00:09:37.780you know, working out and getting strong and biking and climbing and just kind of doing the
00:09:48.100things that I do and then making sure that I'm not just, yeah, like I'm still working out and
00:09:56.940being productive, but in a less controlled or stressed manner. You can kind of hear that he's
00:10:06.480experienced over-training firsthand, that he knows what it's like to train too hard or to let
00:10:14.620training dominate his life too much. It's a really important balance to find, particularly
00:10:20.800as a young person. And it's not easy, right, to walk the line between school, sports, interests,
00:10:29.120your family, major life goals on top of, like, growing your body, for example, getting enough
00:10:35.460sleep, being in relationships with people, figuring out who you are as a person. You know,
00:10:42.300that adds up. And it's worth saying that in the time I spend with him, Joseph is remarkably
00:10:47.960balanced. Maybe that's because I don't see him as much when he's in comp season. But look, he
00:10:53.980likes singing. He's a talented artist. He's an avid reader. He goes to concerts. He rides his
00:11:00.720bike he hangs out with his friends well i'll let him tell you the rest yeah i mean i started biking
00:11:07.240a lot this summer like trail riding and mountain biking but then also dirt jumping um personally
00:11:15.120because i didn't have anything else to do like i couldn't go climbing um but also just because
00:11:22.600you know i can't i can't climb and train all the time that's not an option i have to do other
00:11:30.380things uh so at to some level it's something else you know cross training biking is really good
00:11:42.060yeah I also just I also just really enjoy it it's a lot of fun to you know go out into the valley
00:11:49.740and be there in 10 minutes and spend three hours of my day out just in the valley you know I feel
00:11:58.540like if I if I was just training and climbing all the time I feel like some of the fun would
00:12:06.120be taken out of it like if that was my entire life and all I did you know going to sleep at
00:12:12.960night knowing that I was just going to get up the next day to do the exact same thing that I did
00:12:16.840before I feel like it kind of takes some of the freedom out um or some of the fun and and people
00:12:26.140definitely do train all the time but I don't know I feel like it's nice to do other things
00:12:35.460without just doing that it seems kind of strange to just focus on doing one thing
00:12:43.440even if you know that you're gonna want to do that one thing with your life like I know that
00:12:49.600i'm gonna but do climbing as yeah climbing is gonna be my life to some extent but if climbing
00:12:59.820is just my life and i don't do anything else just to make sure like i'm not even i'm not even an
00:13:06.160open category yet i'm still in the youth categories for competing like i'm still i'm still competing
00:13:11.940as a child. I'm not competing as, like, a full-grown human. So, you know, some people
00:13:22.100that are in open category and are trying to go to the Olympics, then, you know, training
00:13:29.900all the time and focusing on climbing for your life is probably the thing to do. But
00:13:37.660right now, I don't know. Also, there's only so much training I can do for it to be actually
00:13:47.220productive. Like, if I'm training every minute of every day and, you know, meditating and doing
00:13:54.420yoga and working out and doing all this stuff, you know, I might just end up injuring myself
00:14:03.580in the long run and then yeah like getting injured because now I'm not I'm not in my
00:14:14.740full grown-up body yet you know like I'm still my growth plates haven't used so if I'm training
00:14:22.000all the time and my body has no time to grow I'll just end up injuring myself listening to this from
00:14:29.760a parenting or coaching perspective, I hear the importance of balance in training. But another
00:14:36.360major element to elite sports is competition itself, and in particular, navigating the emotions
00:14:42.080that come along with it, particularly failure. Probably the worst thing is just not doing well
00:14:50.280comps and that doesn't last very long like the most that i'll be sad after i did that later comp
00:15:00.700is like a week yeah i don't know it's probably it's probably just comps like i've i've obviously
00:15:08.860this is very particular to me like i was talking about expectations so even though i did actually
00:15:16.480do well compared to what I've done before it seems not that great um so yeah again like kind
00:15:24.440of self-induced stress or you know disappointment um when really I actually did reasonably well
00:15:34.280my second year competing nationals uh i didn't make it oh actually in in qualifiers in nationals
00:15:47.420i did really really well um and well i think i came in sixth or something but if i did one more
00:15:58.360climb which I almost did I couldn't do one of the moves uh I would have come in first
00:16:04.520which would have been the best I'd ever done and was kind of unimaginable for me at the time
00:16:12.300and I realized that and then kind of just got in my head uh for semifinals the next day and was
00:16:19.960like man I have to do really well because now I actually have a shot at coming first um
00:16:27.040um yeah and I kind of just got like really in my head and didn't end up making it into finals
00:16:35.240which I'd done the year before so yeah that's that's probably my worst time even though
00:16:42.680like I said it's not actually that bad but compared to the year before it wasn't great
00:16:52.680but yeah I think yeah like my my self-expectations or possibilities to do well
00:17:02.640kind of just messed me up and then I ended up not doing well I just kind of drove home from
00:17:14.280Quebec after that yeah that was the that was the first time that really like mental game
00:17:20.840started to come into play because before like I said in my first comp season I was just climbing
00:17:27.960and not really worrying about anything whereas in my my third year so after that I kind of started to
00:17:38.580like like subconsciously worry more um instead of just showing up and climbing so that definitely
00:17:48.160started like a journey for me through like my mental competitive aspect uh which wasn't really
00:17:57.060a thing before that um so yeah I was kind of I was kind of confused and annoyed after for a while
00:18:05.380kind of just like what happened because I didn't I didn't really understand what happened I just
00:18:11.860you know i knew that i didn't do well but i didn't know why you know i remember thinking after like
00:18:18.580man like those climbs were so hard i just you know like my shoes just kept slipping off all
00:18:24.280the holes like what was happening yeah like i couldn't i just couldn't climb uh and i didn't
00:18:33.640know why and then i realized after a while uh somewhat with my with my dad's help coaching me
00:18:40.980Like, dude, you were just worrying too much about doing well, and then that actually made
00:18:48.800you do badly, which is kind of a strange thing to comprehend.
00:18:57.260You know, you want to do well by not worrying about doing well, but, yeah, I don't know,
00:19:05.820it seems kind of like a, like a paradox to not worry so you can do well. I think it's
00:19:14.340definitely a part. I don't think you can really go through a whole athletic career without
00:19:19.520seeing some sort of failure at some point. And, you know, there are some people that
00:19:25.860are just like good all the time but there's they still have moments um like yeah i've failed or
00:19:37.120not succeeded in multiple different scenarios and ways but i don't know i think analyzing it
00:19:47.060afterwards and finding out why it happened or just recognizing sometimes that happens like
00:19:53.360sometimes you wake up and it just uh it doesn't feel right and sometimes you can change that
00:20:00.440and make it feel better again and other times you just kind of you'll not yourself all day and then
00:20:08.800you end up doing badly in the comp or it kind of comes together and then you do well at this point
00:20:16.700i want to put a bunch of pins uh in the air joseph talking about the role of coaching
00:20:22.800In his case, that's his dad, and I think we'll come back to that.
00:20:26.080But the role of coaching in getting him to where he wants to be
00:20:29.440and debriefing his success and his failure will put a pin in that.
00:20:34.520Joseph talking about the mental aspect of competition, put a pin in that.
00:20:38.680Joseph talking about that idea that you're always going to fail somehow, put a pin in that.
00:20:45.720And overall, that Joseph is navigating these things at the same time that he is developing into a young man.
00:20:52.320put a pin in that. Because I want to bring into the conversation Jason Rogers, who's the writer
00:20:58.620behind The Mandate Letter, a newsletter on masculinity. He's written for Men's Health
00:21:02.460Magazine, New York Times, and he's also an Olympic medalist. So it's such a gift to be able to
00:21:08.380accompany Joseph's experiences with the perspective of a veteran athlete who has the level of wisdom
00:21:14.120that you could only really get after centering your life for decades on athletic performance,
00:21:19.520on training, on competition and failure. So I'll start just by letting him share his story.
00:21:25.960The first half is about his journey and finding his place in the sport of fencing and how that
00:21:30.120brought him to the Olympics. And the second half is about his experiences, both the devastating
00:21:36.080failure and the ultimate redemption that he experienced at the Athens and Beijing Olympics.
00:21:41.100Well, I started fencing at age 11 in Los Angeles, where I grew up. The short story is that
00:21:49.820I didn't love it at first, but then I had this amazing coach come into my life, a Romanian
00:21:57.060man named Daniel Koston, who just like breathed life and humor into fencing for me and was always
00:22:05.680cracking jokes, was always making it fun, also happened to be an absolutely world-class coach.
00:22:12.120And I found myself on this rapidly moving escalator from competing at local competitions
00:22:19.640to national competitions in my age category, winning those competitions, all of a sudden
00:22:27.620kind of like making our what we call our sort of like junior national team, kind of before I even
00:22:34.340expected that that should be on my radar and then competing on a world stage. And I made kind of a
00:22:40.480very last minute decision to go to the Ohio State University because a coach had been recruiting me
00:22:48.780there and it was someone I had worked with. And he was the guy that I felt could get me to the
00:22:56.320Olympics. There were lots of other world-class coaches, but there was something about the way
00:23:01.280that he interacted with me and the way that he made me believe in myself, that I was like,
00:23:07.780I want to be with you. You know, I want you to be the person that, that sort of shepherds me from
00:23:13.380here on. And I, I immersed myself in this training and it basically doubled in intensity.
00:23:20.440He's a former Olympic gold medalist. Um, I pushed myself pretty hard, you know, just to, to sort of,
00:23:27.380you know, live up to what I thought his expectations were. And, you know, pretty quickly,
00:23:32.320I was like, putting myself on the footsteps of, you know, the Olympic team, and I busted my butt
00:23:40.860and I was very lucky to make the 2004 Olympic Games in basically my what would have been my
00:23:48.800sort of junior year in college, I was so unprepared for the pressure that comes with
00:23:57.360being at an Olympic Games when you are accustomed to competing in environments where there aren't
00:24:05.440that many spectators and there aren't TV cameras and there isn't all this kind of hoopla.
00:24:11.520And so I got there and I was facing a veteran Italian former world champion in my very first
00:24:20.540match, basically my Olympic debut. And I got on the fencing piece, which is what we call the sort
00:24:27.060of competitive arena. And a couple of touches occurred and something kind of funny happened
00:24:35.880with the way the referee was judging the points and all of a sudden my brain and body just shut
00:24:42.280down and I effectively had a panic attack in the middle of that match and you know I felt like I
00:24:49.080couldn't breathe I couldn't think my body went just on total autopilot in the absolute worst
00:24:55.240possible way obviously that's not great from a competitive standpoint and my my opponent who
00:25:02.600you know wasn't inclined to take any mercy on me basically just obliterated me and that for me was
00:25:09.680like the first moment where I was I was really in a dark dark place with respect to how I felt
00:25:16.220about sport I felt about myself whether I wanted to continue in sport at all I just was beside
00:25:26.140myself and I left those Olympic games feeling like a complete failure feeling like why did I
00:25:32.040even do this in the first place it wasn't worth it obviously everyone around me was reminding me
00:25:38.720that that was an absurd conclusion because just making to the olympics is a ridiculous achievement
00:25:45.800in and of itself but psychologically that's where my perspective had slid to and it took a really
00:25:53.740long time i was i was pretty ambivalent about whether i was going to continue fencing or not
00:26:00.540And I kind of dragged myself through a couple of years of competition and began putting back together the pieces of my psyche that, you know, allowed me to get myself back to a decent mental space.
00:26:14.800And I decided I wanted to go for another Olympic Games.
00:26:20.680I think it felt like some sort of attempt at redemption for me.
00:26:24.080And the 2007 to 2008 season, the precursor to the 2008 Olympics, was unbelievably hard psychologically.
00:26:38.320I would travel to places like Iran or Turkey, you know, or, or France.
00:26:43.200And, and I would sleep maybe a total of 10 hours over the course of a four day weekend.
00:26:49.800And so I was just like dragging myself through what felt like extreme pressure to make it
00:26:57.220back to the Olympics and somehow kind of, you know, get back to the top in some way.
00:27:01.840And somehow I managed it, made the team arrive in Beijing, and I managed to kind of pull it together and reframe my whole experience in a way that, you know, I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to kind of let this be what it is.
00:27:19.300I'm going to just try and be present moment by moment, point by point.
00:27:23.140And in our last competition, a team event, myself and my three teammates just had this sort of magical day where we were all in sync.
00:27:34.700We were all just kind of rising to the moment as the moments presented themselves and won a silver medal.
00:27:43.800And, you know, it's hard to put into words like what that feels like.
00:27:48.680um, the moment when we won that second match and it was a clear thing that we were going to win a
00:27:53.940medal. I mean, there were tears, there were absurd euphoric celebrations, you know, the fans in the
00:28:02.200stand, including my parents and friends were all just in beside themselves in tears. Um, and it
00:28:09.560was, you know, it was like one of the most magical moments in my entire life. I kind of like,
00:28:14.200you know, every time I think about it, I kind of relive that moment a little bit.
00:28:17.160I mean, that was just the moment that every athlete dreams of.
00:28:22.200When I talk with young people, some of my greatest lessons really were gained at the hardest moments in my life.
00:28:30.240I guess that's like a cool thing about being a mentor to be able to say, you know what?
00:28:34.480I've been through something like this.
00:28:38.220So with Jason, to not only be an Olympian, but to be an Olympian who failed.
00:28:43.840I just knew he's going to have some interesting insight into the development of young athletes.
00:28:48.940So the first thing I asked Jason about was the role of coaches.
00:28:53.400Like I mentioned before, Joseph's coach is his dad.
00:28:57.020And without being overly emotional about it,
00:28:59.720one of the most beautiful coaching relationships I've ever seen
00:29:02.080is in the love that Joseph's dad shows him.
00:29:05.180Like I've been sitting on the climbing mat at the bouldering gym
00:29:08.340and he'll just be like, dude, I love you so much.
00:29:12.460Like you'll just say that in the middle of the gym.
00:29:14.820And apart from the unconditional love of parenting, what I see in this,
00:29:19.240and what you're going to hear in Jason's description of exceptional coaching,
00:29:21.920is the value of a coach's relational ability to really know their athlete,
00:29:27.220to understand their athlete, to respond effectively in different,
00:29:31.580highly charged and emotional situations.
00:29:35.700The difference between a good coach and a great coach isn't really technical skill.
00:29:41.560It's emotional intelligence and how well they translate that ability into relationship.
00:29:48.840Well, I think the first thing to say is that your relationship with your coach is one of the most important things to get right when it comes to developing a young athlete.
00:30:04.840and so as I mentioned my first coach Daniel the reason why he and I were so good for each other
00:30:19.640or maybe more to the point he was the perfect person to kind of nurture me as a young athlete
00:30:27.640was that I didn't need a lot of direction and pushing when it came to, you know, focusing on
00:30:38.360the sport and putting in the effort. I needed, especially as I got older, um, you know, into my
00:30:47.74016, 17, 18 kind of year old period. And then actually later after college, I returned to
00:30:54.460working with Daniel after I finished school. Um, especially then he was great at just sort of
00:31:02.600helping me keep things in perspective because, you know, I was always kind of like pushing myself,
00:31:09.740pushing myself, pushing myself. And Daniel was the one that was reminding me like, Hey, like
00:31:15.400maybe take it easy today or like be kind to yourself or would crack a joke when I it was
00:31:24.580clear that I was in a grumpy mood and you know Vladimir who was my Russian coach during my
00:31:33.240university years was as world-class of a coach you know and whose credentials were arguably
00:31:42.080on paper better he helped develop me from a technical from a strategic standpoint
00:31:49.540immeasurably but the thing that didn't quite work for us as a pair was that at that point
00:31:58.020I was so maniacally focused on trying to make it to the Olympics that his the pressure that he put
00:32:08.080on me and then I put on myself kind of became a pressure cooker in that I was always trying to
00:32:15.080kind of please him and make sure that he thought that I was putting in all the work and he was
00:32:21.440always trying to kind of push me a little bit further and so we ended up at a point where
00:32:26.360I just was not happy as a person because I'd kind of pushed myself over the edge well into
00:32:33.400what I would call the overtraining zone, where I'd lost perspective on how to live a balanced
00:32:39.760life and how to keep the inputs that kept good energy coming in, as opposed to just
00:32:47.980the, I am going to make it kind of energy.
00:32:52.280And so that balance, I think, is really important.
00:32:55.740And it depends so much on the young athlete, what they need, because some kids are unfocused
00:33:01.440And they need someone to help steer them and push them and narrow their focus to the things they need to be, you know, concerned with.
00:33:14.160And then others need to have fun and they need to have someone that they can laugh with.
00:33:21.620And so getting that chemistry right, I think, is just the key.
00:33:26.960But there are also lots of coaches that adjust the way they interact with different athletes because they're able to sense that athlete's needs or their relational style or they're able to understand that athlete's interior mind sometimes better than the athlete.
00:33:50.540and either kind of preemptively or reactively
00:33:55.020get ahead of any kind of like sticky zones that might be coming.
00:34:01.480When I started thinking about sports in the context of masculinity,
00:34:05.140one of the first quotes I read was from William Pollack,
00:34:16.300allowing boys to experience parts of themselves
00:34:18.260that they rarely experience elsewhere.
00:34:20.540At their best, sports provide boys with a free atmosphere where they can be themselves and express a full range of emotions.
00:34:26.500Whether from the exhilaration of a last-minute goal or the acute disappointment of being defeated by the opposing team, sports provide boys with a theater for the unfettered expression of their feelings.
00:34:38.840So that brings me back to Jason's experience at the Athens Olympics.
00:34:42.960When I asked him more intentionally about failure, he described the shame that he felt.
00:34:48.940He described the challenge of recovery and that same belief as Joseph that failure, especially as an athlete, is ever present.
00:34:59.400Failure can feel a number of different ways.
00:35:03.840And I think it really depends on where you are in your career, how you feel like you have failed.
00:35:16.500but some some days it can feel like hot fire you know and what I mean by that is rage and
00:35:25.900some days it can feel like sadness or hopelessness and I think some of it is
00:35:38.180the shame that you feel if you think that you have let other people down, whether that be
00:35:50.920your coach, your family, your friends. Most of the time, I know for me, if I can just talk about my
00:36:00.520most prominent moment of failure, it was at the 2004 Olympics in that match against the Italian
00:36:09.120when I lost so badly. I was like a zombie afterwards. I kind of went back to the preparation
00:36:17.700room. I took my stuff off in a total haze. I went and I found, I went back to the stands to find my
00:36:26.660mom and she came out of the stands she was with my family that had traveled to Athens some of my
00:36:35.720our family friends that had come we had like a posse of maybe 15 people or something like that
00:36:40.900and I pulled her individually out and we were in this empty hallway behind the stands because the
00:36:46.420event was still going on and I lost it I I don't think I have ever cried like that and since maybe
00:36:55.620I was really, really young. And all I could say was like, like, I feel like such a failure.
00:37:02.980Like I felt like those people had traveled around the world to see me do well. And I had
00:37:09.960let them down. I'd let my coaches down. I, all I could think about was coming back from the
00:37:15.280Olympics and talking to all my friends that were, I just, I just, I just, all I felt was shame.
00:37:21.540and it took a really long time for me to realize that nobody cares you know they're just excited
00:37:31.420for you and all of that pressure comes from within it comes from the feeling that you know
00:37:37.240the fear that you're going to be ostracized or that you're going to lose connection with the
00:37:41.500people that you that you love and obviously none of that happens you know or in very rare
00:37:48.960dysfunctional instances it does but if you have healthy relationships with the people around you
00:37:53.220that's totally untrue and and the sensation of failure comes from your interpretation of those
00:38:01.140events so as it relates to like how coaches and family and friends can help you one you need to
00:38:11.200kind of let it run its course because in the heat of the moment whether it whether you're feeling
00:38:16.560sadness or whether you're feeling anger, you know, trying to logic you through that process
00:38:23.520is not really helpful. So it needs to kind of like, the energy needs to dissipate first.
00:38:30.160But once it does, the best thing that the people around you can do is just help
00:38:37.220gently help you reframe those events into a more accurate depiction of what they are, which was
00:38:45.540you hit a stumbling block and, you know, you, you, things didn't unfold the way that
00:38:52.960you would have liked, or, you know, would have been optimal for you in your career. But
00:38:58.520those events, how you, how you react to those events, how you take those feelings and put them
00:39:05.580back into your training and your sort of like psychological preparation in a productive manner,
00:39:12.140make all the difference to how you're going to approach the next event and the likelihood that
00:39:18.280you're going to be able to do what you hoped you would have been able to do in the event where you
00:39:22.900failed. In theory, failure happens almost every time. And what I mean by that is there are certainly
00:39:33.660prominent moments where it's more than evident that you didn't live up to your potential,
00:39:41.200My Athens Olympics experience is a great example of that.
00:39:46.800But the mindset of an athlete is kind of the it's never enough mentality in the sense that let's say you've achieved a result that you have never been able to achieve before.
00:40:03.400you know, you make a top eight in a national competition, or you place third, you know,
00:40:11.820at an international event for your age, and you've never done that before, your brain
00:40:18.140automatically resets. It's like your new anchor point. So what success looks like automatically
00:40:27.620changes. And it's actually almost very, it's sometimes very difficult to celebrate that
00:40:31.620result, for at least it was for me personally. And unless you're winning a competition and
00:40:37.800you're dominating every single other competitor there by a large margin, you're always going to
00:40:44.480hit some stopping point. So it's hard to not walk away from every single competitive event feeling
00:40:51.060at least some rush with the emotions that come with failure. You may not call it a failure.
00:41:00.040Everyone around you may call it a success. You may even call it a success. But because so much of being an elite athlete is about competition with self, almost every time the bar you set for yourself is higher than where you reach, even if that means you've achieved a result that you have never achieved before.
00:41:26.680Most athletes are like, I want to win, even when that's not really a realistic goal.
00:41:31.320But it's the goal that you set that helps you incrementally get closer and closer and closer and closer to it.
00:41:38.160And when you achieve it, you reset it.
00:41:40.340Jason was so articulate about the mental aspect of high-level athletic performance,
00:41:44.340I figured if there are parents, coaches, or any boys and young men engaged in athletics listening to this,
00:42:32.200And the reason for that is when you get out of this sort of youth period where there are
00:42:37.880a lot of physical disparities just based on who grew faster, who went through puberty
00:42:43.600faster and develop muscle quicker you reach a point where everybody's kind of like at approaching
00:42:51.860their physical best and their technical best and when you attend a competition like the olympics
00:43:02.440the majority of the athletes there on any given on on their best day could theoretically win the
00:43:12.760competition. The question is whether they're able to put the pieces together of their skills and
00:43:19.560their potential to, to actually do that. And there are a lot of things that get in the way.
00:43:28.360And the most important is the mental aspect of performance, the aspects of how you respond to
00:43:36.700pressure and what you do, what you can do to kind of head off the types of things that tend to
00:43:43.320impede your ability to perform. And those are the skills that I hadn't really developed,
00:43:48.880at least not in a way that meaningfully helped me at the 2004 Olympics. Because
00:43:57.200what happens is that your brain registers that this moment is really important
00:44:05.040because i have to win because i need to make the team or i need to i can't lose to this person or
00:44:13.740this person is worse than me i should win those are all the types of things that tend to like set
00:44:19.520off this chain link event that where you spiral down into you know like the land of like
00:44:26.700stress and pressure and the word choke often comes up because what happens in those moments is that
00:44:34.340When you start to have those thoughts and your body starts to physiologically react in a way that produces stress, it produces more cortisol in your body, you know, and your heart rate goes up and you begin to kind of feel hot and sweaty and tingly in your arms, or at least that's how pressure manifested itself within me.
00:44:55.560it takes your attention away from what's happening in the moment, which is your opponent that's in
00:45:04.400front of you, the problems that are above you on the wall. And all of that innate ability that
00:45:13.680you've internalized to react and respond in the most optimal way to those inputs
00:45:21.480becomes compromised because you're thinking about how you feel and you're like oh my god like i'm
00:45:28.440not feeling good that am i gonna choke and then that thought spirals you out of control and it
00:45:34.900takes your focus further and further away from what's important pressure is you know the
00:45:41.080the ultimate opponent you know like you're the opponent in front of you and not all sports have
00:45:48.560opponents in that way but if you do have in a combat sport like fencing like if you do have
00:45:54.640an opponent like that opponent is you know something to be reckoned with the second opponent
00:46:02.360the more important opponent is yourself how do you react to all of the craziness that's happening
00:46:08.940around you at a competition and all of the forces that are acting on you um that whose intent are
00:46:17.620to hold you down. And I think that's the real skill of being an athlete or a performer in any
00:46:25.860realm is being able to navigate those pressures and forces with grace and in a way that it,
00:46:33.860you know, makes your performance seem effortless.
00:46:37.520The last thing we touched on was masculinity because Jason isn't just a veteran athlete. He's
00:46:43.120also a man who is in the midst of delving really deeply into the world of masculinity.
00:46:47.620what it means for our identities, our relationships, our cultural norms,
00:46:53.400the whole confluence of what manhood means today.
00:46:57.480And there's an unavoidable connection, right, between masculinity and sports.
00:47:03.240On one hand, there's researchers like Michael Thompson saying, this is a quote,
00:47:08.360sports give boys an experience of being focused that they may never get in school.
00:47:12.820And sports let them know that they're capable of achieving what they're capable of achieving when they're motivated.
00:47:19.600Just listen to boys and men discuss sports and you'll discover that there are conversations about idealism, character formation, psychology, and love.
00:47:29.120And on the other hand, or at the same time, there's researchers like David Cohen who, and this is taking a bit out of context, but said,
00:47:35.340school sports define a pattern of aggression and dominating performance as the most admired form of masculinity.
00:47:43.400So I figured there has to be a middle ground.
00:47:46.420And who better to offer some insight into that
00:47:49.100but a former Olympian who's turned his attention
00:49:04.300So to that extent, you are kind of going more into this mechanism that can lead boys and
00:49:20.280men into places where they're thinking and behaving in slightly unhelpful ways.
00:49:27.080And I guess to give a very specific example of that, you know, I remember moments in my own career where, you know, I would lose a match that I thought I shouldn't lose and I would be so furious that I would, you know, throw my fencing mask like across the room.
00:49:49.280And that kind of expression of rage may seem kind of insignificant, but it's that kind of unhelpful response to the event of losing, which in my mind is a kind of like loss of status because I'm either looking bad in front of the other fencers that are watching or my family or friends.
00:50:13.960that I think represents a pattern that when we talk about harmful masculinity is generally
00:54:23.320So the call to action then is for parents, teachers, and in particular coaches to see themselves not just as the leaders of young athletes, but as the caretakers of the next generation of men.
00:54:38.520That's also where I'm going to conclude the second season of Breaking the Boy Code.
00:54:43.260I'm not going to lie, it's been a marathon.
00:54:45.120One of the assumptions I made going into this project was that I have enough energy and passion for boyhood masculinity to, like what, design, coordinate, host, edit, and produce a podcast all on my own.
00:54:59.900But the reality is also that I have had a team helping me get started and cheering me on from the very beginning, and that is the folks at Next Gen Men.
00:55:06.620so as i bring season two to an end i'm excited to share that this podcast will be integrating
00:55:13.060more closely with the next gen men podcast network bringing in a new co-host support team
00:55:19.280and continuing to center the voices of boys themselves until season three i'm jonathan
00:55:25.940reed and i think recognizing the inherent potential for positive development in boys
00:55:29.860spaces like sports teams and locker rooms is one of the greatest things male role models can do
00:55:35.320NextGenMen is an organization working towards a future
00:55:37.840where boys and men experience less pain and cause less harm.