Democratic pundits have been wringing their hands about how they lost young men in the last election, and how to win them back. Here, Senate candidate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed talks to Daniel Penny about what they’re getting wrong, and how to redirect young men’s anger towards the people actually making their lives worse.
If you prefer to listen—or listen along as you read—check out the podcast version of this conversation here:
Daniel Penny: Thank you so much for coming on Carbon Bros. It's a pleasure to have you and I think I'm one of many podcasts that you've been appearing on. You've been doing the rounds, which is good to see. It's a theme that comes up quite a bit in the first episode of this mini series that Amy and I have been working on, and even your ad actually for your campaign, there's a podcast that features quite prominently, and we will talk a little bit about that later in our conversation. I thought maybe we could start with just like a brief introduction of who you are, why you're running for Senate in Michigan.
Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah, Daniel first, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited about your project 'cause I think you're talking about some really important issues.
I'm honored to be here. My name is Abdul El-Sayed. I am running for Senate in Michigan. And frankly, as a physician, an epidemiologist whose work has been about trying to use government to make life better, easier, and more dignified for people. One of the things that has become overwhelming, I think for most of us, is that it just shouldn't be this hard to get by in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
You shouldn't have to worry about the quality of air you breathe or the water that you drink, or whether or not you can go see a doctor or whether or not you can afford your groceries or walk in your community without being victimized by a neighbor or the state itself. All of these things come back to one central issue, which is that we've allowed corporations and would-be oligarchs to dominate too much of our lives in the ways that they can use their money and their power to buy politics and buy politicians that allow them to rig the system for them.
And so we're running a campaign to do three very simple things that are really hard to do, but simple things. Number one, we wanna take money out of politics. We want to break the system by which corporations and oligarchs are trying to rig it. Second, we wanna put more money in people's pockets, and that means standing up to huge corporations that have rigged the system, that force us to pay more for the things that we have to buy from them and leave us being paid less for the work that we do for them. We wanna make it easier to build and scale small businesses and easier to join or form a union. And then finally, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, I believe people should just be guaranteed healthcare. And we can do that by passing Medicare for All.
Daniel Penny: You've had a long career of service, which I think it's an important kind of segue. You didn't just go from being a doctor to deciding to be in politics. This isn't the story of Dr. Oz.
Abdul El-Sayed:God, no.
Daniel Penny:You know, you're someone who's been thinking about how. There are a lot of unequal outcomes in health for people in your home state and what's driving those problems.
I thought maybe we could start our conversation with how you got started in government.
Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. I think it goes back to why I became a doctor in the first place. I went to medical school and came to realize that the question in medicine is really simple. What's wrong and how can I help? And too often the answer to what's wrong had less to do with all the physiology I was studying and a lot more to do with pathologies and our politics: Do you get to breathe clean air or drink clean water? Do you get to afford the micronutrients that nourish a brain or the macronutrients that nourish a belly? Can you see a doctor in the first place without worrying about falling into medical debt? And when you ask those questions and you get those answers, you start to realize that the work of healing, the work of taking on those 10-year life expectancy gaps usually happens outside of a clinic or a hospital.
And I followed my passion about solving these problems back out of the clinic and hospital into public health. I got to rebuild Detroit's Health Department after it had been shut down by the state of Michigan that forced the city into bankruptcy, rebuilt it around the wellbeing of kids to provide kids glasses and take lead out of schools and stand up to corporate polluters.
Most recently, I was serving Wayne County, the largest municipality in the largest municipal health department in the state. We did things like eliminate medical debt for upwards of 300,000 people, put Narcan in a hundred different locations to address the opioid overdose crisis, build a state-of-the-art, air quality monitoring system, expand access to health insurance for small businesses.
And that work was really important to me. If you're curious about what actually causes illness, then you have to be curious about the political system that's created it. And I think it's it. It will require us to do more than just stand up to Trump. We've gotta be fighting for a solution to the set of problems that Trump exploited in the first place to come to power.
Daniel Penny: I was just curious a little bit to hear about the pollution stuff that you were dealing with. I think for a lot of people, the climate crisis is this really abstract idea. It's something that's far away, or maybe it's something that you see on the news in the form of a disaster. However, I think people are a lot more motivated by problems of air pollution and water pollution, which are obviously related to the climate crisis, especially air pollution.
You know, if you have really bad emissions in your community from like a highway or something, it's gonna increase asthma and you're gonna see sick kids or older people with respiratory problems and heart disease and things like that.
Abdul El-Sayed: One of the hard parts of the climate crisis is that it's like a really challenging problem to clearly connect cause and effect, and that's because it exists because of a whole system of energy production in which any of our participation is really actually quite small, but exists at a level that's higher than us, which is the level of the factory that burns stuff that comes out of the ground to heat and provide energy for our homes. And then it happens on a time horizon that's not direct in the sense that a lot of what we're experiencing now is a function of things that happened five to 10 years ago, and then there's a lot of money being spent to push back on a clear understanding of cause and effect. So like this is one of the knottiest problems to solve. And the problem with that is that people who want to actually solve the climate crisis too often fixate on emblems of that crisis that people have no actual connection to. So like for a long time the emblem was like starving polar bears.
Daniel Penny: Yeah.
Abdul El-Sayed: I'm not gonna like change my whole life around some polar bears, but the thing we ignore is that every moment that we're releasing climate gases into the atmosphere, they're being sieved through the lungs of our children. So you can see not too far from where I am right now, images of kids playing in a playground with a smoke stack right behind them.
And we failed that in large part because, I hate to say it, for a lot of us who have the privilege to be insulated from those smokestacks, right? Like to me, the thing that is so pressing both about that smokestack and about climate change more generally is that these are gonna have profound impacts on the lives of people.
I swore an oath to protect, and so it's not hard for me to say, “Hey, listen, the climate change part of this is like the chronic long-term consequence, but the acute part is that you have to breathe these gases, your kids have to breathe these gases and they're winding them up in the emergency room because of asthma exacerbations multiple times a week.”
And frankly, if we addressed that problem, the acute problem, we'd be addressing the chronic problem too.
Daniel Penny: Yeah. I wanna talk a little bit about one demographic in particular that you're trying to reach with your message, which is men and young men who really swung for Trump in the 2024 election. I think that's, it's been well trodden at this point that they, the narrative that Dems had about the idea that young people were becoming increasingly progressive and that all young people felt like Democrats were there party, it didn't pan out, and at least among young men, now there's this big gender divide between women and men in politics, especially those under 30. There's been a lot of soul searching on the part of Dems trying to figure out what went wrong.
Many attribute the failure of Kamala Harris's race to like an inability to connect with men or to not go on the right podcast. I think that's a bit simplistic. I think it has more to do with the values and stories that you're telling, not just like whether or not you appear on Joe Rogan, though. I think going on Joe Rogan certainly doesn't hurt if you're trying to reach a broad audience. But I'm curious how you're thinking about winning back this demographic that by all rights, that the Dems should have won and, and how you're trying to communicate with them. Like what, what values or aspirations you're trying to speak to and how you think the left needs to address this crisis of masculinity?
Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. I think there's a couple things. Number one. You know the, we do play this game sometimes of people being just too precious about platforms. Like how dare they do? How dare they talk to that person? You're like, last I checked, politics is about persuasion, which means you have to talk to people who don't agree with you. Number two, I can't credibly call myself young anymore. I just turned 40. So that puts me in some like weird nether region. And I've got my own kids now who are definitely young. I got a whole feeling about this, but I remember what it was like to be very young. And lemme just tell you, the thing about being young is that you want to be bold.
You want to have fun, and you don't really like rules very much. I gotta tell you, I'm still that way. The problem with Democrats is culturally, let's like think about what the stereotype of Democrats are. Not very bold, not very fun. Seem to really like the rules. And so it's not it like from a cultural standpoint, part of me is just like, you kind of forgot what was transgressive about what it meant to be a Democrat, where you were willing to fight against these big, powerful corporations to try and win on behalf of the little guy.
Like, to me, that's pretty bold. I'm gonna do something, have some fun with it. Let loose a little bit. And Democrats these days too often because of the way we do politics, bought off by big corporations. So you're not gonna be transgressive at all because you're not gonna stand up to the corporation who are funding your campaign.
And then because you're kind of lying to voters, that's not very fun. And then from there, like a lot of what we focus on is, oh, but they're breaking the rules. What would we do if they break all the rules? You're like, look. The thing you have to get at is who set the rules in the first place and who are they working for?
And I just think we have a clear message that can be bold, fun, and willing to take on the status quo of who wrote the rules in the first place. And I think that we need to lean into that. The problem is that that. Majority of the Democratic Party cannot because there is nothing transgressive about asking a corporate PAC to write you a check to uphold the status quo that they wrote.
Let's just be clear about that. And then the final point that I'll say is this, because we're not willing to do anything structural, we've leaned in on this whole social conversation, and so we end up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook and there's this trope of like toxic masculinity. And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it's usually. It usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there's not another option about a non-toxic masculinity, then at some point you're basically condemning a whole group of people. And if you don't offer [00:12:00] them anything, why is it surprising that they're gonna go in a different direction? And I'm just saying that I want Democrats to be Democrats again. There's this thing that's happened that like Republicans have gone MAGA and a bunch of Democrats have become like Republican curious. They're like, ah, we could just do this thing that Republicans used to do back in the eighties and nineties. And that's a perfectly great lane. And you're like, no, but that's not our lane.
That's not the thing we're supposed to be doing. So I'm just saying, let's, let's let Democrats be Democrats. We don't need to go back to trying to be Bill Clinton. I think, you know, that chapter's closed and yeah, it's time to move forward.
Daniel Penny: To your point of, okay, the Democrats weren't offering young men a compelling vision, or they were explicitly signaling to them that they weren't really interested in who they were or their concerns, their grievances, some of which are real, some of which are, have been ginned up by by Republicans.
What is it that you're offering them? What is your vision?
I mean, obviously as a senator, you're one of many, you alone do not control the legislative agenda, but what is the vision that you have for these young men? Because I, yeah, I think MAGA at least offered this idea that you're being oppressed by women and the woke mob and the elites, and we're gonna get you money, right? Give you a tax cut somehow it never quite made sense to me how that money was gonna appear. But there were promises of money and that we're gonna make America more traditional and its values and back when men were in charge and, and you're gonna feel that power and that permission again to be who you really are. And obviously, yeah, there are a lot of lies baked in there, but that's a good story and I can understand why a lot of people fell for it. So. What's the story that you're offering?
Abdul El-Sayed: The first one is, I'm not gonna talk down to you. Right? Like I, I've been a young man. I know what it's like to be talked down to, and I know it doesn't really quite work, so I wanna have an honest conversation. Two, I wanna talk about what masculinity is that doesn't feel shitty. And the Andrew Tate version of masculinity is one where you're told that the thing about being masculine is that you could put down other people. And I come at this Daniel, as a father of daughters, like I, I don't want anybody in the world thinking that my daughter's success came at the cost of theirs. 'Cause I know that's just not how the world works. And so let's talk about what masculinity means, does it mean that you punch down at people you perceive to be weaker than you? Or does it mean that you are a promoter and protector and empowerer of other people? That you can do that in a way where you can live in a society where everybody's got a great shot at things and you can still enjoy doing the things that you know bros enjoy doing, which I enjoy doing all the time.
I come at this, honestly, like I'm not, A lot of Democrats are like, let's pretend like we like working out. You're like, if you don't like working out, don't work out. Like just be who you are, number one. But. I say this as a guy who grew up doing the traditional bro things, who still enjoys doing these things and can demonstrate that like they're not mutually exclusive to having, progressive values.
Daniel Penny: What are those things if you don't mind my asking?
Abdul El-Sayed: Like I played football in high school. I captained my wrestling team and lacrosse team. I had my football team. I played lacrosse in college. I work out ,I mountain bike. Like those are like things that bro code. But let's be clear, some of the, like gnarliest lifters I've ever seen in the gym are women, like, including my own wife who deadlifts 1.5 x body weight for reps, which I'm just like, that's incredible.
Daniel Penny: I I saw your bench press—315. Congrats on that.
Abdul El-Sayed: I thank you. I, it's, it was interesting, right? Because it was like, I hesitated with the idea of doing it in large part for one reason, right? There's been this effort to make by Republicans to make Democrats look weak. And for most of these Republicans, part of me is just like, you know, I'm not even close to what my life PR was like.
I'll never hit my PR again. That was in college and it was a lot, we'll just say a lot more than 315, but part of it is also this idea that if you're going to take them on that point, the best way is to show, not tell, right? Like I challenged Donald Trump or frankly any Republican in the US Senate on anything because you guys pretend to be strong, but it's fickle. And so at some point, like show not tell. So I, we were like, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna do this video and I dare you to come and call me weak, especially dare you to come and call me weak to my face. I just think it's important to demonstrate that you don't have to cede on strength to be willing to be empathic, right?
Daniel Penny: Mm-hmm.
Abdul El-Sayed: Those two things are not, it's not a lack of strength for which you show empathy for other people. I think it's actually deep strength to be able to bring that, but like these are things that oftentimes. This conversation we've had says they code too much as being masculine. Ergo like the, these things should be shunned.
And I think a lot of folks have said no. Like you can do things that you enjoy that that build strength that don't come at the cost of someone else's power. And I think that is the thing we need to do well. But there's something more here, which I think is really important and I really wanna talk through.
I think a lot of the reason that so many young men have been fed to the likes of an Andrew Tates or a Jordan Peterson is because they feel really profoundly disempowered in their lives. And I actually think we need to talk about why. And I think it goes back to this question of corporations and their power in our society.
I don't know a young man who doesn't feel like they've got a really awkward if exploitative relationship with one of the following: weed, porn, video games, sports betting. And if you think about all of these industries, they're industries that exist to prey on a risk reward cycle and dopamine spikes in people's minds, specifically young men's minds. I got a friend of mine, our whole relationship like existed around watching sports, right? Like our whole relationship consists of bringing up names of bygone athletes and just talking about what they used to do so well, and then pulling up their clips on YouTube and watching them.
Like that was our whole relationship. And like I know many people who have relationships with people like that. This friend of mine can't watch sports anymore. And the reason why is because no matter where you watch your sports, it has become a long ad for sports betting and this friend of mine has problematic gambling.
He's already almost gambled away his whole home and his 401k and he's like, look man, I just can't watch sports anymore. And I'm like, man, that is so sad. Like this was a big part of your life and it shouldn't be this hard to turn on ESPN and not be fed an ad for something that could have you losing your home in a month.
Right? And this is where we are. And so you've got corporations who basically are working to write the rules so that they are deregulated, so that they can prey on the dopamine cycles of young men. And we gotta talk about that. And look, I'm not for banning any of these things. Like I think any of these things ought to be in like you one ought to be able to enjoy them if they choose.
But the idea that you're pushing them into people's faces and you're not taking on the problematic nature of some of this is a problem. I think about like young men that I mentor in their teens and the number of them for whom their "For You" page on TikTok or Instagram isn't basically an advertisement for some kind of porn.
That number is zero. Like all, none. Nobody I know doesn't have that. Everybody I know is like, here's my For You page, and it's always right a couple clicks away from some kind of porn, and I'm just saying that like pornography is a thing that consenting adults ought to be able to enjoy. But 14 year olds and 15 year olds are not consenting adults.
And we gotta talk about the ways that Big Tech has played games around regulation to enable this kind of thing. And so part of the problem is if your dopamine cycles are fried by some combination of all of these things, and then you feel disempowered in your own life because you can't muster the capacity to go and show up in your life.
And then you're online and somebody like Jordan Peterson is telling you that it's because of women that you're in this situation, you may just be liable to believe them.
Daniel Penny: Mm-hmm.
Abdul El-Sayed: And I just think we gotta have an honest conversation about the way that corporate power is being wielded against men's neurotransmitters in ways that leave them disempowered and frankly exploited in their lives.
Daniel Penny: Yeah, I think that the sort of the dopamine addict has become a figure of, you know, the last few years, this idea that young men are being bombarded with various addictive services on through their phones and become dependent on them and then retreat from social life and all of the things that sort of matter in that we would say, oh, this is, you know, work and relationships and family and friendships and all of that kind of recedes, and it leaves a very open to radicalization as well and susceptible to disinformation.
Abdul El-Sayed: I wanna just make a finer point on this because I think it's easy for us to blame young men. For quote unquote "falling into it." Right? You know, it's like how many traps are there and why is it that nobody's actually going after the trap setters? And these are simple things about the conversations we ought to be having about regulation.
The reason that we don't do it is the same reason that you have like monopolies in the meat packing space and why we pay so much for meat in this country. It's the same reason why we get our paychecks garnished every two weeks and four weeks to get insurance that we then have to pay again for if we get sick.
It's all connected to the same issue and part of the thing I'm trying to get people to see is that like you are taking, being taken advantage of and you've got one group of people telling you that to be strong, you've gotta go and say misogynistic things about women, right? While actually this other group of people are literally exploiting you.
And I just think that it's important for us to actually take on the things that are powerful, that are disempowering people in their lives, and I want folks to be paying attention to those things because those are things we can actually take on you. You shouldn't have to be worried about whether or not you're gonna lose your home in a month because you turned on ESPN.
That's not a thing that should happen in America, and it doesn't have to happen. That's a choice we make as a matter of public policy.
Daniel Penny: Yeah, we made rules about how you could advertise alcohol, how you can advertise cigarettes, and this is generally accepted. Like you can't show someone actually drinking a beer in a beer ad on tv.
I mean, our cigarette ads I think are pretty much gone. Right. I can't think of anywhere we're. Cigarettes are allowed to be advertised. So it's certainly possible as a society to come together and say, okay, if you wanna smoke, you can still smoke. But we're not going to make it easy to convince new people to start doing this because we recognize that this is really bad for our society and it's just not worth living in a world controlled by these interests.
And yeah, I think you, you raise a good point. Like the problem is not the individual who falls for these highly engineered and well tuned tricks, you have hundreds, thousands of people whose job it is to make these products attractive and to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen. So if you aren't able to resist, like it's because it's been designed really well. I wanna talk a little bit about the sense of, I guess, skepticism among young men, particularly around science. This can connect up to climate, but also things like vaccines and other public health, you know? RFK right now is doing a number on the, on America's public health, and I think it speaks to a larger, yeah, skepticism around science and the validity of scientific expertise.
I think young men also maybe feel a little invincible in a way that as they get older, they may realize isn't quite so true. But we're living in this period where a lot of people don't seem to believe in the realities of, of basic science and as a doctor, I imagine this confounds you. You can't just hit them with the facts.
It doesn't really work. We've seen this, at least in the climate debate that just trying to prove to people, yes, climate change is real. Yes, this is really happening. When there are climate skeptics and it's become like a part of their identity, it's just not something that really penetrates, and I think you've probably experienced this with people who are have vaccine hesitancy or now anti-vaxxers, that once this becomes like an article of faith.
It's very difficult to dislodge. And yeah, I think all of these are interrelated in the sense that they really put the onus on the individual and say like, it's up to you to make yourself healthy and that you're someone who deals with public health.
Abdul El-Sayed: Look, I think it's important to understand what some of these more dangerous ideas swim with, and what I mean by that is usually we pay attention to, oh wow, there's a lot more vaccine hesitancy, if not frank vaccine denialism out there. But ask yourself what waters they swim with? It's usually this MAHA Pilled Make America Healthy Again Pilled, which like on its face is insane because America is about as nearly healthy as it's ever been.
Just if you look at the statistics. But the whole idea of MAHA is there's a couple of things that you can do. To protect yourself from any and all diseases. You don't need any of these other things, and these are all grifts to take advantage of you. That's the frame. And so usually it's not the vaccine denialism that is itself enticing.
It's this idea that you are the captain of your own ship and the captain of your own destiny. And if you just do these things. You can protect yourself from everything, right? And it's the same people who are telling you that somehow beef tallow is a healthy thing. Like no beef Tao is just another version of fat.
In fact, probably a less healthy version of fat than the one that they told you was so unhealthy. That's the same people who tell you that because they made the change [00:26:00] in the sweetener in Coca-Cola that somehow now Coca-Cola is a healthy drink. No, look, if it's cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, neither of them are particularly healthy for you. This is a marginal difference, and they tell you that if you get your stuff in you, cane sugar does taste a little bit better. I think it tastes better. And look, I, it does taste better, but it's not better for you. If we got rid of the ultra processed forms of sugar, I think we'd be marginally better off.
But do not pretend that because you made it cane sugar, that the 240 calories in your 20 ounce Coke are somehow not 240 calories of sugar anymore, like they're just sugar. But like this idea that you can be the agent of your own future and that you don't have to worry, it's enticing, but it's like a form of, it's a form of ostriching right?
It's like you are being intentionally ignorant to things that are outside of the degree of your control. And the one point I always make to folks is actually like the man flu. I'm like, you know this idea of the man flu, right? If there is some evidence to suggest that in younger men, influenza is more severe, and the reason why is actually because you have a very intensely tuned immune system, and it's the immune response to the influenza that is so extreme that then causes the kind of death, and there are a bunch of hypotheses about the 1918 flu pandemic. It killed a lot of young men. Part of that is because young men were concentrated in the barracks during World War I, but part of that may actually be that it was just more severe among young men. And so part of me says, okay, so like you go, you work out, you run, you lift, you become very healthy. And now you've got an extremely robust immune system.
And now you get the flu, and now your flu is so much worse because of all the amazing workouts that you did. So it just so happens that I'm not gonna tell you to stop working out. Yes, in general, you should do this thing, but what that tells you is if there is an added thing you can do to stop yourself from getting the flu, maybe you should do that shit.
Like it, it should be kind of obvious, right? And so there's this idea that somehow I can do, I can control everything about what happens to me. And that is a fallacy of modernity. That's just not how the world works. And so I think we need to start breaking that down, which is to say, Hey, I look at, I, I understand why you get some security and thinking, I do all the right things.
I eat all the right foods, I do all the right workouts, ergo I'm gonna protect myself, but. I want you to ask yourself big picture questions about the things you can't control, like the weather or the climate or whether or not you get infected or exposed to flu or COVID. And so there are other things that you want to do and live in a society that do for you so that you can be protected against these things should they happen.
Daniel Penny: Yeah. And also that you have a responsibility to other people. I think that was one of the things I saw in COVID. My wife has a suppressed immune system, and I was pretty aware of the risks that we were living with and what could happen to her if I got sick or if she got sick. And it was, yeah, it was interesting. It seemed like very early on the manosphere got really restless with the idea of vaccine one, getting vaccines, but two, just the restrictions and having to wear a mask and not being able to do the things you wanna do and, and I think that there was a sense of, I should be able to do me, bro. And what do my actions have to do with you?
Like they don't affect you. And there was this real kind of denial of the relationship between oneself and other people. And, and I think that was something that, that has only gotten stronger and intensified in in the following years. It used to be an important part of traditional masculinity. It was this idea that like, yeah, you have a duty to other people.
Like you're part of a community. You're not just out there like self-maximizing.
Abdul El-Sayed: Yeah. And look, I think this is the, to go back to the point about labeling all masculinity as toxic is like we have inadvertently made the stereotype of masculinity toxic because we haven't presented an alternative form of masculinity that is not toxic.
And that point that you made about duty and about empowerment. And about protection. I think that's a really important part of a more like benevolent masculinity. And I think we need to be punching that up now. The zeitgeist has basically said that because all masculinity is toxic, ergo we're going to get rid of all masculinity.
And I think we missed the opportunity to say, actually the masculinity I grew up with was one where you are someone. Who takes the risk first, but you always eat last in the sense that you protect resources and you protect for the people who have to come first and, and that part of it, I think we've lost because we've basically labeled all masculinity as toxic.
I would much more have wanted to be able to say, actually no, don't be an asshole. This is extremely selfish behavior and it's small and it's petty and it's unbecoming of the way that I understand masculinity. It's unmanly to be this way, and I think. In a lot of cultures when you, if you said that you would be making a very powerful argument.
Right? And a lot of folks would say, no, it's my duty to people who don't have the same strength or capacity that I do to make sure that I'm doing the things to protect them right in this society. Because part of my identity is as a protector and as an empowerer. And I think we've lost that, and I think we've lost that to some really detrimental consequences.
Daniel Penny: You've been traveling all around. Your campaign is in full gear. What have you in your experiences with, with citizens of your state and voters like. What have you been learning along the way? Democrats are all trying to crack the same code right now for 2026, and I mean, for some of them the answer is just shoot a video and edit it like Zoran.
But I think others are going a little bit deeper and trying to actually incorporate some real changes in voter sentiment and understand how people are feeling. What are you like sharing with your fellow Democrats who are trying to reach those same suspected young men who are. Maybe not quite cracking the code yet.
Abdul El-Sayed: Be who you are. I just think w when I ran in 2018, I was always being coached around. I literally remember people being like, oh, your bro is showing. I was like, oh, okay. Lemme just, and this time around I'm like, you know what? I am who I am. I've always been who I am. My, my challenge has never been that I don't know who I am.
I just want folks to be authentically who you are because I think if you can be who you are, even if you know you don't code in one way or another, I think people will respect and appreciate what you can bring to the table. And I think more than anything, what people have a very high intolerance for right now is bullshit.
If I think you're pretending to be like me or you're pretending to say things that you know, you think I'm gonna like to hear, people can see through it. I think one of the consequences of modernity is that we're always being fed. Like now. It's like truly AI slop, like inauthentic. Junk. And I think we've gotten really good at looking for the things that are real.
And I just think it's really incumbent on politicians to be as real as they are. And I think leaning into the things that make you who you are and bringing people into that part of your life is important. But there's another piece to that, which is you gotta be willing to be vulnerable. And I think to the point that we've been circling around here, one of the things about masculinity that I think has been a real challenge is that a lot of the way we've been taught has been to hide your vulnerability. Right? Like, men don't cry. Right? And I just think that right now, this is a moment to be willing to be vulnerable, to be able to let people in and recognize that some people are gonna be assholes about it. And that's okay. Like it's just part of the part.
And I think when you decide to put yourself out there, what you are signing up for is a, a willingness to be vulnerable with people. But if you're willing to show them that vulnerability, I think the vast majority of people will embrace it and appreciate it. And also what happens is you can unlock their ability to be vulnerable for themselves.
Because at the end of the day, our argument is the world is an imperfect place and there's a lot of things that could be fixed. And it takes us being willing to admit that there's a challenge and a problem, rather than pretend that no, we're all good, that we actually can only solve together. That requires us to be vulnerable about how those problems affect us.
And so if you want to be somebody who is a leader to solve those problems, you better lead first with your own vulnerability. And so I, I just think that being able to do that thing of putting yourself out there, it makes the argument that needs to be made. 'cause people just see it. It's like show don't tell.
