Professor Scott Galloway - Why Young Men Are In Decline, And What To Do

All right, Professor Galloway, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How you doing this morning?

I'm good. Thanks for having me, Connor.

Yeah, it's a real honor and a pleasure to have you here. I've been sort of watching your work and following you for a while. Some great guests coming on in the first sort of quarter of 2023, and you're one of the conversations that I've been looking forward to. So let's start off with how I always start off, which is tell us, tell the audience a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Yeah, I knew he said off, Mike, you're going to ask that. And, I mean, we started off, I'm going to cheat. It's a toss up between two moments, and they're both pretty, lack of better term, pretty serious moments. My mom got very sick when I was in graduate school and ultimately got the cancer that was going to kill her. And I came home. She called me at grad school and said, come home. I'm not doing well. And we were underinsured. We didn't have a lot of money. It was me and my mom. My mom was a secretary, and they had discharged her from the hospital early after surgery. She was just in a very bad way. And I was 26, my first year of grad school, or 25. And I immediately thought, okay, I can solve this. I can fix this, and started calling around, couldn't find a hospital that would take her. They said, bring her to the emergency room. And as I thought that through, that was going to be an awful experience, so I thought, oh, I'll get a nurse to come take care of her. Nurses were 55 bucks an hour even back then, and I didn't have the money. And I just remember feeling a sense of real kind of emasculation, frustration that, like, kind of my one job to take care of the, you know, the person who raised me, I couldn't do. And it was very humiliating, but it was also very motivating. And that is, up until that point, I had been kind of your classic underachiever and just did enough to get by. And that really kind of focused me on what I would need to do, or at least try to do to have more success such that I could take care of my mom. That was very motivating. And then the other thing was, when my oldest son was born, I was, you know, it wasn't a Hallmark moment for me. I felt crazily nauseous. I couldn't stand. And it wasn't because of the experience, which is, by the way, a gross experience, but I was terrified. And that is, I'd had some success, but I hadn't saved as much money as I should have given how much money I'd made. And again, I'm like, shit, it's no longer about me and I'm not where I need to be. So these are very intense moments that call on very instinctual feelings. But, yeah, not being able to take care of my mom at that moment, and then a fear that I wasn't going to be able to take care of my son. These were very seminal, motivating moments in my life.

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. I think first off, the classic underachiever really resonates with me. That was sort of my mo, you know, average at best, for pretty much everything that I did for a very long time. And, you know, it's interesting because I. I've talked about this on the show a little bit, but I'm. I've kind of been going through a little bit of both of what you've been talking about. My mom was diagnosed with terminal stage 4 cancer not too long ago, kind of right after my son was born, my first son. And it's been, I think what you just described has been sort of a summation of my experience. You know, this sort of how do I save her, how do I support her? But then also stepping into the role of fatherhood, of am I ready to sort of tend to or take care of this new little life form that has entered into my sphere, which is a beautiful, wonderful, awe inspiring experience unto itself, but also can be pretty stressful. I think one of the things that stands out to me about what you're saying is, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's almost like there's something about being under duress or going through a really hard time that caused you to step up or step into a more competent version of yourself. And I know for myself, I kind of bottomed out in my life at one point in my late 20s, and that set me on a different trajectory. Do you think that there's something that is required that we need maybe as mental or as human beings, where we kind of need to experience that type of hardship to step up? Or is that just a test of character? What role would you say that that plays in our lives?

Yeah, I mean, the way you get strong is you stress your muscles, you damage them, and they grow back stronger. A certain amount of adversity is a key component of success. Because you learn how to get through it and you realize that you can get through it and you develop a certain level of resilience. Part of the problem we have at universities now is freshman suicides have become so prevalent that we have training now on how to recognize someone who is perhaps having dangerous thoughts of self harm. And the reason this is happening is that so many of us who are blessed with resources naturally want to do good things for our kids. So we engage what has been termed concierge or bulldozer parenting. And we use so many sanitary wipes on their lives, they don't develop their own immunities and then they get to college and they get their heartbroken or they get their first D and they literally freak out. And there's all sorts of research that supports this. The reason that the Gettys and the Carnegies don't control the world or the duponts is because rich kids usually spend their parents money. The children of immigrants are the most successful because they look at the parents, they look how hard they work, they look at the success, they recognize through that hard work and they learn. The children of rich kids generally decrease the wealth. I mean, they have more opportunities, but they generally don't go on to build. The saying that I struggle with and you'll struggle with this, I have 12 and 15 year old boys and I always say if I had what they have, I wouldn't have what I have. And that is what on earth is their motivation? I mean, they get. I just sent my kids, I live in London, I'm not there, so I send them tickets to go to Tottenham Hotspur's versus Man City. And I love my kids, so I want to surprise them, a lot of them. So I buy them great seats.

My kids don't only have a safety net, they have a fucking cashmere safety net. And so what? Exactly. And it amazes me when I meet rich kids that are motivated because I'd be like, if I had had money, the only two things I know would have been in my life are cocaine and a Range Rover. That's how I would have responded to resources. But I didn't have those things. So it was very motivating. But walking through coals, getting calluses, appreciating how hard life can be. You're entering a different phase of life right now, Connor. And it's what I call the shit gets real part of your life. And all of a sudden you have a kid. And while we're supposed to pretend that it's joyous and amazing and it Is. It's also wildly stressful. And I don't care. I'm sticking to this. Babies are awful. They're just awful. It's a science experiment to keep the thing alive. It provides you with absolutely nothing, especially as a dad, you're useless. Your job is to support your partner and make sure that he or she or whoever the primary caregiver is has the resources they need and get a night nurse. And also your job is to go out there and hunt the fucking mastodon and bring home the meat. And I know that sounds sexist, and sometimes being an adult or being a man means getting out of the way. If your partner is better at that money thing than you are. But your job primarily is to take. I think every man should start with the assumption that he is going to take economic responsibility for their household. And it's really stressful because it's a competitive market out there and everyone else is trying to get more than their fair share. And so you're out there, and as a man, you're kind of judged full stop based on your economic success or lack thereof. If you live. Where do you live, Connor?

Upstate New York.

Okay, so you're in upstate. It's not as bad, but it's still between schools, between living. You know, once you have a kid, it's kind of two, if not three bedrooms. Right away you start thinking about, if there's good public schools, you're blessed. But in America, there's a lot of areas where you think, well, no, the perfect angel needs to go to private school. Maybe your wife or your partner takes some time off to take care of the kid. And all of a sudden you go from needing X per year to 3x. And if you don't have a path to that, it's really stressful and hard. And then you're going through the other very stressful thing that is unimaginable when you're 18 and that is someone you love a great deal and who loves you immensely, has gotten sick and may die. And that reality is so harsh that the human brain just can't wrap its head around it until it happens to you. It can't describe the feeling. It's the most unjust thing that will ever happen to you, and you can't imagine it. So I wrote a book on happiness, and all the studies say the same thing on an if you look at the Y axis is happiness and the X axis is age. All the data comes back across geographies, ethnographies, income classes. It's a smile. Zero to 25 is Star wars, beer, football games, making out of prom. It's generally pretty happy. And all the shows about being awkward in seventh or eighth grade. Okay. But there's a lot of fun as a kid. And then 25 to 45 is what I call the shit gets real part of your life. Just hard. You're not going to have a fragrance named after you. You're not going to be Senator. And you're like, oh, wait, I was supposed to be the. You know, everyone. My parents in college told me I was amazing. And what do you know? It doesn't feel like I'm amazing right now. And then something wonderful happens. In your 50s and in your 40s, if you're more soulful, and that is, you start finding joy and appreciation in things you didn't before. And hopefully your kids get less awful. Hopefully you get a little bit economic security. Hopefully you've kind of settled into relationships that are more productive. Hopefully a little bit economic security. And it's just weird. You start finding joy in places you didn't. I remember I was telling the story of my mom. I used to go to this deli called Junior's Deli on Westwood Boulevard in West la, right above Pico. And every week she'd order the same thing. Lox, eggs and onions. And it would come up with a side salad or something. And the salad, this stupid little salad in a little wooden bowl would come, and she'd stop me and she'd put her hand on my hand. She's like, isn't this beautiful? Like when we were supposed to just pause for a moment and enjoy the beauty of the salad. And, you know, you're 13 and you're like, what the fuck? And then as you get older, it's like. One of the many reasons I miss my mom is I would love to just share this. There's just times when I'm walking through. Walking through the park with my dogs and I see a fox. And I am so stilled by that moment. Like, I'm not into wildlife or anything. And you just. Like even 10 years ago, and especially 30 years ago, it had been just like, oh, there's a fox. And it just would run by. And now I just stop and wonder. And I don't know if it's the recognition of the finite nature of life. Something happens to your brain. But I always tell people, kind of 25 through 45, if you're stressed, if you're economically insecure, if your relationships are stressed, if you feel insecure about your achievements, if having a family, it seems to be, like, not the Hallmark Channel moment you thought it was going to be, I say, okay, that's exactly where you should be. And the key is every day to keep. Keep on keeping on. Try hard, one foot in front of the other, that happiness waits for you. But, yeah, you're in. You're in. You know, you're in Vietnam right now. A young man whose parent is sick and who just had a kid. There's just no getting around it. This is a stressful time in your life.

Yeah, it's. It's like grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, you know, or joy in the other. Because there is something. My son's almost 2 now, and he's. He's in a very interesting phase. I can, like, I can hear him upstairs right now running around, scratching the shit out of my floors and.

So child childproofing your house.

That's right. That's right. But I. I think one of the things that stood out is, you know, I. I didn't grow up in. In wealth. And, yeah, I struggled financially for a long time, but have managed to. To do fairly well for myself. My wife and I have managed to do very well for ourselves. And one of the things, admittedly, that I've grappled with is I think I've seen what you have been describing in the sense that many of the people that I know who were born into affluence and extreme wealth or even just a good amount of wealth, have struggled to find a depth of motivation to go out into the world and find some sort of path that's meaningful to them and to contribute. And so I'm actually just curious from a personal level how. How you handle both ends of the spectrum. You know, like, what would you say to people who.

Are struggling financially and trying to raise their kids in a family? And then what would you say to people that do have that affluence and kind of are aware of that factor of that, you know, that elephant in the room that maybe their kids won't want to work as hard? Like, what do you do with them? You know, because this is something that I've thought about 15, 20 years down the road. It's like, do, you know, do I cut my son off and just say, there's nothing there for you, and I'm going to spend it on a. On a Porsche and, you know, traveling the world for years at a time? Or, like, how. How do you think about handling some of those situations? And I know I'm. I'M basically asking you for like massive life advice right now. But you're like, I wish you didn't ask me that question. Like, this is, this is.

I'm writing a. I'm writing a book on, called the Algebra of Wealth and that is how to Strategies for establishing economic security. Because it's. Money is something we don't talk about a lot, especially as men. We're just supposed to be ballers and figure it out silently. And it's just in a capitalist society, it's just hugely important. There's no getting around it. And they say money isn't everything. You're right. Relationships are everything. But without a certain level of economic security, relationships are just strained. Kids who live in homes that are economically strained have greater standing, blood pressure, you're more likely to have a stroke, be obese, suffer from cardiac problems, be depressed, have violence in the home when you go below a certain level of economic security. And so I think it should be a kind of a family mission. And that is. All right, look, we're not. My mom was very straight with me. I remember when my two kids took. My two kids, my two best friends in seventh grade took off from Emerson Junior High School for a private school, Windward, because they started busing. And, and I'm going to be honest, the initial integration efforts in lausd for a 12 year old were shocking for us and for them. And the school was violent. It was strange. It was just a weird place. And so my two friends immediately got pulled out and sent to private school. And I went home and said, okay, I need to go to private school, I need to go to Windward. And my mom sat down with me and said, okay, Scott, it's time you knew, I'm a secretary, I make $18,000 a year. Let me take you through our budget. And it just like for the first time, I'm like, oh, money's a thing. And I don't have as much as my friends. And we lived in a nice neighborhood, we lived in a small condo in a nice neighborhood. And most of my friends were affluent and just kind of letting me in on the joke and showing me what costs, what helped me. And money came, not a little bit of a game, but a strategy I sort of understood at an early age. And I think bringing your family in on these efforts and also being very serious about it, this is how much we need every month budget. This is what everyone's expected to do to contribute. Your contribution is to be thoughtful about how much money you spend or whatever, you know, Turning off the lights, you know, whatever it might be, helping out, cleaning. We used to clean the house on Sunday, you know, we didn't have people cleaning our house. Every Sunday morning we got up and we cleaned the house. And I think involving your family and saying, okay, you know, economic, some level of economic security is something we're all engaged in because it's bad for our family when we're not. It's stressful for me, mom and dad. It's stressful for you. So here's our budget, here's how we get, get past that. This is each of our, each of our jobs. Because economic security isn't a function of how much you make. It's kind of more a function of how much you spend. And you can be very happy and economically secure if you just kind of live like a stoic and don't get into that lifestyle creep. And you know, all the stuff that Suze Orman talks about, credit card debt, not, you know, ignoring expenditure. So that's on the, you know, the, the side if you're struggling. And by the way, it doesn't always work. Some families just have a tough time their whole life. The other side, how to instill a level of grit with your kids. This is something we all struggle with who are blessed with some level of economic security. And what I can, I observe is all my friends talk a really big game about cutting their kids off after college. They all say the same thing, or most of them, they're going to get whatever they want, they can do whatever they want, I'll pay for their college. And then boom, it's over, you're on your own. Because that's important, right? And this is what happens. They graduate from college usually, and they're good kids. Most of them are good kids, right? And they're like, they can't live in New York. They get a job, a decent job making 50, $55,000 a year, which is decent for a recent college graduation. But they can't live near their parents, they can't live in anywhere near the same neighborhood. So they say, well, let's just help them out. Oh, they have a kid, we want to help them buy a house. So you give them some. What kid? What 28 year old? I bought a house at 28. What 28 year old can buy a house right now? I don't care what city you're in. So you help them a little bit more and slowly but surely you're kind of supporting your kids and it's easy to talk a big game but it's not like they're drug addicts that you're cutting them off. It's that they're good kids or this is what I see happening. And they don't end up dependent upon you, but they end up kind of needing your support and it's hard to break out. And it's a societal issue because for the first time in history, a 30 year old is first time in the history of the US a 30 year old isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at the age of 30. My generation has basically taken a lot of economic, has done well. If you're under the age of 30, you're 24% less wealthy than you were 40 years ago. People over the age of 70 are 72% more wealthy. So we have tilted the economic table towards old people and incumbents. And so it's just harder, it's economically more stressful for young people. Now what I try and do is I'm trying to instill some level of grit in my kids. I try to get them involved in sports, I try to push them physically. My dad gave me a gift and that was physical fitness. He got me doing burpees and sit ups and this Royal Navy workout when I was like 11. And that stuck with me. Pushing myself really hard in college sports gave me a sense of confidence. My first job at Morgan Stanley, I used to work, I had to, I had no choice. Work exceptionally hard and that gave me a certain level, I think, of grit. But that desire, that economic desire to want to take care of people and also, quite frankly, a lot of it for me was, to be blunt, was sex. I noticed my senior year, junior year, senior year in the fraternity at ucla. Like all of a sudden, women started being drawn to the guys whose parents had homes in Aspen, right? And people will find that a sexist statement. I'm like, it's observable. The guys who came from wealth seemed to get more than their fair share of mating opportunities. And I just connected the dots that, okay, instinctively women want someone who can provide them with the material and the lifestyle to take care of their kids. And I thought, well, I would really like to have a disproportionate opportunity set in terms of mating. And that involves economic security or I want an unfair advantage. So all of these things start adding up. Hopefully early grit you're hopefully born in. The best thing you can do for economic security is to be born the right person at the right time, in the right place. A lot of it is not your Fault. I would say much of your success and your failure isn't your fault, but trying to instill a level of grit in your kids, you know, you need to do it, but I don't have the answer. I do it through sports. I'm trying to get my 15 year old a summer job at a place like CVS where he has to put up with the public. I mean, he's used to being on the other side, saying, yes, I'll have you know. Do you have Sprite? He says to the flight attendant. And then playing with his flat seat or whatever, right. So I want him on the other side of that coin. I, I grew up in service jobs from the age of like 13. I was a box boy. That was really important for me to get a sense for what it's like. And you learn some wonderful things. Last point I'm blabbering on. A lot of people are really generous to me. I remember I was a box boy at Westward Ho and occasionally someone would give me 10 bucks, take their groceries out to the car and they give me 10 bucks and would make my day. It's like, oh my God, I can go to a movie in Westwood, into Swensons. If this happens twice. If, if, if lightning strikes and I can get a date, I can go on a date. I mean, it just, it just. And so I'd like to think that some of my recognition of how easy it is to make someone's day because people, I think people, Americans are generally generous people and anyways, athletics, you know, values, grit jobs. But if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears. Because it's something I think we all struggle with.

No, I mean, I think what you're laying out is really solid. And you know, first off, you're just such a good storyteller, I just gotta say it. I love listening to you tell stories about past or whatever it is. I think in many ways, I mean, when you were talking about, you know, economic hardship, like I remember being a kid and a teenager and every week we would collect the bottles in the house. And that was sort of like my responsibility. And it was my first take at making money, you know, and it was something that we did as a family and it was, and it was, it sort of reinforced to me that, you know, I sort of heard all the tropes, right? Money doesn't grow on trees and all that kind of stuff. But there was real world action that we were doing to try and just make 20 bucks, you know, or 30 bucks. And that, that always Stuck with me. And then I think the other thing was, you know, working.

Jobs, you know, I worked retail, I worked as a gas jockey, you know, pumping gas when I was like 14. And I grew up in northern Alberta, so I was pumping gas when it was like minus 30, minus 40, outside working construction when I was 18, 19 years old in the gravel pits. Right. And so I think all those things, I, I, I think what I'm going to try and do with my boy is give him, like you're saying, the taste of the, you know, the other side and make sure that he has these experiences where he's working in jobs that give him a sense of, of what's out there. You know, I think one of the best things that I did was go and work construction, gravel pit in northern Alberta at the age of 18 and 19 and be like, oh, shit, like, is this what I want to do with the rest of my life? And it really made me question, you know, a lot of things of the trajectory that I wanted my life to go. But anyway, I want to shift gears a little bit because I wanted to talk to you specifically about young men. And you've been talking quite a bit. Just first off, how did a professor of marketing at a business school become the sort of champion for the state of modern men in our culture? Because I've noticed that you've just sort of been everywhere and sort of championing some of these things. I'm curious about why that's happened or at least why you sort of picked up the torch to speak about some of these things.

I think you're being generous, and I would point people to people who really are experts on the topic, like Richard Reeves from the Carnegie. I'm sorry, he's at Brookings. Excuse me.

He just wrote a book called Boys and Men.

Yeah, and Boys and Men. And I just think it's, he just lays it out. He's kind of like everything I was feeling and seeing he kind of summarized in a wonderful book. And it's, I think of myself, who loves data, marinates in data. And I'm drawn to unconventional thinking. Like the data says something that is entirely different than the narrative and the discussion. What's really interesting, the discussion around failing young men has flipped in two years, and that is in two years ago, if you were in any way advocating for men, it was seen as a zero sum game, and that meant you were anti women. If you were talking about struggling young men and we need to be focused on helping young men, that was seen as misogynist. Just from the get go, it was like, boss, you've had a 400 year head start. How come your hair's on fire now when women have been essentially abused and had real disadvantages over the last several thousand years? And so the conversation that we're having now, even some feminists are recognizing, you know, who wants more emotionally and economically viable men. Women. And there's something going on here. And I think the data reveals the following. And that is no cohort in America has fallen further, faster in the last 40 years than young men. It used to be 40, 60 women to men in college. Now it's flipped at 60, 40. And it's even worse than that because men drop out at greater rates over the next five years. There's going to be two women who graduate from college for every one man. And you think, well, okay, fine, women are finally getting their due. And you could say, well, when it was disproportionate towards women, we were there for women. We had affirmative action for women, we had affirmative action for people of color. And by the way, that was the right thing to do. But now that it's flipped, you can walk through NYU and everywhere there are flyers, women in consulting, angels banking, all these female support groups, go girl. It's just everywhere. There's nothing for young men. And if you think about some of the knock on effects, the unintended consequences, I'm a progressive, but there's a general feeling in progressive politics that you don't want to acknowledge the difference between men and women. Because if you were to acknowledge a difference in the genders, you're somehow again discriminating against people who are non binary or transgender. And that's not true at all. But there is, and studies show this, there is a difference from a very young age between people born as males and people born as females. Our prefrontal cortex doesn't mature as early. So an 18 year old, two 18 year olds applying to college, the woman is effectively competing against a 16 year old woman when she competes against an 18 year old man. The executive function, the on, off, gas and brake is just not much more immature for men. And you've seen the stats. 4 times more likely to kill themselves. 3 times more likely to be addicted. 12 times more likely to be incarcerated women. More single women now own homes than men, which I think reflects a lot of progress. But the unintended consequence here, and there's all sorts of knock on offense, is that one, women, and we don't like to say this, are typically drawn to men who Are what I say taller than them. So physically taller. 50% of women say they're not attracted or wouldn't date someone shorter than them. It's probably more like 80% because I think in a survey women probably don't acknowledge it or take that number down because it sounds weird to say I wouldn't be interested in a man shorter than me. But also women mate socioeconomically horizontally and up men horizontally and down. And 3/4 of women say economic viability is very important selection of a mate. It's only one in four for men. And here's the issue. Every year women are getting taller and men are getting shorter. And so there's just fewer and fewer men who are viewed as economically viable, emotionally viable as mates. And so we're seeing mating rates going down. We're seeing what I call mating inequality. And that is technology tends to consolidate it a market. Amazon consolidated retail, social media, consolidated social, Google consolidated search or information gathering dating apps consolidate mating in the sense that women have a much finer filter and because they have access to millions of people online, they can implement those filters. And 80% of the women are interested in the same 10% of men. So if you're a reasonable looking guy, that's not even number one. But you went to MIT and you're working at Google and your Rolex accidentally slips into your profile profile picture, you're going to get a massive number of swipe rides. If you're kind of 50 to 90th percentile, you do okay. The bottom half of men are literally shut out of the market. I mean shut out zero swipes. And it creates this downward spiral of confirmation that the market, specifically women aren't interested in them. And the problem is now that you have more than 50% of young people and like 2/3 of men living at home, they become that low self esteem. And where it gets really ugly is they start blaming others, specifically they start blaming women, they become more prone to misogynistic content, they become more prone to nationalistic content blaming other people, whether it's immigrants for taking the jobs or women, whatever it might be. And they start buying into this notion that somehow it's women's fault and they need to take on this aggressive complexion around society and women. And I think that's really, really ugly. And the thing I hate about some of these quote unquote advocates for quote unquote and I use air quotes advocates for men on TikTok is the first. 80% is great. Take responsibility for your life, get really strong physically, have a Propensity towards action. And then it comes off the rails. They start talking about women as property and putting her in her place and crazy like metrics around what it means to be a man is like some sort of dominance or power over women. And it's just like, Jesus, how did this get so ugly so fast? And so I think whenever you start talking about an advocacy for men correctly progressives and women, their spidey sense goes off like, okay, is this just repackaged violence against women? So in the last two years the conversation has become much more productive. It's like, okay, let's acknowledge the data here. Men are really struggling. The reason I got interested in it is I relate to it.

I was kind of going nowhere as a young man. It was upsetting. I was lost. So I relate to young men. I have two young boys. I can see the difference between them and their female classmates. It's like my boy's 15, he's literally a dope. And the 15 year old, some of the 15 year old girls in his class, I'm like, that's going to be the junior senator from Pennsylvania. I mean there the girls are just shooting and there's, there's evidence showing that they're actually pulling away, that it's the, the delta is actually expanding. And so, and I have a lot of friends who have the, the narrative goes something like this. And the people who are hands down most receptive and supportive of my content, some young men like it, a lot of young men like it. Some say, you're accusing us of being incels and we don't like it to feminists. A lot of feminists correctly say, have a real problem with this and are very cautious of this content. I understand that hands down the people are most supportive of this content is mothers. And I get emails that go something like this. Two daughters, one son, one daughter at Wharton, one daughter in PR in Chicago and my son's at home in the basement vaping and playing video games. And there's just a bunch of biological societal factors. A lot of the kind of on ramp jobs to the middle class have been outsourced in manufacturing. Men are told societally that they, you know, quite frankly should just be in their place. They try and tone down some of their masculine features around being aggressive. Colleges, the education system is biased against men. Two people brought into the principal's office for the exact same infraction. On a behavior adjusted basis, the boy is twice as likely to be suspended. The, the behaviors and activities that colleges and schools reward. Discipline, staying in your seat are just girls have just a much easier time with so good for them. When we leveled the educational playing field and maybe even tilted it towards women, they have just blown by men. But now we need to look at, okay, if we want to have a society where people form the elemental foundations of a society and that's relationships. If we want men who are economically viable, if we want to have kids and not go into population decline, what can we do to level up men just as we have attempted to level up other groups that are struggling? But the fact that we're even having this dialogue without me waiting for, I'm not exaggerating, hundreds of tweets of hate and anger and accusations of misogyny now means the dialogue has expanded dramatically. And now I see my job as we have to come up with a different definition of masculinity than the definition that is coming from some of these quote unquote male advocates. Because there is a level of control and even like thinly veiled packaged violence and dominance and control over women that is just wrong. And I think we need a different, if you will, a different vision of masculinity. And I'll provide a definition and then stop talking. But I think masculinity, it's a man made construct or a person, it's a societal construct. Femininity and masculinity, we can have it be whatever we want it to be. But masculinity is, you know, a set of behaviors that are usually associated with people born as men. But I like to think that it's acquiring the skills and strengths such that you can protect for and advocate for others. That means early on you got to work on yourself, you got to be strong, you got to get certification, you got to be mentally fit, you got to work really hard and try and establish skills such that you can get economic security, you can be emotionally and mentally strong. And the whole point, the whole shooting match is such that you can protect others, you can provide for your family, you can provide for yourself. And then at some point in your life, you can start advocating for and protecting others. That is true masculinity. That's what people in the military, that's what cops do, that's what firemen do. That's what. And by the way, it's not just the domain of men. A lot of women demonstrate wonderful masculine attributes. It's getting up at fucking six in the morning and going to work and doing shitty work such that you can protect your family economically. You know, there's a lot it's being physically strong, being mentally strong. But for God's sakes, it's never using your masculinity to in any way oppress people or to be some sort of predator for women, physically or sexually, or not have the same level of respect and admiration for women. So I think we need some traditionally, you know, masculine figures to start advocating a new form of masculine. And. And also to say that it's okay to be masculine. It's okay to want to have sex. It's okay to take risks. It's okay to be sexually aggressive. It's okay to go up to a woman who. A strange woman who you're attracted to and try and initiate a conversation. And if you don't know the difference between being aggressive and harassing someone, you got bigger problems. That's okay. That's okay. It's okay to ask someone out, even if the. I mean, the thing that came off the rails for me was that Gillette ad. And Richard Reeves talks about this a few years ago in the midst of the MeToo movement, where a guy sees a hot woman and he jumps up to go talk to her, and then his friend kind of gets away and says, hey, bro, that's not cool. Don't do that. It's like, that's where we are. We're not supposed to initiate contact with strange women. And I have found that a lot of women would actually appreciate respectful overtures of interest from men. And if they're not interested, you'll figure it out very fast. And guess what? You're both going to be fine. It is not a traumatizing event. And so I think there are male behaviors that we have to say to men, this is okay. This is okay. It's okay to embrace your masculinity. But we have a situation where professionally, biologically, societally, educationally, men are really struggling. And the last fact, and I promise I will stop here, is that Pew did a study that one in three men under the age of 30 haven't had sex in the last year. And people hear the word sex and their brain fires. I think of sex as a key step to an intimate relationship, and relationships are the basis of happiness in a productive society. And a huge cohort of men are not establishing the skills to have relationships. And it confirms this insecurity they have, and they just go down a rabbit hole. And by the age, by the time they're 30, they haven't developed skills. Young men need guardrails. They need a girlfriend, a friend, a boss, parents to tell them no you got to put on a clean shirt, you know, My first girlfriend was like, okay, if you want to get high every night, you're not going to have sex with me. I'm not interested in a guy who has. Who smokes pot every night. Right? My mom told me in implicit, explicit ways, you've got to get your shit together because you're, you know, you got to take care of me. You know, My friends were like, okay, boss. You need young men. I had my boss at work at Morgan Stanley used to take me to a conference room after meeting and go, you can't say that shit. Shut the fuck up. You don't have to talk. If you don't have anything productive to say, don't say anything. I needed that. Young men need that. And so many young men are detaching from so many relationships. They have no guardrails. God, that was a rant.

No, that was great, man. I mean, I was trying to track. I was like, oh, my God. There's so many pieces that I want to touch on and talk about, but, you know, I think that's true. I was kind of getting a chuckle because you're talking about these guardrails. And I remember when my wife and I first met and first started dating several years ago, I was living in an apartment that was like your classic bachelor pad, where. And it's not for a lack of money. I was sleeping on an air mattress, and all of my books were stacked up beside my couch that was acting as my coffee table, you know, and all of my socks had holes in them, which some of them still do. But, you know, when we started dating, she was like, what is going on? You know, And I was living in Vancouver. She was living in Manhattan. Here's this very successful, you know, one of the top marriage and family therapists in. In Manhattan dating this guy. And she shows up into my apartment. She looks around and she's like, what is going on in here? And I was like, I just haven't prioritized it. And she's like, well, I don't know if I necessarily want to come back here unless you have, like, a fucking bookshelf, you know, and a real mattress on. On a. On a bed frame. And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, I guess I should probably do that. So I think it's those types of things that, you know, whether it's from other women, other men, that I think are very important. And to your point about some of this rise of. I don't know what we want to call it, you know, misogynistic masculinity or whatever. I remember when I first started man talks, there was a lot of pushback, you know, and I was just bringing men together to have conversations. The whole premise was that were going to share their defining moments as if they were going to die the next day, to sort of impart some of their life's wisdom or lessons onto other men. And it was so interesting to see some of the pushback that I got initially because I started this probably eight or nine years ago and now today it's a very different thing. Like you're saying, I have mothers constantly DMing me, sending me emails, thank you so much for what you do, all that kind of stuff. And that conversation has radically changed. Or wives sort of saying, I'm going to send my husband your way, or he's checking out your content, or who else should he be listening to. So I think it's changing quite a bit. But I have noticed this rise in this very rigid, one dimensional version of masculinity that seems to be in opposition to the narrative that has emerged over the last decade or two. And I think somebody asked me about this the other day and I said, I think what we as men often look for are frameworks. We love frameworks to operate in the world through, to be able to see the world through a very specific framework. And I think that some of those movements give men who don't have a lot of masculine or male energy in their life, don't have a lot of order or frameworks or structure in their life. It gives them a very clear way to operate. It's like, here's what a man is, here's what a woman is, here's what it means to be masculine, here's what it means to be feminine. And if you just don't ever step outside of those confines, then you're good. And so I think that it creates this illusion of safety and security that is oftentimes very crippling and can be abusive and can be very detrimental. And so. And again, that's not me advocating for it or supporting it in any way. I've just always tried to figure out, like, why are those frameworks, like, why are people like Andrew Tate so appealing to some men? Because some guys really just love him and pedestal him. And so I'm curious to get your take on, why do you feel like some of those structures, whether it's the red pill movement or the black pill movement or the Andrew Tates of the world, what is so appealing from your perspective? To young men, about those guys, it.

Kind of all comes down to, in my view, if you were trying to find ground zero, it goes back to what I said before, and that is the basis of evolution. The fundamental compact with any society is that if I work hard and play by the rules, my kids will do better than me. And for the first time in our nation's history, that compact has been broken. And that is your son or your daughter, mostly your sons are not doing as well as dad was at that age. And that creates tremendous shame and rage. That is a breakdown in a universal celestial compact we have. And in America.

Up Until like the 50s and 60s, 92% of. Of people born were going to do better than their parents. And now it's 49. And so the majority. And then for men, I think it's more like 40. So majority of men. And then because of this kind of nimbus rejectionist culture, different talk show that makes housing more expensive, you have a lot of men at home, they're not doing as well as their parents were at that age. And there's just this feeling of shame and rage. And then, by the way, try and get a date. It's not a good rap. Oh, I live at home. That's not a good rep. So you get confirmation from dating apps, and you have constant reminders from your roommates, I. E. Mom and dad, that you're failing. And so what do you do? Do you go into a hole and say, it's my fault and turn on yourself? And some do that, but a lot say, I want answers. They're very prone. If you look at the darkest moments in history, they all have one thing in common. They have an economic cohort of young men who are failing economically and want answers. And the easiest answer is, it's not your fault. It's not your fault.

You'Re being unfairly persecuted because of this group that's taking your jobs or this group that's coordinating against you, or women, whatever it might be, or the WOKE movement, whatever it is, it's not your fault. So they're very open that in addition to, I think the content you're talking about, a lot of it's really good. A lot of it's very productive. I see some videos from Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and by the way, I shouldn't conflate the two, because I think Jordan actually has a healthier set of messages and I think it calls on more science. But the majority of Andrew Tate's videos, I would say, are actually pretty productive. It leads to a dark, ugly place and a certain mentality around, I own women and if I'm a real man, I'm going to put a woman in her place. And she's not ever, she doesn't ever go out without me. I mean, all this bullshit, right? And anyways, so that men are looking for answers and they're very prone, they're very prone to nationalistic content. Once a man comes off the rails economically and emotionally and doesn't have a viable partner to kind of keep him in check, weird things, he's more likely not to believe in climate change. He's a lot more likely to have a gun. He's just, he becomes a shitty citizen. And if you look at the most violent, unstable societies in the world, they all have the same thing in common. They have a disproportionate number of young, broke and alone men. And men become violent. I mean, think about mass shooters in the U.S. we know who they are before we know who they are. They're young men who have been attached to school, haven't attached to relationships, haven't attached to work. And that's not to say that every young man who's an introvert is a danger. I'm not saying that. But there's, I just don't think you can, you can ignore the most, the most violent, dangerous societies in the world just have too many of this, this, this one individual. And also we have seen population rate decline, we're seeing few less household formation. So I think when you're a guy and you feel this rage and this shame, you're looking for excuses that it isn't your fault and you're looking for someone who offers you the answer and gives you a channel for your rage and says it's not your fault. Do these things, it's this person's fault. And you become very susceptible. I mean, this is Trump. Trump came into a group of people who had been overlooked and who were like, I've played by the rules, I've worked my ass off and my life just isn't very good. And this is a guy comes in, this is not your fault. It's immigrants coming over the border and taking your jobs. All this stuff that's blame game that happens. And I think men are especially susceptible to that message. So I think it happens over and over again in history. People don't want to look inward, they don't want to focus on self improvement. They want to find someone who convinces them, says, this is how you get out and this is a strategy. And I Don't have a framework. What I tell, I coach a lot of young men. The moment you say, I'm up for coaching young men, your friends come out of the woodwork and saying, would you talk to our 19 year old son living at home? I mean, they are everywhere, literally everywhere. And I don't have a framework, but I start with a very simple, very simple practice. I say, give me your phone, unlock it, I'm not going to judge you. And I look at their screen time and I'm like, we're going to find 4 to 12 hours in your phone and we're going to reallocate it, we're going to write it down, we're going to look at Twitter, we're going to look at Coinbase, we're going to look at Robinhood, we're going to look at video games, we're looking to look at pornography. And we're gonna. And you have no, we're on a TikTok. You have no trouble finding four, eight, 16 hours a week. Okay, first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna reallocate it into fitness. You're gonna spend three to five hours a week and I want you to get really strong. And there's apps now that are free, certain, certain minimum level of nutrition. When you're young, it's like you can get away with bad nutrition. It's more about moving and exercise. But I tell young men you should be able to walk in any room and know that if shit got real, you could kill and eat everybody or outrun them. Like, you either need to be really strong or really fast and really fit. And you can do that at the age, if you're a 19 year old. You know, I don't know about you, but I look back on when I was 19, I can't get over how crazy strong and fit I was. I mean, it's a marvel. It's a marvel. And to not embrace that, to not really enjoy it and get into it, you're going to be, that's great for mental health. It's great. You feel more attractive, you feel more kind. You're less likely to get into a bar fight. If you're big and strong, you're the guy that has the confidence to de escalate the situation. You can step in and tell people acting like idiots to just calm down. So the first is fitness. The second is we're going to start making money. I don't care if it's flipping on a Dasher app or Uber or getting a job at A restaurant, you are going to start the business. The best way to get rich is to start by making a little bit of money because you get a taste for the flesh of money. And then the third thing we're going to do is we're going to join groups and organizations that give us random contact with strangers, softball league, junior college class, church, nonprofit, spending time at a food anything, and try and find random contact and exposure to a bunch of strangers who are your age in the pursuit of something bigger than you. Meet people, meet people, make friends, meet people and ask them out to coffee that you think you might be attracted to. Whatever it is, whatever it is, get around strangers and try and do it every day. So it's fitness, it's starting to make a little bit of money, and it's getting in the company of strangers. And there's time. Give me your phone. I'll find the time. Especially young men, they waste so much goddamn time. And then all I do the next week is I say, okay, I added up all this time, and I got 12 to 14 hours across these eight apps. Let's add it up again. Okay, you're doff. Three and a half hours. What did you do with that three and a half hours? And just create a quick journal. I worked out, I spent a little bit more time. I got a job, whatever it might be. I'm like, that's it. It doesn't have to be complicated. I don't. There's some kids who I can tell are really struggling, and I think that they should engage, reach out and do online therapy. It's pretty inexpensive now, and I think a lot of these kids. I'm not a trained adolescent psychologist, but sometimes I just feel like something going on here. This kid's really struggling. And I think that there's nothing wrong with reaching out to a professional. And parents are sort of loath to do that sometimes because they're worried it. They're just worried that they want to ignore it. They want to sweep it under the rug. And I'll say to parents, I'm like, I can't diagnose someone. I just get a weird feeling this kid's really struggling, and I think it would make some sense to reach out anyway. I don't have a framework. I'm just like, okay, fitness. Get a taste for flesh, taste for money, and be in the company of strangers every day.

That's great, man. That's great. I 100% have seen that those three things radically changed my own life. You know, I think I've Always loved strength and working out. And that's something that I'm very grateful for. Like, at a very young age, I found I played hockey as a kid. And one of my hockey coaches when I was like 13 or 14, said I was getting pretty tall pretty quickly. And he said, I think that you should probably start working out. And so I started checking it out. And then in high school, I was working out, you know, four or five days a week. And it just changed everything. And then I loved it. And it's, you know, still to this day, I'm 39 this year. And my mission, you know, is to be in the best shape of my life by 40. And I mean, I've started pushing more weight than ever before, doing mma, those types of things. And then when I started to actually make decent money in my early 30s, it like lit me up, you know. Cause I had been broke for so goddamn long.

And when I.

And I just, you know, I hadn't really prioritize that. And when I did, there was something about it where I was like, oh, this is a very interesting game. It's not this horrendous thing. And I finally started to enjoying, finally started to enjoy playing that game, learning about stocks, even just buying a couple shares here and there, 100% getting into it. And I was like, oh, this is a lot of fun.

Yeah, sort of gamify. And so I love that advice. I think, you know, we, we unfortunately have to wrap up. I could talk to you all day and find value and I think everything that we would dig into. But I want to wrap up with just a quick insight from you about pornography and, you know, the number of men that I've seen that have come to work with me. I think some of the research shows that it's like, you know, on average between 9 and 12 year olds, boys are going to find porn. I'm gonna start watching it. And I'm curious how you talk about pornography in terms of how it relates to young men. You know, is there a way that you talk about it to your kids, to your boys? I know for me, like, I, I found porn at a really young age at like 13, 14 years old. And then this is back in the day of, you know, dial up and having it load line by line. But I really had a problem in my late teens and early 20s, you know, watching hours and hours of porn a week. And I see a lot of men, especially young men, reaching out to me now who are really struggling with porn. Right. It's getting in the way of their relationships. So how do you, how do you talk about porn? What would you say to young men about pornography and the, the role that it can play? I know I'm sort of asking a big question in a short amount of time, but I'm curious to get your thoughts.

Well, I'm starting to think about this because I have a 15 year old son and I think it's okay to say to young men in, in boys going through puberty, it's okay to be horny, it's okay to masturbate, we all do it. And what we have with pornography is the largest unsupervised experiment on young men in history. Because the reality is no professor wants to be the porn professor. So there's a total dearth of peer reviewed research who wants to be the porn professor. So people are interested in all kinds of research around social media, mobile impacts on kids, but no one wants to really do a lot of research around porn porn. And also it's difficult to get honest self reporting. What I tell young men is like, look, I think being horny, wanting to engage in porn is entirely normal. And I would argue if you haven't had a period in your life where you're watching too much porn, that's probably more abnormal. That's okay, it's okay, right? The question is, how do you modulate it in an era of superabundance where sexual titillation is available everywhere on demand, whatever you want, you go down to a rabbit hole and find exactly what you want. And what I tell men is, I'm not going to tell you young men. And again, it goes back to the phone. I'm not going to tell you not to be on you porn, but I'm going to tell you to try and modulate and limit it. Because here's the danger of porn in my view. One, it creates unreasonable expectations around what it means to be in a relationship with a woman and what you should expect from a woman. And two, I think even worse, it flattens your mojo. And that is why do I go through the pain? When I was at ucla, I'm convinced I missed a lot of classes. I would have missed more had I not thought there was a reasonable chance I might meet a woman and eventually have sex with her by going on campus. And if I'd had porn, it would have reduced my mojo to just ever leave the house. Because what you don't want is to be engaged in so much porn where the difficulty and the effort to get out, to put on a clean shirt to engage in the really uncomfortable scenario of initiating contact with a straight woman, of enduring rejection, of figuring out a way to ask a woman out, of figuring out a way to establish a dialogue with a woman on a date, to again endure more rejection, to be thoughtful and then quite frankly, make your own bad porn. Without that motivation, you never get to a point of or you're less likely to get to a point of establishing a meaningful relationship. And so, yeah, porn, I get it. It's like eating chocolate or drinking or smoking pot. I'm not gonna tell anyone to abstain. I engage in all of those things, but I try and modulate them because what you don't want is a young man who loses his mojo to get out there. I am so hungry for a relationship. I am so hungry for sex. I'm gonna walk up to strange women or I'm gonna talk to, I'm gonna try and initiate contact, or I've met this really nice woman in my English class and I'm going to try and get coffee with her such that I can get to a date with her, such that at some point I might have my own sex. You do not want to do anything. And society is telling you that that urge somehow makes you guilty of something. No, it doesn't. That's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. And as long as you're respectful, there's nothing wrong with that at all. I think more women would actually like more men to respectfully initiate contact. So the thing about porn, I don't know the answers around it. There hasn't been a lot of peer reviewed research. Richard Reeves would argue that it's a small number of people consuming a disproportionate amount of porn. Every young man I know is very engaged in porn. And I'm like, it's like anything else. I'm not going to tell you to stop smoking pot, but smoke only smoke on weekends so you don't have work the next day, Right. I'm not going to tell you to not watch Netflix, but Jesus Christ, how much Netflix are you watching? I'm not going to tell you not to play video games and porn. You know, modulate, modulate and don't let it get in the way of you getting out and making your own bad porn.

Yeah, well, I think that's very sage advice. And as a classic over consumer of almost everything, I had to modulate down to net zero on almost all those things to have some real relationship to them. Professor Galloway, I really appreciate having you here. This is a Great conversation. When does your next book come out on wealth? I'd love to have you back on to dig into that.

It's weird. It's supposed to be pencils down in March, but it takes like, nine months to print. It's weird. We can produce a Tesla in six weeks, but we can't seem to manufacture a book in nine months. So I think it's the end of year or Q1 next year. But thank you for the generous offer, and I'll absolutely hate you up for it.

Yeah, no, I. I get it. I just. My. My book just came out on the 31st of January, and it was like a 2.

What's your book, Connor?

It's called Menswork.

Oh, nice.

So I share some of my personal experience, and then I'll send you a copy. I'll send you.

How's it doing?

Really, really, really well. Yeah, I was number one on gender studies. Number one in men's gender studies. I'm up there with. Richard's actually coming on the show in a couple weeks, so I have a. Oh, so you're.

You're killing it. That's great. I should be asking you questions.

It's going. It's going well. I'm not. I'm not steeped in the research like Mr. Reeves is, but. Yeah. Well, listen, Professor Galloway, this is awesome. I'll have the links for everybody in the show notes. For everybody that's out there listening, Please man it forward. Share this conversation. This might be a good one to. To just, you know, sit and discuss with. With a few friends, have some discourse about what we talked about in this episode, and we'll have all the links to Professor Galloway's podcast and books and website in the show notes. But Professor Galloway, anywhere that you would like them to go, where they can just get everything that you put out.

It's a generous question. So my podcast, the Prof. G Podcast, Pivot Podcast. And then at Prof. Galloway, you can sign up for my weekly newsletter, no Mercy, no Malice. It talks about mostly economics, but occasionally I talk about relationships.

Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, thanks, everybody, for tuning in. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.

Thanks, Connor.