Why Are So Many Men Unraveling?

A man with a fairytale castle in upstate New York who keeps trying to make a self-produced reality show about "princesses" happen — and become a modern-day Hugh Hefner. A man who got famous on YouTube for lawn care who ends up filming himself as a baby — and has a SWAT team called to his house. These stories form the backbone of Jon Ronson's journey into the world of "unraveling men." Those two men's stories are exceptional, but they're also an entry point into a subject area I like to think of as "WTF is going on with dudes right now."

Join Jon and me as we avoid the usual discussion about "toxic masculinity" and go deeper into friend-less-ness, algorithms, purposelessness, Sad Dads, and male buffoonery. It's a wild ride that felt like the beginning of a much longer conversation (that I hope we can keep having in the comments)!

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Show Notes:

Buy The Castle here!

You can read an excerpt of The Castle — specifically about the guy who started out as a lawn care influencer and then became The Third Baby — in the New York Times Magazine

Jon mentions his piece for GQ about the White House cage fight

Learn more about Jon Ronson's work (there's so much of it!) here