tumble fighting way back when we wrote our series about male honor. Ever since I learned about it, I’ve been fascinated by it. The idea that men would regularly try to gouge each other’s eyes out over perceived slights seems almost incomprehensibly savage from our modern perspective. Yet for thousands of working-class American men in the 19th century, this brutal form of combat was as normal and socially acceptable as settling disputes through lawyers is today.

Below, we take a look at this forgotten, but important, practice of American honor culture.

The Scotch-Irish and the Birth of American Brutality

The rough and tumble traces its roots back to the fighting traditions of the Scotch-Irish immigrants who flooded into America during the 18th century. They were a pastoral people who came from the borderlands between England and Scotland — a region where life was hard, government was weak, and personal honor was often the only thing standing between a man and his livelihood.

In a pastoral culture, such as was practiced by many Scotch-Irish, your livestock was your livelihood. The problem with animals is that bandits or a rival family could easily steal them. As a consequence, shepherds not only kept a constant eye on their flocks and herds, but they also developed and maintained a reputation for violence to deter would-be thieves. If someone messed with you or your family, an 18th-century Scotch-Irish man was expected to respond with brutal force. Killing someone over a slight wasn’t off the table.

When these immigrants settled in the backcountry regions of the American South, they carried this violent notion of honor with them. How that violent honor manifested itself began to splinter across class lines. Southern aristocrats, wanting to distinguish themselves from black slaves and lower-class whites, looked to European aristocrats as a model of settling disputes of honor. From European nobles, the Southern gentleman borrowed the code duello — an elaborate code of conduct governing duels that emphasized decorum and restraint. The goal of the code duello seemed to have been to curtail brutality, while still allowing for a man’s sense of offended honor to be restored.

Meanwhile, the poorer class of Scotch-Irish continued to use the raw violence of their ancestors to settle scores. Scratching, biting, hair pulling, and eye gouging were all fair game. The goal of this style of fighting wasn’t just to defeat your opponent; it was to mark him permanently, to leave visible, lasting proof of his humiliation. This style of honor fighting among the working-class in the South became known as the rough and tumble.

Rules? What Rules?

Unlike dueling, which required knowledge of complex codes of conduct, expensive weapons, and social connections to arrange the affair properly, anyone could engage in a rough and tumble. It was democratic. All you needed was a grievance and a willingness to endure unspeakable pain.

That’s not to say there were no conventions at all. Rough and tumble fights typically began with a ritualized challenge. One man would announce his readiness to fight by issuing a specific throwdown to his opponent. A man of honor had no choice but to accept. The challenger could ask, “Rules?” His opponent could then respond with something like, “Queensbury rules.” But he was apt to just say: “rough and tumble.” And when he did, the violent melee would begin right there and then. 

There’s an episode of Disney’s old Davy Crockett show that shows this back and forth before a rough and tumble (hat tip to Dying Breed reader Mark McGrath for sharing this with me):

Before the actual fighting started, the combatants would usually strip to the waist. This served a practical purpose as clothes could be grabbed. But it also served as a symbolic gesture indicating that this was a serious business; there was real skin in the game.

Once the fight began, conventional rules of fair play went out the window. Gouging out eyes was not only acceptable but expected. In fact, eye gouging was so common in rough and tumbles that this style of fighting was often called “gouging.” Some men even grew their fingernails out to increase their gouging efficiency.  

Grabbing a man by the hair and bashing his head into the ground or a nearby tree was par for the course. Biting off ears and noses was considered good technique. Fish hooking was a go-to tactic in rough and tumbles. A fighter would jam his finger (or fingers) into his opponent’s mouth and hook it into the corner of the cheek, then pull violently in an attempt to tear the flesh. The goal was to rip the corner of the mouth open. Some fighters would even attempt to twist and tear their opponent’s testicles.

A rough and tumble ended when one man either couldn’t continue or acknowledged defeat.

The Rough and Tumble Spreads

In the 19th century, the rough and tumble gained wider notoriety through “Crockett almanacs.” These cheaply produced pamphlets portrayed Davy Crockett and other Southern-born frontiersmen taking part in rough and tumbles and boasting of their gouging skills. The tales cemented the image of the American frontiersman as a man who solved problems with raw violence. It also helped spread the rough and tumble across the country.

It even cropped up among Northern men. Historian Lorianne Foote notes that working-class Union soldiers often settled disputes with rough and tumbles, while middle and upper-class officers stuck with aristocratic dueling conventions. Once again, class shaped the form honor disputes took.

If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s epic film Gangs of New York, you’ve actually seen a Yankee version of the rough and tumble. It’s the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Amsterdam Vallon, squares off with Bill the Butcher’s heavy, McGloin (played by Gary Lewis). The fight begins like a boxing match but quickly devolves into a rough and tumble, ending with a near fish hook before Bill the Butcher calls it off. Besides capturing the spontaneous brutality of the rough and tumble, the film also gets the cultural context right. Such fights weren’t fought between gentlemen. Both Vallon and McGloin were Irish immigrants, and they duked it out in the working-class slums of the Five Boroughs.

The Death of a Violent Tradition (Mostly)

So what led to the decline of the rough and tumble? Two main factors converged to hasten its demise. First, the rise of professional law enforcement, which shifted dispute-settling to the state, and second, evolving ideas of masculinity, which increasingly frowned on extreme violence as a way to adjudicate honor.

Yet the tradition never vanished completely. Variations still surface in isolated communities today. During a podcast I did with Stayton Bonner about bare-knuckle boxer Bobby Gunn, we discussed the Irish Traveller community Bonner grew up in. In that culture, men still settle disputes of honor by stripping to the waist and fighting with bare hands until an opponent is maimed and gives up. Like their historical predecessors, when a Traveller engages in a rough and tumble, there’s eye gouging, fish hooking, and testicle twisting. It’s a brutal echo of honor’s violent past.

For more on how the idea of male honor has changed over the centuries, check out our series on the subject.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In a world that often feels dominated by technology and constant change, it’s easy to forget that some people are still living by the rhythms of ancient traditions. James Rebanks, an author and shepherd, is one of them, and in today’s episode, he shares what following a way of life that has endured for thousands of years can teach us about modern life and the things that matter.

James offers a glimpse at the often ignored and misunderstood world of pastoral life in England’s Lake District, which isn’t just about working with sheep and cattle but maintaining a deep connection to past generations, a commitment to community, and a sense of purpose. He takes us through the life of a fell shepherd, where the timeless values of hard work, seasonality, stewardship, and stillness still get lived out day to day.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• James’ books
• Grazing School
• The Poetics of Manhood by Michael Herzfeld
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Dying Breed article: 5 Things Farmers Have Taught Me About Work, Life, and Legacy
• Wendell Berry’s books
• Regeneratist Allen Williams
• Regeneratist Greg Judy

Connect With James Rebanks

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

My kids and I watched The Sandlot on the 4th of July. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen this movie. It never feels old or stale.

The Sandlot is the all-time greatest kid’s summer movie. It’s the Platonic ideal of a kid’s summer movie.

It has it all. Baseball (of course), sleepovers in a treehouse, hijinks at the community pool, neighborhood cookouts and fireworks, and backyard adventures. The Sandlot depicts a childhood many older men remember and boys raised on screens wish they had.

While watching it again, I think I figured out what gives this 30-year-old kid flick its staying power.

First, it perfectly captures the rough-and-tumble joy of male bonding.

In 1969, anthropologist Lionel Tiger published Men In Groups. He highlighted how human males are adept at forming male-only coalitions — gangs — in which they take part in intra- and inter-competitions. They jockey within the group for status, and they bond by working together to take something on — another tribe, a business, or nature itself.

That dynamic is at the heart of The Sandlot.

The Sandlot gang forms a “coalitional group”: bound by ritual (daily baseball), hierarchy (Benny is the undisputed leader, and there is good-natured teasing), and a shared mission (beat the rich-kid team; outsmart the Beast). Their friendship isn’t built on heart-to-heart talks, but on sweat, risk, and play. The Sandlot shows male friendship at its most archetypal.

The other reason I think The Sandlot has stood the test of time is that the film showcases a shining example of positive masculinity in Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez.

Benny is the guy.

No one is as cool as Benny.

He has, as my kids would say, infinite aura.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be like Benny. As a 42-year-old man, I still want to be like Benny.

But what makes Benny so cool?

Well, Benny’s got prestige.

We talked about what prestige is in our article “The Myth of the Alpha Male.” It’s one of the two ways men can gain status in the social world. The other is dominance. Here’s the TLDR:

Dominance is aggressive and coercive. It’s about intimidating others and demanding respect.

Prestige is earned. You gain prestige through competence, generosity, and service to others. People freely confer respect on men of prestige based on their valuable skills, knowledge, and/or moral character.

Dominant men make others feel small. Prestigious men make others feel inspired.

Of the paths to status, prestige is more effective. While dominant men can gain status in the short-term, people come to resent them and try to usurp their power. People are more loyal to prestigious men, who maintain enduring influence.

Benny is the epitome of prestige. That’s why he’s so damn cool.

Here are some lessons men — whether they’re 14 or 44 — can learn from Benny on how to be more prestigious:

Be Competent

Prestige starts with being really good at something.

Benny is really good at baseball. He knocks the guts out of a ball and steals bases with ease. But his competence goes beyond the sandlot. He’s the one with the courage and know-how to retrieve the Babe Ruth ball from the Beast’s yard. The other boys look up to Benny and follow him because he’s earned their respect through his competence.

Want to be prestigious? Start off by getting so good at something people can’t ignore you.

Have Amazing Drip

I’ve always admired Benny’s style. It’s laid-back and functional — casual but subtly put-together. PF Flyers. Baseball shirt or a tucked-in tee with a camp collar shirt over it. Cuffed jeans. Ball cap. His look is timeless. I’d wear it today.

A prestigious man takes pride in his appearance. He knows how he dresses signals his self-awareness and discipline.

Build Others Up

The thing that really makes Benny prestigious is how he lifts others up. Benny combines competence and warmth, which is the recipe for charisma.

The way Benny takes Scotty Smalls under his wing at the beginning of the film is a masterclass in charismatic prestige.

Smalls is the new kid who can’t throw, can’t catch, doesn’t know who Babe Ruth is, and wears a dorky fish hat. While the other boys shun Scotty, Benny makes him feel included. He doesn’t humiliate Smalls, but he doesn’t baby him either. When Scotty started feeling sorry for himself for being such a wiener, Benny kindly and firmly told him to get over himself and to quit thinking so much. He showed Smalls how to throw a baseball and then, like a boss, gave Smalls the confidence he needed by hitting a pop fly right into his glove.

Benny’s aura doesn’t end there, though. As the boys are walking home from the sandlot, Smalls tries to give back the baseball glove that Benny lent him for the day. “Keep it, man,” Benny nonchalantly says.

Then Benny kindly tells Smalls to switch out his dorky outfit for something better suited for baseball on the sandlot — a t-shirt and jeans. Benny also tells Smalls to burn his fish hat and replace it with a proper ball cap. “Well, yeah, this is the only one I had,” Smalls sheepishly replies.

And then Benny does the most dadgum smooth thing ever. He pulls out an extra hat from his back pocket, hands it to Smalls, and says, “Not anymore. It’s one of my old hats.”

So smooth!

When the gang celebrated beating the snooty rich kid team, Benny treated them to a night at the fair. A prestigious man is a generous man.

Through small yet impactful gestures, Benny imparts a lesson in how demonstrating prestige involves making those around you feel awesome.

Serve Others

Prestige culminates in service. When the gang’s other plans to get the Babe Ruth ball back fail, Benny laces up his new PF Flyers and jumps the fence to pickle the Beast. It’s an act of self-sacrifice for the team and for Smalls. And in doing it, Benny becomes more than a good ballplayer. He becomes a legend. Prestigious men serve others.

In a situation where life imitates art, Mike Vitar, the actor who played Benny, went on to become a firefighter in Los Angeles (and his brother, who plays the older version of Benny in the movie, joined the LA police department).

Heroes Get Remembered; Legends Never Die

While Benny eventually makes it to the major leagues, it was his big league attitude that made him the leader of his friends, a model of prestige, and a great cinematic example of positive masculinity. It’s demonstrating skill, encouraging people, helping others — and even looking good while doing it — that makes a man of any age influential and ensures he’ll be long, and well, remembered.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I’m a suburban man. Born and raised.

I grew up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. I now live in the suburbs of Tulsa.

Suburban manhood has its own meaning and archetype — one that’s a weird and complex mixture of other archetypes of American manhood.

Homeownership gives suburban men a chance to harness a bit of the genteel farmer archetype of American manliness. Like the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, you’ve got a little plot of land that’s yours, and you can do what you want with it. But unlike the republican yeoman farm or the ancient Greek oikos, where property produced food and raiment, suburban homeownership is mostly consumptive. Suburban men spend money to maintain their homes instead of their homes maintaining them. In many ways, suburban manhood is a simulation of the ideal of the country homesteader.

Suburban manhood also mixes in the archetype of the urban man. Urban manhood is characterized by ambition, professional success, style-consciousness, adaptability, and social sophistication. The urban man excels in commerce, culture, or professional fields, embracing dynamism, networking, cosmopolitanism, and competition. The suburban man embraces these energies, too, but to a lesser and more ambivalent extent; living in a less densely populated area, and perhaps even working from home, he has fewer opportunities to rub shoulders with others, attend cultural events, demonstrate wit, knowledge, and style, and exercise interpersonal skills.

The archetype of the heroic artisan is present in the ethos of suburban manhood as well. While few suburban men earn their living crafting tangible goods, there’s still an expectation for manual competence. A suburban man might handle household repairs or engage in DIY hobbies, though often at a basic level.

In addition to this mixture of ideals in the suburban manhood archetype, there’s also a general tension between public achievement and private investment. There’s this idea that your primary job is to go out into the world of work so you can bring home the bacon. You’ve got to be high agency and competitive and willing to bump elbows in the ladder-climbing world of work. But there’s also an expectation that a suburban man should be domestic — in a manly way. He’s the involved dad who fixes up the house so it looks nice and grills burgers on the patio on the weekend.

The other day, while tackling some chores around the house, I was pondering these tensions and what it means to be a man in the suburbs. I felt a sense of masculine competence by getting things done, but at the same time, couldn’t shake a nagging thought: “What exactly am I accomplishing by puttering around the house? What kind of life am I up to here?”

Wanting to make better sense of the contradictions of suburban manhood, I went digging through history. Below I’ll unpack how suburban manhood came to be a strange hybrid of public navigator and domestic homesteader — and what it means for suburban men today.

A Brief History of the Rise of the American Suburbs and Their Influence on Our Ideas of Manhood

In his book Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson outlined four defining features of the American suburb: low-density housing, high homeownership, separation of work and home via commuting, and middle-class affluence. Over the last two centuries, these features of the suburb have waxed, waned, and influenced our ideas of modern manhood along the way.

The 19th Century: The Birth of Suburban Manhood

American suburbs first emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Unlike European cities, where the wealthy stayed in the urban core, America’s elites moved to the outskirts of cities to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life. Advances in transportation made this possible. Rail lines and later street cars allowed men to live in the pastoral charms of the suburbs and then commute to the city for work.

This marked a profound shift: for the first time, work and home became physically separated for most men. Before this period, men’s working lives and domestic lives were closely intertwined. Farmers worked their land at home, and craftsmen operated workshops adjoining their residences.

With the rise of white-collar and factory work in cities, work and home life were severed. Work outside the home began to be seen as the exclusive domain of men, while the home was seen as women’s sphere. This shift was reinforced culturally by what historians call the “cult of domesticity.” Under this ideal, women were seen as the moral and spiritual caretakers of the home, while men participated in the workplace and in civic and cultural organizations. After toiling in the “dirty” urban world of public and professional life, men could return home to the renewing and refining oasis cultivated by their wives.

Yet toward the end of the 19th century, there was a movement among suburban men to reclaim the home as part of their masculine identity. They began to get more involved in home life when they were off the clock. They started gardens in their backyards and wood shops in their garages. They were doing things that allowed them to exercise masculine competency — but in a domestic way. Instead of spending time with the fellows at the pub or at the fraternal lodge, many suburban men started spending more time with their families. Scholars call this social movement “masculine domesticity.”

The 1950s and 1960s: The Golden Age of Suburban Manhood

The Great Depression put the brakes on the spread of the suburbs in America, but after World War II, they boomed. The interstate system and the rise of the automobile allowed homes to be built further away from cities while still enabling men to commute downtown relatively quickly. The GI Bill provided low-cost mortgages to returning vets, opening homeownership to millions of men. After years of actively participating in the carnage of war, many American men welcomed the tranquility of the suburbs.

Masculine domesticity went into hyperdrive in the 1950s. There’s a reason why, when we think “suburban man,” we typically picture some mid-century illustration of a 1950s guy in his backyard, grilling burgers while wearing a “Kiss the Chef” apron. Do-it-yourself-ism exploded. Magazines like Popular Mechanics became staples in suburban homes. Cooking, once the near-exclusive domain of wives, became a manly pastime — so long as it involved meat and fire. Dads volunteered to coach Pee Wee baseball and lead Boy Scout troops.

The rise of mass consumerism in the 1950s shifted the meaning of being a provider for suburban men. Instead of fulfilling that role by providing food grown or raised through their own labor, suburban men provided for their families by bringing home a paycheck to purchase the bacon at the grocery store. What’s more, the scope of providing expanded. It wasn’t enough just to provide the basic necessities for living; suburban men needed to provide middle-class luxuries for their families, like nice cars, clothes, and vacations.

Television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showcased the ideal of domestically masculine suburban manhood. Life magazine labeled 1954 as the year of the “domestication of the American Man.” It seemed like suburban men had it all in terms of masculine identity: a sense of being a capable producer and provider at work and of being a competent, creative DIY-er at home.

The 1970s-1990s: Cracks Start to Form

Things began to shift in the 1970s. Economic stagnation put a strain on many American suburban families. Job growth moved away from central cities and traditional manufacturing hubs, undermining the older “commute-to-the-city” suburban model. Suburban office parks began appearing, allowing men to work closer to home. The rise of urban decay also led men to spend less leisure time in the city.

It wasn’t just urban areas that experienced decline; suburbs that grew rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s began encountering problems traditionally associated with cities: congestion, strained infrastructure, and rising crime. Consequently, people started moving even further out from traditional suburbs into areas now known as exurbs.

With more women entering the workforce, men began to play a larger role in childcare and other domestic responsibilities, and both sexes had less time for hobbies, household maintenance, and general domestic investment. The stress of juggling multiple roles increased. Cultural portrayals of suburban life during this period began to highlight these emerging cracks in suburban manhood, exposing tensions between traditional expectations and modern realities.

The 2000s to Today: A Return to Oikos Manhood?

Advances in technology and an uncertain economic landscape have eroded two of Jackson’s defining features of the American suburb: separation of home and work via commuting, and widespread home ownership.

Digital technologies have allowed many men to work from home, and they’re having to figure out how to blend family life and work life. One minute, they can be on a Zoom call with their boss; the next, they’re driving a kid to baseball practice. In some ways, this is a return to the Greek idea of oikos manhood, where the home functioned as a place of production.

Opportunities have arisen with this shift: men can invest commuting time back into their families, communities, and hobbies. But there’s a downside, too: without clear boundaries between work and home, everything tends to bleed together. Suburban men may feel stuck in a cycle of half-working and half-fathering, never feeling fully present in either.

Homeownership has long been central to suburban manhood. But rising home prices, stagnant wages, and investor-owned subdivisions are changing that. Renting in the suburbs is becoming more common for younger men. This has shifted the old suburban script of being the master of your domain. Property stewardship becomes negotiated. Men can still DIY in their rented homes, but they have to talk to their landlord first. Perhaps they can’t remodel their kitchen, but they can build raised garden beds in the yard or create a makerspace in a spare bedroom.

​​Even when modern men do own their own homes, they were less likely to learn DIY and handyman skills growing up and are thus more likely to outsource maintenance tasks to professionals. And rather than hands-on hobbies, today’s men are apt to spend their leisure time in digital pursuits — playing video games, scrolling their phones, and watching television. As their professional jobs often involve manipulating digital modalities too, this further blurs the line between work and home, giving men a feeling of lopsided development and lending life an ethereal, unreal quality.

A New Old Ideal

The reason I — and I would imagine other men — feel ambivalent about being a man in the suburbs is that there’s an inherent tension in suburban masculinity. It incorporates various archetypes of manhood but doesn’t fully embody any of them.

The suburbanite archetype still retains something of the self-reliant homesteader — the man who fully provides for himself and his family — but only as a faint echo of that ideal. Sure, you can raise backyard chickens and grow vegetables, but you’re far from self-sufficient. You’re kind of playing at being a self-sustaining farmer.

The suburban man has professional ambitions, often strives for some cultural sophistication, and maintains a network of colleagues and friends, but doesn’t have the cosmopolitan sophistication of a city dweller. He’s more isolated and has fewer chances to dress up and make conversation with different kinds of folks; when he does socialize it tends to be with his family and in the context of youth sports leagues and church functions.

The suburban man is still expected to have a little of the heroic artisan in him, but typically doesn’t possess all that much manual competence and only engages in a nominal amount of concrete hands-on tasks — either in terms of home maintenance or his hobbies.

Despite these tensions, there’s value in embracing the contradictions of suburban manhood. Living in the suburbs has a lot of perks. You don’t have to worry about drought killing your crops. You don’t have to wake up at 4 am to milk the cows. You have ample free time (more free time than ever before) to pursue hobbies and be involved with your community.

You just have to embrace the idea that it’s worthwhile to dabble in the various archetypes of manhood, even if you’re not all-in on any of them. You don’t have to be a genuine farmer or cosmopolitan or artisan to get satisfaction from gardening, being well-read, or staining your deck.

Embracing the tensions of suburban manhood also requires investing in domestic life without losing your edge. Avoid succumbing to soft suburban dad syndrome. Stay ambitious about your work. Keep fit. Get out into the wild every now and then. You can live in the suburbs without being entirely of the suburbs.

Perhaps suburban manhood today is less about mastering a specific role and more about navigating an amalgamation of responsibilities with resilience and purpose. At least that’s what I tell myself as I shoot off emails from my home office, check on the brisket cooking in my wood pellet smoker, and finish up a workout in my garage gym.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.