Who breaks up fights at bars? Big strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don't like themselves. So I think strength immediately moves to protection. And then the third thing, and I get more pushback on this, is procreation.
Not on this show you won't, Scott. Don't worry.
What are men for? We've been having a debate for a while about the falling fortunes of the modern man and the difficult conditions facing young men in particular. The single biggest killer of men under the age of 40 is themselves. It's suicide. Boys and men are falling behind in several different areas. There's about one million fewer young men now enrolled in college as compared to 2011. Are they radicalized and toxic? And just what is masculinity, anyway? Most masculine I've ever felt after the birth of my first child. The definition of true manhood is love, protect, cherish, defend, provide for your wife and for your family. And the masculine perspective is you have to understand that life is war. My guest this week has a lot of thoughts on this subject and a lot of advice for our fellow men. He's a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business. He's the impresario behind the Prof G media universe, and he's the author of a new book that answers all of these questions. "Notes on Being a Man." Scott Galloway, welcome to "Interesting Times." I think at this point, probably most people listening or watching are familiar with some of the basic information on the condition of young men in America. And so I want to not dive into that data, but start at a more personal level. You are a teacher. You're a father. You're a podcaster. Just in your personal life, how did you first get the sense that young men in America were in a kind of trouble.
Well, it was a specific moment that kind of lit the candle, if you will. And that it was during Covid. And a young man named Alex Kearns was trading options on Robinhood. And he got what ultimately ended up being an errant message, saying that he owed them thousands of dollars. And he spent most of the night sending panicked emails to an unresponsive Robinhood who wants to scale so there's no humans. And then in the morning, he decided that he didn't want to leave his family with that burden, and he took his own life. And you see this kid, Ross — do you have kids?
I have a number of kids, yes.
Well, occasionally you see something and you see a picture of a kid, and you're like, that's my boy.
Yeah, and you have two. You have two sons, right?
Yeah, I have two sons. And that happened to me. And it was very, occasionally something — and this is the power of media — just reached into my soul and grabbed me. And I just started doing some research on it, and I just found a lot of data about the challenges facing young men. In this instance, the kind of unrelenting foe of big tech that every day is trying to figure out a million times a second a way to get you on a screen one more second. And the young, immature prefrontal cortices of men is especially vulnerable. And big tech, which is 40 percent of our S&P right now, essentially has one job. And that's to separate or sequester young men from their relationships, which is key to a mammal's health. And I worry that we're evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males. And if you go back four years, it is receiving a lot of attention now, which is really rewarding. But it wasn't four years ago when I went to the Democratic convention in Chicago just a couple of years ago, I saw a parade of special interest groups articulating all the very real issues different special interest groups still face. I didn't hear one word about the cohort that has fallen further faster than any cohort in American history. And that's young men. And so that was the moment where I started going down this rabbit hole, if you will.
So take us back in time in your own life, because your book about this subject is partially analysis and prescription, but a lot of it is personal story and memoir. So you're 61, right?
Yeah. Can you believe that.
An exceptionally well preserved 61, I must say. And so you came of age. You came of age about 15 years before I did, so in the 70s and 80s. And what do you think was different in the male experience then?
Well, first of all, that's a generous question. I relate a lot to these struggling young men, because I think I could have very easily, with a few wrong turns or bad decisions, or lack of infrastructure, could have really come off the tracks. My father was not involved in my life. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. I feel like America back then, Ross, loved the unremarkable. I got assisted lunch. I always say I'm a product of big government. And by the way, this is not a humble brag. I'm a remarkably talented person. I may even be a one percenter, but that puts me in a room with 75 million other people. My life, my wealth, my opportunities are well above the 75,000,000th most blessed person. And I reverse engineer those things to several factors that aren't my fault. First and foremost, the irrational passion of my well-being of my mother. But more than that, maybe even I was smart enough to be born in America and especially California in the 60s as a white heterosexual male. I got assisted lunch. I applied to UCLA, Ross, when it had a 74 percent admissions rate, and I was one of the 26 percent that didn't get in. And I was installing shelving for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, 18 bucks an hour, and I came home one day and I just broke down, and I said to my mom — I was living with my mom — this is my life. And not that there's anything wrong with vocational work, but I wanted to be a doctor at the time. At that moment, I thought I was going to be, I had aspirations to be a pediatrician. And she said, well, is there something we can do. And I found out there was something called an appeal process. And I wrote an appeal. And the truth has a nice ring to it. I said, I want to be a doctor, and I'm installing shelving right now. And I remember the call, someone from the admissions office at UCLA called me and said, you're not qualified, but you're a native son of California and we're going to give you a shot. And I got through UCLA showing up with a 1984 Honda Accord and $60 in, $4,500 in student loans. My tuition was $1,200 a year, and then I graduated. I rewarded the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regents of UC with a 2.27 GPA, which, just for your listeners, Ross, is not very good.
It's above a 2.0. It's better than a 2.0. It's enough to graduate. They did give me the same diploma everyone else got. And this is the crazy part: Berkeley, arguably the finest public institution in America, let me into graduate school. And a lot of men, I quite frankly, just didn't get my act together until I was about 25, 26. And it kind of inspired an upward spiral of prosperity. And I worry now that what we're trying to do in America is identify a superclass of freakishly remarkable young kids who play lacrosse and find time to build wells or have platforms helping the mental health of kids all over the world, or are the children of rich kids and turn them into billionaires. And I think America has lost the script. I think the whole point of America is to give unremarkable kids a shot at being remarkable or doing something important. And I feel like I had that infrastructure. And I worry that in today's world, a lot of that infrastructure has been crammed into the kids who already demonstrate the remarkable at the age of 18.
Yeah, there's a couple places I'd like to go with that. But just one point is the idea of slow development and grace, because to me, when you tell that story, I don't think you're unremarkable, but it does sound like you were a kid who needed time and space and opportunity that wasn't there at age 16 or 18 and ended up being there. So just talk about that for a minute. Like, is the big difference the space that society allows between the ages of 15 and 30 for people to screw up or find themselves? Is that a big change that's disadvantaged men?
I would argue the primary education system is biased against boys. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended, and once a boy is suspended twice, he's probably not going to college. Think about the way we approach what we ask for students in school. Sit still. Be a pleaser. Raise your hand. You just described the activities that come more easily to a girl. Even push a pencil around, ask questions. Our prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl's. And then you have a kid who, quite frankly, may be not ready for college and the traditional on-ramps to a middle class life. A lot of those on-ramps have been closed. We all knew that kid in high school. He wasn't going to go to college, but he could fix your mom's car. And there was woodshop, auto shop, metal shop. Those have gone away. They've been replaced with computer science and Mandarin courses. And we've all decided as parents that if our kid can make 80 grand a year at the age of 19 installing energy efficient HVAC heaters, that somehow you failed if they don't end up at M.I.T. So we have this one path of success that's been driven into families. And there's a certain amount of shame. And then you have my industry, which has embraced this [expletive] rejectionist LVMH strategy of artificially constraining supply such that we can brag that we turn away 90 percent of our applicants.
Your industry being higher ed?
Yeah, it's morally corrupt. Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment. It lets in 1,100 kids a year, they could let in 11,000. It's in the middle of nowhere. They have the infrastructure. They have the money. And by the way, there would not be any degradation in the quality of those freshmen. But once people have a degree or a housing permit or a house — and this is the virus that infects America — they pull up the gates behind them because it makes their degree and their house worth more. How many times have you heard someone say, I would never get into the college I went to if I applied now.
I hear that occasionally as a parent, as a parent of younger teenagers.
What that means is your daughter's not getting in, and we have to flip the script. But maybe he does go, or she goes to college for one or two years, borrows a lot of money, decides it's not for them, drops out. And what is one of the few forms of debt that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy? Student debt. They drop out and this debt haunts them the rest of their lives. In addition, the transfer of wealth could reasonably be called a transfer from the rich and the middle class, or the poor and the middle class to the rich. But more than anything, the transfer has really been from the young to the old, who owns homes and stocks, people our age, who rents and makes their money from current income and wages, young people.
So those are things though, student loans, cost of housing and so on. Those affect men and women both.
Both men and women. Percent going into debt. Both men and women are struggling to buy homes.
But on the question of men in particular, you were talking, mentioned earlier going to the Democratic convention and hearing people talking about all kinds of identity groups and their struggles and not talking about men. I think it's very clear from the perspective of people at the Democratic convention why they're thinking that way. They listen to your story where you say, I was lucky to be born a white, heterosexual man in 1960s America, and they say, damn right. White heterosexual men had all kinds of unfair advantages. They were propped up in various ways by what gets called patriarchy. Those advantages have gone away. And OK, now, now men are struggling. But didn't everyone else have to struggle for hundreds and hundreds of years? Why can't men deal with it. I'm curious. I'm curious how much of what you experienced, the advantages you feel like you experienced growing up, are connected to unfair advantages, sexism, and so on. And what isn't. Like, what is the thing you can pull out of the 60s and 70s and say, this is still something we can have in a more egalitarian America. That is percent fair.
And when it's very easy as a younger man to credit your grit and your character for your success and blame the market for your failures. And I didn't really recognize until I was in my 40s. I raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my startups in the 90s, and it didn't dawn on me that there weren't any gay people, or non-whites or women raising money from venture capitalists. The question is, should a 19-year-old male being raised by a single mother pay the penalty for my privilege. Because things have changed dramatically. It's just no longer. The advantages I had just are no longer nearly as distinct. And maybe there's even some disadvantage to being a young male.
And just going back, I want to touch on what you said, that the economic challenges facing young people face men and women percent true, but this is the bottom line, and I don't think we like to admit this. Beyoncé could work at Kentucky Fried Chicken and marry Jay-Z. The opposite is not true. Young women. Young women are disproportionately and unfairly evaluated on their aesthetics. Young men are disproportionately and unfairly evaluated on their economic viability. Young men get much, if not most, of their identity from their professional or economic success or lack thereof. So while I agree with you, and I think the solutions should be focused or gender neutral, focused on lifting up all young people, it has disproportionately negatively impacted young men. But then maybe they can't be gender neutral. I mean, I think part of why you're an interesting figure is that you make a lot of arguments that are right now seen as conservative and conservative coded arguments. A lot of things that you say about the struggles of men are things that you hear from conservative writers, conservative thinkers and the manosphere in their crudest form.
And you, as I watch you, I feel like you have these views and you're trying to stay liberal. I mean, maybe that's unfair, but that's what I see in Scott Galloway. But it seems like what you're describing is a world, is a landscape where there's some set of advantages that men used to have that you can just say were unfair and it's good that they're gone. But then at the same time, when you say, look, men need more time to develop. Male teenagers are just the weaker sex in educational settings compared to women and so on. It does seem like there's certain things that your theory needs to favor that would be pro male in a particular way and in a way that would by their critics on the left get called the return of patriarchy or something like that. What do you think about that.
It's a really fair point. And to be fair, the far right saw the problem. First they realized that something was wrong in Mudville with young men and they saw them first. The problem was their answer was to take women and non-whites back to the 50s, and some of the initial voices that filled the void were really negative voices just cosplaying, cosplaying empathy. But what they really were was just thinly veiled misogyny in a form of masculinity that was coarse, coarsening our discourse. And the first thing I always feel my land acknowledgment is the following. Women don't have an obligation to service men romantically. Sexually, this is not women's fault. One of the greatest victories in America and society generally is that women are thriving, and men should take pride in that and be the afterburners for our sisters and our mothers and our daughters' success. The far left answer to this problem, quite frankly, is you don't have problems. You are the problem. You've had a 3,000 year head start. Deal with it now. Deal with the crap we've been dealing with forever. And quite frankly, what's the solution for young men from the left? Act more like a woman. And I don't think that's helpful either. So I think there has to be something in the middle. And I think it's very progressive to talk about empathy and lifting up groups.
But in your story in education alone, like you, it sounds like you do need something that is just effectively a different track for men. And maybe in the way we talk about this a lot with women in terms of how do you make the workplace compatible with pregnancy and motherhood. And it seems like you're saying, in the same way, we need to think about how to make the modern educational system compatible with boys whose brains develop more slowly, and the need for men to have what, an extra five years in effect. Is that the argument?
Let's go to solutions. I believe we should redshirt kindergartners. I think boys should start kindergarten at six. They're 18 months behind. O.K., let's true up the cognitive abilities. Start them at six. Girls start at five. Let's do a better job. Let's raise wages for teachers and do a better job of recruiting men into primary schools. Simple stuff like pay for after school sports coaching, which is disproportionately men, compensate them for those extra hours. I think mandatory national service would be hugely beneficial for patriotism, for America and for young men and women. A lot of young men, quite frankly, they just lack purpose.
So you're taking, just stay on that idea for a second. So the idea is you're taking, let's say, somewhere in the 22-year-old zone, whether it's a guy who isn't ready to go to college or a guy who's graduating college or hasn't finished, doesn't have purpose. And you're saying, O.K., you need this extra two years of development and you need something to do in that time, anything from being in the military to being smokejumpers, to elder care, to senior care, to donating time at a no kill animal shelter.
I think America needs a lot of talented young people who understand technology to get out there and spend time with other Americans. I think that's it.
You just gave a nice gender neutral sounding description. But it is, if it's the men you're worried about. I think in your story you need, it's the smokejumper. The problem you're trying to solve is more likely to be solved by the smokejumpers than the. But then the no kill animal shelter. Is that fair.
I'm trying to. I'm not trying to make you to.
I'm trying to come up with a series of solutions that are more politically palatable, that have a chance of being enacted. And I also want to recognize that a lot of the things I talk about are challenges for young women as well as young men. But I think there's a series of programs to lift up young people that would disproportionately help young men, because a lot of the benefits have been taken away and have been especially detrimental to young men.
Why don't you like the term toxic masculinity.
I don't think there's any such thing. I think there's coarseness and cruelty and criminal behavior. But I think masculinity is strength, service, stoicism, demonstrating strength and skills such that you can establish resources and strength such that you can then protect others. I think it's, I think it's optimizing for service, not for attention. And unfortunately, a lot of criminal, violent, psychopathic behavior has been conflated with masculinity. I don't think, I don't think there's any such thing, just as I don't think there's any such thing as toxic femininity.
So I don't like how the phrase toxic masculinity gets used, but I think it can be a useful phrase because of what it implies. It implies that there are vices that maybe are not exclusive to men, but are disproportionately male. Men are more violent than women and so on. But then that there are also virtues that are again, not unique to men, but are associated with masculinity in certain ways. And I think you were just trying, you were just describing some of them. And in the book, you have the three P's. To me, it's your description of virtuous masculinity. So tell me what the three P's are.
So provider, I just, I think a decent goal for a young man starting his career is in a capitalist society, just to acknowledge the way the world is and that if you want an absence of anxiety, if you want health care, if you want to be attractive to a mate, you're going to need to have a plan to make yourself economically viable. And that might be getting a trades license, getting a Bachelor's of Arts, just working real hard, whatever it might be, that you're going to need a plan to be economically viable. And by the way, that plan will change. But you have a responsibility to develop some sense of a plan for economic viability in a capitalist society. Once you develop a series of strengths that can be character, it can be kindness, it can be economic power, the next move is to protection. It's a tragedy to me that women don't feel safe on the New York subway. Women shouldn't cross the street when they see a group of young men. They should cross the street to get to be around young men. Your job is to protect. Who breaks up fights at bars? Big, strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don't like themselves. So I think strength immediately moves to protection. And then the third thing, and I get more pushback on this, is procreation.
Well, I think we need to, I think we need to stop demonizing and start celebrating young men's horniness. It makes them better men. It makes them want to shower. It makes them want to have an economic plan. It makes them want to have girlfriends so they can figure out a way to behave around other women. It makes you kinder. My first girlfriend told me that if I didn't stop smoking pot every night, she was going to stop having sex with me. And guess what. I stopped smoking pot. A movement I hate, Ross, I hate the incel movement. I think it is such bullshit. This notion that women have such high standards that they can never be successful. Well, welcome to the workweek, boss. For 99 percent of history, 99 percent of men have been involuntarily celibate. For 99 percent of the time. There are a few men that wouldn't rather be doing something else more right now than having sex, and it's a motivator for us to be better men. No man has the right to reproduce. You got to work for it. And I hate this movement where men throw up a BS excuse and they abdicate, and they stop putting in the time and the effort and the energy to be better men that are more attractive to women who understandably, are raising their standards because they're no longer economically indentured to men and they're excelling. And so they have the right to have higher standards.
So the incel movement and everything associated with it is pretty much by definition, a movement for men who feel like they're not succeeding. Generally, for men who are succeeding, who are attractive in the dating pool. If you're telling them, go out, have sex, be horny, whatever. Whatever else, how do you get that to be connected to protection and providing rather than just being a different P, right? Which is predatory. And I don't mean to be clear, I don't mean like rape and sexual assault predation. I'm just being a player that's not really, just treating women badly in a dating market that benefits you because all these other men are failing.
What I would say is that one, you're talking about a minority of people and not all men. As they say, look, well, men not doing well and struggling with their career or their romantic possibilities, I think that applies to 95 percent of men at some point in their life. I know it applied to me for a large portion of my life. I don't know about you, but there's definitely moments in my life where I was insecure about my professional and romantic success and opportunities.
