Transcription
[Music] It's cool to not care as a boy. You won't ask for help 'cause you don't want to be seen as weak.
America's young men are falling behind at school, at work, and at home. Society has these stigmas on the man.
It's the latest development in a seismic shift decades in the making.
We tore up the old script for women. We said, "No, no, no. The future's female. You go girl. Future president. Women can be anything." Incredibly inspiring, empowering script that we put around girls and young women. Now, what's the new empowering, exciting, and inspiring script for men that we've replaced that old one with? We didn't replace it. CBS reports explores how boys and men are navigating a new reality.
The messages you get from the culture is that men should throw off anything that reeks of tradition and embrace anything that smells like modernity.
There's so many successful women who are well educated and they want a person who makes at least the same income as them or more.
Welcome guys to Access Vegas and the online ecosystem calling out to those left confused and struggling. There are probably people who would look at your program and listen to your pod and then listen to this interview and say, "This guy's full of..." I would feel bad if I didn't have 4,000 guys telling me that this worked.
There's like a lot of like these influencers now that try to tell kids nowadays use steroids and stuff like that. It's really appealing, especially to younger men who are like, "Well, I'm not sure what masculinity looks like." This guy has a road map and he's telling me what it is.
[Music] Bro, all like three of my classes, all my electives I'm taking, they're like all underassman and then all my other classes are just IB year 2. So I have like a lot of electives like I'm doing like art like I have weightlifting.
Santos Navaro and Ashton Stevens are seniors at Oberlin High School in Ohio where they're both active in sports.
I'm just excited to get it done. Yeah. I want to move on. I want to be done. Yeah.
Stevens is captain of the varsity soccer team while Navaro plays linebacker on the football team. Navaro lives with his mother, Rosa, in an apartment near school. He's one of the roughly 20% of minors in the US parented by a single mom. His parents divorced before he was a year old. And from the ages of 4 to six, his father was in prison.
So, I love wearing stuff like this. Like, it's literally just like it's just different. And nobody else is like really wearing stuff like this in school. Like, it has like a whole bunch of rhinestones on it.
He says in middle school he dealt with a lot of anger issues. But now that he's nearing graduation and adulthood, he's been thinking a lot more about the kind of man he wants to be.
Every person is different and like every young boy just like gets to decide what man they want to be. And I feel like the type of man that I would want to be is just definitely like dependable and open to the unknown.
Navaro's classmate Ashton Stevens is one of the nearly 70% of US minors living in a two-parent household. He's an Eagle Scout, skateboarder, and proud brother to two sisters.
I keep the boards around just 'cause I kind of I like the vibe. Every time I bust like get a board or break it, I'll just throw it on the wall.
Steven says he's also spending more time these days thinking about his future. Kind of man I want to be uh when I get older is um a man who gives, a man who is willing to um work hard. The word strength is a very broad word and um when you say "I am strong," yeah, that at face value that means like strong. It could mean so much more. Mentally strong. Like I feel like there's a lot of levels to that one word.
Both Stevens and Navaro's mother say they are immensely proud of their sons, but share similar concerns about the challenges confronting this generation of boys and men. Society has these stigmas on the man and like the pressures of a man and what a man is.
Steven's mom, Joanna, struggles with how to encourage her son to succeed. An issue she says she doesn't have with her daughters.
With girls, you need to make sure that they are, you know, strong. It's easy to say you need to be strong, you need to be independent, you need to, you know, look after yourself and be in control. And with boys, you can't really say that because if you tell a boy, "You need to be in control," it just sounds wrong. And both boys and girls are important because I have a daughter who's an amazing kid who's successful, who's strong, who's independent. And then I have a son who I also want the same for him.
Is there amongst young men a sense of confusion about what it means to be masculine today?
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, in some ways, the big question that young men are asking today is, "How should I be a man?" And that's because there isn't a clear script anymore for what that looks like.
Richard Reeves runs the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan think tank focused on research and advocacy.
Why the need? Why did you decide to start this?
It's a much more challenging time for young men to figure out their place in the world than it was. And then you add to that the fact that we have massive education gaps.
Boys are lagging behind girls in school, especially in reading, and they're less likely to go to college. Today, it's women who are 15 percentage points more likely to get a degree than men. We've flipped the gender gap, and actually women are a bit further ahead of men today on college campuses than men were in the early '70s, which is when we passed Title 9 and had a really concerted push around kind of helping, helping women. In the average school district, boys are about a grade level behind in English. So, we see very, very big gaps in the education system and in mental health. And I think that then flows into employment, family life, and so on.
From 1970 to 2020, the percentage of men participating in America's labor force fell nearly 5%. During the same period, the percentage of men getting married also fell by twice as much.
Young men um and boys are falling further and further behind. Many are disconnected or disaffected, don't have a clear life path.
Delano Squires is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation with a focus on family and education.
The second wave feminist movement was extremely successful at directing resources towards women and girls, whether that's in terms of education, in terms of the economy, in political representation.
Help me reconcile because I think I think this is a point that that many Americans would be confused by. The highest echelons of power, whether in the corporate world or in government, are largely held by men.
I think part of that is recognizing the generational divide. The crisis is is generally speaking among younger men, right? So that's why we're talking about boys and men. The people in power obviously are older men, and eventually they're going to transition from those roles.
The median age of both Fortune 500 CEOs and members of the House of Representatives is about 57. While only 28% of the members of Congress are women, the number of women sworn into the most recent Congress represented a 44% increase compared to 10 years ago. There are more Fortune 500 CEOs, I think, named like John, David, and Mike, than there are female Fortune 500 CEOs, period. But the thing is, most men are not Fortune 500 CEOs. And these men who are succeeding extremely in their fields, they're doing great, but they don't necessarily represent all men or even the majority of men.
Christine Emba is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.
Pretty much since the founding of the United States, uh, political thinkers and ideas people have been bemoaning the state of American men. First, it was that the frontier closed and American men didn't have anywhere else to explore. Then, it was that the world wars had decimated men. Uh, eventually that turned into sort of an obsession with how unfit physically men were getting. So this has always been sort of a question that's being asked of men. However, I do think that in this moment um men maybe are facing an identity crisis.
One of the things that uh a lot of the young men I've talked to mention when I'm asking them about masculinity and manhood and where they get their ideas of how to be a man from is male role models.
Yes. Yes. Hey, I have a tie for you. Part.
Many will say, "My dad wasn't in the house," or like, "I don't really have sort of older men around me who like taught me how to be a man." I think boys in particular feel this emotional roller coaster, this push and pull of like, on the one hand, um, I'm hearing people think men should be able to cry, but I also don't feel I can express myself. Don't have enough adult men in my life that actually model that for me.
Describe a physical sensation in or on your body. So something that you can feel and then you're going to describe an emotional feeling. We don't give teenage boys enough credit for how emotional they are. When you create a space or an environment where it's acceptable and encouraged to do this, it's beautiful what happens naturally.
[Music] Classic five Friday. Drew, young men in the men's work project, please report to the library. Thank you. And we're take one big deep breath in through the nose, sigh out. We're do one more big deep breath in through the nose. This time we're going to bring our hands above our head and sigh out. Drop your hands.
David Reese is a language arts teacher at Oberlin High School in Ohio. Johnny Cole is Reese's former student and founder of Hey Brother, an organization that seeks to challenge and examine what it means to be a modern man. Every other week during the school year, Cole and Reese lead a group of over a dozen high school boys in lessons and discussions focused on the role of men in today's world, a program they call men's work.
So here's a question. When in your life was there a time when you wanted to cry? You felt it. You wanted to cry, but you kind of like stuffed that down and would not allow yourself.
Jaden, when my dog died. I feel that was just a big part of my life. And for him to be taken just in an instant, it was, it was kind of sad.
Who here has lost a pet? All right. Um, who here wanted to cry and did cry when you lost your pet?
Why do you think there's a hunger for this now?
I believe that there always has been, but it is more present and potent because we have a cultural dialogue around men being expressive and the expectation that men should be going to therapy and women wish that they could find men who were more expressive. I mean, I met David when I was 13 years old. And at the time, I was incredibly emotionally suppressed and struggling a lot at home because I grew up in an abusive environment. And so, I developed a bit of a mistrust for opening up to older men. And that didn't stop me from admiring David. And as you see from his interactions at school, he's such a wonderful presence and such an incredible role model.
On the subject of of uh positive role models and whatnot, um, you know, this obviously has to start very early in life.
Yeah. Where are men or are men in the classroom?
We've seen a massive decline in the share of male teachers. So, we have fewer men in our classrooms now than we do women in STEM STEM professions or women in law, uh women in medicine, etc. And we actually need to go a bit further in some areas. Meanwhile, a decline in the share of men in professions like teaching. And what that means is that there is just this dearth of men standing in front of these kids. In the 1980s, one of three K through 12 teachers were men. Today, it's just one in four. And there have been many headlines in recent years highlighting how boys are falling behind in school.
In the classroom. Have you seen boys struggle when it comes to achievement when it comes to participation?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, handing in assignments. Like all my girls are handing in the assignment and if I've got like eight boys in the class, maybe maybe one or two did.
Educators see boys lagging behind from elementary school through graduation. Prior to middle school, boys are more likely to repeat a grade than girls. And in high school, girls have consistently earned higher GPAs than boys.
For years, people have been saying that the K through 12 education system is not set up for boys, requiring them to sit still for, you know, hours on end, labeling any boy who's a little bit, you know, more rambunctious as having, you know, ADHD or some other social issue.
It's cool to not care as a as a boy. It's cool to be nonchalant. You're struggling in a math class and you, you won't ask for help because you don't want to be seen as as weak. Whereas girls are not socialized to believe it is weak for them to ask for help.
[Music] Today I'm feeling very excited 'cause we have a home football game today and I'm super happy and excited.
Okay. And where do you feel that in your body? Like?
I feel that like in my chest, like my arms, my upper body.
That's it. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah.
In the 2010s, I think we sort of reached this um I think rather unfortunate, frankly, high water of sort of almost jokey feminist progressive movement um, missy. You know, we talked about girl bosses and the future being female. And then of course the flip side of that was it being okay to be like, "Men are trash. We don't need men anymore." And I think that also left a lot of men thinking, well, okay, if being a man is bad, if masculinity is toxic, what am I supposed to do?
Given where we are, where we have um a certain portion of the male population kind of uncertain about where their place is in society, you might say that they're vulnerable to manipulation. They go online, there's a whole host of people who are kind of waiting with, you know, open arms. Yeah. To grab audience and with ready answers. It's not entirely irrational for some boys and young men to feel like their problems, their struggles are not treated with the same level of seriousness and empathy as the struggles of others. And as long as that remains the case, we have left a gap. We have left a psychological vulnerability among those boys and young men to the claim from someone who comes along and says, "I get it. You're struggling." True. Do you know why? They don't care about you. The society, the school, they don't care about you. I care about you and I have the solution to your problems.
I think that marriage is one of the tools that the western world uses to enslave men. Women have become delusional and men are completely different disenfranchised. Majority of women definitely I don't think should be able to vote.
In recent years, an ecosystem of content has exploded online and on social media targeting men of all ages, including teen boys. It's become known as the manosphere. There are thousands of content creators in the manosphere, but one of the most popular, well-known for his extreme and misogynistic rhetoric, is former kickboxer Andrew Tate. The online world is buzzing this morning about a sudden move by Andrew Tate. That hugely popular personality is known for telling his audience that men should dominate the world the way they used to.
Well, it's been proven that the smartest people in the world are men.
So, the manosphere used to be a collection of predominantly online websites and blogs that all had shared a belief men were the oppressed group in society and women were doing the oppression. Marielle Barnes is an associate professor of public affairs with a focus on gender and has done extensive research on the manosphere and the ideology of so-called red pill content.
The idea of red pill comes from The Matrix. Neo is offered a red pill and a blue pill. If he takes the red pill, he wakes up and he sees the truth about the society he lives in. With the manosphere, when they say they're red-pilled, what they mean is they have taken the red pill similarly to Neo. And they've realized that actually everything they've learned about society before is incorrect. There is no patriarchy. There is no misogyny. In reality, it's women who are in charge and women who are oppressing men and men who are suffering in modern society.
Men and boys hear these messages that sometimes their very presence, their very being is a problem. It's problematized particularly on the progressive left. What you see in some respects, particularly online, the rise of sort of the red pill communities. And so if the people over here say, "Your maleness is a problem," the ones over here say, "No, it's it's good to be a man and you should say that your head held high, your chest stuck out." The idea that these places actually target men and say they're for men and also sort of define masculinity in a clear way is really appealing, especially to younger men who are like, "Well, I'm not sure what masculinity looks like or what it is, but like this guy has a road map and he's telling me what it is."
I think the growth of social media and podcasting has made manosphere content much more accessible. Before you had to go look for it, right? You had to find a blog that you liked and you had to read it and you had to engage with it, right? Uh, a comment on a blog. Whereas now, you can just be on social media and an algorithm will pop something up, right?
In a study of TikTok accounts mirroring adolescent boys, each account started off with 13 targeted videos out of a hundred that contained misogynistic content. Five days later, that number jumped to 56. And in less than a week, teen boys were four times more likely to encounter sexist content, not by searching, but by algorithms. TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Do you follow anyone who might fall into like the manosphere camp?
Um, yeah, 'cause I, I like to work out a lot and I feel like there's like a lot of like these influencers now that try to like tell kids nowadays use steroids and stuff like that and it just like I feel like so many kids nowadays are like starting to actually think that this stuff is like cool. Kids at younger ages are starting to like think it's okay.
Do you ever come across or do you follow any influencers who uh, you know, try to tell young men about how to how to act around women, how to treat women?
I think I do follow uh like this one dude and like a couple like other like uh like big like fitness influencers.
What, what do they say about women?
And like they just like call them like and like hoes and stuff like that. I just feel like that's just like it's almost like objective, just objectifying them and just like putting that on all women. And I feel like when you put that on all women like you, like it's just disrespectful.
So, watching these fitness influencers, do you ever, do you ever come away feeling like, "I want to be a man, I got to get, you know, I've got to bench a certain amount. I got to get jacked"?
Yeah. Just feeling like I need to be bigger, like just feeling like I need to be doing more or whenever I am in the gym kind of just light in my my like head, I guess.
A 2025 University of Toronto study of 1,553 boys and men found that those who often saw muscular bodies, supplements, or drug content on social media were more likely to show signs of muscle dysmorphia, a condition affecting about one in three participants.
That gets to the question of are some of these spaces exploitative? And I would say some of them definitely are. I think there are a lot of men who feel kind of troubled or unsure of their identity and are looking for answers. And there are a lot of people willing to sell them an answer that looks like, "Buy my product. Keep subscribing to my podcast. I will tell you just how horrible it is to be you, how badly you're doing, and I will sell you something that will like sort of make it better, but still make you anxious."
If you're a young man, especially if you haven't maybe had particularly strong male role models in your life, and it's very interesting that those young men who are most attracted to the misogynist manosphere, let's call it that, right? The Andrew Tate type figures, they are the ones who are kind of most hungry. That those are the ones who have a vacuum of one kind or another. So the question is like, oh, how did that vacuum get created? How do we answer the question, "How to be a man?" in the boy's actual life or the young man's actual life so they don't have to look for it online?
The worst of it, I would say, are male content creators who are selling men a vision of manhood that's all about, you know, making a lot of money, owning, you know, fast cars. But the one thing that they don't talk about is the importance of family. Why would a man sign up to get married today when he knows that given sort of the social status of women today that your wife could leave you at the drop of a dime and take half of what you own? So particularly to these guys, marriage is a bad deal and it's one that the modern man should not sign up for.
[Music] So, how important is sports in finding a a you know a partner?
A lot of people when the first date they'll go, "Oh, so you golf. Am I going to be a single mom while you're golfing the whole time?"
Michael, who asked his last name be withheld for privacy, is in his late 30s and looking for love. A co-owner of a small business, he's one of the growing number of men over 35 that's never been married.
There are times she's probably going to want to get rid of you.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Everyone I've talked to at at the club who's who's older is always like, "And if they're terrible at golf, their wife made them pick it up so they're not at the house."
He says he's been in several long-term relationships but hasn't yet found the one.
You've been in relationships.
I was single for pretty much all my 20s. I didn't want to be. I wanted to be in a relationship, but it was like one of those things where I hadn't found myself yet. It was a lot of trying to figure that stuff out.
That's that's what your 20s are for.
Exactly. And then and then my 30s, the majority of my 30s, I've been in relationships, right? There was one person that I dated for about 3 years that that was just a phenomenal person. I still think the world of her. Unfortunately, we kind of got to a place where we're like, "God, everything's great. We should be running to go get married." But we're not.
Michael's story is becoming more common by the decade. In 1949, more than 75% of US households were headed by married couples. As of 2024, that number has plummeted to just 47%.
Do you think it's becoming harder to date?
It's just different. I look at my grandparents, you know, my my grandfather was a blind date with my grandma in a rowboat on Coney Island. He said, "I'm going to marry you." And she thought he was crazy. It took him seven dates to kiss her. It's both easier and more difficult, I'd say, because you, you can find what you're looking for easier today. I mean, you have an app and you have access to everyone who's single in the area. It's like a superpower, right? Yeah. Like there's always something better around the corner, right? And you, I think a lot of people lose focus of the, you know, "Can I be in the here and now with the person?"
What do you feel the role of a man in a relationship should be?
That's a loaded question.
What do you feel you should bring to a relationship?
Look, I, I think that's contingent on what the two individuals think, feel, and believe, and then how they come together. Um, I think a very good quote, and I'm going to botch it. Relationships, they're not 50/50. They're 80/20, they're 60/40, you know, like it, you and you trade off. I, I think it's a dance, you know, what, what the roles are. There's the question of of, you know, how you show up, what you should do, what you shouldn't do.
I don't have many men around me. However, I am very lucky to be part of a women's community that has really opened my eyes to seeing the challenges that men face in our country right now. Natalie Kramer is the founder of Single Saturdays and once a month hosts meetups like this to bring men and women together in New York City.
I think one of the biggest challenges facing men and women is the differences in connection to our masculine and feminine energy. Yes, we have both of them inside each of one of us. Most females um are more connected with their feminine at their core. And what we're seeing in modern times is because of the Me Too movement, um because of how the media shows men, there are a lot of good men that are fe have become fearful and they have taken a step back to go to like bars or restaurants or museums or whatever to meet women. They don't have the opportunity because they want to go out. They want to go out alone.
Nick Rosen is the co-host of today's meetup and is a professional matchmaker with clients in New York City and across the country. It's a sensitive time when it comes to guys being misunderstood when they come up. Like they're worried about if they're being misunderstood, if they're coming off as creepy, if they're coming off as weird.
A 2020 survey by Pew Research found that roughly half of men surveyed said a key reason they struggled to get a date in the past 12 months was the difficulty of approaching women. A significant share of single men rely on dating apps to meet women instead. But one report found that the match rate for the average man on Tinder was under 3%, compared to nearly 31% for the average woman.
Do you get guys who say that perhaps, you know, they've not had luck because they're not good-looking enough or they're not tall enough, they're not, you know, they're not as fit as as perhaps the women want them to be.
Yeah, I think that's definitely the height part of it for sure. There's a lot of women I do interview that at a minimum they're like 5'10", you know, and that's like a really like strong minimum for them. Uh, there is that height thing. So, I do think that that's not a misnomer. It's actually reality.
I'm sure you have male clients who are insecure about whether they make enough money to attract someone of the opposite sex. There's so many successful um women who are well educated and these are actually clients of mine, like female clients of mine who are so well educated and have amazing careers and all this, all these things, but I think a big thing is to have a person. They want a person who makes at least the same income as them or more.
The percentage of women earning more than men in a marriage has risen dramatically. In 1972, women were the primary breadwinners in just 5% of households. As of 2022, it's more than tripled to 16%.
The really good thing about the old male role model of breadwinner, worker, husband, father, breadwinner, etc., was it was really clear, uh, and really simple. The trouble with it was it was deeply unfair, especially to women. So, we quite rightly have changed that. But as a result of, in a sense, just unbundling what it used to mean to be a man, we've created this huge confusion. And one of the things we've done is that we've reduced, I think, the incentive for men to feel like they should be in the labor force and they should be working. It's why I think women still say that they care about men's earning potential when they think about a partner. It's not because they want a man who can just let them stay home. They're not looking for an old-school breadwinner. They are looking for a man who has his act together, who is skilled, who is equipped, and who will be with them.
What are some of the qualities that are important to you?
So, what's important to me with the person is is at the core of who they are, you know, like I, I want someone who's who's driven but not blinded by their drive, you know? So, someone who's, you know, who's motivated, who wants to do something. I want someone who's says yes to fun opportunities like, you know, "Hey, I saw this thing on Instagram. There's this really cool waterfall in upstate. You know, I wanna I want to go check it out." It's like, "Absolutely, I'll get the snacks, right? Or I've already got a playlist for this great idea, you know, like to actively go do that stuff."
The challenging part is that at least from my experience, most women still do want a guy who sees it as his role to provide for his family. Um, and this is the tension is that people say, um, "We don't want men to think of themselves this way," even while expecting men to fulfill these traditional roles because the fully modern man who says, "You know what? I'm looking for a breadwinner wife." When you get, um, 15 inches of snow in the winter, I can sip my hot cocoa while watching her in the window as she shovels our cars out. Um, I don't know many women who want that kind of guy. But the messages you get from the culture is that men should sort of throw off anything that reeks of tradition and embrace anything that smells like modernity.
You know, masculinity is defined by certain things and one of them is being the provider. You know, then it's like a more thing of like, "Well, I want to be like really um I want to be this effective leader at work, but that when I'm at home, I want to be treated in a more like typical like more masculine feminine type of traditional roles type thing."
Yeah. And um, you know, I want a guy who's going to be dominant in maybe in a in the bedroom and and certain things like that.
But adds to the confusion for really for the men and the women in some cases. And
Oh, yeah. Oh, it's so confusing. It's really confusing.
If you talk to women especially, actually, who are dating in this moment, you hear a lot of them talking about like meeting this kind of guy who professes to be a ladies' man or says that they want a relationship but like calls women "females" and talks about how all they all they want is dinner paid for, which is really off-putting. You have these guys who, you know, tell young men that women are out to get you. Women are gold diggers and only want one certain kind of guy and you're never gonna get a girlfriend and you shouldn't even try. Except keep subscribing to this podcast and I'll tell you how to beat the odds or how you can trick women into liking you or, you know, the products that you can buy and like the the posture that you need to have to to get women.
You see how my palm doesn't touch the ball and I lift it and put it over the rim.
Okay, guys. So, we're going to start off with knockout and then we're going to stretch. All right. If you have not played knockout before, get in the back of the line.
Michael Sartain is a coach, but he's not a basketball coach.
I need this motion and you're doing this motion.
He's coaching these men on how to date and attract women. We walk like athletes. Does everybody understand? And if you didn't walk like athletes, no more of this.
47-year-old Sartain is an Air Force veteran and host of the Michael Sartain podcast.
You're from Texas.
Big. Yeah. From East Dallas.
Oh, I love me a southern man.
Host of the YouTube show Access Vegas.
And welcome guys to Access Vegas. Uh, you guessed it. We're going to have a great time tonight.
Where he talks culture and dating with female influencers and models. He's also founder and CEO of Men of Action program that focuses on leadership, communication, networking, and dating. It's becoming harder and harder to meet high-quality women these days. Dating apps are completely rigged against the average man. Women are more resistant to cold approach than ever, and modern women have unrealistic expectations of what they want in a man.
Tell me, why do people come to you?
They'll see on my social media that I host these incredible events where there's a lot of really attractive women there and we don't use money and there's no drugs and there's no alcohol. I just saw that in the dating space and in uh just men in general, there was a falling behind largely due to social media causing men to lose the ability to act uh in real life. Uh, most of the marketing is about dating. Uh, I sell them what they want and teach them what they need. Once they get in the course, they come to find out it's it's a U.S. military officer training course. That's kind of what I put him through.
Over 4,000 men have signed up, ranging from a 53-year-old grandfather to young professionals, blue and white collar workers who have all paid anywhere from $27 to $6,000 for coaching services. One program includes an in-person Las Vegas immersion experience with face-to-face interaction with Mike, photo ops, events at clubs, and dinners. Competence means nothing. Don't worry about that. Just do the thing first. That's why it's called Men of Action.
We were allowed to film one afternoon of the Las Vegas immersion. We were asked to blur all the attendees' faces, but one client of Sartain's program agreed to speak with us.
I've talked to some of the most attractive women I've ever talked to. I've learned a lot of techniques on what I'm going to have to do to develop this life that I dream about.
Mazier Montared is a 33-year-old professional poker player from Wichita, Kansas. He's a month into Sartain's program and used different online dating coaches before Men of Action.
Pick-up guys, they'll go into interactions with women and they'll say, "Oh, she's not going to sleep with me. Screw her. I'm going to go to the next next person." Michael's like, "No, you build connections with these women. You make them your friends. And in the long term, that's going to provide massive amounts of value to your life."
The thing I see most common is highly intellectual guys who don't know how to communicate with the opposite sex.
To help his clients engage with the opposite sex. While in Vegas, they must approach 50 women every night.
Who here was able to finish 50 approaches in a night?
You guys were. Who here at what approach did you just not care anymore? Was it 12? Was it, was it all 50 you cared?
10.
About 10 you didn't care anymore? You know what happens? They get to 12. They get into an awesome conversation with somebody who like lives in a place they used to live and they spend the whole night talking to this person that they just met, but sh don't tell them that. But yeah, they never get to 50, man. They, they just get over their approach anxiety.
They're probably people who would look at your program and listen to your pod and then listen to this interview and say, "This guy's full of..."
Yeah. You know, you're capitalizing on the fears and the vulnerabilities of of men who are really struggling here.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And I would feel bad if I didn't have 4,000 guys telling me that this worked, that this changed their life. If I didn't go to weddings from my clients, then I would I would agree with you.
Do you think that men are consuming content online that could be harmful to them?
Yes, they are. I absolutely believe they are. Part of that has to do with the fact that if I'm a content creator and I make content like I do, which is about solutions, it doesn't do very well on YouTube. And so a lot of these content creators, they're rewarded with more views for saying outlandish, bombastic, ostentatious things. And the the algorithm keeps rewarding them.
The definition that you uh ascribe to manosphere, you would be part of that man.
Yes, for sure. There's good parts and bad parts. If you take the worst ideas from Manosphere content, it sounds horrible and I don't stand by it. That's why I don't consider myself red pill. I'm red pill adjacent.
Sartain met Andrew Tate at an event in 2025 and says while he wouldn't use Tate's communication style with his audience, he strives for an open dialogue with content creators across the spectrum. It, it is problematic when I hear manosphere. When I hear the term manosphere, I just think a collection of men. And I know Richard Reeves wouldn't agree with this, but Richard Reeves I would put in the manosphere because he's having a conversation about men and women and why they're falling behind. He's not going to identify himself that way, but that's what manosphere means. There's only a dark side to the manosphere, right? There isn't a sunlit amazing manosphere. No one ever talks about it as a great and empowering thing. But actually, even when you, even when you do use the term in the way that you've just defined it, which is this this space that's about masculine content, it's geared towards men. It's provided for by men. Joe Rogan's the biggest platform in the world. Most of Rogan's content is not about masculinity at all. It's about whatever. Andrew Tate has made his name and his reputation, not least by specifically leaning into misogynist content and does have very prescriptive ideas about what masculinity should look like, which are hateful.
But I think it's a bit like the the term toxic masculinity is if you start using these terms to lump people together in a way that just is, it just captures such a broad spectrum. This lumping together of different kinds of content, this pathization of any young man who is just honestly searching for an answer, it backfires. What ends up happening is that the circle of what is red pill and dangerous just grows larger and larger and larger. I've heard people put Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson in the same category. So, if you're a guy and says, you know, "I like to lift weights. I like to eat red meat. All right? I like to shoot guns." What you end up doing ultimately is driving young men further and further away and into the arms of exactly the types of people you want to keep them away from. I actually think that we have a a cohort of young men who feel to some extent fairly that they have grown up in a world that has offered them a lot more wagging fingers than it has helping hands. It's why I struggle with some of these terms like toxic masculinity. It says we've figured out what's wrong with you and we're going to fix you rather than fix the structures and systems that serve you. It does frustrate me a lot because I've seen it through Ashton, how it's so hard to tell a boy like, "No, you do matter. You, you do count. You do need to be strong." And I'm like, "No, boys rule, too." Like, we all rule. We all are equally important.
Right now, frankly, we have a media that deals in sound bites and short conversations, and it's easier to clump everyone together and just be like, "Men, all men are struggling." Uh, women, all women are succeeding, even though there are lots of gradations in there. I think unfortunately when we're looking for solutions to problems with male identity or how sort of young men figure out how to be, the difficulty in solving that issue is that it's not really a top-down solution. I think there's already been more discussion about getting male teachers back into schools and sort of creating more third and social spaces, but I think a lot of the solution will have to be one-on-one people in their communities, especially sort of parents and older men looking around and looking and seeing younger guys who need help and actually stepping up and talking to them. That's something we can't mandate. You know, you call this a crisis. This is something that it's been in the making for for decades. How do we course correct a view? So, the first thing we should do is stop doing the bad things. Stop u making masculinity look like something that's inherently negative. Stop publishing op-eds u from mothers who who bemoan having a son, who think about all the the harm that their son is going to cause, you know, when they get 18. Um, and then give them examples of of what it means to be a man. Positive examples.
Do you want some yogurt?
Um, no. I'll probably have some yogurt probably after.
Yeah. Me and my mom's relationship has definitely, it's definitely grown a whole, a whole lot.
Yeah. Like how so?
I like, I feel like now like whenever I get home, I feel like we both work a lot and like at the end of the day, we kind of have get to have dinner together and we kind of get to debrief and talk about our day and I just, I'm, I'm happy that I get to have that closeness with my mom. I want to like tell her about my day. I want to hear about her day.
And I'm like so thankful um to be his mom. um, it's so proud even in this moment and hearing you speak and I really want you to go out into the world and experience it and have um the love and the joy um that I know you can, like I know you're going to do well.
Yeah. I love you.
I love you too.
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