A Generation Poorer Than Their Parents! - Why Men Are Lost, Lazy, Broke & Single | Scott Galloway

Men have fallen behind dramatically. Less men are dating, having sex, or even just making as much money as their parents did. Social media, dating apps, blatant theft of financial opportunity, and a social shift to shaming men for being ambitious and aggressive have created an environment where guys feel lost, hopeless, and lonely. Here to talk about it is Professor Scott Galloway. For the first time in US history, a man 30 years old who's largely judged by his financial success is not doing as well as his parents. What went wrong? So, there's a variety of uh things that have created this these atmospherics. So, um some of them societal, some of them biological, some of them economic. We have men mature later. Their prefrontal cortex is literally less developed. And it's getting worse for some reason. Girls are going through puberty sooner, men or boys later. In addition, with uh the second most single parent households of any nation in the world with the exception of Sweden, what you have is this increasingly prevalent single point of failure for when men come off the tracks, and that is they lose a male role model. So, what's interesting is if you look at a single parent household, and it's usually about 88% of the time it's a mother taking care of children. Uh the girls have similar outcomes, similar college attendance, go on to similar incomes, similar levels of depression. Boys become much more likely to be incarcerated, much less likely to go to college, much more likely to be depressed. It ends up that while boys are physically stronger, girls are emotionally and mentally much stronger. So, you have uh some societal factors that are producing a lot of emotionally weak men. I think you have an education system that is biased against boys. In boys only will have us twice as many recesses as co-ed schools. If you think about the ideal student, organize, pleaser, sit still, do your homework, only speak when spoken to, you're basically describing the attributes that come easier to people born as women. We're now We used to be We used to be 60/40 male to female in colleges 40 years ago. Now we're 60/40, and it's probably going to be closer to two to one women two to one women for every male that graduates from college cuz men drop out at a greater rate. It used to be a third of jobs required a college degree. Now it's two-thirds. So, you end up with this kind of perfect storm where we're producing a tremendous number of economically and emotionally unviable um men. And then something that also impacts women is our economic policies over the last 40 years, in my view, have been just an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old. So, the two biggest tax deductions in America are mortgage interest rate tax deduction and capital gains. Who owns stocks and homes? Uh people my age. Who rents and makes their money from sweat or current income? Young people. So, 40 years ago, 19% of GDP was controlled by people under the age of 40 in terms of their wealth. That's been cut in half to 9%. The average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. Cost of living adjustment for social security last year increased 9 %. The child tax credit, uh which eliminated 40% of child poverty, which is remarkable, somehow manages to get stripped out of the infrastructure bill because who needs Who needs that money? Kids who don't vote and young people. So, I think there's been a perfect storm of biological, societal, and economic transfers. And then we didn't talk talk societal. I think that men have been getting mixed messages. I think we've done a great job lifting women up, um focusing and trying to address some of the injustices and biases that women have had to endure for a long time. And I wouldn't say we've overcorrected, but I think that people uh don't have a sympathetic ear or society doesn't have a sympathetic ear uh to young men. When we talk about young women or non-whites and the the substantial challenges they still face, we talk about resources and the requirement or the need for government intervention and social programs. When we talk about young men failing, you start using words like they need to level up or if they were only more in touch with their emotions or we use words like accountability. So, there's a lack of empathy for young men. And then into that void slipped in some very um negative voices, I think, that were sort of thinly veiled mis- thinly veiled misogyny. So, now um the conversation hasn't been that productive the last few years. And I would argue it's getting much more productive. That people are actually that the data is just so overwhelming. Four times as likely to be addicted, uh three times as likely to kill themselves, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. I mean, the numbers just can't be ignored. And now we're having, I think, a much more productive conversation around potential solutions for how we level up young men as a means of leveling up an entire younger generation who my in my opinion, for the first time America is consciously leaving behind. What's changed in the dialogue? Cuz I agree with you, it's gotten a lot better. What's now included in the dialogue that was being left out before that's made it more productive? Well, there was a gag reflex and that was uh because people felt what was going on and they saw what was going on. And uh we weren't addressing it because people were uh worried about There was a general view that if you were pro-man, that it was a zero-sum game. And that that meant automatically you were anti-women. And you had some voices enter the space that were just basically telling you it's not your fault. You need to treat women like property. You need to go get a supercar and trade crypto and kind of be the bro-iest bro in bro-ville, which sort of inadvertently meant not treating women especially well and not embracing education, not embracing empathy, not embracing some of the key components of what it means to be successful. And the conversation, I would say uh when I started talking about this stuff probably four or five years ago, my inbox was littered with kind of accusations that you're a misogynist. And what I think something we have to embrace is that empathy is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights did not hurt white people. It helped them. Gay marriage did not hurt heteronormative marriage. Uh it helped it. And being empathetic towards the plight and the statistics around failing young men does not draw from the very real concerns and empathy and the progress that young women have made. And I would argue that there are two groups that would like to see more emotionally and economically viable young men. The first is women. I mean, how many times have you heard, I know all these great women and they can't find a date. And two, for my work, the people by far I get the most support from is one cohort and that's mothers. And it goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters, one son. One daughter's a PA and the other's in PR in Chicago. And my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. So, mothers have really kind of stepped into this void and said, look, I see it firsthand. There is a difference here. And on the far left the far right, I think it's somewhat weaponized masculinity as a means of saying that that efforts to elevate women or non-whites has gone too far, which I would argue is not true. And the far left doesn't want to even talk about it cuz their fear is that if you start talking about even gender, you're somehow attacking the 5 or 10% that are non-binary. And that's not true. We can all have empathy for each other. We can all celebrate that incredible progress that women have made over the last 40 years. It's a wonderful thing and we shouldn't do anything to get in the way of that, but there's a very unusual dynamic taking place and that is the metaphor from Chris Williamson and another podcaster who's done a lot of great work on this is he calls it the high heels effect. And that is metaphorically every year women get taller, more educated, more economically viable. There are more single women in the United States now than own homes than single men. And meanwhile men are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And 50% of women state they won't date a guy shorter than them. I actually think it's much greater than that. It's just an embarrassing thing to say. So, what you have is a group of women who are getting taller and taller and taller and men are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So, there are fewer, kind of, in the eyes of women, viable mates. This reduces household formation. It reduces birth rates and that is uh starts an inextricable downward spiral in terms of an economy that both Japan and Italy and soon Russia and China are facing. If you don't have young people in household formation, there used to be 3.1 kids in household 60 years ago. Now there's 1.9. So, it has economic impact and also I think it has a lot of impact just on general happiness. The majority of I'm not saying you can't be happy living your life as a single person. I was single for most of my adult life. I was very happy. But I do think the most rewarding things in life come from a function of deep and meaningful relationships and often times that comes from a relationship with a romantic partner that you decide to have kids with. And I think there's a lot of young men and women who feel like they don't really have the same uh environment to form that sort of relationship. They don't It's economically more challenging for them. Um and there's a variety of factors including other things we can talk about online dating that I think make it even even more difficult. Yeah, I think to really tease apart the issue, we will certainly get into that stuff. For me looking at it, it is men and women exist in a dance. And people are not thinking from first principles. So, when you start thinking about, okay, men and women have co-evolved together, they have a role where they each are both what I call the shout and the echo. So, you are what you do, the shout, and you are the echo, what comes back to you. So, I've heard you say this and this is certainly true for myself. Uh so much of my ambition was simply to get laid. Uh and then in the beginning, that certainly got me moving. And then when I got married and was doing well in that department, I felt I had uh an obligation to my wife to become the kind of man that could continue to provide and protect. And so, I ended up developing a pretty I I was not raised with what I'll call a super traditional outlook on what masculinity was. But, I ended up finding that as a way to um provide for her in the way that I had promised her that I would. And that that just sort of led me to uh becoming more aggressive, becoming more stoic, uh acquiring skills as rapidly as I could, understanding what um what part of the relationship I was going to play. When we got married, it was very traditional. So, my wife grew up a traditional Greek girl. She has since become an entrepreneur in her own right and has just taken a totally different path. But, when we got married, she was a housewife for almost a decade. Uh I went out and earned an income. And I watched a really interesting dynamic form between the two of us where in the beginning, she did not plan to interface with the world directly. So, it was through me that she was going to get things done. And so, she didn't think I was asking for enough or pushing hard enough or working hard enough, whatever. She would encourage me with her feminine wiles to get me to behave in ways that she liked and look she was maybe not even consciously aware of all of it and we've always been high-level communicators that discussed all of this but if she thought I needed to put in more energy at work she would make that known if she thought I should ask for a raise she would make that known so on and so forth. And so that dynamic of behind every powerful man is a strong woman I actually watched that play out in the beginning until she decided she was going to have her own voice and step forward but that beginning dynamic between the two of us showed me a lot of the historical dance between men and women where a woman was largely going to be focused on raising children just biologically obviously that's a a role they are optimized for and so now when we live in a world where she can choose either path she can go in and become an entrepreneur as my wife has chosen to do or she can stay at home and and the they really function more as a unit and that is what I feel is breaking down is right now everyone is sort of running the race on their own and to your point you now get women are being far more successful at what could be deemed a traditionally masculine game and now men are beginning to lose out at the traditionally masculine game. Um what do you think about that? There's a lot there so I think with the what you described in terms of your role and what you're trying to bring to your relationship I think that's a pretty decent subtext or definition of masculinity in a very crude legs of the stool protector provider procreator. And a romantic the prospect of a romantic or a sexual relationship is exceptionally motivating for a young man. That's why a lot of young men shower it's why they actually have a plan it's why they go to work it's why they stop getting high and drinking so much during the week because often times their partner their romantic or sexual partner will say, "Unless you get your [ __ ] together, I am leaving." And also you begin these instincts begin to kick in where you want to take care of this person. You want to build a life together and you want to be a great provider. You want to be a great protector. And by the way, that attribute of masculinity is not sequestered just to people born as men. A lot of women demonstrate wonderful forms of masculinity. I like to think I demonstrate a lot of the attributes normally associated with femininity. But to have an adult conversation around this, we have to have an adult conversation and that is somewhere between 5 and 10% of people identify as um um as homosexual. That means about 90% identify as either heterosexual or non-binary. So it's okay to talk about the majority of people are going to be born with a certain predilection or a a certain bias or more easily embrace certain attributes than people born as the other gender. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And what I'm telling or what I'm trying to argue for and I'm trying to write a book on masculinity is that men need to lean into a modern form of masculinity and there's nothing wrong with that. You brought up the motivations for you being a good provider. My success is a function of a few things. One, the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regents of the University of California. I went to school where you live at UCLA and Berkeley where my total tuition for 7 years of school undergrad and grad was $7,000 total tuition. And more importantly than that, the admissions rate at UCLA when I applied was 76%. This year it'll be 9%. And I in exchange for their generosity, after spending 5 years smoking dope and watching Planet of the Apes, I got a 2.27 GPA from UCLA. And what happened with that 2.27 GPA? Berkeley let me into graduate school. Imagine that. Berkeley, one of the finest institutions in the world, let me in with a 2.27 GPA. And then I got my [ __ ] together, and I went on to do to do well by most most metrics. And the real motivation uh the real motivating factors were women. First and foremost, my mom got very sick. You know, it was just me and her. I was raised by a single mother who lived and died a secretary. And we didn't have money, and we were underinsured. And if you want to see the harsh side of America, there's a lot of wonderful things about America. I think America becomes more like itself every day. And that is, if you have money, it's a loving and gentle place. If you don't have money, I think it's a rapacious violent place. And it I saw that up close when my mom got very aggressive cancer, and we were underinsured. And I came home from grad school to take care of my mom, and I couldn't take care of her. We didn't have any money. I couldn't afford a nurse. I didn't know where to I couldn't take her back to the hospital cuz we were uninsured, and the place they wanted to send her was so vile, I just couldn't do it. And it was incredibly emasculating. And I thought, you know, here I am, I'm the man, you know, a lot of my life took great care of me, and I can't take care of her. And it was humiliating. And I decided then and there I you can't decide to be rich. There's a certain X factor to it. But I remember thinking, I'm going to try very very hard. I'm going to get my [ __ ] together, and I'm going to throw everything at this professionally because I want to take care of my mother. And then the second thing is much less noble, or a little bit more crass, but I noted it I noticed it a very young age, that guys who weren't that interesting had a much broader set of selections of mates if they had a lot of money. And I was very mating opportunities. And I realized that if I wanted to add two points you know, everybody's on a scale, right? A character looks whatever it is success scale of one to 10 and men and women are judged kind of with different inputs. But when you're a wealthy guy, you get to add two or three points to your selection set. And so I thought one I'd really like to take care of the person who's important to me, my mother. And two, I would like to have a broad selection set of mates. It was very motivating for me. Uh but those are what you have especially with men. When men don't establish a romantic relationship and now only 1/3 of men under the age of 30 have a girlfriend, 2/3 of women under the age of 30 have a boyfriend because they are dating older. Because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. So when you have a whole cohort of young men who are not going to college, not having the same economic opportunities and quite frankly have no or little prospects for a romantic relationship, you generate the most dangerous person in the world. And that is a lonely broke um young man. That is any society that's violent, any society that has revolutions, any society that engages in religious extremist behavior has a dis- disproportion number of this cohort and we are producing way too many of them in the United States and it is You say, "Well, okay, your hair's on fire now, but what about women?" Women are much better at finding places to give and receive love even without the prospect of a romantic relationship. I'm not saying they're not lonely. I'm not saying their loneliness is any any less tragic. But women don't pick up AR-15s when they're lonely. Women don't get as involved in conspiracy theories as men. Women have a much broader friend network without that they invest in and they maintain and closer familiar bonds when they don't have a romantic relationship. It's generally your wife reminding you to call your mother. It's generally your wife saying, "Oh, we should really get together with your friends." Or they're much better at maintaining There's this great line in the movie Magnolia. I forget his name. He's He's He He says He's this kind of pathetic guy and he says, "I have so much love to give, but I don't know where to put it." And women are much better at figuring that out. They're much better at figuring out places to put and receive love without the prospect of romantic relationship. Young men without that prospect and that motivation generally become shitty citizens. They're less They're less likely to go to college. They're less They're more prone to conspiracy theory. They're much more likely to believe some carnival barker telling them that it's women's or non-whites or immigrants' fault. They become In some, they become shitty citizens. And so, unless we can massively invest in the younger generation to give them more opportunities, and I don't think we want to go to male affirmative action. I just think it'd be too politicized. Unless we make the requisite investments, and we can do this. We've done it before. To have a dramatic step change upgrade in the economic viability of all young people, including young men, we're not going to have as much household formation, and we're going to have too many lonely young people, especially too many lonely young men. The big tech community has made trillions of dollars trying to convince young people that they can have a low-risk, low-entry, reasonable facsimile of life via algorithms and screens. Don't put in the hard work and email people on LinkedIn and network and get certification to have a real job. Just trade stocks on Robinhood or buy Solana on Coinbase. Oh, you Do you really need friends? Well, you have friends on Discord and Reddit. Oh, it's humiliating to go to go to a bar and work out and figure out the skills and the rejection and the humiliation of trying to find a romantic or a sexual partner? Well, you got YouPorn, and now you have an AI girlfriend and soon you're going to have a sex doll. So, you have a group of people, young people, especially young men, who are exiting and sequestering from what is the most rewarding thing in life and that is deep meaningful friendships, professional relationships, and romantic relationships. The reason why romantic comedies are 2 hours not 15 minutes is that the real victory in life, the really rewarding things in life, the reason we live life, all of those things have one thing in common, they're really hard. It is really hard to establish relationships and mentorships and a reputation as a good co-worker and manager at work. It is really hard to establish a great network of friends and invest and feel that collegiality and that joy and it is really hard as a young man to get your [ __ ] together and be attractive enough that you can you have the confidence to endure rejection. The only thing I can guarantee anyone who who wants to succeed professionally and romantically is rejection. That's it. That's the only thing I can guarantee you. And unless you develop the skills to endure that and then become that person that people want to be with, I worry we have this this group of kids or young men who have literally just fallen off the map. They don't develop professional or social skills and then they get into their mid or their late 20s, they're still living at home with the majority of people over the age of 30 are not living with their romantic partner or roommate, they're living at home and they never catch up. They never catch up. They turn into they spend the rest of their lives alone and they never really get to experience that victory, that warmth, that friendship, that love that that many of us got to experience and in America that quite frankly just invested more in youth. Man, this is uh this is a really fascinating problem, exactly why I am obsessed with people thinking from first principles. So, you saying that um you know, a lot of this stuff is going to be really hard and right now technology is helping people optimize for doing things that are easy. This is the danger sign I want to flash to people. If you're going to think from first principles, you have to first ask, what is the wet works that determines how we feel about the world? So, you're interpreting everything through your body, your mind obviously, but your mind is in such concert with whether it's your microbiome or whatever, but you you are a uh what I will call a a flesh-based AI that is going to uh respond to, adapt to, and learn from its environment. So, what is the nature of the human mind? Whether male, female, doesn't matter. Just what is the nature of the human mind? And I think when people talk about um things have gone wrong and we want to go somewhere new, it's like, okay, what exactly are you optimizing for? And for me anyway, my North Star is to um create as much human flourishing as possible and reduce as much human suffering as possible. Now, I'll round that to fulfillment. So, I think people should be optimizing for fulfillment and I think fulfillment has a recipe that's based on the evolutionary reality of the way the human mind works. So, I think the human mind is optimized for the just hundreds of thousands of years where surviving was brutally difficult. And if evolution only has pleasure and pain as levers to move your behavior in the direction most likely to cause you to survive long enough to have kids that have kids, which is all nature's trying to do, then it's going to say, "Hey, you did a really hard thing. Feel good about that." "Hey, you you're just sitting around. Don't feel good about that." Because if you're just sitting around, you're not doing anything, you're not pushing yourself, you don't feel exertion. I know you said if you slip into depression or if you were advising somebody that does uh that sweating is one of the things that you recommend. Just like get out there and do a thing. Now, the reason I think that works is because evolution had to incentivize you to go out and do hard things, to face danger, to take risks, to improve yourself. And so there are all these evolutionary pressures from a I am striving to be fulfilled standpoint to work hard. So, my recipe for fulfillment looks like this. You must work hard to acquire a set of skills that you care about for whatever reason that allow you to serve yourself and the group. And if you don't do any of that, including just not working hard, you will have a profound sense of disease. And so, I look at modern life and I'm like, this is utterly fascinating. We have killed ourselves for God knows how many centuries to build a perfect walled garden where there are no predators, we don't have to worry about anything. And when you get there, because of evolution's manipulation of the human brain, it doesn't feel good. And so suddenly you have to put yourself back in a position where you have to do hard things that you have to have a goal, you have to be striving for something, making progress. And if you're not doing that, you don't feel good. Makes sense? Yeah, so this is where I now then start asking, okay, technology which you've touched on, what is it doing that's creating the downward spiral and or contributing to it if it isn't the sole thing cuz I think you've laid out three very important factors. But when I look at society, what it's doing, and technology, pornography certainly comes to mind. If you had to rank order the technological problems, what rough order would you put them in? Is it pornography first? Is it Um, wasting time on video games? What what are the problems created by tech? Uh, so so first off, let me start with um, stuff that probably there's more alarm than actual harm. Uh, video games have been shown it would be logical if you see these multiplayer shooter games to think, "Okay, that's what's causing shootings." mass shootings. And all the research shows that that's in fact not the case. And for a lot of boys, it's a means of socialization, it's a means of relaxation for them. Obviously, there are limits to it. I notice it when my son's on screens too much, he just for lack of a better word turns into an [ __ ] And if if if he's used to being entertained all day long, when you don't entertain him or he doesn't get that action reaction, he'll do something to get a reaction regardless of whether that's good or bad behavior. That's as true of screens in general. What I think is most damaging is uh, polarization. I think our discourse has become too coarse. If you look at America relatively speaking, America I would argue has never been stronger. We're food independent, we're energy independent. Uh, China's neither of those things. You can maybe argue they're food independent, but China can't get into a war an aggressive action because there's so many choke points they could cut off their energy supply. We produce more energy than we consume, we produce more food than we consume. No one is lining up for Russian or Chinese vaccines. If you think about the most breakthrough technology creating the most shareholder value, it's AI. 98% of it was not only invented and captured in the United States, the majority of it is within a 7-mile radius of SFO International Airport. Our universities are the best in the world. When a conflict breaks out in the Middle East, we can send two carrier strike forces that can deliver the violence of a, you know, a third or the fourth biggest nation in the world, which hopefully cauterizes is becoming a national conflict or a regional conflict? You know, we're our inflation is the lowest in the G7 while our growth is amongst the highest. Our unemployment is at near record lows. The our markets are at record highs. I mean, there isn't a nation that wouldn't kill for our problems right now. And yet we don't like each other. And yet we see each other as our enemies. About 45% of of Democrats are worried their kid is going to marry a Republican. People are talking to their neighbors less. The number the number of people who who would vote for an autocrat as long as it was their autocrat is 25% in each party. A quarter of Americans would be fine with an autocrat who was elected Was that how the question was posed? Like are you okay with an autocrat or they describe something that you read as an autocrat? I need to know how terrified to be. Yeah, I don't know the market research semantics but the wording but it was something along the lines of if it was a Democrat, would you be comfortable by this person getting elected at all means possible even if it meant election interference? In other words Oh god, see that freaks me out. Would you I think a quarter of Democrats and Republicans would be would tolerate election interference as long as their guy or gal was the beneficiary of that. Yeah. Well, I think you're seeing that. I think you're well, I think you're seeing a lot of it especially on the Republican side but anyways, I'm I'm biased here. We don't like each other. I think in addition, what you have is I mean, you have teen depression and childhood depression especially acute among girls, Instagram, lack of self-esteem. I mean, imagine you're younger than me but you probably grew up in a imagine never being able to leave the high school cafeteria. I got to come home and relax and I I didn't no one was evaluating me. Now these kids, if you don't get invited to a party, you not only have to deal with humiliation of that which I dealt with a lot but I didn't have to watch it play out in real time on Instagram. Oh god. It there's just so much in addition with boys bully physically and verbally, girls bully relationally and we're seeing a lot of girls have now these nuclear weapons in their hand in the form of a phone. And they can go into the room with their phone. One of the things I do with my kids they're not allowed to go into their room with their phone. Very smart. And they can go down a rabbit hole and then these companies that have absolutely no regulation on them will have algorithms that help them scale. They're not malicious people, but they're what I call amoral people. And a 14-year-old girl in the UK gets sent the following emails from Meta and from Pinterest. Here are some images on suicide. We thought you might find interesting. And they're images of pills, nooses, and razor blades. This is sent to a 14-year-old girl from a one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. So teen depression, um coarseness of our discourse, misinformation that gives people the wrong um misleading information around our elections or vaccines, uh concentration of power, you know, this is you you could go down a rabbit hole in terms of income inequality. I also think that um more generally and the biggest threat of AI if we think about technology is just the increase in loneliness. One out of seven men don't have a single friend. One out of four men can't name a best friend. Women uh don't report numbers nearly as stark. Women are much better at maintaining friendships. But I worry that being online and especially AI with AI girlfriends and then these algorithms uh per our previous comments are going to increase loneliness. So, you know, pick your poison. A coarsening of our discourse, a reduction in faith in our institutions, misinformation around health care, around health, or around elections, uh teen depression and suicidal ideation, and generally speaking loneliness. Those are the downsides. I also need to just say I do think technology has created a tremendous amount of economic value. I think it's made a lot of people's lives better. Um there's some real upsides. I don't think you would press a button and have it all disappear. I think we are net gainers from technology. The problem is with the word net. And that is because we are net gainers, we don't hold these companies accountable. We don't make a decision on someone or a company and say if it's a net good, it shouldn't be held to the same standards that we held previous generations of people and companies. So, I think fossil fuels are a net good. I think pesticides are a net good, but we have an FDA and we have an EPA. And for some reason we've decided with technology there should be no similar governing bodies or laws. How often are you checking your credit score, afraid of identity theft, or account breaches? We all use the internet every single day for important things like personal banking and remote work. So, why not protect yourself with our sponsor Aura? Aura is an all-in-one cybersecurity service that keeps you safe online. Aura identifies data brokers exposing your info and submits opt-out requests on your behalf. Aura also monitors your credit, tracks your passwords for data breaches, and secures your online activity with VPN and anti-malware protection. You can try Aura for free for 2 weeks by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code. Yeah, it's uh this one scares me. So, I agree with everything you're saying. And I also think that with social media, which is effectively the transmission of information, you are going to run into, as long as it's my autocrat. Um so, I am super distressed by how easy it is to um manipulate the information that people see at an algorithmic level. And yet I understand that there's so much information, even just from the people that you follow, you have to have an algorithm. So, uh then the question becomes, okay, how would we set up a body that is regulating that in a way that, um, I Here's my sort of I haven't thought about it enough take. First, do no harm. Uh, so creating algorithms that first do no harm, I think I'm having heard you talk about age gating it, I'm probably more comfortable with that than I am as a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of anybody um, governmental body being able to control what we think is and isn't okay. Um, so I agree on the problem, not entirely sure how solvable it is. And so my instinct is just letting kids have it, that one scares me. Now, I don't have kids, so this is very much, uh, easy for me to say, and I know it must be brutally difficult for a parent to try to keep it out of their kids' hands. Um, what's your take on that in terms of if you could press a button, governmental body or uh, that um, regulates this, or just kids before they're whatever, 16, 18, uh, they don't have it. Yeah, you couldn't you couldn't do it under the age of 18. Uh, I don't even think you'd get away with it under the age of 16. I I don't see any reason why a real upside to kids being allowed on social media under the age of 14. I mean, if you think about Instagram, it really starts from a place of perversion. And that is the algorithms are going to encourage young people, especially young women, to pose in very sexualized positions, uh, with with very provocative clothing, such that they can be evaluated by their peer group and strange men all over the world. I mean, it's just it's a quite frankly, it's just a little bit [ __ ] up. And the amount of harm it does, it it does create some communication, some But the number of high schoolers that see their friends every day has been cut in half just in the last 10 years. And I think some of it is they think, "Well, I'll just I'll just snap them or I'll go on Insta." And they become I saw this sort of play out in real time. I had made the mistake of filming my kid doing a handstand, my oldest one. I think he was about 12. And he did a handstand on the beach and he said, "Can you post it to YouTube?" And I said, "Sure." So, we uploaded it to YouTube and created an account. And he got a like. And someone said, "Great job." And I just saw something connect in his brain. And for the next 24 hours, he was saying to me, "Can we check YouTube for more comments?" Because you your ability to modulate affirmation and love from others or concern or whatever it is is very difficult when you're young. Your brain's just forming and you're just becoming kind of a socially aware animal. And then and then a comment was "This kid clearly has never taken a gymnastics class and has no coordination." And then you saw another connection happen. And he wanted to see the other comments every 10 minutes. And I merely thought this just isn't good for the forming brain. It just isn't good. And generally speaking, and I don't know if you how much you this you get. Young people need watering. They need warmth, they need security, they need love, they need reinforcement. And they do need guardrails. And there's something about these social platforms when you're adult the raw unfiltered pushback, immediate reaction. You know, there's there's a good element to that that I think is good for people. But a young person, I think it's mostly like 90 um percent bad because what you have the gestalt online and I don't know if you've experienced this. And when people come up to me, I get I track it about one and a half times a day when I'm out. Someone approaches me just says, "Hey, seen your work." And the next 30 seconds to 3 minutes are lovely. They're nice. They say how they've been introduced to my content. They're super complimentary. They tell me something about themselves. It's just lovely. Makes my day. Every day a stranger comes up and kind of makes my day. Online, it is not the same. I have people calling me I've been very outspoken on Israel. So, people call me Prof Genocide. And I don't even know if this is a real person or a bot. I have people say really vile things. Really vile things. And I'd like to say, well, it just rolls right off me. You know, I'm such a baller, I don't care. It doesn't. It bothers me. Sometimes I've had I've had weekends ruined. And the the general malice people bring online in anonymous formats. And also, you don't know if it's a bad actor. If I were the GRU or the CCP, I would just have algorithms trying to get people Americans to hate each other. I think that's absolutely the easiest way to diminish our standing in the world is to get us When the settlers came into North America, they didn't they didn't immediately take on the Native Americans. They got them fighting each other. They planted rumors and they encouraged them to kill each other. And then they came in for cleanup. If I were China and I couldn't beat America kinetically and I had a I had a an interest in diminishing them competitively nationally, I would just set loose millions of algorithms that got people bickering and fighting and saying mean things to each other and starting fights. It's like when you're in fourth grade and a couple kids have words and everyone surrounds them and goes, "Fight, fight, fight." and pushes them towards each other. Imagine that times a billion. That's what these algorithms are doing online. And if you're old, you should be able to modulate it. Maybe it takes a toll on your mental health. It was taking a toll on mine, so I got off of Twitter. I thought Twitter has become just such It's become the sewage system for a cesspool. I thought it has just gotten so ugly and so angry. I don't I'm no longer getting as much The downside is greater than the upside. I can modulate it. I don't think a 13-year-old girl or boy can modulate it. So, I'd like to see age gating. I don't I don't think there's a lot of downside to age gating. We age gate the military, pornography, alcohol, cigarettes, content. I mean, I couldn't get in to see the I had to sneak in to see The Exorcist when I was a kid. You weren't supposed to be 17. Why on earth wouldn't we age gate social media? Yeah, it's interesting. This is the thing that that really scares me about technology. And full disclosure, I am a techno-optimist. I'm about as optimistic as you're going to get. I wrote a whole comic book about this set in the future in a world that I think is actually going to come to fruition where AI and robotics meet, people begin augmenting themselves. Uh and in that, my pitch is that technology is actually the good guy, and it's the reactionary people that are going to create the problems. However, like if you're not being Pollyanna, you really have to recognize that there is a terrifying truth to the velocity and volume of information that people are exposed to. The human mind has a very difficult time holding on to nuanced arguments. And so, if you give somebody a catchy enough slogan to repeat and as an algorithm figure out which way they lean, and you just feed them more of that. Um and again, this is something I've heard you say that outrage sells way more than sex. And so, if you can get people into an outrage loop, uh you've really got them. And my thing, going back to first principles, if you understand that's the way your mind works, hopefully you, at least as an individual, can avoid falling into the trap. But, and this I actually I'm very interested to hear what you think about this. I have a whole spiel about I think people should distrust their emotions. I don't think just because you feel it, you should act upon it. I think people should have goals and say this is my goal, which I hope is honorable. Uh you have an honorable goal and then it's does this emotion move me closer or farther away from that goal. Uh take being in a marriage. So, I've been married now to the same woman for 21 years, together 23. And man, there are times where she makes me mad. And I think if I am to lash out and just trust my anger, then this is not going to move me towards my goal of having a thriving emotional compassionate relationship with my wife. And so, I put that in check. I distrust it and say, "Hey, it's possible. In fact, I I have a thesis about when you get angry, someone's probably treading on your insecurities." And so, me getting mad is probably me just lashing out because she's touched on an insecurity. Anyway, one of the things that I just see people celebrating themselves for and others for is you feel it and you should express it. And I am hugely skeptical of that based on, remember my North Star, I want human flourishing, which I will define as people moving towards fulfillment. Uh so, I think people have to really be careful. But when you have the that velocity and volume of information coming over social media and uh okay, now we're getting into something I don't know if I've ever said this out loud before. Everything has a name. Every uh every way that somebody could be like you're nagging that's a terrible example. Like every way of being has a name and so everybody's like that's narcissism and by putting it in a box they're no longer thinking critically about it. That's misogyny and everything goes into a box. And once it's in the box, we know we can dismiss it rather than as you said earlier having an adult conversation. Um that freaks me out. So, when I think about navigating social media well, I'm not optimistic. The only way Go ahead. Well, yeah, I'm I'm not I I will say I agree with you. I'm an optimist around technology, too. I just I do think um As So, just to go to solutions, there's something called Section 230 that basically inoculates or immunizes all social media platforms from the same liability. If If they could reverse engineer this podcast and show statistical evidence that girls started engaging in self-harm on a regular basis after listening to this podcast, you'd be in a world of hurt. You'd have a class action suit against you. It would be so scary and so economically ruinous that this podcast would either go out of business or quickly pivot to putting in place the technology to solve whatever was causing self-cutting or self-harm among girls. We decided that these nascent technologies, this law was written I think 26 years ago, should not be subject to the same scrutiny as every other media platform. That makes no sense any longer. So, for example, if you were to say any content that is algorithmically elevated is no longer protected by 230, they would be a lot more cautious about this type of content. They might put in place more They might invest more in their safety teams. So, I think there's a lot that can be done that wouldn't even be what I'd call um additional regulation, but just taking away regulation, if you will, that somehow creates them as a protected a protected class. But, when you're starting to talk about AI, I mean, things are going to get you know, things could get very scary very fast. But, I agree with you. I'm largely a technology optimist. I think it'll be wonderful, but regulation has been key to you know, we have emission standards. Where you're not allowed to spray your food with certain things. One of the things I like about the UK is there's about 1,200 pesticides and preservatives and hormones they're not allowed to put in the food here. And my orange juice goes bad a little bit sooner, but I can taste the difference and I think over the long run it's probably good for me. Might be a little bit more expensive, but I just bet it's better for me. So, I think I I agree with you. I'm a technology optimist, but I'm also worried that we're so fascinated by technology and we have we suffer in the United States from what I'd call an idolatry of innovators that because there's a lack of religion in people's lives, and I'm an atheist. I'm not what I call someone who talks about the importance of religion, but church attendance and the reliance on a super being declines as a nation becomes wealthier. It's much much less prevalent than it was just 50, 60 years ago in the United States. And into that void has slipped uh has slipped our new uh Jesus Christ and that's technology innovators. Magic feels mystical. It's hard to understand. These people are compelling. They make trillions of dollars. We're all very drawn to them. So, we decide that our new Jesus Christ are Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, and we don't hold them or their companies to the same standards as other companies, and I think that's dangerous. I don't think because we assume that we keep waiting for their better angels to show up. And the reality is in a capitalist society where you have better that reference broader selection set of maids, people like you laugh at your jokes, you can help elect the next president when you have a lot of money, the temptation in capitalist society to aggregate wealth is so great that almost every CEO will make a series of what I call micro rationalizations and get to a point where they're sending emails with nooses and pills and razors. And we keep hoping their better angels are going to show up. And guess what? They don't. They don't. And they're not going to because we've put in place an incentive system that encourages them to ignore it or to water it down or to delay and obfuscate, right? I think Sheryl Sandberg is probably a good person. She was consistently telling the world, "We need to do better. We're proud of the progress." She was the heat shield for all the damage that Meta was levying on our youth and quite frankly the world and a lot of vulnerable groups. So, we have in the US absence of regulation and absence of standards and way too much idolatry of innovators and the dollar. And the result is that a sector that is arguably the most influential sector in history. It's just a wild west at this point. And they would argue, "Well, that's how you how you innovate." I think there's some truth to that. But the majority of industries that have grown really fast do have some sort of standards or regulation. And they will claim, "Well, these are great products and their cost is free." They're free. You know, Google's free, Facebook's free. And I would argue that the economic cost of being a parent trying to raise emotionally healthy mentally strong kids the cost to democracy wondering what if what you're seeing is a deep fake of Biden following or Nancy Pelosi drunk you know, or wondering if this vaccine is actually going to alter your DNA. I think every day the costs go up they're being levied on our society as a function of a lack of regulation on big tech. Okay, so I think that's a very eloquent argument. Certainly sets the table for the problem. Um we've got the daughters in school doing well. We've got the son in the basement playing video games and vaping. What's the strategy for making him a productive member of society? Uh so, I don't think it's any silver bullet. I think it's a variety of solutions. Um one, I would and this is Richard Reeves' idea who wrote a kind of the landmark book on the topic called The Boys and Men. So some of his ideas are in here, but I would redshirt boys. I would start boys in kindergarten at six and girls at five. They just mature at different paces. I would try and get more men back into primary and uh high school education. There are more female fighter pilots per capita than there are male kindergarten teachers. You can now go through if you're living in a single-parent household, you can go through all the way through high school and never really have a male role model. So try and get more men back into um primary education. A massive investment in vocational programming. I don't know if you're old enough to remember woodshop, metal shop, and auto shop. But there were just a bunch of guys who just weren't going to go to college. But you know what? They were really [ __ ] talented. They knew how to fix [ __ ] They were handy. And they they kind of got into wood. They were the guys hanging out at woodshop and making stuff and repairing cars. And in the American economy, the real economy, that guy with a one- or two-year apprenticeship or that gal, and it's about 80/20 male to female, that that guy or gal, they're making 80k right out of high school. And they're not going to go to college and it doesn't mean they're a failure. It doesn't mean their parents have failed. You know, electricians, roofers, specialty nurses, specialty construction. Do you know how many Do you know how many really talented specialty construction managers we're going to need as we build more and more nuclear power plants? I mean, you're not putting up a tin shed here. It's not easy to repair an electric vehicle or you know, or it requires different skills to to to to install and maintain energy-efficient appliances requires a different set of skills. If you're renovating a house, you're going to see how much you're paying your plumber and your roofer. There are real jobs out there. So a massive investment in vocational programming, a massive in- investment in increasing the number of freshman seats. So, instead of having all these incredibly emotional arguments over DEI and who gets in to Harvard or Cal State Poly or to, you know, to Pepperdine or USC or UCLA, it's a giant misdirect cuz the answer isn't who gets in, the answer is how many. And when these universities sit on endowments the size of small Central American nations and they decide to limit their freshman classes so guys like me who are on the faculty at NYU can feel more important and we stand up and applaud the dean every year when we say our admissions rate went from 14% to 12%. We've lost the script. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be public servants, not a Chanel bag. So, massively increase freshman seats and then a series of economic programs that stop transferring money from young people to old people and elimination of capital gains. You can lower taxes if you get rid of capital gains tax exemption. There should be There should be If you're going to favor anything, you should favor sweat. There should be a lower tax rate on people who actually get their asses out of bed and go to work and do real work as opposed to guys like me who just buy and sell stocks. Why? Why is what Why is money more noble than sweat? It should be absolutely the other way around. Uh first home first home buyer programs, there's some in different states initiatives. We have to level up young people. When the greatest innovation in history was not the semiconductor or the iPhone, it was the American middle class. It's fought wars, it's paid for so much incredible investment in DARPA, GPS technology, EV charging stations. The middle class in America from the end of World War II to now has been the gift that has kept on giving globally. So, the question is if that's the most noble and the most righteous innovation in history, how do you support it? And I think at its core was that we had young people with a lot of economic viability and the the kind of flaw in the matrix right now is that we don't have enough economically viable young men. And in 1945 when the war ended, we had all these men come home in uniform and they had demonstrated excellence and then we gave them GI bills and subsidized loans for housing and we made them viable mates and they were attractive to a cohort of women and we started the baby boom and the middle class. And we gave them tax benefits and a shot at having a reasonable life and we gave them incentives to stay together and incentives to have children. And that created the you know, prosperity the likes of which the world had never seen before. So how do we create an economic environment where people have more incentive to to find each other, mate, have kids and stay together. Now, I'd like to see compulsory national service. We need more kids from different sexual orientations, economic backgrounds and ethnic backgrounds mixing with each other because they'll have more empathy for each other. It'll be less easy for them to hate each other when they hang out with a trans kid and see this kid's pretty much just like me. Right? It's when you don't comingle, it's when you don't bounce off these people that it's easy to start resenting them. I think there's a ton of things we can do. Economic, societal, more third spaces, more parks, after school leagues, religious institutions, non-profit work. We got to get young people meeting each other in random environments in service of something bigger than them. And all of these things have existed. We know how to do this. We know how to let in 76% of people to an elite college called UCLA. We used to do it. We know how to figure out a way to make it affordable for them such that the the single sons or the sons of single immigrant mothers who lived and died a secretary, yours truly can get a great education, get their have the opportunity to get their [ __ ] together and go on and live really remarkable lives. We know how to do all these things. It's more like a back to the future thing rather than the incumbents will tell you, whether it's corporations or the 1% quite frankly, which I'm now a part of that are getting a disproportionate amount of this spoils, will claim that these are huge unsolvable problems. They use words like networks and globalization. [ __ ] We have more prosperity in this nation than we've ever had. We've just decided not to share it the way we used to share at the top income tax bracket after World War II was 90%. Even through the '60s and '70s, it was 70%. Now, and I'm very public about this, my tax rate for the last 10 years has been around 17%. That's just That makes no sense. When I sold my last company, the first $10 million was tax-free. That makes no sense. I had I got very lucky with another investment. The first $25 million was tax-free. Does that make sense? Is that how we restore the middle class? I mean, it's just it it It is so naked here what is going on, this transfer of wealth from lower middle-income households to the very rich, that it's no wonder the middle class is withering. And what's so upsetting about this is none of this needs to happen. The cake has never been bigger. We're just slicing it much differently. Yeah, the uh Eric Weinstein said something to me one time. Um I agree with him on so much. This is sort of the one unique thing where I He said a crazy to me, which is uh he was saying that boomers basically need to step down and that they're hoarding wealth and they're, you know, shutting out young people from all these opportunities. And I said, "Eric, that's not how this works. Like they have to be bested. Like you you can't expect anybody to be like, "I I'm going to slow down so you can lead." So, clearly something is broken. And I think you've done a really good job of outlining the problem. And I think you've said what I'm about to say between the lines and I I'm pretty sure you believe this, but part of what is missing in all this is going back to the first thing you said, which is that men are getting shorter metaphorically and for anybody following along, uh men need to get metaphorically taller. And so some part of this is going to have to be inspiring people and I think this is why you were saying like, "Okay, we need to take care of the middle class will not take care of itself." And so one of the notes I was taking is is the reason that you're interested in the class is it gives something attainable for um a young man to aim for where he can put in work, not necessarily going to a college, but he can put in work in a trade, get good at that, and show progress in his life, become a again metaphorically taller man, so that more women are interested, so that he has mating opportunities, so he's not getting frustrated, because that makes sense to me. And if what we're saying is, "Hey guys, uh we over here on a policy perspective, we have to make sure that we're creating a playing field on which you can make progress, because that is as Tony Robbins says it is a foundational pillar to human happiness, which I agree very much, um but at the same time, you're going to have to come on and play your guts out. And that's one thing that I don't hear a lot about anymore. As somebody who's sort of of the final generation of people that was raised with the expectation that I was going to be tough, I was going to learn to man up, which I know is like ultra triggering now as a phrase, but man up, get tough, uh get better, strive, don't give up, and that was my entrepreneurial journey. I ate [ __ ] in the beginning. It was just an one atrocity after another of me just being hopelessly bad at it, and having to get good and work obscene hours, uh and I think that is going to have to be part of the message if we want guys to pull out of this tailspin. Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with parenting. So, we've touched on if you look at the spike in teen depression, and it's extraordinary what's happened over the last 10 years. Um hospital admissions through self-harm, teen suicide, re- um reports of hopelessness, it's up, you know, like I think about 40% with men and I think 60 to 80% with girls. And they've Jonathan Haidt, my colleague at NYU, sort of reverse-engineered it to two driving forces. One is social media, and we talked about that. We talked about the ills of technology, the ills of technology. The second is what he calls concierge or bulldozer parenting. And that is as parents, we use so many sanitary wipes on our child's lives that they don't develop their own immunities. We clear out all their obstacles. And then they get to NYU, or they get to college, they get their heart broken, or they get their first D, and they don't have the um scar tissue or the calluses to deal with it. They don't have the resilience, and they freak out, quite frankly. So, you're not doing your kid any favors. You know, when you make money, what you want to do is you want to protect your kids. And that that I mean, the world has changed so dramatically. I used to leave my mom's house on a Saturday at 10:00 a.m. with a Schwinn bike, an Abba-Zaba bar, and 35 cents, and I might be home 14 hours later. She had no idea where I was. Maybe I remembered to call her if I was spending the night somewhere. That was verboten if I was going to spend the night at a friend's. We did sleepovers, right? If my kid isn't home, my kid gets out of school at 3:40. If he isn't home at 3:58, we practically contact Scotland Yard. It's so programmed. Any problem tutors, and you know, kids need to I mean, quite frankly, kids just need to fail a little bit more, right? They need a lack of after-school programming where they learn skills and disappointment. A lack I mean, quite frankly, a lack of mating. I mean, teen to pregnant teen and and drunk driving deaths are down, which is a great thing, but a lot of it is because these kids aren't experiencing relationships, aren't getting together, aren't making mistakes, aren't experimenting with drugs, aren't experimenting with sex, aren't experimenting with relationships. And quite frankly, some of that is really good for them to learn their boundaries. I I hung out with Mormons when I was a kid, and I never drank, and I got to college, and I had I had a tough time handling alcohol. I would like I'm giving my 16-year-old we live in Europe. I have him drink beer every once in a while. He was very open with me that he tried pot. I actually think that's a good thing. That's a good thing. We I think I don't know if you can sort of tell young men to level I don't know if that I I I think the way you instill it from a young age is competitive sports, summer jobs, as parents letting them fail, doing a better job of teaching them a little bit of grit. I think it's sort of up to us, if you will. Um, but what I would what I agree with you is when I was starting my career, I just did nothing but work. And I get all these questions on my podcast about balance. I'm like, "Well, where do you expect to be economically?" And they'll say, "Well, I want to make $150,000 a year." I'm like, "Okay." That puts you in the, you know, 85th percentile of all income-earning households. And if you're How old are you? I'm at the age of 27. Okay, to make $150,000 under the age of 30, probably puts you in the top 3%. I'm like, "I've never met anyone who attains the top decile economically in America that isn't isn't either born with money or isn't a genius, you know, genius talented, that doesn't work all the time. Are you willing to work all the time? Cuz stop this [ __ ] about balance. You can have it all. You just can't have it all at once. And young people are geniuses of finding some balance. I I I all the time, but I always found time to drink. I was found time to find my friends. I was find time to try and pursue mating opportunities even if I struck out. But, I I this whole thing about follow your passion and balance, okay, if you want to move to a low-cost a low-cost city, you have a partner, you don't need a fat house, you want to coach little league, if you want to live to work, or should I say work to live, more power to you. Most of the young people I speak to expect to have a lot of free time, a lot of focus on their hobbies, self-care, while making a [ __ ] ton of money. And I'm like, "Okay, it's one or the other, boss. It's one or the other." And Instagram is constantly telling them they're failing if they're not making millions in crypto or partying in Ibiza or Tulum or staying at the Almond, that somehow they've screwed up. It's like, "I'm telling you, unless you inherit that money, the only people that get there are the ones who have sacrificed immensely. There's no free lunch here." And we keep telling kids in education about the importance of balance. And what I say is the importance is having a sober conversation around the trade-off. Do you Do you want to have kids at an early age? Do you want to have balance in your career? Then, okay, if you don't have a lot of money, then you got to move to a low-cost neighborhood, and you got to be really disciplined in terms of your budget. And by the way, that might be the hap- the way to go. My way isn't the right way, it was just my way. I just worked for 20 20-odd years. I did nothing else. And now I have a lot of balance, and the reason I have a lot of balance is cuz I had none back then. So, it's just pick your punches. But, young people I find we have told them they can have it all their entire lives, and I feel like that's a lie. And to your point, the notion of kids being a little tougher or young people being a little tougher, I think that's mostly my generation's fault as parents. That That we want to clear out every obstacle for them. It's a princess and the pea syndrome where they get to they get to a challenge and they can't you know, they can't sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Scott, I think you're one of the most profound thinkers on this topic. Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people follow you? Uh well, first off, thank you, Tom. Um you know, to resist is futile. I'm everywhere. Uh I'm Prof Galloway is my you know, if you want to get my newsletter No Mercy No Malice. Um two podcasts, Pivot co-hosted with Kara Swisher and my podcast Prof G um including a markets and I have a four books and another book coming out called The Algebra of Wealth strategies for establishing financial security coming out in April. So, yeah, I'm I'm like AOL in the '90s. Like stick your hand in a cereal box, you're going to find me. I love it. All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Check out my intense conversation with Patrick Bet-David about masculinity. To truly be free, you have to be strong enough to control your own life. And many men today simply do not qualify. Many of you have been told the pursuit of power is disgusting. You shouldn't do it. Many of you don't even have a clear definition of what it means.