How to stay a man during a midlife crisis? Interview Bill McCamley

Modern society is changing faster than ever, and with those shifts, the traditional role of men has been completely rewritten. For many, hitting midlife brings up a heavy cocktail of loneliness, anger, and confusion. Too often, men looking for answers are pulled toward toxic voices that weaponize these feelings into resentment, blame, and division.

How do you navigate a midlife crisis, step into true accountability, and figure out what it actually means to be a man today?

In this episode of the Ask Faleskini Podcast, host Peter Faleskini sits down with Bill McCamley to tackle these exact questions head-on. Bill brings over 20 years of intense public service experience—having served as a County Commissioner, State Representative, and New Mexico Secretary of Labor—to a deeply personal crisis facing men in the modern world.

Drawing from the raw, practical insights of his book, Right My Dudes...Now What?, Bill shares how men can shoulder their burdens, find authentic mentorship, and build real-world connections before isolation takes over.

🔍 What We Discuss in This Episode:

• The Changing Role of Men: Navigating the rapid societal shifts that leave many men feeling out of sync with current cultural expectations.
• The Mentorship Gap: Why young men are struggling to find real-world guidance, and looking at the systemic reality that 76% of public school teachers are female.
• The Digital Distortion: Why pornography is a trap and definitely not an instruction manual for healthy, real-world sex and intimacy.
• Assuming Ultimate Responsibility: Shifting away from external blame and learning how to take true ownership of your life, emotions, and future.
• Bill’s #1 Advice for Modern Men: Why the ultimate antidote to loneliness and resentment is simple: Get off your phone and meet people in person every single day.

🌐 Connect with Bill McCamley:

Ready to ditch the screen and find real answers? Connect with Bill and grab his book here:

• Official Website: https://www.billmccamley.net/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Ask for Leskini podcast with a guest. I'm proud to present Bill McCamley. Bill, welcome to the show. Please tell us more about yourself. What is your story?

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Thanks, Peter. So, as you can all tell, I'm an American. I actually live in southern New Mexico, which is a desert, which is always interesting when I go to Europe. It's always a very uh big culture shock just in terms of the weather. I actually spent 20 years as a politician. I was very interested in the topic when I was in university. I became president of my student government at my university, ended up studying public policy at Harvard University, the John F. Kennedy School, and came back to my local area right away to run for office. I was a county commissioner, which is like uh, you know, a regional government or a city council in most areas of the world. I ended up running for U.S. Congress and barely losing when I was 28 years old, but ended up in my state legislature. The clearest European version of that, I think, is where you have uh regional governments in, for instance, Spain or in the United Kingdom, where you have separate governments in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland. So I was in that parliament uh that we have in the state level here in New Mexico. I did that for six years. Then I became the state secretary of labor. So that would be like the Minister of Labor for Wales or Northern Ireland. And I worked really, really hard on trying to create systems where people could get good jobs. That's really important to everywhere in the world, and it was important to me. And it was also important to me to enforce rules like minimum wage requirements. Unfortunately, there are some folks out there that don't want to pay workers what they are legally obligated to get. And I was the one in charge of kind of helping enforce those rules. I also uh, unfortunately, was in charge of the unemployment office in New Mexico, our state, during COVID. And whereas in Europe, during the pandemic, many of the countries decided that the way that they were going to get people help was that they would do so through regular payroll systems. So, hey, government says we want you guys to stay home. Employer X, tell us how much you all give to your workers every month. We'll give you 70% of that money, and you can distribute it to them like they're getting a paycheck. In the United States, we didn't do that. What we said to people who were not able to stay on their jobs for whatever reason was apply for unemployment. And in the United States, that system was created in the 1930s for an economy that basically does not exist today. We have a lot more people that are moving all over the place between states. We have a lot of people that work multiple jobs to make ends meet. And we have a lot of contract employees. So in the United States, you're a separate designation if you work what is called a W-2 job. So you have a regular office or uh employer job versus if you're a contractor, you drive for Uber, you are a massage therapist, you are a yoga instructor, whatever. And so that difference created a really hard situation for a lot of people to be able to get their benefits. And it was my job to try to help work through that. It was really problematic, Peter, in a lot of ways. You know, you read my chapter on mental health. I'm sure you saw what I went through. Uh, we had we had a 15-fold increase in the people on the program within a three-month period at the start of COVID. Our Congress decided to change the rules every two or three months, and they required us to tell the people rather than them telling the people about those rules changes. We had a lot of criminals that would come in and impersonate other folks with identity theft to try to get uh dollars that were not legally allowed. We weren't illegally allowed to give them, and so it created all these problems, and people got very angry. Um there was a lot of frustration trying to get through. Again, that led to a lot of rage and it led to some personal issues with me. We had a car bombing in one of our state offices. Uh, I got a very hard death threat. Um, people would come and try to beat up our security guards and assault some of our staff members at our offices. And when someone found my personal address and then my mother's address, that's when I cut the job and left. And I've done a few things since. Um, but it led to a lot of mental health issues for me, as you might think about. But through that political career, it's been a very interesting place to be a white straight man in America, because you have a situation where things are changing. Uh, women are becoming more and more educated. They're getting more and more jobs. And unfortunately, here in the United States, and I believe probably it's fairly similar in a lot of European countries, men are actually not working as much. We're not going to school as much, and it's creating a bunch of issues across the Western world. That's leading a lot of men to go and follow guys like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes and all of these very, very kind of right-wing people that are telling men the solution to your problems is to blame women. It's to go back to this mythical past where the man was the worker and the provider and the controller, and that women are actually trying to undermine you with their policy stuff to make you feel worse. On the flip side, there are some feminists in France and the United States and other places I document that are saying, hey, men, your time is done. You need to sit down and shut up and withdraw. And I don't believe in either of those solutions. I don't think those are right. We as men have a responsibility to try and thread a needle and say, look, we need to be fellas. Physical strength, risk taking, uh, a want to be a protector and provider, like the traditional guys think of themselves. These are good things. These are positive things, and they can be really constructive for society. But going all the way to the right and saying we need to go back to this way and blaming all our problems or women or other people, that's not going to work either. So the whole book was an attempt by me to really try to say, hey, look, how do we look at these issues in a bunch of different ways, but that leads us to try to grow as responsible, healthy, happy men in a world where things are fairly complicated right now. And that's really what I tried to address. The book is called Write My Dudes Now What? Being a Man in the Twenty-First Century Without Being a Dick. And if you want to learn more about it, you can go to my website, which is billmacamley.net, B-I-L-L-M-C-C-A-M-L-E-Y. And you can learn more about the book. And frankly, Peter, uh, there is an email that you can get to me directly on there as well as social media. I would love feedback from fellows about how they feel, what's going on with them, what do they like, what do they not like? What I want, and we talked a little bit about this before the recording started. I want us to grow and learn. And we can only do that by interacting responsibly with one another. And that's really what one of the main points of the book is.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Okay, I read the book, and thank you. Um I I I like it, how you address a different topic. And uh I would say that uh you're uh quite conservative in it, but uh not uh in a political sense, but but uh reserved in in your communication, how you go about it. You you you want you you're building a big consensus if possible or when possible. So uh I I like that about your book. Uh my uh studies uh are mainly on the topic of what is going on with the men in their midlife crisis. So I see a lot of uh similarities, and uh I I do believe, for example, uh when you mention Andrew Tate, um I I think that is of interest for young men for for midlife. Uh for me for people in their midlife, that is a joke, more or less. It's um but I I I do believe there's a huge problem uh that you might or might not touch in the book. It's a lot of people nowadays that they do not have a father, they don't have a figure, and you address that with a mentoring system. You you propose a mentoring system for for men, uh and I agree wholeheartedly with the mentoring system, especially where they did not have a father on their own. And I do believe that there's a huge problem in society uh because there are no no multi-generational families anymore, or almost none of them. Uh, there are certain groups in the US also, Amish and uh people like that, that they still you you can meet your grandparents every day and stuff like that, and that that is a huge benefit, uh, because then you have uh multiple uh male role models, right? And not just movies and and and games. And I I do believe that that that that is very beneficial for young people. I I know I had a lot of uh male role models in my surroundings, um and that helped me become who I am today, and I see people that were basically my generation but had different problems in their families. How now that we are getting in we're in our midlife already, we see how this is not beneficial for them. And I I I I do believe that the family and role models are paramount for everyone, and and that is why these problems are universal, or not universal, but global. We don't know what what people in the outer space are doing, but uh we we know that even in Asia there are similar problems because uh people are leaving homes very soon. Um a lot of people is in second, fourth marriage, um, a lot of single people. Uh and and as we know from statistics, single people have a problem with with mental health that is much higher or bigger in percentage than uh than people that are in happy uh marriages. So um you propose a couple of things and and and you made an interview with a couple of guys in uh in your book, and I like that. Um and you had a strong role model if I remember correctly, because uh your uh your your your father was in military and they had a completely different uh discipline that uh we now have. And um do you think that it's possible if and that is uh just from uh I I know your your book is uh really hands-on, uh, and I I might be more theoretical, uh, reading too much uh Karl Jung and Freud and stuff like that. Uh is is it possible that we substitute the dead or the father figure with the mentor?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Yeah, um it's interesting you're bringing up men of our age. I am 48 years old, so I've been around a few years, as you have, and as some of the guys listening to this show might be. I I think I want to start talking about guys our age, though, from when we were growing up, and a lot of people see a lot of very fast changes that were not the same for when we were younger. Uh, you know, I start the book talking about movies. When I was growing up in the United States, almost every movie in the 80s had someone that looked like me that was the star. When you talk about Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Ghostbusters or Goonies or all those American movies at the time, that's what I watched when I was a kid. And that's changing. And I think sometimes guys our age, where there's more women out there, there's more conversations with people that that didn't look like us. And I think that's something we have to really understand is that we were brought up with a culture of all these stories that showed us that we were always the star of the show. And I do think that's something we have to understand because there's a lot of people that are not looking like this, may not have our sexual orientation, a lot more women that are now becoming more prominent in society and they're going to want their place at the table. And we do need to recognize that. I think that is an issue for guys in their 40s and 50s. Um, you know, I talk about in the book when I was the labor minister, I had a guy working for me. He was an attorney, and I hired a woman as our chief attorney. She was, I think, 32 years old, whipped smart, worked really hard. She did what I asked her to do. She was one of my best employees. But the guy in his late 50s or early 60s, I can't remember how old he was, he could not take direction from her. He just couldn't do it. And I remember one of my coworkers saying, they talked to the guy and he went home to talk to his wife and said, I can't do this. I think these are the kind of conversations we are going to have to really deal with as men of a certain age. I would also say, to your point about mentors and dealing with that, that is very, very important for me for a couple of reasons. Number one, as you pointed out, there are a lot of boys growing up in these households where they don't see a positive male role model in their lives. If their father has left, if they're in school, I don't know what the numbers are in Europe, but here in the United States, 76% of public school teachers are women. And it's fairly common for a boy not to have a male teacher until they maybe get to the high school ages and they're a sports coach. And what that does is it says these guys don't have anyone to look at as an example. So what do they do? They go online and they go to the Andrew Tates of the world. They go to these other folks that are speaking to them in ways that make them feel powerful and heard and seen. And if we, as dudes of a certain age, don't have the responsibility to be those mentors in whatever way that looks like, that's not going to be helpful for society in a number of ways. You know, I talk fairly frankly in the book about sex. And we don't tend, at least in the United States, you might be better at this in Europe, but we don't talk about this in the United States. It is a taboo topic. In fact, movie ratings here in America are much more likely to be stricter with sex than violence. If you blow someone's head off, that could be a PG-13 movie, which means teenagers can see it. But any kind of sex act, it's up here. And that's really tough because so many of these guys are turning to porn. And they view that as an instruction manual for sex when it's just not. And a lot of women don't like that. And so there's this separation, as you talked about, um, there's all these issues with dating. Young American men are simply not asking women out for a whole lot of reasons. It's a confusing time. No one wants to be seen as creepy after the Me Too movement that came in. And they get mixed messages from women. You know, women say they want men to approach them in general, but in a lot of different ways, they say, Don't approach me in the bar or in the library, the bookstore or on the street. Sabrina Carpenter actually had a very famous song here in America last year called Man Child, which said, All men are stupid, no men are good in bed, and don't approach me. And so if we as men of a certain age who've been around and seen these things, don't have conversations with the younger guys on how this works and how you can talk to people, and it can't just be this stuff. It just can't be on the phones because that's where all so much of the communication is happening, then it's not going to get better. And then, you know, you talked about my dad. You know, my dad was in the military for 25 years. He was a paratrooper, raised in a fairly um small c conservative household in a very uh the Midwest of the United States is very traditional, and he was an Irish Catholic. And so he never expressed himself. He never thought that asking for help or expressing emotion was a manly thing. And that almost broke our family apart because when I was a senior in high school, about to go to college, the PTSD he had from the Vietnam War, he did two tours over there, came back hard, and he wouldn't get help. And for two years, all he did was get more and more angry, more and more hard to deal with. And my mom was about ready to leave him, causing those situations that you talked about with the divorce, until my uncle had to come to Jesus with him and said, Mike, you need to ask for help. And he did. He did. And so that's really an important lesson for me that men asking for help, because after he did, after he got on an antidepressant, after he got into a group with some of his old veteran compatriots, he got better. And so that was a good lesson for me. But the things my dad was very, very good at was treat everybody the way you want to be treated. Be responsible with your life. Make sure when you do something, whether it's good or bad, you take responsibility for that. I am I am not happy with the current president of the United States for a lot of reasons in Donald Trump. But the thing that I think gets me most angry about him is that he refuses to take responsibility. Just last week, after one of the agreements with Iran came up and J.D. Vance, the vice president here, was negotiating the deal. He said, Well, if it works, I'll retake responsibility. But if it doesn't, I'm blaming him. And my father would say that was the most unmanly thing possible. Because we as fellas should understand what we're doing, should get better when we do something good, we should do that again. If we don't do something right, we should recognize that, apologize if we screw up and get better. And we cannot improve unless we take responsibility for our actions. But Peter, I think all of us guys of a certain age have the responsibility, again, that word, to if we can bring some life experiences to the fellows that are younger than us in real ways. I actually substitute teach once a month. Um and the boys in there, you can tell they are dying for a dude with some masculine energy that they can identify with because they just don't get that very often. And I hope all of us can understand that there's a role that every single one of us can play to help build up our communities through mentorship, through being a role model, and having these conversations about paying the bills, dating women, being responsible for our actions and getting better, all of those things. No. I I believe it is not because none of us are perfect. I I talk in the I'm a goalkeeper. Um, I still I'm still playing. I don't know how much longer I'm gonna do that, but I screw up sometimes. Uh just three weeks ago, we were in a game and I I didn't set my wall correctly, where I was on the post and I set my guy right up to the angle was there, but it was on the left post and a right footer bent the the ball around the post or the wall into and I screwed that up. Now, I had to let my defenders know that's on me. I screwed up and I didn't make that mistake for the rest of the season. Um, but I needed to be accountable because, and Peter, this is important. If my defenders don't think that I'm making the right decision, if they don't understand that I'm learning from my mistakes, they're not going to listen to me. They're going to overcompensate. Because they don't trust me. And that's how your defense gets all messed up on the football pitch. It's just not going to work. And I use that as an example in life where it's we need to be accountable to ourselves and the people around us in order to get better because none of us are perfect. We are all going to screw up. We're all going to make mistakes, but that's how we learn. And if we bring the people around us into our accountability mechanism, whatever that looks like, that's a way for all of us to get better. So, no, I do not believe it is it is there's a capability of being responsible without accountability. To me, they're the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Okay. Uh now I have a really hard question for you. It's uh the corporate America, uh, they can buy their self-no names, but they can buy uh their selves out of any trouble. So they don't need to assume uh uh accountability, um, and they always have a right to do something because it was not written or it was not agreed upon and stuff like that. They don't assume uh responsibility and how does that affect our mindsets because I believe that a lot of people are just followers and they see they're doing great, they have a lot of money, they're they prosper, or so we see them. Why should we then go with the average Joe that takes full accountability and um it's nice to people? Uh and uh if if if he does something wrong, corrects it even if it's not beneficial for him. Uh why should they or what is the initiative to follow um the right person instead of the one that does not assume accountability?

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Yeah, it what you're talking about is real, and I see it as a massive problem because young men in the states, and I'm fairly certain this is a worldwide phenomenon, don't trust systems. They they don't trust the people in charge, the governments. They see them as ignoring where they're at here in the United States. I'm a fairly left-leaning politician politically. I'm a member of the Democratic Party. And yet, so many Democrats see people that look like me as a problem to solve rather than as a person who needs representation. And, you know, just a year and a half ago, the website of the main democratic organization here in the United States had a list of 16 things called who we serve, I was not on there. And I was like, what the hell? I've been representing you guys and us for two decades, doing all the things right, and yet you don't see me as someone who's uh needs help or people that look like me. And that's a problem, Peter, because this. If young men don't see a system and the rules that the system has put into place that hopefully keep us all accountable, they're gonna say, well, why the fuck should I follow the rules? I see corporate Americans getting ahead by getting rid of the rules. And if they can do it, why can't I? And that's a real issue for societies because we rely on this thing called the rule of law. If there is a law that is passed, a rule that is passed, a standard that is passed that we're all supposed to follow in order for the community to do better. And a few people break those and they're not held accountable, that a lot of men, especially young men, who hate the system to start, are gonna say, well, screw the system. I'm just gonna do whatever I want. And I do believe that's a massive problem. And it's something I really want to ask our political leaders here in the States to do a better job of. I don't know what the situation is in your neck of the woods, but I do believe that is a massive problem. I don't know what the specific solutions are, other than we need people in charge who are gonna say, here's a standard, here is a consistent way of following these rules, and everyone's gonna be held to the same standard. And again, my father, and a lot of this comes back to he was my biggest role model growing up, believed in consistency. Again, if you screw up, you take accountability. If you do good, you should understand why that's good and grow from that. But you should have a set of standards, of moral standards that you believe are right and wrong and should follow those. And if those go away, then we create this real jello-like atmosphere where there aren't consistent rules and people will do whatever they want. And I just don't believe that's really good for a society and communities to be happy and healthy. And frankly, if we as men believe that our roles are supposed to be protectors and providers, it's hard to do that when we don't have consistent rules uh that everyone can follow to do better. There's not a good solution. I'm sorry, I don't, but we just we need to ask our political leaders if we're in democracies, frankly, just to do better and enforce rules on a more even basis.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Yeah, but then we have so much discrimination within the law that there's an additional problem. And where do we start? Do we erase everything or do we try to mend the existing system?

SPEAKER_00 27:51

We're getting real deep here, aren't we? I I always found there are people that are unhappy with the system that are the burn it all down and start over types. And the problem with that is a lot of times you need a violent revolution for that. And you know, that might sound fun in fantasy world reality, and it's not, and it doesn't really work as well as working your way up from the ground up. I've always believed, and that's why I was in politics for so long, even when I was a young kid, that you should work within the system to make it better. Because most of us, you know, not in Russia, but in other places, have a system where there's a capability of working within it to make changes that are going to be better. Now, do I think leaders need to try for bigger changes? Because sometimes if you get in power and you're there, there is an acceptability of the status quo. And so many people right now do not feel like they are benefiting from the status quo. And if we don't recognize that as people, if our leaders don't recognize that, what are they gonna do? They're gonna turn to dictators, they're gonna turn to strong men, and that's what pretty much all of them are, who say, I have the solution to all of your problems, trust me as an individual rather than a system. And they're gonna go that way if we don't do better within the system to fix some of these issues. But but I I tend to believe that you know, systems that have evolved over time are are generally okay, and you can try to fix them in the middle, and only at the worst possible way should you try to burn it all down and start over. Um, I do think with AI and a lot of the robot stuff coming in, that there's the possibility there could be some turning points here, and we may need to figure out new ways of living. But I hope we can do that within the system because that generally is a less violent way to change things.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

Thank you, Bill. What would be your number one advice for men experiencing a midlife crisis?

SPEAKER_00 30:05

How to man up and get off your fucking phone. Go out and meet people in real life. Um, Peter, I I talk very openly in the book about my suicide attempt. And my job right now is working with construction workers here in the United States. Those those guys have the highest rates of suicide and highest rates of death by overdose in the nation by profession. And so much of it is they feel alone because we're we're trying to spend all our time on this thing, and this is a worldwide phenomenon. I'm on social media. It is addicting. Like social media companies know what they are doing, they get you addicted to their services. And the more time you spend on this shit on your phone, the less time you are spending going to see a game with your buddies, playing Call of Duty with your friends, taking a girl out to coffee. If you're if you're married, taking your wife out to dinner, spending time with your kids. The more that we interact with each other in real deep ways, the healthier and happier we are all going to be. And unfortunately, a lot of times, men, um, you know, we don't view social interaction as a positive thing. I'm gonna be stoic. You see all these memes, again, for these young guys online saying the best apartment is a mattress, a computer, and a weight bench. Like, no, no, that's not going to make you happier or a better person. So, my one piece of advice, Peter, for any man, if you're 20, 50, or 80, put down the phone, turn off the TV at least once a day. Try to do something where you interact with other people that you like in person. I think that is one of the biggest things that we can all do to be happier and healthier ourselves and build happier and healthier communities.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Bill, thank you very much for all these insights. Thank you for the incredible book, and thank you for being my guest tonight.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Peter, I really appreciate the opportunity. I hope everyone has a wonderful, wonderful rest of the summer and everyone tries to stay cool out there.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Thank you. Bye.