How to Actually Help Young Men Struggling in Our Economy
Optimist Economy
Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi
4.9 • 829 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The "boys and men crisis" conversation set in motion following the 2024 election is now shooting off in erratic directions, leading to a lot of hand-wringing about college enrollment, long-gone factory jobs, and “loss of purpose.” Still, men’s workforce participation has been on a long, slow slide for seven decades, and it is reaching a worrying level. To address that, though, we need to have harder conversations about what truly affects young men disproportionately – things like substance abuse disorders, other addictions like gambling and video games, and criminal records.
Support the Optimist Economy podcast by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, or donating at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This whole episode is just going to be a tribute to like songs we could never afford the rights to. |
| 0:04.8 | Like the boys are back in town and boys, boys, boys, Charlie X-E-X, I watched the video twice today to get ready. |
| 0:14.1 | Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine. I'm Robin. On this show, we believe the |
| 0:23.1 | U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time. |
| 0:35.0 | Y'all, we have a website. It's Optimisteconomy.com, and it's a little bit newer looking because we |
| 0:41.2 | received some feedback from many of you that you actually tried to give us money and you couldn't |
| 0:46.1 | figure out how from our website. So that's on, that's a cell phone. That's on us. We're trying |
| 0:52.6 | again. We're learning and growing. |
| 0:55.3 | Totally unrelated. |
| 0:58.8 | Someone gave us a review in which they said we were delightful, but quote unquote, |
| 0:59.7 | unhinged. |
| 1:03.5 | And I just have to say, y'all don't even know what we sound like before we start recording. |
| 1:04.7 | And you never will. |
| 1:07.8 | This is like attempt six to get started and sound serious. |
| 1:13.2 | But that is another way of saying that we absolutely love y'all's reviews. And we love getting emails and telling us about the show. So you can go to our website. |
| 1:19.6 | You can email us at optimist.com or you can leave reviews wherever you get your podcast. |
| 1:25.5 | I also wanted to add that you can join our chat on |
| 1:28.1 | Substack, and we got a subscriber in North Dakota. Greetings to you in Fargo. And also, |
| 1:34.8 | several of you have actually come in at kind of a super spiritual sponsor level, and we also |
| 1:39.4 | wanted to make that in particular easier. Yeah, or the guy who said he wanted to give us money, |
| 1:44.1 | but not have to be |
| 1:44.7 | committed on a monthly level. I was like, wow, that actually kind of looks like entrapment. Also fix |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.