On this season, we'll explore our most ingrained beliefs, delusions, and archetypes, the ways that cognitive dissonance shapes our culture and how our reality is created by the stories we tell.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Well, I say that it's a very scary time for young men in America.

So essentially the movement believes that there's discrimination against men and not women.

That's right.

It has to be the feminazis.

That would be a chickification of anything else.

You force me to suffer all my life and now I'll make you all suffer.

In the years I spent hitchhiking across America, one of the most memorable men I met was a lonely

trucker named Jimmy, who took me and my traveling buddies all the way from the Mojave Desert to

Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an enormous 18-wheeler. We got along so well that we ended up staying at his house for the

whole weekend, playing country songs for each other. The songs Jimmy wrote were tough, honky-tong

rock and roll, raspy, rough, and, well, manly. But Jimmy had a secret. One night after a little drinking, he shyly took out a

hidden box full of unmarked CDs, and without looking at us in the eyes, he asked if he could play

one of the songs he wrote and recorded but never shared with anyone. A sad song, he said,

with a shrugging disdain for himself. So many of the men I rode with over those years,

the men I was told to fear, instead of harming me, they told me their secrets. They scratched their thumbnails nervously

against the leather steering wheels, and sometimes they cried, or at least their eyes grew red-ringed

with a shine of tears. With only the briefest chance at this anonymous confessional, it was as if they were desperate to get things out, and as they talked, they transformed with a shocking ease into the little boys they once were.

Here, in this stretch of 20 minutes, an hour or seven, I learned a lesson over and over again.

So many of America's men are desperately lonely and desperately sad, unable to talk about their feelings.

You make me want to be a better man,

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