Former President Barack Obama used the premiere of his new podcast to wade into the cultural conversation about masculinity, telling novelist Lauren Groff he wants "a bunch of men" modeled on a fictional cowboy's quiet courage.
The six-part series, "A Great Book With Barack Obama," dropped on Audible on September 24, the latest product of a multi-year deal between Amazon's audio platform and Higher Ground, the Obamas' production company. In its final episode, Obama sits down with Groff, author of "Fate and Furies", to discuss Cormac McCarthy's 1992 National Book Award-winning novel "All the Pretty Horses," a story about a young Texan named John Grady Cole who crosses into Mexico, falls in love, and navigates a world that tests his character at every turn.
Obama held up Cole as a model worth emulating, USA TODAY reported after receiving an exclusive clip ahead of the premiere. But his remarks also ventured into familiar progressive territory, the language of "toxic masculinity" and "patriarchy", even as he acknowledged that those very terms alienate the young men they are supposed to reach.
In the clip shared with USA TODAY, Obama told Groff:
"The challenge I do think is, for a lot of boys and men, when they hear, you know 'patriarchy' and you know 'toxic masculinity,' etc., there's a part of them that's thinking, 'Well, gosh I don't know, I don't want to be toxic.'"
That concession is worth pausing on. Obama did not reject the framework. He did not say the terminology is wrong or counterproductive on its merits. He said it makes young men defensive, a problem of messaging, not substance. The distinction matters. It is the difference between questioning a worldview and focus-grouping the sales pitch.
He then posed the issue as a societal project, asking Groff how the culture might "cultivate" the kind of manhood he admires in McCarthy's fictional cowboy:
"The question then becomes... 'How do we as a society have a language to try to cultivate that?'"
Groff, for her part, turned the conversation into a tribute to the former president himself. She told Obama he was "the best possible argument for that kind of man" and said she felt "so grateful" he was president when her oldest son was born because he "gave an example." The clip ended with Groff suggesting that young men may not need new language at all, just examples of radical empathy and compassion from people in positions of power.
The podcast is the latest entry in a sprawling post-White House media portfolio. Obama, a four-time bestselling author, published "Dreams From My Father" in 1995, "The Audacity of Hope" in 2006, the children's book "Of Thee I Sing" in 2010, and "A Promised Land" in 2020. He co-authored "Renegades: Born in the USA" with close friend Bruce Springsteen in 2021.
Higher Ground previously held a three-year deal with Spotify, which produced "The Michelle Obama Podcast" and a companion audio series tied to "Renegades." In 2022, the production company signed a multi-year, exclusive first-look deal with Audible. That arrangement has already yielded "Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise," an eight-part history series Obama co-hosts with Malcolm Gladwell.
Michelle Obama, meanwhile, currently hosts the "IMO" podcast with her brother Craig Robinson. Her 2018 memoir "Becoming" was adapted into a 2020 Netflix film of the same name. The family's combined media footprint now spans audio, streaming video, and publishing, a commercial operation that dwarfs anything a former president has assembled before.
A press release issued earlier in 2026 said the podcast would explore books "that have profoundly shaped his worldview and our society." Obama announced the series days after releasing his annual summer reading list, which this year featured 11 picks. Only the final episode, the McCarthy discussion with Groff, has been described in detail. The subjects of the other five installments have not been disclosed publicly.
There is nothing wrong with admiring John Grady Cole. McCarthy wrote him as a young man of few words, deep loyalty, and physical courage, virtues that do not require a graduate seminar to understand. Most Americans, conservative or otherwise, would recognize those qualities as good ones.
But Obama's framing reveals a familiar pattern. He identifies a real problem, young men feel alienated by the left's rhetoric about masculinity, and then asks how "we as a society" can find better language to guide them. He does not ask whether the underlying ideology is flawed. He does not consider that the men recoiling from "toxic masculinity" lectures might be responding to something more than bad branding. He treats their discomfort as a communications gap, not a substantive disagreement.
Groff's answer was even more telling. She pointed to Obama himself as the model, a man of "radical empathy and compassion" in a position of power. That is a perfectly fine personal compliment. As a theory of masculinity for millions of young men who feel adrift, it amounts to "be more like Barack Obama." It is not a serious answer to a serious question.
The men who built this country, and the fictional cowboys McCarthy wrote about, did not need a podcast to tell them what manhood looked like. They had fathers, churches, communities, and a culture that did not treat normal male instincts as a disorder requiring treatment. If Obama wants to understand why young men tune out, he might start there.
