Male Roles, Obligations and Options for Building a Fulfilling Life | Scott Galloway

22:38Would you like to grab a coffee sometime? And this is the goal. The goal is no, because you're going to get no's. And then I'm going to call you after you've made the approach. You're going to text me. I did an approach. Did you get a no? Yeah, I got a no. That's exactly the point. That's the goal. Because everyone you admire, everyone you think has killed it, the only thing I can guarantee you is there were a shit ton of no's in getting to one of the top 10 podcasts in the world, getting to a person as a partner who's higher character and hotter than you, getting to make more money than you would have ever guessed that person would have made.

23:10The only thing that got them there was the willingness and the endurance to anticipate no. And unfortunately, big tech is setting up an algorithm that convinces you that a frictionless life is a good life and that you never need to endure no. And what you end up with is a lack of skills to persevere, to realize you're okay. And that's what I ask the kids the next day. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm bummed out. but you're okay. If a man under the age of 30 works out three times a week, works 30 hours a week outside of the house, right, and is volunteering, that immediately puts him in the top 8 % of all young men.

23:49And I apologize for the word salad here, but something I hate is the incel movement, involuntarily celibate, right? Throughout history, 99 % of men have been involuntarily celibate for most of their lives. There's few things young men would rather be doing than having sex. Only 40 % of men have reproduced throughout history, 80 % of women. So no man has a birthright to reproduce. In the West, it's actually now 75%. So young men have more agency than they ever have. Now, if you do those things, right, just those three things, work outside of the house, work out, have a kindness practice, volunteer in the service of others, you're immediately going to put yourself in the top decile of young men.

24:30And if you're in the top decile of young men, I can guarantee you, over time, you will become voluntarily incelibate, which is awesome, because you'll establish a relationship, and young men under the age of 30, a lot of the research shows, benefit more from a relationship than women. Yet only one in three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship, whereas two in three women are in a relationship. And you think, well, Scott, that's mathematically impossible. It's not, because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. So I'll circle back to the more tactical recommendations.

25:04Get fit. Start making some money. Have a plan. And start doing things in the agency of others. I think the ultimate hack for depression, or if you're feeling bad about yourself, is to start helping others. And to always keep in mind, and this is the hard part, that the antichrist of your progress as a young man, the devil, the fucking enemy, the villain here, the bond villain, with trillions of dollars is big tech. They are trying to figure out with AI a million times a second how to convince you to spend one more second a day on your phone sequestered from your relationships because they're a shareholder value.

25:4540 % of the S &P is 10 companies whose sole mission is to monetize your time. And unfortunately, they're not bad people, but what they're doing has resulted in a small group, a cohort of men. it's not small, millions of men who are evolving into a new species of asocial, asexual males who wake up at the age of 30 thinking they've had a frictionless life, living at home, obese, anxious, and depressed, having never developed the skills that they need to do well professionally, personally. So big tech is not your friend. If you do not figure out how to modulate big tech products, whether it's Instagram or YouTube, you are falling into a trap of eventually being sequestered and not developing the skills to establish the most important thing in life, and that is relationships.

26:35Andrew Huberman:Two questions about big tech, and I'll just push back a little bit on the big tech thing, not because I'm afraid of big tech. I did grow up in Silicon Valley, so I... When you're at Stanford. Yeah, invariably have a different relationship to it. And I'm not name drop. I happen to be close with some of the people that run these companies or in number, you know, two or number four slots or, you know, in some cases who run the companies. One who I've never met, who I'll just raise first, is who you referred to earlier, the richest man in the world is Elon Musk. And I was frankly a little bit surprised that you called him out when discussing the importance of being a protector.

27:13Andrew Huberman:I understand the political side. Well, let's just, for the moment, I will just set Trump aside. I'm a very polarizing figure. Happy to go there if you want, but I know your stance on him. But the mention of Elon as a non-protector surprised me because I think of Elon as somebody who seems to love his children very much. He's organized family differently than most, but he certainly has the capacity to take care of them, who is committed to big projects. I mean, a superhuman level of output in terms of just Neuralink, the field that I'm closest to, right? Phenomenal progress. And that's just one of the SpaceX Neuralink, Tesla X, et cetera.

27:52Andrew Huberman:So I'm just curious what motivated that that makes you, because I don't see him as a non-protector. I don't know that I see him as a protector of a particular kind in his personal life, but I don't have access to that. But in terms of his motivation to protect our species. I personally believe his desire to get to Mars is a genuine one to have an option for humanity. So I see him as a protector and I'll probably piss off a lot of people by saying this, but that doesn't mean I universally adopt everything he says and does, but I see him as kind of an awesome figure in our history. He was like, let's get to Mars in case this earth thing doesn't work out.

28:32Andrew Huberman:And also let's get to Mars because it's awesome. I think that's an entirely fair viewpoint, and you're adding nuance to it. So let's talk about Elon Musk. If I had a red button that I could push and get rid of all of big tech or Elon Musk, somehow we could float away like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character and not die, but just not have happened, I wouldn't press the button. I think big tech and Elon Musk are net goods for the world. We're going to get to EVs. We're going to get to Mars faster because of Elon Musk. He inspired the EV race, which is good for the world. The problem is with the word net.

29:11And as it relates to masculinity and as a role model for young men, he's probably one of the best role models in terms of being super aggressive, taking risks, ignoring the noise, and just being laser-like focused, telling an amazing story, garnering capital. I mean, there's just no getting around it. The guy is just an inspiration. I think the whole shooting match is if you become the richest man in the world, I think he moved to protection. I would argue that he's not a great role model and that he has not done a great job of convincing younger men that protection and taking care of others, I think the way he acquits himself online by punching down.

29:50When he says something mean about somebody, and I know this and I'm fine because I have money and I'm not dependent upon any one person's opinion of me. But if he says something negative about you and calls you names, his 120 million followers come for you. And I think as a general rule, and this is true for everybody, but especially for men, you never punch down. You just don't. Anyone, I'm openly, I make personal attacks on people. This is technically a personal attack on Elon Musk. To call someone not good, a good role model, that's a personal attack. But I never make personal attacks of anyone who isn't markedly more powerful than me.

30:29And I find that a lot of these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have no problem punching down. So again, it goes back to this. Is he a net good for the world? I acknowledge the point. And I would even argue, yeah, he is. But he should also be held accountable for his blessings. I can't stand the fact that he should post America and the government. If you look at the most successful companies in the world, they're littered up and down the coast we're on right now, whether it's Qualcomm in San Diego, SpaceX and Snap here, head north to Salesforce and Meta and Google, keep going, you hit Amazon and Microsoft, and then it stops once you get to the Canadian border.

31:08And then you have to go all the way up to Lululemon to find a multi-billion dollar company. Come back down to where you teach at UC San Diego and those great companies, and it stops. And you got to go to another 7 ,000 kilometers to get the Mercado Libre in Buenos Aires. There's something about America that creates unbelievable opportunity that creates the wealthiest men in the world. And I find that these tech brothers have a total lack of appreciation for the sacrifices in the system built in America and are the first to ship post the government and complain about regulation and things getting in the way.

31:39I find that especially obnoxious. But let me acknowledge the point. I think on the whole, Elon Musk and big tech are a net good for the world, But that doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable and ask, why would you do these things when you're so blessed?

31:55Andrew Huberman:So this gets to the heart of something that I think is extremely important, which is we're living in the age of everything pretty much being public about public figures. Not everything, but many more facets of their lives than ever before in history, in part because they share many more facets of their lives. It's not just that stuff gets unearthed. It's like they're talking about their company. They're also in the role of arguing with their ex on sometimes online. You know, you see that their kids sometimes will will be a parent who they are. You know, it's interesting. My dad, first generation immigrant who came here, became a scientist.

32:33Andrew Huberman:And he's from Argentina. And he along these lines, he always said it was funny to him that when you would go to somebody's office in the United States, a professor or a businessman or something, the picture of his family was facing out. He said, that was so weird. He said, in Argentina, your picture of your wife and your kids and your dog, we're facing in, that's yours. You don't share that with a person coming to your office. Like who would do that? This oversharing thing, when you look back, is kind of a longstanding theme in American business. And it shows up even more so, of course, online.

33:05Andrew Huberman:So to me, this idea of, okay, Elon, for instance, but very different role model figure, someone that I consider a close friend, Jocko Willink, incredibly impressive, true warrior, great dad, great husband. I know his family, amazing human being in so many ways. And he's kind of like the tough football coach that a lot of guys didn't have, that younger guys. I think that's one of the reasons people gravitate towards him. You don't wonder whether or not he really can do what he says you ought to do, because he does it every day. and he posts it on his watch. So Jocko is a really good example of somebody that people admire.

33:40Andrew Huberman:And I consider Jocko one example. So why not look at public figures, you and perhaps even me, for instance, and just look at these people as a buffet of options to adopt certain traits but not others. Be doing great things and assuming that the other things they're doing aren't truly atrocious, right? I mean, criminal, atrocious, you know. I don't know that we're asking the people who are role models, leaders, business leaders, I don't think we're placing a reasonable expectation on them. I don't say this for any personal reasons. I've known I'm replete with flaws for a very long time, so I don't claim to not have them, never have.

34:16Andrew Huberman:But then young guys might be thinking, well, I have to be perfect too. And if I'm not perfect and I don't have 150 million followers, I better have a fraternity of people to protect me. this is the kind of the underlying current that i think has driven the toxic end of the hate the word the manosphere i hate it because it's become too mishmashy it's not it's not even a continuum it's just a mess so what do you have to say and think about the expectation that the leaders of the world the role model not have these flaws at the same time telling guys hey like ask and get told no. I mean, you and I both know, I don't know if it's real world data or if it's statistical data, but I have many women friends in my life and I have a sister.

35:06Andrew Huberman:If an attractive guy rolls up on a woman and says, Hey, you want to get coffee sometimes? It's romantic. It's romantic. If a guy that's not attractive does that, it's creepy. So how do you tell a guy that isn't good looking to do that and then not be called a creep and not just be called a creep, but be called a creep on an app, which isn't just designed to prevent sexual assault, but is also designed to share information about who to date and not to date. And guys get black, I'm told by young guys, I'm not on dating apps, but that guys get blacklisted basically, not because of sexual assault, but because, you know, they get called out as like a bad kisser.

35:44Andrew Huberman:He didn't smell so good or something. This is the stuff that used to be in private discussions among women. I know this because I have a sister, right? Women talk, I listen through the wall, right? What do they talk about? and now it's public. There's parallel construction here. I'm sure you're tracking it, but for everyone listening, it's like, this is a serious problem. I mean, can't we acknowledge that somebody like Elon, let's just stay on that example, is a phenom that probably has never existed in at least 100 years, has huge vision. Sure, he might have some issues in his life that are none of my business, and yet he has a lot of good example to set for young men.

36:23Andrew Huberman:I believe that. And it also gives permission to not be perfect without harming people. So I acknowledge the point and there's a lot there. But I still think if someone is constantly optimizing for attention to draw cheap capital to his firms and is very open and very critical of others and is probably the most dominant force in electing the next president, that we should pay very close attention to his activities, whether it's reported addiction to ketamine and sleeping with a loaded gun next to his bed and not living with any of his children, whether it's... You think that should be public fair game?

37:09I think if he wants to put certain aspects of his life out there constantly for affirmation, that that type of scrutiny is probably fair game. I also acknowledge the point that people are human and you need to have some grace and say, well, unless you're perfect, try and learn from people, try and understand them and try and demonstrate some grace. The other thing going back to big tech is that we have connected economic value to tearing down people. So you've had bestsellers. I've had bestsellers. I see my book hasn't come out yet. I hope for it to be a bestseller. You haven't, you haven't booked it?

37:46No, it comes out in September. It's been delayed for a while, but I appreciate the - I feel like I've already read it.

37:51Andrew Huberman:No, well, God willing, it does well. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Let me prepare, because I think you're actually, I don't know you well, but I do know you. I get the sense that, like me, a lot of the criticism doesn't just bounce right off you, that you take this stuff to heart, and sometimes it upsets you. I know it, okay, I'll say it, it upsets me. Some of it does, but it's not the criticism that people think upsets me that upsets me, but that's a different story. Your book will be a bestseller. You could put out, I don't know, the script of The Sound of Music, and it's going to be a bestseller.

38:24Andrew Huberman:It'll be better than if I had done that, but not better than The Sound of Music. There you go. And this is what TikTok and YouTube, the algorithms, someone will immediately say, this is why Andrew Huberman's book is bullshit. Because if they put a well-known figure's name in front of a best-selling book and says bullshit and creates antagonism and comments, the algorithms pick up on that, optimize it, it'll get millions of views, which is more Nissan ads and more shareholder value. So there is not only a healthy check on people's power, more scrutiny, the president should get a lot of scrutiny.

39:01The president deserves to have his business and personal life, to a certain extent, at least where it demonstrates character, looked into and examined. And I think a certain amount of power and healthy check on power is probably a healthy thing. Unfortunately now, there's economic incentive around tearing people down. Like, I don't know about you, I do have a real fear. I am highly imperfect professionally and personally. I've engaged in a lot of professional and personal behavior that I am not proud of. I've been divorced, I haven't been as kind to people that have worked for me as I should have been, and I'm worried it's all gonna come crashing down.

39:35And a lot of times I feel like the stuff I'm saying on podcasts like this, I'm trying to portray myself as being better than I actually am. I have huge imposter syndrome. And big tech has an economic incentive in trying to find as many guardians of gotcha pins as possible. Because if you get to a certain point of fame or credibility, there's just too much money in trying to find the soft tissue on you. So there's a very unhealthy attribute in our society where we're all just waiting for bad news and there's economic incentive to say, well, this person isn't perfect. Look what this person did. So I agree with you.

40:11We need to demonstrate a little bit more grace. Something I really hate about my party, I consider myself a proud progressive, is these purity tests, right? That, oh, you know, I put out a picture of me and a bunch of buddies that I went to UCLA with. One's an aircraft carrier pilot. One's an ophthalmologist. It was a picture of all of us, and I've said, you know, find impressive men and befriend them.

40:36Andrew Huberman:I think I saw that post. You were the one towering over the rest of them. Yeah, I think I've shrunk. Huh? It's not weird. You're a tall guy. No, I don't think you've shrunk. I only know you now. I was 6 '3 in college. I'm 6 '1 1⁄2 now. That's nice. I'm at an age where I'm shrinking. Anyways, and I knew I was just waiting for it. Why privilege? What a douchebag. What, you know, just all the comments and all the sort of, you know, people coming after you, right? Or people who can't just say, oh, good for you. Well done. And that's just part of it. And that's a small price to pay for a certain level of success.

41:07but the algorithms immediately grab that and elevate it because there's money and antagonism. A thoughtful, nuanced conversation online and a positive reinforcing comment, that doesn't tickle the sensors. If you can create a fight online, if you say mRNA vaccines alter your DNA, you're going to get a lot of comments and the algorithms love that and it'll elevate it. So unfortunately, we have attached 40 % of the market value of the S &P to incendiary content that tears us apart. And the result is people now don't believe that Russian troops pouring over the border in Ukraine is their enemy. They believe that their neighbor with a Trump sign is their real enemy.

41:45Or someone who doesn't believe your ideology around gender politics is your enemy. And unfortunately, it's being, I believe, and I know this sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. These poorest platforms that have an economic incentive and antagonistic content are being fueled by bad actors, whether it's the GRU or the CCP, who look at Americans and say, we can't beat them economically, we can't beat them kinetically, so let's get them to hate each other. And that is Americans now perceive other Americans as the biggest threat. So one, it is healthy to look at powerful people that have huge influence, such as you and to a lesser extent me, and question their beliefs and write critical articles of them.

42:27It crushed me when the, I can't remember if it was the Atlantic or the New York or New Yorker came out with sort of a critical review of my book. It was really upsetting to me. And I think part of the thing that was so upsetting was when we were talking about this off mic, it meant some of it was true. That's healthy. It's healthy when there's thoughtful criticism around your book. But when I have hundreds of comments accusing me of shit that never happened, and then you look at it and it's Dog Mom Wisconsin 331 with three followers, that's a bot. And the fact that these platforms choose not to screen out those bots because they know more incendiary comments that create more comments and more Nissan ads, I think that is tearing at the fabric of America.

43:09But I just want to acknowledge the point. I think maturity is realizing people aren't perfect. Learn from them what you can. But I do think the wealthiest man in the world and the president should be held to a higher standard. I think they have extraordinary blessings. I think their decisions matter. And I think the scrutiny they come under is warranted. And I will say this, I think the president, to a certain extent, Elon Musk, have created a lot of cloud cover for our imperfections.

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44:12Andrew Huberman:Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day. But I'm often asked if you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it has just been oh so critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1, and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription.

44:49Andrew Huberman:Again, that's drink AG1 with the numeral one dot com slash Huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. I disagree vehemently with one point, which is that I'm more influential than you are. You're incredibly influential. In fact, an ex-girlfriend's sister who went to NYU asked me if I knew who you were. I said, of course. And she said her words for our generation. Scott is like a father to us. and she happens to be in venture capital so maybe there's a finance link there too but I pressed on that a little bit and just asked and she said yeah, we look up to him, we listen to him he's very paternal to us so I thought you might appreciate that I do appreciate that I'd appreciate it more if she'd said older brother I'm very conscious of my age now are you?

45:41Really? 100 %

45:41Andrew Huberman:you're in your 60s, you're super fit you've got two healthy boys you're in a happy relationship. You got huge reach. I imagine your bank accounts are fine and you're actively engaged in service. In my eyes, you're doing great. I appreciate that, but I'd rather be in this spot at 41, not 61. I'm very self-conscious about my age, but I just want to go back to something I think that gets in the way of success and has been a huge unlock for me. is, I mean, it's not, but your fear, your fear of criticism. If you're going to be successful, you're going to face criticism. Starting a business is subjecting yourself to public failure.

46:23I want to go back to something you said about approaching women and guys being afraid to be that guy. I think some of that is a little bit exaggerated and that most women, if you are respectful, the vast majority of women, if you're respectful and approach a woman at a bar, hi how are you and she's not interested you're going to be fine and you're both going to be fine and just as i think there's two myths that are damaging to the mating market which is really upsetting to me one that men think that all women are looking to or a lot of women are looking to embarrass them and they might get canceled professionally if you're respectful to a woman and approach her and make her feel safe and then if she's not interested politely exit you're going to be fine and so is she and i don't buy that your career you're taking your career in your hands i think that's just bullshit and an excuse to be an incel.

47:08I just don't buy it. And two, what really has been an enormous unlock for me is I believe in my atheism. I believe at some point I'm going to look into my kids' eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. I was fucking their age. You got a bunch of young dudes in here who look like former Abercrombie and Fitch models. I remember they look like they're 25. They're probably 35. It was yesterday I was their age, which means just Just in an instant, I'm going to be, again, at that moment where I know I don't have much time left. And in 100 years, no one's going to give a shit what I said or thought or did or the mistakes I made.

47:42And embracing that and accepting that has given me so much courage, right, to start businesses, to make dumb investments that might be crazy, to tell men in my life finally that I love them or I'm impressed with them. When I was their age, I had this weird sense of masculinity that if I said, oh, dude, look how handsome this dude is, that it took away from my prestige somehow, that I couldn't tell people they were impressive. I couldn't tell a woman, God, I'm just crazy about you. I would give anything to spend more time with you because I was worried that she wouldn't return my affection and I would be just too hurt and I had to be cool and not need her.

48:21All this bullshit that got in the way of me really having a good life. And what I realized is every failure I've had, people go, oh, his business went bankrupt. Okay. And then they go back to thinking about themselves. So everyone you're worried about really doesn't give a shit about you. And by the way, the dude that's not very good looking and is with a ridiculously high character hot woman is one of two things. As rich parents or two or two is willing to endure rejection. So I just don't buy, you know, that myth of the man risking his personal and professional reputation, I don't think that's true.

49:01On the other side, the myth I hate, I don't know if you've seen this. On TikTok, a lot of women are saying, I don't date because the risks of being unalived, which I guess is the woke version of saying murdered.

49:12Andrew Huberman:I think it's because on social media platforms, if you say murder or suicide. Oh, it goes right down? I don't know if it actually does, but it's this idea that, yeah, that it's going to be ranked down. Here's the data. Okay, 2 ,500 women a year are murdered by men. That's way too many. It's a huge problem. Sexual assault is a bigger problem. The majority of women who are murdered are murdered by someone they know. So the reality is a small number of women are murdered on dates with strangers. It just doesn't happen that often. And 40 ,000 men a year kill themselves. So if you go on a date with a man, the man is 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you.

49:53So what I would say to men is make the approach, take the risk. And as long as you're respectful, you're going to be fine and so is she. And you are not taking your professional or personal reputation into your hands. And what I would say to women is if you go on a date with a guy that you met on an app, there's all sorts of digital breadcrumbs. and it's a lot, you are, and I can statistically prove this, the ride over an Uber, the Uber was a lot more dangerous than the date itself. And you are more likely to die of choking during dinner than to be hurt by that man. So what I hate is that there's all this inflammatory content being boosted on online media that's getting in the way of the most rewarding thing in life.

50:33And that is to find someone who you are physically attracted to, You sync up with spiritually and you decide to build a life together. And not enough of that is happening. We're in a sex recession, right? And online is making it worse. The dating apps have an incentive in you finding a bigger, better deal. And the genders have done an amazing job of convincing each other it's the other's fault. And I think one of the big foci that need to be really paying more attention to is what I call renewal of alliances. is. I'd love to see a renewal of alliances between us and our great allies in Europe.

51:08Renewal of allies who are moderates. I know nothing about you. I just don't, I just can't believe you're an extremist on the left or the right. I just don't. Bullseye. There needs to be a renewal of alliances between what I'll call moderate lefties like me and moderate conservatives that are everywhere. We're all Americans, but the most important alliance that needs renewal is the greatest alliance in history, hands down. And it's the alliance between men and women. The integration of female and male energy, the ability to find someone you want to procreate with, to build something together, that is the most rewarding thing in life.

51:42And I can prove it's key to the species' progress and existence. And men and women have been taught not to trust each other and to blame each other. I hate the fucking manosphere. And I hate the, quite frankly, some of the reactionary notion on the left where it's misandry, cosplaying as social commentary. There's a lot of bullshit misandry online where you're assuming every young man is a predator. And quite frankly, that every billionaire is evil or that every white person is racist. But the alliance between men and women needs to be reformed. It's the greatest alliance in history. And online, it's teaching men to blame women for their problems.

52:21No, women's assent saved our ass. Women in the factory in World War II is the reason we won the war in four years, not in seven. Women going into the workforce in the 70s and 80s and protections of their rights for fair pay is the reason we're not a second tier power to China right now. If women hadn't ascended, we'd be really squarely and duly fucked, right? And their ascent is in no way inversely correlated or correlated to men's descent. Men have to stop that bullshit. An immigrant didn't take your job. He made it such that you could have lower rent, a meal for a reasonable price, and have someone take care of your mother when she's older.

52:58And at the same time, if you're having romantic problems, it's not her fault. Women are ascending, and naturally, they have higher standards because they're no longer economically dependent upon men, which should be a motivator for men to level up, not to start blaming women. And all this shit is being totally inflamed and taken totally out of proportion by online because it creates more attention, it's interesting, it's novel, and it creates more Nissan ads. But I'm trying to figure out what is the economic incentive to try and figure out a way to get more men and women appreciating the other gender beyond just the basics, right?

53:37How do we renew that alliance?

53:41Andrew Huberman:I love that statement. I saw somewhere, of all places, on X. Every once in a while, you encounter something that really sticks with you. Every once in a while, there's a gem that just falls through, really makes you think. And I don't know who this person was. This might have been an account with one follower. And it landed in front of me and it said, the way you destroy a society is to get the men and women to hate each other. And as a biologist, first and foremost, I thought, well, that makes perfect sense. If you want to eradicate a population of any species, you get the males and the females to start hating each other.

54:12Andrew Huberman:Not just because they don't mate, but because you throw off the mating dynamics in a way that then can create infighting among the males. We see that too, infighting among the women. Although, I don't know, I think that there's a lot to explore around this sort of what the standard is that we're holding the opposite sex to. It's an interesting question. I can't say I've really evolved my thinking around this enough to maybe dive into it, but I know you thought about this. I think a lot of males hide behind this notion that they have to be everything. They have to be tall. They have to be rich.

54:47Andrew Huberman:They have to be jacked. They have to be kind. They have to be, you know, hopefully everyone's kind, but you know what I mean, that they can't say the wrong thing even once. You know, so they're hiding behind that. And if they go out and look, they'll get plenty of evidence for that. Right? No protectors, no this. Actually, I brought, I did something I rarely do, which is I brought my phone into this. Because right before I came in here, a woman that I've known for 20 years wrote and asked me if I would ask you a question. Wow. No, and it's directly related to this. So I'm going to do this. Of course, I'm not going to say who this person is.

55:18Andrew Huberman:And she said, because I mentioned that I'm speaking to you today, and she said, please tell Scott that I'd personally like to thank him for his efforts encouraging men to embrace their duties as protectors, providers, and generally just being accountable. Because we have a serious shortage among hetero dudes, she lives in San Francisco, particularly in the Bay Area. And I said, will do, but can you tell me what you mean by accountable? Serious question. I want to make sure I'm specific.

55:53Andrew Huberman:She said,

56:14Andrew Huberman:Give up when something requires internal growth or leveling up. They shy away from acting protective of their partners in favor of egalitarian dynamics, which is flawed since men clearly have more physical strength. Oh, my God, this goes on and on. This is almost overwhelming me, but I think I can grapple with it. Oh, thank you. I swear I didn't plant this. She said, none of this has ever applied to you in case you're serious. Thank you for that one, by the way. She says, they're wimpy. They avoid relationships that require work and responsibility because they don't want to feel inadequate. They avoid difficult conversations and repair because they don't want to feel shame or guilt.

56:48Andrew Huberman:They avoid asking for anything explicitly because they don't want to feel obligated or complimenting a woman or giving her flowers or romance. They're all scared to do it. It's so odd. Anyway, that's it. That's all, huh? Okay, so I'm hearing that second part for the first time, the long part. And I have to say, if I were a 25-year-old guy now, I'd be like, whoa. Right. That's a lot. Okay. There's something there. They want me to bring flowers, be romantic, be affectionate. Clearly there's a, there's a reference towards being sexually proactive there. And yet assume responsibility, level up, be empathic.

57:28You know, I'm not trying to defend

57:30Andrew Huberman:or attack this person who's I'm close to in my life, but that's a lot. That's a, that's a, that's a tall building right there to scale for a guy who's trying to figure out how to work out three times a week get off porn. Anyway, I thought I'd share that and just get your reflections. I think that first off, I think that... We all have a set of insecurities around not living up, mostly because, again, I really do think big tech has had, while it's a net good, incredible economic growth, job growth, I connect with my buddies from college. I get to build a business and market it less expensively.

58:12I can break through voices that can bubble up just based on their talent. teen suicide has skyrocketed since social went on mobile. It's not the only reason, but it's either number one or number two, according to my colleague Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge at San Diego State. I don't believe there's any reason that anyone under the age of 16 should be on social media where they encourage, young girls are encouraged to sexualize themselves, where if they start having suicidal ideation, they are sent an email that says verbatim, here are some images on suicide we thought you might find interesting.

58:45But also it's created unreasonable expectations for a lot of young men and young women about what they need to look like. If they haven't made millions of dollars, if they aren't on a private jet going to Coachella, if they don't have a boyfriend with a six pack, if they don't look just amazing all the time. I think it creates tremendous anxiety and unreasonable expectations. But I do, you know, so I would argue that who's, okay, so who's at fault? We're at fault. in that as we keep hoping or waiting for the better angels of tech CEOs to show up, that's not going to happen. I've been working my whole life with CEOs.

59:19They're going to make incremental decisions to do whatever moves the stock price up. That's their job. That's capitalism. Their job is to take a set of resources, figure out an offering where they get more than they paid to garner those resources and create shareholder value. They will do anything to do that. That's their job. And then we're supposed to tax them such that we can build our roads, take care of our veterans, and have a set of laws so they don't get out of control, so that they don't lie and say, no, smoking's not addictive. And then our mothers, our sisters, and our dads start dying, right?

59:49We have regulation. We are net beneficiaries from fossil fuels and pesticides, but we still have an EPA and an FDA. There's absolutely no regulation on big tech. There's more regulation in this mic than there is on big tech, because they have weaponized Washington and money and Citizens United. There are more full-time lobbyists living in Washington, D.C., working for Amazon, one company, than there are sitting U.S. senators. So they have very effectively avoided all regulation to the point where they basically run unfettered, whether it's bots, whether it's harm to children, whether it's letting bad actors try and influence elections.

1:00:27and they, in my opinion, if your content can be reverse engineered to self-harm among teens, if your podcast, if we could prove statistically that your podcast was resulting in self-harm among teenage girls, this podcast would be shut down. You would be sued and you would eventually decide to go out of business. Yeah, well, if we were harming people, appropriately so. I would argue big tech does that and more every day. And these cases that just came down, actually, one in L.A. that found Google liable. Do you realize that the New Mexico attorney general, do you know what he did in his case? He created an account posing as a 12-year-old girl, and within minutes, he was getting messages and solicitations from known sexual abusers.

1:01:09That was their first piece of evidence, that if you create an account and you say you're a 12-year-old girl, within hours, they were getting overtures from known sexual predators. So the fact that this company can target you and know that I'm wearing Warby Parkers and start serving me ads by looking at the screen or know that I'm at Coachella listening to David Byrne and start serving me albums of David Byrne's greatest hits, then they can figure out that a 12-year-old girl shouldn't be getting overtures from 55-year-old men.

1:01:39Andrew Huberman:I'll bracket that sentence right there. Very fair and very important statement. that if there were some balance of optimization towards real protections, that that is important. But they made, I think,$11 billion last year from people under the age of 18. But you asked who's to blame? We're to blame because we haven't elected people who are willing to hold these companies accountable. And their sole mission is to get reelected. And in 97 % of elections, whoever raises the most money gets reelected. And these companies are now the fastest growing expense line amongst big tech, isn't AI? As a percentage basis, it isn't R &D, it isn't CapEx, it's lobbying.

1:02:18Because the greatest ROI in history is spending money on politicians. I give money to politicians because I'm getting more politically active. And it doesn't surprise me that they're whores. The most disappointing thing is what cheap whores they are. If I give$50 ,000 to a senator, he'll have dinner with me when he's in New York or she. Because they have to. because the system is set up such that whoever raises the most money gets elected, and big tech has figured that out. So until we have the judgment to elect people who are willing to stand up to big tech and actually implement safe and common sense regulation, I don't want them to go out of business.

1:02:56Let our thoroughbreds run. I actually believe the American model of less regulation versus more is one of the reasons we're much more successful than Europe, which hasn't grown in 20 years. But this has gotten to a point where we seem to have a total lack of regard for our children's well-being and the fact that Americans hate each other and that we're kind of eating ourselves from the inside out. So again, we need an EPA and an FDA or some sort of equivalent for big tech, especially with AI. But I want to acknowledge the point. None of this could have happened without fossil fuels. There is a trade-off here, right?

1:03:30Pesticides are important for our food safety, but there is an FDA. We have decided to just let big tech run unfettered. And I think it's been gotten to the point where it's pretty damaging for society. I think we've robbed kids. My kids are in the kill zone, 15 and 18. I think they've been robbed of a lot of their youth. I understand this shit. And I have a son who has device addiction who will lie, take his phone, say he doesn't feel well, take his phone into the bathroom for 45 minutes, and I have to bang on the door and jokingly scream, start masturbating, because this kid is addicted to TikTok.

1:04:03What the British did to the Chinese in terms of getting them addicted to opium, I think that the The Chinese, via poorest platforms that are shareholder-driven in the GRU, are addicting our youth. And we're going to raise a generation of civic nonprofit and military leaders who fucking hate America. We are teaching kids to hate each other, hate America, hate every special interest group, hate every ideology that doesn't fit their own. And there's no grace around what it means and how fortunate are we to be American. And I think at the center of it is a total lack of regulation amongst these incredibly brilliant companies.

1:04:39The most technologically sophisticated, deepest pocketed companies in the world are trying to sequester our youth from us. And they're stealing youth. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half the last 20 years. Men between the ages of 20 and 30 are spending less time outdoors, Andrew, than prison inmates. We are robbing youth because we refuse to regulate these companies. So do I want these companies to go away? Do I think they're bad people? No, but we have a system that values wealth and shareholder value above all. And so tech CEOs and their boards will make a series of incremental decisions regardless of the damage to the public.

1:05:20And we have a set of elected leaders that don't do their job, and that is they're there to prevent a tragedy of the commons. And it's Democrats and Republicans. So it comes down to very boring shit. Unless we reform Citizens United, unless we de-gerrymander the United States Congress, money is going to win. And these companies have more money. But no, I would push back. I think these companies are starting to do a lot of damage to our youth. I'm worried my kids are going to grow up so used to getting DOPA so easily and squeezing it so fast, and this is your field, that we're flushing into society a series of young people who are so ready for addiction because they're so used to getting an automatic dopa by just flipping out their phone really fast.

1:06:04One thing that I don't think I've emphasized enough on this podcast,

1:06:09Andrew Huberman:this and certainly not this, but other episodes as well, is a kind of reframe around the dopamine in phones. I'm not trying to correct you here, but I think it might be helpful for this discussion and for people listening to, we need to move our minds away from the idea that the phone is providing these dopamine hits because it's not. The behavior with social media, but phones generally is a lot more akin to true clinical grade obsessive compulsive disorder. Colleagues of mine that work on obsessive compulsive disorder, I just want to give a shout out to the pioneer of this field was a woman I just adored, Judith Rappaport.

1:06:47Andrew Huberman:She passed away recently. People We can look up her obit. There's a really nice one in the Times. Identified the brain structures associated with this thing that we call OCD, right? Hand washing, scratching, hair pulling, you know, all the variations of it. What defines obsessive compulsive disorder is that the engagement in the behavior, the compulsion, doesn't relieve the obsession. So to call someone OCD because they need everything perfect, but then when it's perfect, they're like, okay, I can relax. That's not OCD. OCD is when you engage in a compulsive behavior over and over again, and all it does is serve to reinforce the obsession.

1:07:22Andrew Huberman:That, to me, more closely mimics what I see in terms of phone use than the idea that it's like, no way, this amazing thing on the phone. That comes every once in a while. But after you've spent a day or so on social media or on YouTube, we are all engaging in a much more passive, slow degradation kind of way that I'm sure impacts the dopamine pathway. In fact, OCD is directly tied to the dopamine pathway, so I'm not divorcing it from dopamine. But I think if we started to look at our relationship to the phone as more of an induced obsessive compulsive disorder than an addiction, I actually think that's one of the potential ways out.

1:08:01Not just because words matter and concepts matter, but because I think in order to get out of that loop, you have to see yourself from the outside and you have to realize that you're being hijacked.

1:08:12Andrew Huberman:I think right now there's just so much incentive for being on it, for being in the bathroom, looking at the phone. Look, I'm not addicted to my phone, but I will tell you there are days when I feel like I pick up that thing even though I don't want to. Yeah. And that's different than addiction. I know what addiction feels like. That's not addiction. That's happening just reflexively. People aren't even thinking about it. The lack of awareness is just not there. So forgive me for going on this tangent, but as you're saying everything today, I'm trying to think solutions. And I know Mark. I actually am friendly with Mark.

1:08:47Andrew Huberman:So I think they care. I do think they care. I think they've created something so big that it's very hard to navigate and keep up with shareholders and all this stuff. But I would love to see the world's relationship to their phones and social media change so that it is more in our individual control, more benevolent. But that's against their economic interests, and they'll fight that tooth and nail. But I wonder if there is a way to incentivize that. Well, let's talk about that. I'm trying to think of solutions. So let's move to solutions. One, antitrust. I don't think Meta should have ever been allowed to buy Instagram.

1:09:22I think their ability, their scale of data suppresses any formidable competitor. Two-thirds of all social media now goes to one company. And with a lack of competition, there's really no oxygen for a company that might say, we're not going to allow 18-year-olds on here. Any content that's incendiary, anything that looks like it's been weaponized by bots or might be from a bad foreign actor, we're not going to allow it. I think there's a lot of parents and a lot of people who would like to be on that platform. The game's over. They've won. I don't think Google should have been allowed to buy YouTube.

1:09:50And people say, well, they're great companies. If YouTube was divested from Google, the next day YouTube would decide to start a basic search algorithm and Google would start another video platform and we'd have two competitors. and there'd be lower rents on labor and on advertisers. Competition is an amazing thing. These companies are a set of distinct monopolies that extract rents from labor, from the consumer, and from the well-being of America. So antitrust, Senator Klobuchar has done great work here. Basically, she says, I'm overrun. She's like, I got a staff of 60 people. There are 200 lawyers hired by Meta and Facebook who are doing nothing but getting in the way of anything to do with antitrust and giving money to people who will delay and obfuscate anything around antitrust.

1:10:33Two, removal of Section 230 for algorithmically elevated content. Their basic premise is we're not a media company. We're just a platform. We're just putting stuff on a board. Well, okay, but if you decide this content gets more views, they elevate it. They make the decision to elevate it. And sometimes the content they elevate is not good for the mental health of America. It tears at the fabric of America. I think if you algorithmically elevate content, you should be subject to the same liability as, say, News Corp. When News Corp and Fox told its on-air anchors to repeat a lie that they knew was a lie, that Smartmatic voting machines had been weaponized by Hugo Chavez and they knew it was a lie, and then Smartmatic sues them and says, you caused this economic harm, they had to pay$750 million fine.

1:11:26What happened on Fox was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud of what happened on Facebook that day. But these nascent platforms, which in 1997 we were trying to give them running room, those protections are in place for tech platforms that are not in place for media companies. So if you algorithmically elevate content, you are now a media company. You should be subject to the same liability as every other media company. And then finally, three, age gate this shit. The downside of Instagram and YouTube for 15-year-olds is way greater than the upside. And people who say to me, Scott, this is about parenting, that's a tell for they don't have kids.

1:12:04This is where they get their homework. And my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter, who also has an appointment at the psychology department, said when you take kids off of screens totally, it actually is more damaging to their mental health because they're ostracized from all social activity. So, and what's happened, the greatest uptick in school scores in recent history is when they do what my buddy Jonathan Haidt suggests these schools do, and they ban their phones. So I think there are common sense solutions. They keep a lot of the good stuff these companies do while recognizing, well, maybe a 14-year-old shouldn't be spending seven hours a day on TikTok or Instagram while his or her single mother is at work and can't police it.

1:12:45So I think there are common sense solutions in a meeting of the minds here. But everything I propose, they will spend tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to get in the way of and make sure it never happens again.

1:12:56Andrew Huberman:I really appreciate your answer. I like to think that they are listening, especially in the wake of these recent lawsuits where they had to pay out, granted, a drop in the ocean compared to their total revenue. But those were very public cases. And maybe I'm overly optimistic. I like to think that they care enough to pay attention. I mean, look, many of those guys, it's mostly guys running those companies now. YouTube used to be a woman, but now almost all of them are run by guys. They have kids. I can guarantee their kids don't spend a ton of time on their phones. They send them to schools who are not allowed to be on screens.

1:13:29Right. They're doing their job. We're not doing ours. I don't even kind of resent them. I think Mark Zuckerberg has been especially damaging, but they're doing their job. Capitalist society has to have for-profit companies that, within the bounds of law, make a lot of money. Look, you can't have a Navy. You can't have innovation. You can't have parks unless you have the tax revenue to support this shit. So we need our thoroughbreds to run. They're great companies. But there's basic common sense regulation that should be applied that they've managed to delay and obfuscate and ensure it never happens to them.

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1:15:15Andrew Huberman:Glad you mentioned the Navy. Recently, I was invited out to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and had the privilege of giving a talk to 4 ,000 midshipmen, which includes both young men and women. It was an amazing experience. I'll tell you this. A guy who's been a guest on this podcast was the one that organized this. Coleman Ruiz has amazing life stories. He's not particularly public facing, but amazing story of his own life. And, okay, so you go there. And all these young men and women are, of course, in their, you know, cadet fatigues and going about. They live two to a dorm room. They do PT, physical activity, every morning at 5 a.m.

1:15:55Andrew Huberman:Lunch was the most incredible experience. It's you walk into a dining hall with thousands of men and women, tons of noise. A bell goes off. Everyone's quiet. Everyone sits down. A bell goes off. Everyone starts eating. 15 minutes later, bell goes off. Everyone stands up and walks out. Everyone has to play a sport competitively. Everyone there is forbidden from using their phone most all of the day and night. One member of this dorm room might be studying while their roommate is sleeping. Every single question was about how to be a better human being physically, mentally, emotionally. And this visit was right in the early days of the recent war with Iran.

1:16:43Andrew Huberman:So they have a lot to worry about. And they're very close to all these things. A young woman came up to me and told me that she's part of the space program, the military space program. Amazing. Like just a complete contrast to everything that we're talking about. I thought to myself, like, goodness, like these people, young people like this still exist. Yeah. All firm handshakes, all eye contact. And by the way, every color you could possibly imagine. Every color you could possibly imagine. You know, every stature you could possibly imagine. Every income class. I would ask people, where are you from?

1:17:18Andrew Huberman:You know, part of the meet and greet. The problem was they were like, you know, my problem is I actually want to know about where people are from, what their name is, what they're interested in. It can just take days, right? But it was incredible. And I thought to myself, okay, there's hope. Like we came out of there. Our team was like, yeah, like there's hope. Okay, it's associated with the military. I'm sure people will scratch at that point. But like thank God that these kids and this thing that we call the Navy exists because it was so inspiring. It made me level up as a 50-year-old man who thinks these guys shit mostly together, emphasis on mostly.

1:17:54Andrew Huberman:I was like, whoa, I like step it up. Now, probably their only quote-unquote flaw was I did a poll. There were a lot of questions about nicotine. And I asked approximately what percentage of the room takes nicotine every day. And I would say about 20 % to 30 % of the hands in the room went up. Nicotine is a major use in young people. Are they using the? The oral nicotines, yeah. Which, by the way, don't cause cancer. But yes, it's very addictive, raise blood pressure. And, you know, I'm not encouraging people to do it. But this brings me around to a separate point. I just wanted to kind of paint that picture.

1:18:24Andrew Huberman:But to a separate point, you and I have never had a public argument, nor are we going to now, about alcohol or about cannabis. But you and I share somewhat different views on alcohol. I've been very vocal. And perhaps our most popular episode ever was the episode on alcohol. I didn't foresee that. But and the deal is zero is better than any. if we're strictly looking at health. Two per week is probably fine. If you're going to drink more, you should probably do a bunch of other things to reduce inflammation and offset it and get good sleep and et cetera, et cetera. I'm not telling people what to do.

1:18:58Andrew Huberman:They should just know what they're doing. You've made the argument quite aptly that alcohol can be an important social lubricant for young and older people so that they can socialize and have a life. I worry that if young people now drink more, they're going to end up drinking alone. They're going to end up masturbating into porn more alone. They're going to end up with more hangovers after all their alone behavior. I think what you've argued for is the notion of healthy fraternity, healthy dating and socializing. You've mentioned bars a couple of times, alcohol as something that can bring people together in a positive way.

1:19:40Andrew Huberman:If you don't mind, if you could elaborate on that, and maybe I'll just toss out cannabis as another one, because cannabis has problems, and I'll acknowledge benefits of its own. So I want to go to the first thing. First is I want to just touch on Navy. I went to Annapolis when I was 17. It was because my dad was looking to get out of paying for college and decided I should go to Annapolis. And he took me, and we did a tour. And, you know, we were very sophisticated. and it became so clear so fast that I was totally unqualified for Annapolis. Like the kids, the average SAT, these are the finest young men and women in the world.

1:20:19And also you have to get a recommendation from a senator and it was just so ridiculous that we were even there. I was just not of that quality and that standard but my dad was in the Royal Navy and decided go to Annapolis because we don't have to pay for it. Anyways, but that was the last time I was at Annapolis. But if I could have one policy, So I'm advising a lot of Democrats running for president, which is like 40 of them right now, who all claim they're not running. They're all running. If you call me and say you're really interested in my viewpoint, it means you want my money and you're running for president.

1:20:47And I just say, look, that's fine. Come on the podcast and I'll write you a check. If I could have one policy, one blanket, if I had a magic one, one policy, it'd be mandatory national service. If you look at the lowest levels of young adult depression in the West, it's two countries. It's Israel and Singapore. and despite all the existential threats facing Israel, what does mandatory national service do? It gives you the sense that you're serving the agency of something bigger than yourself. It gives you purpose. You're handling dangerous equipment. It's the great equalizer. You don't care that this gay kid is totally different than you.

1:21:22You respond to his or her character and competence, because if you're getting fired on, you don't give a shit how rich their father is. All you want to know is, is this person good at what they do? and you put people's lives in your hands and they put their life in your hands and you're serving in the agency of something bigger than yourself. I spent time with an IDF battalion in Israel and had the same kind of experience, it sounds like, you had at Annapolis. These are young, beautiful, fit people outside all day meeting friends, mentors, and mates. In Singapore, the president there, who's arguably one of the greatest leaders of the last century, said this is the most religiously diverse society in the world.

1:22:01we're going to have ethnic violence. There'll be a strong man who will weaponize this diversity and get people to turn against each other. So we need a different religion, and it's going to be the flag. And we need to get people praying to the flag again. And if you look at the great legislation in America in the 60s and 70s, which was probably the most productive, unified time in America, it's because many of our elected leaders had all served in the same uniform, and they saw themselves as Americans before they saw themselves as Republicans or Democrats. And I'm not just saying military service, senior care, donating time at a no-kill animal shelter, being a smoke jumper.

1:22:36There's a lot of ways to serve. But I think young Americans would benefit so enormously from getting outside of their own circle and seeing just how wonderful America and Americans are. And having a chance. And not only that, people say, well, it's easy for you to say you've aged out. I can tell you as a father of boys, if we set it up well and invested in it, I think they would really enjoy a rotation through different parts of America and different opportunities to serve. So the one thing I would do going back to Annapolis and the IDF and what they do in Singapore is mandatory national service on drinking.

1:23:11First, my acknowledgement as it relates to the intake of any substance, if it's Andrew Huberman or Scott Galloway, defer to Andrew Huberman's advice. I just want to say that up front. You just have the qualifications and the domain expertise here. I think personally, the risk to a 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation. And I worry that with 40 % fewer pubs now post-COVID in Britain and a lack of mating and a lack of connection, that the data I've seen, and correct me if I'm wrong, that 95 % of people are able to integrate alcohol and drugs into their life without serious consequences.

1:23:48If you have a history of addiction, if you, for whatever reason, don't enjoy it, then by all means, avoid it. If people are telling you that you're having an issue or a problem or it's getting the way of your work life or you're one of those people that gets violent or mean under the influence, then for God's sakes, tone it down. But what I ask people is to look back on their younger days and say, what is the most important thing in your life? Relationships, friendships, finding someone to mate with. and I asked them, did alcohol play a role? You know, it's not easy to come in and lean in for a kiss without a glass of wine.

1:24:22Or let me put it this way, it is easier with a glass of wine. It's a lot of fun. I smoked a lot of pot and I drank a lot of alcohol in my 20s and in college and it created a lot of wonderful bonding moments. And so what I'm saying, there's a balance and a trade-off. And what I would suggest is that everyone needs to make their own decision. But what scares me is the anti-alcohol movement in remote work has led to a level of isolation and fewer moments where people can bond, where people are willing to take a risk and go up to a strange person and say, hey, what's going on? So I worry that the anti-alcohol movement, what I see among young people is that while they've demonized alcohol, it's not that they're not getting high.

1:25:01They're just doing a shit ton of drugs. And the thing I don't like about many of these drugs is that they're more solo activity or small group activity. I think alcohol is a group of people, I like to think, meeting new strangers. Whereas when I was in college, all the dudes who were doing cocaine, it was because they had no sexual currency and they would sequester a woman who liked cocaine and go into a bathroom. That's creepy as fuck. Totally creepy as fuck. And eventually everyone's like, if a dude's into cocaine, it means he has no game. I find with people when they do drugs, it's a small group of people and they sequester and it's isolating, whereas with alcohol, and to a certain extent with marijuana, I found, it's more social and more bonding.

1:25:40So absolutely be cognizant of your addiction history. Absolutely be mindful of that or any other substance you're addicted to. But I believe, and I've said this, I've said this on Bill Maher a bunch, and I've gotten some shit, but I think there's some truth here. I think young people need to drink more, go out and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off. I don't think there's anything wrong with some alcohol. I worry that the risks of loneliness far outweigh the risks of alcohol and that alcohol has been demonized as something that if you take one drink of alcohol, you're going to get cancer or you're going to become an addict.

1:26:16And I don't think the data is there to support that.

1:26:19Andrew Huberman:I really appreciate the candid expression of where you stand. I agree that isolation is worse than alcohol and it's compounded by alcohol. So to make that point clear, I went to UC Santa Barbara. We majored in drinking. Speaking of alcohol. It was like, it was part of the general education. I remember they had sand in the dorms. I'm like, why didn't I go to school here? Well, you know, it did select for alcoholism if people had that predisposition and you had to be disciplined to get your work done. You know, my messaging around alcohol was, it was intended to land in three places. One, people who don't like drinking, but felt that they had to got a great reason to not drink.

1:26:59Andrew Huberman:Many, many people wrote to me and said, thank you. I always feel like garbage after drinking. I don't want to drink. Now I understand why I feel like garbage. It's not that I was casting it toward a particular age group, but there are many people who hit their forties or fifties and they're like, God, I'm aging fast. And I look like shit and I sleep like shit. And my workouts are no good. And you might be drinking too much. Right. And And then there are the optimizers. There are people that are really just going for maximum vitality, not just longevity, but maximum vitality, which is to me one of the most important things.

1:27:31Andrew Huberman:In any case, people should do as they wish but know what they're doing, provided they're not harming anyone else. There's one thing that I want to kind of, you know, lump in with this discussion about alcohol and your statement, which on the top contour I totally agree with. Go out, drink, and make a few bad decisions and probably some good ones. Bad-ish. Bad-ish, right. So this is the thing, phones. Somebody says the wrong thing. They loosen up too much. Now it's not a problem. Three years ago, you might be sitting in front of HR. Your classmates might isolate you, right? You were in a fraternity.

1:28:06Andrew Huberman:I wasn't in a fraternity. I grew up in the fraternity of skateboarding, punk rock music, and just the fraternity of Y chromosomes. Guys drink, they start saying stupid shit. With phones around, stupid shit is recorded. When stupid shit is recorded, it can be very harmful. And when you're drinking, you make less filtered decisions about what to say than when you're not drinking. So I'm not pushing back in that sense, but I could understand why a guy in his 20s or 30s would be afraid. A guy that would never, ever, ever push himself on a woman, let alone something far worse. Would never, ever drug somebody or anything.

1:28:41Andrew Huberman:So I'm not talking about the Bill Cosby examples of this. I'm talking about the fear that exists in a lot of young guys and probably should exist in a lot of young women too nowadays based on what we've observed in cancel culture. In particular, I'm just going to say a lot of white women are afraid of the Karen movement, right? That if they say anything, I think even beloved Billie Eilish, whose music I love, was called out for something. She did a sort of impersonation of an Asian person at some point. Always going to happen to famous people. Right? Okay, always going to happen, right? Yeah. But people see famous people get into these situations.

1:29:14Andrew Huberman:They go, oh, my gosh. So do I think Billie Eilish is a racist? No. And I love her music. And she was mortified and she apologized. But it's enough to make people go. 100%. And like maybe I just stay in my room and like scroll on Instagram. So you can kind of get why the fear of drinking might also compound some of this social media stuff that we're talking about. Yeah. So I want to acknowledge the point. I would like to say our hope that at some point, I'm really glad a camera wasn't following me around 24 by 7 when I was 18. I can't imagine. That one time you said that one dumb thing, right? I just can't imagine.

1:29:53What I do think we are headed to, though, I'd like to think, is that in an era of social media and phones, that slowly but surely we're heading to a point of more grace where we forgive people, especially young people. So, and there's been a bunch of movements where a lot of young people did things I really disagreed with on campus after October the 7th. I was less angry at them than some of the faculty because I'm like, I cut an 18-year-old a lot of grace, right? Or I try to. The thing I would push back on is that I think there's certain looking glasses into people's soul and how they treat their pets and how they behave when they're drunk.

1:30:28And what I find is for people who, for every person who would say something stupid, there's more people when they get drunk who say, you know, I just think you're wonderful. I'm so impressed by you. Or walk up to a woman and say, I just love your dress. Or God, you have such a beautiful smile. Or just walk up to her to begin with and say, and express interest. Expressing interest to someone is a wonderful thing. Or do you want to dance? Yeah, it says, I saw you and by the way you move and the way you smile, well, I want you, I'm interested in you. That's a wonderful fucking thing. And so my sense is that for every negative thing, it may, of course, increase someone's, if someone's bad judgment is revealed in an awful way, they've got bigger problems than alcohol.

1:31:16What it also does is lower inhibitions. And I generally think the majority of people are good people. And I have found that the majority of my friends And the majority of people I'm with, when they have a little bit of alcohol, it lowers their inhibitions. And they're more likely to hug you. And they're more likely to say how much they appreciate the friendship. You know, when I was younger, I don't know if you ever did this, when I had a few drinks, I used to call my mom, you know, and tell her how much she meant to me. Don't let my mom hear that, please. But I think that alcohol, to a certain extent, without getting into issues of abuse, which are much bigger, lowers your inhibitions.

1:31:54But you get to see, to a certain extent, that real person. And I know a lot of people will say, well, that's pathetic that you have to be the real you under the influence. But I think a lot of people reveal some wonderful things about themselves and also have the courage to reveal those things to other people. And I worry that there's so many barriers now that people, young people, just aren't connecting. So I just want to acknowledge the point. I think you have to be really cognizant. It's not a great idea unless you know you can handle alcohol to drink at work, at a professional function. It can fuck up your whole career.

1:32:25Andrew Huberman:Oh, I mean, one thing that I observed coming up through the academic ranks, and that just, I could not believe it, that at every gathering where you have graduate students and faculty members and postdocs, it was like the happy hour was like sort of the highlight of the meeting for many people. And it became the place where, in theory, Everyone meets at the bar to talk about the data from the day, right? Like these meetings. In reality, 90 % of the problems that existed between faculty and students and postdocs and faculty and faculty that were independently married and all that stuff, alcohol facilitated that.

1:33:01Andrew Huberman:I really believe that. I saw it over and over and over again. It caused a lot of problems. Caused an immense number of problems, and it was funded by grants. I mean, I'm a big proponent of trying to – And I have worked very, very hard on the phone to try and keep NIH funding, at least to not getting cut. And it looks like it hasn't. To not get the indirects cut, this is kind of academic inside ball stuff. But it looks like it could be far better. But at least the cuts that were going to happen didn't happen. So the NIH funded my career. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the NIH. I had grants, reviewed grants, et cetera.

1:33:33Andrew Huberman:But the idea that you could spend money on alcohol way back when and then people were gathering around alcohol, It created a lot of problems. Now, students drinking with other students, less of an issue. Well, let me propose something to get your reaction. I think they should study and thoughtfully consider lowering the drinking age back to 18. I live in the UK. I'd see by your face where this is going. I live in the UK. Military, drinking age 18. I mean, I like some of the things. Well, if you're in the military, you can drink under the age of 21. Because the idea is that if you're going to die for your country, you should be able, you're adult enough to order a drink.

1:34:06Andrew Huberman:At least the logic is there. That makes sense, right? But in the UK, if you're with an adult at a meal, you can order a beer at 17. And even without an adult at the age of 18 in a pub, you can order a beer. And when my son comes home, he doesn't do it as often as I would like. But when my son comes home on the weekends from boarding school, I like to take him to a local pub and we have a beer. And I found out that after one beer, he's more inclined to tell me a little bit about what's going on with him. And as a father, all you really want, you just really want conversation with your kids. You want to know what's going on with them.

1:34:37And so he doesn't get drunk. He's not into alcohol. He listens to you. He listens to other people. He's very wary of it. But I find that easing young men and young women into alcohol as opposed to 21, and then they kind of go, I don't know. I wonder if we should be lowering their drinking age. And the reason we raised it was Mothers Against Drunk Driving were very effective and very on point because of all the young people who were dying in automobile accidents. I remember that era. I think it's gone way down because of Uber and because of airbags. So I'm proposing would it make sense to do a study on whether you'd have more social connection and perhaps less alcoholism later in life if you let kids ease into it at the age of 18?

1:35:18And if they can be drafted, we're now trying to get, you know, the administration is proposing they be drafted. So if a kid can be drafted, shouldn't he or she have the judgment to know when they can order a beer or not?

1:35:29Andrew Huberman:All great arguments. I didn't know we were going to end up. Well, I mean, you talk about cannabis. Yeah. I want to get your view. Yeah. I smoked a shit ton of pot in college. I could make a bong out of any household item. I learned every line from Planet of the Apes. You know how to make a pipe out of an apple. That's like a 90s trick. Dude, that's sophomore. I can go much better than that. Anyways, but then 22, got a job at Morgan Stanley, got very focused on getting my shit together, and I basically didn't smoke for 20 or 25 years. Now I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble winding my brain down, and I take edibles.

1:36:01I do edibles probably twice a week. if I'm amped or think I'm going to have a tough time sleeping, I'll take a five milligram edible, the stuff that takes you down. I forget which one that is. And it's been an enhancement to my life. But I'm reading a lot of stuff about potential psychosis or whatever. Not for you.

1:36:18Andrew Huberman:You're like the psychosis predisposition doesn't apply. You would already know. You'd be psychotic by now. There you go. Yeah. Or I just haven't acknowledged it. But it's been accretive to my life. I really enjoy THC. And I do it packaged so I know where it's come from. I like edibles because I like the dosing of it. But I would argue that THC is something. When my mom had stomach cancer, I was living with her. And the only thing that worked for her nausea was marijuana. And I found myself literally, Andrew, on the streets of downtown Las Vegas trying to score marijuana because I was too scared to travel with it.

1:36:56And this was July of 2004. and I thought, Jesus Christ, here I am on a street corner in this weird place in Vegas trying to score marijuana for my mom who has stomach cancer. So, you know, I think there's some benefits to, well, I'll stop there. The THC usage, I enjoy. I think it's been added into my life.

1:37:17Andrew Huberman:I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells.

1:37:50Andrew Huberman:Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an element packet dissolved in it. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors.

1:38:20Andrew Huberman:In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. Yeah. I think with THC, it's highly individual. Young males in particular who have a predisposition, genetic predisposition to psychosis or bipolar disorder need to be really careful, especially with high concentration THC, not just the edibles, but they do need to be careful.

1:38:53Andrew Huberman:I think that young, again, mostly young men who are challenged with apathy, obesity, self-loathing, porn, masturbation, addiction, shouldn't be using THC. I think high agency, that seems to be the term nowadays, right? The guys that you mentor a year in who are working out three times a week and they have a goal and they're hopefully seeking or in a relationship, they have a different self view of themselves. And yeah, I don't see why that couldn't be a part of their week. It'll nuke their REM sleep, you know, to be specific, if they come off, their dreams are going to be wild because they'll get more REM sleep.

1:39:36Andrew Huberman:But creatives, there are a number of creatives who can use it appropriately to increase focus, get them out of anxiety or get them to cope with anxiety. And then there's just as many people that take it and it makes them incredibly anxious. So I think it's sort of on what backdrop? And I think the alcohol thing also is on what backdrop? If somebody's overweight, not working out, you know, a guy in their 20s or 30s that's dealing with, let's just paint a picture here. He's like playing video games. He's not like morbidly obese or anything, but he's like kind of overweight and he feels like shit.

1:40:07Andrew Huberman:He shouldn't be drinking and smoking weed. He should be going to the gym and get himself in shape and then maybe have a couple beers a week with his buddy. So the context really matters. Well, I would argue never do substances alone. And during the week, try not to do substances if you've got to be on point the next day. that it's something to be, you know, it's a recreation. The thing I'm curious to get your take on is one of the things I'm working with some young men on is I think the most under-researched addiction is porn. And my fear is that, I mean, if you look at what, again, I go back to big tech.

1:40:41Big tech's trying to convince young men, why go through the pecking order and the effort of trying to develop a friend group when you have Reddit and Discord? Why go through the bullshit of putting on a tie and trying to go into the office and make a good living and navigate the corporate world when you think you can make money trading stocks or crypto on Robinhood or Coinbase? And why would you go through the effort, the expense, the potential rejection of trying to have a kindness practice, look good, work out, endure rejection, all the expenditures of going out and trying to get a date when you have lifelike porn?

1:41:18And I'll use myself as an example. When I was at UCLA, I graduated from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA, which isn't easy because it means you almost, I failed nine classes, right? And I still graduated. And by the way, talk about a different age. We're both children of the University of California, UC San Diego. Talk about how blessed we are. Talk about how, just what winds, hurricane-like winds we had in our sales of prosperity. When I applied to UCLA, admissions rate was 74%. Now it's nine. Graduated at 2.27. You know what happened? Berkeley let me into graduate school with a 2.27 GPA. But anyways, back to UCLA.

1:41:53One of my motivators for going on campus was that there was a non-zero probability that I might meet a woman, establish contact with her, see my buddies, maybe get her to a fraternity party or get her to go on a date with me, and maybe at some point be physical with her. That was an enormous motivator for me. If I had lifelike porn on my phone, on my computer screen 24 by 7, I don't know if I would have been is motivated to go on campus as much. And there was little margin for error in terms of going on campus a few less times. And I worry that that mojo, that desire to quite frankly go out and make your own bad porn is being reduced so much with lifelike porn that men aren't evolving into risk-taking, aggressive in a positive way men who are motivated to dress well, to work out, to approach strange women, to go through.

1:42:45I mean, it is hard. It is hard to find a partner. And what I say to these men is, welcome to the fucking work week. It's been hard forever. That's the whole point. Women are choosier than men, and there's a reason, right? We're trying to spread our seed to the four corners of the earth. They put up a much finer screen to pick the smartest, fastest, and strongest seed, and that's the reason why our kids are going to be smarter and taller than us. That's the way of the world. But when you reduce that desire, it's going to get in the way of not only you finding a mate, but developing the skills to be successful in all other parts of your life.

1:43:14So back to the basic premise, I wonder and worry if porn is the most under-researched addiction and the damage it's having on young men. Because what I see amongst my colleagues, and I'd be curious if I actually spoke to a really thoughtful woman about this who's an addiction professor at Stanford. I'm sure you know her. I forget her name. Anna Lemke. Anna Lemke. Yeah, she runs our dual diagnosis. Fantastic. Amazing woman, amazing human being. Immediately when we got off the podcast, said to me, if your marijuana ever becomes a problem, just call me. And she was sincere. That's totally Anna. Do you sense it?

1:43:48I mean, she's the real deal. I'm like, do you sense it's a problem? I'm like, hold me, Anna. Anyways, but I don't think there's enough really good research out there on porn because I don't think people want to be known as the porn professor. And so I worry that we really don't know the impact. And what I see anecdotally is that I see a lot of young men who don't have that healthy fire because they think that they can just, they think, oh, it's like in the last 20 years, the guys who didn't have their own game or didn't want to be that successful, they would go to some low-income country and basically become sexpats.

1:44:23This has become, I think, a much broader version of that, that rather than level up, you'd rather just sit home and get a reasonable facsimile of a relationship or sex with porn. I wonder if that is more damaging than people estimate right now.

1:44:40Andrew Huberman:Yeah, it's a really important topic. And it's one that people contact me about all the time. Your analogy of what's happening with porn to sexpats, we should probably explain. Expats are people that leave the United States. I'm not sure everyone's going to follow that one. And sexpats are this community of people that I think they go to Southeast Asia or something. And where they can, or South America, where they can essentially buy whatever experience they want. In general, I have to assume, I've truly never done this, nor do I have any interest, but I have to assume that these are men who just basically figure, well, that's low effort once they have the money.

1:45:15Andrew Huberman:And real dating, real sex, if I may, you know, is it takes some work and it takes some learning. And, you know, especially if you want to be told genuinely good job and know that it's true, it's going to take you're going to you have to get some reps in there. So put your ego on the line, learn to communicate, learn to listen, all that stuff. The idea that porn is is the much broader and more destructive analogous thing, I think, is bullseye. The moment you said I'm like, I think people need to hear that. Do you want to be that guy? I think with any behavioral change, you know, the neuroscientist in me says, okay, we have circuits for kind of like things that are aversive to us.

1:45:57Andrew Huberman:Like you have to engage the aversion and you have to engage the appetitive aspect, right? Like so that there's a win and then there's something to avoid. I really think in order to get any real behavioral change, you need to push away from something and towards something else. Okay. So I think that porn, I mean, it's our most fundamental wiring. The two circuits in the brain that really crank out dopamine, okay? Circuits for reproduction, sex, and anger. There's this incredible study by a very controversial guy named Robert Heath in the 1960s. He was a neurosurgeon who would stimulate different areas of the brain.

1:46:32Andrew Huberman:And unfortunately, he was into conversion therapy. So, you know, he appropriately got run out of science for trying to make gay people straight by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Good luck with that. Yeah. He was kind of a piece of shit person. But again, let's look at what he did separate from that. Immediately, people were like, I don't care about his data. But he gave people with electrodes in their brain, in certain studies, the option to stimulate anywhere they wanted. They could stimulate and get sexual arousal. They could get laughter. They could feel drunk. All the things we're talking about, really.

1:46:59Andrew Huberman:They could feel soothing of the sort that their mother was holding them. The area that they chose to stimulate the most is in the central midline nucleus of the thalamus, an area that my lab has spent a lot of time on in other situations. and they would just lever press and lever press and lever press for the feeling of mild frustration and anger. Because the arousal associated with it is its own reinforcement. As a student of mine who's now hopefully soon to be a faculty member, I won't name the university, but she has an offer from a phenomenal university. Her name is Lindsay Soleil, and she's worked on this in a very, very mechanistic way.

1:47:34Andrew Huberman:When we're angry, when we're frustrated, the link to the dopamine circuitry is just pounded out we just all day long and what's amazing is it doesn't attenuate there's no threshold for anger the more angry you get the more frustrated you get the more arousal you feel from that you never satiate there's no post-coital bliss there's no my belly is so full i feel like i'm going to going to explode and so this gets to the social media thing too that's the circuit that i worry about and i think that's the circuit that yes i think tech, big tech has tapped into whether they want to or not. And I think that that's the one we really have to be careful of.

1:48:12Andrew Huberman:And, and I've experienced it myself. I think I actually, in this moment, I'm experiencing a little bit of it, like that kind of arousal of like, yes, the forward center of mass that we feel, but when it's fuck them, like fuck the Republicans and, you know, or fuck the left or the extreme. Well, I mean, that's, people are just high all day long on their own anger and frustration. And I think we just see it everywhere. And I raised my hand, I'm sure I'm guilty of this at times too. Yeah, that's illuminating because I correlate my anger to a pathway to feeling depressed. I struggle with anger and depression and it usually starts as something triggers me.

1:48:48I get really angry and then I feel like my blood turns to some sort of corrosive acid and it just wears me down. That's adrenaline. And I'm just depleted. I'm just depleted for two or three days. So I was, I have a practice around trying to calm my anger, but Just hearing you say that occasionally on one of my podcasts, when I see something that's inherently wrong and I point it out or ingest, I do feel like a rush, like I'm being a leader or a baller or pointing something out. You are.

1:49:15Andrew Huberman:I mean, I will say, you know, testosterone, a conversation we've had a little bit before offline, at the level of the brain, it makes effort feel good. Anyway, I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent, but I'd like your thoughts about how testosterone can be leveraged for good versus bad. And maybe even, I don't know that we put everyone on testosterone. I'm not suggesting that it can nuke your fertility if you don't do other things to offset it. So kids, be careful. But what are your thoughts on testosterone and just sort of proactive male behavior, testosterone in adults, older generations taking testosterone?

1:49:53Well, I'm one of them. I'm on T-therapy, and I do it because I quite frankly want to feel younger. It makes me stronger in the gym, better erections, even weird things like my skin. The way I would describe T-therapy is it just kind of took me back three or five years in the gym. So I'm an advocate for it. You should do it under the guidance of a doctor, which I'm doing, but I'm a fan of it. And I think you've done really interesting work about hormone replacement theory. I've listened to a lot of your work on it. And the argument around testosterone and masculinity, I think, is a really important one in the political spectrum.

1:50:25Because to the far right's credit, they recognize the problem with young men before anybody else. The problem is they conflate masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. And their solution was to take non-whites and women back to the 50s.

1:50:38Andrew Huberman:Some of them. I'm not trying to protect them. But I would say, you know, I don't know his political leanings. But my friend Jocko Willink has daughters. He's not that guy you just described. No, I'm talking about the far right. Far right. I'm talking about whether it's Donald Trump or, you know, quote unquote, the traditional manosphere. It's about the subordination of women. And it's about demonstrating a certain harshness and coarseness, and I would argue cruelty, and conflating that with masculinity. Whereas the far left, and this isn't helpful either, their advice to young men is to act more like a woman and that they conflate masculinity with toxicity.

1:51:12And there has to be something in the middle. There has to be an aspirational form of masculinity. And I would argue that we need to celebrate that initiation, aggressiveness. All right. You know, Jimmy Carr, who's one of my idols now, says, all right, you can demonstrate cruelty or you can demonstrate valor. You can be a lover or you can be an addict. And Richard Reeves has this great saying. He's like, you want a man to be invaluable in a shipwreck but acceptable at a dance. So there is a certain needle to be threaded here. But the Carnegie Award, which is given out to people who put their own physical safety in danger to save someone else's physical safety.

1:51:50It's literally the running into a burning house award. You see a car on fire, you put your own safety in harm's way to try and protect someone else's physical well-being. They gave it 83 awards last year. 75 of them are men. Men are more prone to take those types of not only bad risks but good risks. And we need to celebrate that. Now, you need both. You need both, by the way, on the combat field, because men are more likely to rush out and try and save their comrade. But women are more likely to say, let's not be stupid. Let's think this through. You need both of those. I mean, this is the great thing, is that both energy, when they come together, make a better world.

1:52:26But we seem to be very suspicious of that masculine energy right now. And I think it needs to be celebrated. There needs to be someone who sees movement in the tribe and immediately grabs the spear and goes and tries and kill it for the benefit of the community. who wants to put people on Mars and makes these crazy, ridiculous investments that make no sense and is super aggressive around these things. I think that's a wonderful energy. And when I went to the Democratic National Convention, I saw a parade of special interest groups talking about the very real issues they all face, but I didn't see one mention of the group that has fallen further faster than any group in recent history, and that is young men.

1:53:06Andrew Huberman:Well, I think that's because based on the feedback I've received, for instance, when we had Terry Reel on the podcast, who talks about some balance of masculine and feminine phenotypes and therapy and partner-partner communication and these kinds of things, the pushback that I always get for, or I got there, not because of Terry specifically, was as long as we can't talk about toxic femininity, these were clearly men writing to me, then this whole discussion feels imbalanced. That's how they feel. They feel like there's this idea that they're good men and they're bad men and they're really bad men.

1:53:42Andrew Huberman:Totally agree. You know, I've got the optics of a macaque monkey blindfolded on LSD when it comes to certain members of our species. But when it comes to men, I grew up in a big group of boys, et cetera, a big group of men. I get it. That statement is true. They're great ones. They're ones. And then they're like really bad dudes. So when you talk about manosphere, I would say if I had my way, manosphere would apply to just the really bad ones because that name has become synonymous with really bad men. Okay, we can come back to that perhaps. But there is this issue that no one is allowed to say there's wonderful femininity, there's women with issues, right?

1:54:25Andrew Huberman:And then there's bad women. You're not allowed to say it. The only women that I can have that conversation with are lesbians. They were the ones who explained to me, there are truly bad women. And I said, well, how come no one talks about that except lesbians? And they said, ah, because we are living in a time now where men talking about women or having things they wish for women to do differently itself is seen as toxic. That women feel, this is what I was told, so I'm regurgitating, that they've suffered so much at the hands of men that we need like a good 20 or 30 years before we're ready to get to that conversation.

1:54:59Andrew Huberman:which of course for young men growing up just pull like makes them feel like okay it's all it's all on us and that's good like agency advocacy for one's own life is important stay out of the really bad men category and ideally the not so good men category too but this the the polarization i think is set by the fact that sure we can talk about toxic masculinity we can talk about the male crisis but why aren't we talking about the suicide rate well because women's issues were i think in a good way, we're still thinking that we need to protect and provide for the women and the children in our society.

1:55:33Andrew Huberman:We're holding that as in the highest regard. Like those, they get the life rafts when the Titanic goes down. So, you know, it's complicated. And there's a lot of off-limits terms. And I'm glad that they're coming up today just organically because those off-limits terms, I think, are the potential bridges between where we sit now, where we look at men and we go, oh shit, they're a mess. Some of them are just like downright awful. We look over here and we go, man, they're really dissatisfied. The assumption is if a woman is dissatisfied or somehow not doing well, that a man failed. That's a presumption that a lot of people make.

1:56:10Andrew Huberman:I don't make that presumption. And I can look back to the times in my youth where 90s narrative probably fed that a bit. But now I think we need to really like pull back the veil and go like, who are like, take a real hard look at ourselves and try and do this mesh that we're talking about? Yeah, the only way you get there is with data. So from 1945 to 2000, America registered a third of the world's economic growth, a third of its prosperity, with only 5 % of the population. So we had 6x the growth of the rest of the world, right? And within that 6x, the majority of that prosperity was sequestered to the one-third of the population that were white, male, and heterosexual.

1:56:47It was just a lot harder to participate in that uplift if you weren't in that group. So men of my generation, born with my sexual orientation, skin color, and gender, arguably had 15 to 18x the wins in their sales. The question is, should a young man now pay the price for my privilege? And I understand the gag reflex when I start talking or advocating for men because they look at me and they said, you had unfair advantage. 100 % guilty as charged. But now a young man who is four times as likely to kill himself, three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated, and men of my generation aren't stepping up and providing the mentorship or voting for the programs that might take a little bit of money away from my generation to support all young people and bring them up.

1:57:32And most of the programs and policies I advocate for would advocate for all young people. The average 7-year-old is 72 % wealthier than the 7-year-old 40 years ago. that 25-year-old is 24 % less wealthy. And then every day it's speedballed with 110 notifications telling them that they're failing. And what do you know? They're the most obese, depressed, and anxious generation we've had in a long time. And there really isn't an honest conversation. And I've said this on stage, and it gets some pushback. I'll say I think women make better managers. I think that they are more emotionally in touch with other people.

1:58:07They have higher EQ. I think they'll probably make better doctors and lawyers. I think their attention to detail genetically or anthropologically, whatever you want to call it, their bedside manner. And there's more women in both law school and medical school now, especially medical school. If I say that, women are better managers, we'll make better doctors. Nodding. Everyone, everyone. The women agree and the guys will look around and go, nod. Right? If I say men on average make better entrepreneurs, and that's not to say that women shouldn't be offered the same opportunities, and they haven't been, right?

1:58:3995 % of the capital has been not only allocated to men, but the majority of it has been allocated by men who went to one or two schools, Harvard and Stanford. I don't feel safe around you.

1:58:49Andrew Huberman:Who doesn't feel safe around you? It's fine to say women make better X, Y, and Z. To say men are better at anything. Better combat soldiers. I mean, let's be honest. If you said it on X, everyone would be like, cool, males make better entrepreneurs. If you said it in a room, I mean, again, I don't want to make this political, but we can't avoid this. If you said it among a more center to right-leaning crowd, I think you'd probably get less pushback also from women. I think that's fair. I'm not saying it's who you're hanging out with. You know, I barely hang out with anybody. So I've got a very small world.

1:59:24But to your point, if you go to the Democratic national website, DNC.org, and they change this. But I talked about this a lot on CNN, left-leaning website. They said they have a page saying who we serve. And they outlined 16 special interests groups, veterans, the disabled, black Americans, Native Americans, seniors. And I added it up and it was 74 percent of the population. And when you say you're advocating for 74 % of the population, you're not advocating for 74%. You're discriminating against 26%. And basically, the only people they didn't mention were young men. So I understand the notion that men have had so much disproportionate advantage that there needs to be a catch-up period.

2:00:06But I would argue it's gone a little bit overboard. Our school system, K through 12, I would argue is biased against boys. A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior-adjusted basis as a girl. A black boy, five times as likely. 70 to 80 percent of K through 12 teachers are women. Who do people naturally advocate for? The people that remind them of themselves at that age. Seven to 10 high school electorians are girls. It's now 60-40 female-male in college. And so the bottom line is we level the playing field, and there's a little bit of bias, and women have totally blown by men. Fine.

2:00:38More power to them. But what do we do now that young men just, quite frankly, don't have obvious paths to prosperity, and young people aren't as economically prosperous relative as they used to be, and young men are disproportionately evaluated in society, especially in the mating market, on their economic viability? And I get a ton of pushback saying, no, I'm just looking for emotionally untouched male. I think that is such bullshit. That's total bullshit. There's still economic hypergamy. Educational hypergamy has leveled out. There's a lot of people who, women who will marry a guy who didn't go to college or their educational hypergamy has vastly reduced.

2:01:15But in cities where women make as much as men, so there's an equality. If you find a couple, twice as many couples, the male earns more money than the woman. Economic hypergamy is still an absolutely full, full force. So if we don't figure out a way to level up all young people economically such that there's more pass for economic viability for young men, I think it's just going to tear at our society. We're going to have lower birth rates, fewer people to support, the very expensive programs, which make up 40 % of our government spending now on people over the age of 65. And we're going to have real issues.

2:01:49And people say, well, that's repackaged violence, that men are more violent. I'm like, no, it's just the reality. If you look at every unstable violent society in history, it always has one thing at the core of it. And that is a group of young men with a lack of economic or romantic opportunities. I don't care if it's Weimar, Germany, or some of the most unstable places in the Middle East or Africa. When you have the most dangerous person in the world is a young man who is lonely and broke. And we are producing way too many of them. And by the way, I don't think the remedy here is affirmative action for men.

2:02:19I just think that's too politicized. But we have to stop transferring wealth from people their age to people my age. Why the hell are we transferring every year$1.3 trillion from a generation that is the most anxious, depressed, and obese in American history to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet called Social Security? That's a third world in politics. I'm not suggesting anyone should die in poverty. Should you and I get Social Security?

2:02:43Andrew Huberman:No. No. I don't need it. I mean, probably a third of seniors really don't need Social Security. But you get near that, you can't get elected, right? 40 % of all government spending is going to people over the age of 65. It's going to be 50 % within 10 years. We spend more money on ICE than we spend on children. I mean, it's just there's my generation. I don't even think of us. I'm on the edge of Gen X baby boomer. The best way to describe my generation would be the vampire generation. We were never drafted into war. We never really had to serve. And what has my economic complexion been in America?

2:03:21Unprecedented prosperity, but the lowest taxes in modern history. So a lot of these solutions I just think are common sense. We need to do away social security tax, right? Six percent up to$160 ,000. So a kid working for me making$150 ,000 or$160 ,000, good living. They pay$9 ,000. I make a lot more than that. I pay$9 ,000 because it tops out at$160 ,000. Why does that make any sense? Two biggest tax deductions, mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and stocks? People our age. Who rents and makes their money from current income? All the dudes in this office, the young kids, right?

2:03:56We are literally transferring trillions of dollars from young people to old people. And we wonder why young men feel anxious when they are disparate. 75 % of women say economic viability is key to a mate. It's only 25 % of men. Women still look at men as economic providers. And so you have this entire generation of young men who feel like they have no purpose, no on ramps to the middle class and are being evaluated on a set of criteria that get harder and harder for them each year. And then there's like unbelievable set of expectations that they're taught they should have because it seems like everyone else is making a million dollars selling ETH or is in amazing shape or has a ridiculously hot boyfriend or girlfriend.

2:04:36and as artists passes to Coachella. So it'd be shocking if they weren't depressed and obese. Wow.

2:04:46Andrew Huberman:The analogy that comes to mind is academic science. You know, I used to joke, you know, the advantage of having a dad who was a scientist who was also a little bit irreverent was that I grew up around an understanding of how academics works. And early on, I thought, as much as I love my colleagues, like a lot of them need to retire. They just need to go. 100%. And the reason they need to go is because they were having three, four, two to four NIH grants, like million dollar a year grants. And that itself isn't a problem, except that there was enough money for young investigators. And so fields die and science dies.

2:05:22Andrew Huberman:They don't retire. And so it was very interesting right before the Trump administration came in, I started logging into these NIH hearings. And I think our previous NIH director, and I will go on record in saying, and our current NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, both very good directors in different ways, trying to do important, different things. And you'll notice the budget was not cut under Jay and IDC for the academics out there was not cut. But an interesting problem was outed at the kind of end of Carolyn's role at NIH, the former director. And it was the following. Someone said, what is the deal?

2:05:56Andrew Huberman:Why are people living longer and young people are killing themselves? And we have all these mental health issues, mostly among men, but also among young women. And she said, it is true that we've been very successful in medicine at getting people 65 and older to live much, much longer, to treat late stage diabetes, to treat cancer, to treat, we don't have cures for these things, but we've extended life for the older generation. And to a large degree, the quality of life, especially if they're willing to get sunlight, exercise, probably not drink alcohol at that age or drink a lot less, not smoke.

2:06:31Andrew Huberman:People are living longer and longer and longer, and tons of research money is being poured into this. There's this enormous gap where many of the problems that are most important to young people to thrive in every way, not just health, but mental health, etc., they're just not even being studied. So there's this top weighting of age and of seniority, clearly in what you're describing, but also in the science that we're funding, and that clearly, really, clearly harms young people because no one's studying porn addiction in a serious way at scale. Nobody's studying social media addiction in a serious way at scale.

2:07:06Andrew Huberman:I think what Jonathan's done is fantastic and others are now getting involved in this. But it's a problem if you look at the numbers as serious as cancer for people who are in their 50s and older, and actually cancers and diabetes and deaths of despair, as our previous, you know, Surgeon General pointed out, are among the greatest killers of young people. So we've totally lost perspective in many ways. I don't know what to do about Social Security. That's your domain, not mine. But I vote very strongly for what they do in Japan, force scientists to retire. I'm going to earn some hate from my colleagues, but anyway, force them to retire at 65.

2:07:45Andrew Huberman:They still collect a salary and in many cases a pension, if they're state-funded schools. They still have health care. Their kids still probably went to college partially for free, the inside ball of these schools that you and I work at, right, this whole network. And they got in. And they got in. And so let them retire. Let them keep their office. I do believe there's a lot of wisdom in the older generations, but I was quite happy to. There was your land acknowledgment. Let me go on some. Well, I just want to say there were senior faculty members like Lubert Stryer, I'll just call these people out who wrote the book, Biochemistry, ending when they were started.

2:08:20Andrew Huberman:Lubert retired, closed his lab. He made a bunch of money at Affimatrix, the gene chip company. And he used to come around to the lab and go, hey, what are you guys working on? He would talk to the students and give them amazing ideas. I think that generational wisdom passed down is great. Guess what he wasn't doing? Consuming grant dollars, consuming square footage on campus. He was shedding knowledge for free because the system is taking care of it. He's a Yoda, but he's an outlier. So you work at Stanford, one of the finest faculties ever assembled. NYU has an outstanding, at the business school, we have an outstanding faculty.

2:08:49I would argue one of the best in the world, not because it's our fault, but because every great faculty member loves the idea of coming and spending four, eight, ten years in New York and living in Soho. That's pretty good. That's our advantage. Hey, come here. We'll give you free housing. You and your wife, your kids are out of the house. Come teach accounting here. We get amazing faculty. A third should be put on a fucking ice floe. They get to a point where they aren't adding as much value. They were the bomb on Gap 1 accounting in 1988. They get tenure and they won't leave. And they leave feet first.

2:09:19And the result is young people who could bring a certain creativity, a new way of looking at things. There's no room for them to come up. And I want to go back to the notion of vampire generation. We talk about sunlight, being social, eating well, sleeping well, all the keys, right? I would argue the number one predictor of longevity is one thing, money. China's gone from an average life expectancy of 47 to 77 in 60 years as their wealth has gone up. You're in the bottom decile, I believe, of income. You live 12 years less long than someone in the upper decile, right? It's about money. And all we have done is not only suck money from young to old, we have sucked life.

2:09:55Because we are so selfish and so unwilling to pay it forward. Old people elect even older people to vote themselves more money. and what they are doing, maybe unwittingly, but they are doing it, is they are robbing life and happiness from young people and transferring it to old people. There not only needs to be term limits. Washington, D.C., the people allocating capital, has become a cross between the Golden Girls and the land of the walking dead. Enough already. We have totally robbed not only money, we have robbed life and health from young people because money in our society is health.

2:10:31Andrew Huberman:How do we create financial incentives inside of uniqueness? I think that's what makes the United States great. Because I saw social media that way. But I will say that's because it worked out that way for me. I love learning. I love teaching. I flipped on a camera and I started the podcast with that guy sitting over there. And it worked out great. The way I would describe the transition that's been bad for America is that, the way I would describe it is that back when I was growing up, America had a commitment to and even loved the unremarkable. I was remarkably unremarkable. And that's not a humble brag.

2:11:03I got$1 ,130 on the SAT. I had a 3.1 GPA. We didn't have any money. But this is what I got. I got assisted lunch, right? And the great state of California used to send coupons to my house that were the same colors the kids would buy in school so I wouldn't be embarrassed, right? I got Pell Grants. I got accepted to UCLA on appeal, 74 % admissions rate. I was one of the 26 % that didn't get in. And I was installing, and Shalvan came home really upset one day and said, is this my life? I was always told I was funny. I wanted to be a doctor. And my mom said, well, is there an appeal process? And I remember the day the admissions director called me and said, you're not qualified, but you're a son of California, and we're going to give you a shot.

2:11:47Andrew Huberman:Son of California. Son of California. Imagine that. What a great statement. I get emotional just thinking about it. And then I got, as I said, I got into Berkeley. And this is a brag and a flex, but I'm going to make it. I've given$20 million back to the University of California in the last five years. Awesome. So it's worked out for all of us. America isn't about identifying a super class of rich kids and the freakishly remarkable. It's about betting on unremarkable kids. So this is what we need to do. If you're a university and you have more than a billion-dollar endowment and you're not growing your freshman class faster than population, you're a hedge fund with classes and you should lose your tax-free status.

2:12:22If 20 % of your degrees are for nontraditional things such as nursing or specialty construction or vocational programming, you don't get access to tax-free money. In my opinion, mandatory national service. I think there's a ton of things we need to do. I think we should tax the shit out of private schools and reinvest that in public schools. We need to disassociate house property taxes from the quality of the schools. Think about the disadvantage. The average public school spends$15 ,000 a year on a kid. The school's in Portier is$9 ,000. The average private school spends$72 ,000 a year per student.

2:12:57So if you're fortunate enough to go to a private school like my kids, we're spending$850 ,000 on them. And some kids were spending$120 ,000. And you want that kid to compete against another kid to get into an elite university? And we all tell ourselves this myth now that, oh, with AI, college doesn't matter. It's never been more important. And if you had a drug that can make it twice as likely that you get married, half as likely that you kill yourself, three times as likely that you become a millionaire, ten times as likely that you run for office, four times as likely that you become an officer in the military, three times less likely that you become obese, would you hoard that drug?

2:13:34And then when someone gets into the working environment or the economy, would you create a tax policy that just transfers money from you to the wealthiest generation in the world? There's just so many basic common sense solution around higher ed and K through 12 that we come up with all these reasons. We use terms like network effects or globalization or tech. And it's nothing but thinly veiled bullshit to transfer more money. The bottom 99 % in young people are just nutrition for older people. And to me, it's fairly obvious. They're just common sense solutions. And higher ed has become, unfortunately, an emblematic of the rejection LVMH-ing of America, where you either at the age of 18 have to be freakishly remarkable.

2:14:19Are you captain of your lacrosse team and building wells in Africa? Then fine, come in and we'll put you on a glide path to potentially being a billionaire president. But say you're unremarkable, sorry, you're shit out of luck. Maybe you can build a data center somewhere and maybe get into the middle class. And by the way, we don't even have an apprentice culture in this environment. And so many parents feel so shamed when their kid doesn't get into an elite university. 11 % of LinkedIn profiles in Germany and the UK say apprentice. It's 3 % here because parents feel shamed if their kid doesn't get into an elite university.

2:14:50We need to dramatically expand vocational programming, freshman classes, and stop this insane transfer of wealth and health from young people to old people. And higher ed, unfortunately, our industry is at the tip of the spear of fomenting this rejectionist bullshit culture where we've identified we're the arbiters of success. You know who gets into Stanford and NYU? Two cohorts. The children of rich people, you're 77 times more likely to get into an elite university if you're in a top 1 % household, or the freakishly remarkable. And here's the thing, I can prove to us all mathematically that 99 % of our children are not in the top 1%.

2:15:27America loved the unremarkable when I was a kid. It's fallen out of love with the unremarkable. Is America about identifying a superclass to become billionaires? Or is it about planting as many seeds as possible? Because no one can be the arbiter of greatness at 18. No one was going to see me at 18 and go, someday you might have an impact and you'll be wealthy. No one would have known that. And we've decided, no, we're about the children of rich people and we're about the freakishly remarkable. And everybody else, in my opinion, hopefully gets to the middle class. but if you don't, there's big tech waiting there to addict you.

2:16:00There's a tax policy that might impoverish you. I think that young people, people say about young people, they're entitled. I think they're entitled to be enraged. I can't imagine the rage they must feel right now. They look up, they look sideways, and they see all this prosperity. And they look at my generation and see the benefits we've accrued. And we want to spend$2 trillion a year on their credit card. We spend$7 trillion a year. We take in$5 trillion, and that incremental$2 trillion is all going to seniors. I'm in the club doing rails of ketamine and champagne, and the closest a young person gets is they get to throw their credit card in, and I'll keep swiping it.

2:16:40I mean, it is literally morally corrupt what we are doing in terms of deficit spending and how we are prioritizing our budget. Our budget reflects our values, and our values are all fucked up. and have said, let's party, right? The baby boomers, let's party like there's no tomorrow. And the young people, well, they're going to have to clean up the house and the garage is on fire and the dogs are going to be pregnant, but that's their problem because I'll be dead by then. This generation, my generation, for some reason, does not feel the same obligation to pay it forward or back and create infrastructure and investments for young people.

2:17:12And to me, it feels fairly obvious and the solutions are fairly common sense, but we'll have thoughtful conversations and social security will be a third rail and we'll have thoughtful reasons for why when I sell my business, the first$10 million should be tax-free. The last business I sold, the first$10 million is tax-free. What the actual fuck? They say, well, Scott, entrepreneurs are more productive. We want to unleash our productivity, our most productive. I had no idea what tax policy. People don't start businesses because of tax policy. Did you know about 1202? If you sell this business, the first$10 million is tax-free if it's a C-Corp.

2:17:49That's not why people start businesses. No. But every day there are new tax policies that do one thing, transfer money from those dudes to us, more me than you because you're 10 years younger than me. It needs to stop. There's basic tax policy, basic health and human services policy, right? Why on earth you're a doctor? For God's sakes, we spend$13 ,000 per individual for more obesity, more anxiety, more depression than every other G6 nation. We should absolutely have nationalized, socialized healthcare. The bottom 99%, again, are just a fucking body bag of nutrition for the top 1%. Monetizing health care.

2:18:25I'll put that to you. I absolutely think we need single-payer socialized medicine right now. I think it is indefensible to health care in this country. 40 % of households, medical or dental debt. You don't have kids. Do you realize what kind of shame you would feel as a father if your 16-year-old girl gets a screaming toothache and you have to go into debt to get her a root canal? and that hangs over you for the next two or three years?

2:18:50Andrew Huberman:Well, I'm all for robbing it from Social Security because I like that idea. The moment you say, you know, nationalize health care, I think, oh, boy, here we go again. But I like the idea of robbing it from Social Security. I'm not talking about taking old people and turning them out to pasture and letting them over the streets, you know, mumbling to themselves. I do think that taking care of the older generation is important, but I do think we are a very top-heavy culture. And maybe because I want to, I consider you Gen X as opposed to boomer. I appreciate that. I really do. And actually it raised a question for me.

2:19:19Andrew Huberman:Feel free to say pass. You don't want to answer, but earlier you said you're somewhat, I don't know, bashful or you have this issue around your age. Like I, my friend Kelly Starrett, who's a, you know, PhD in physiology, amazing trainer and stuff. He said the best thing about turning 50 when I was turning 50, he's like, you're going to be among the best in shape for your deck, for your decade. And I think, I mean, look, you look great for a 40 year old, like you're, you're killing it, you know, you're fit, all this stuff. So, but I wonder, is this kind of shame around it because your peer group kind of sucks in the way that you're describing?

2:19:49Andrew Huberman:Or is this actually about age? Because to me, one of the best things is to feel like your friends, your people, the people you associate with are awesome. And your generation, I loved, I think Gen X is an incredible generation. As this conversation continues, I'm thinking more and more about the responsibility and both the failures and the opportunities to remedy things for the next generation. That's how we started this conversation. So two questions there. First of all, is that what that's about? Like your peers kind of suck and you don't want to be a part of it? Because I consider you Gen X and I'm not just trying to, what do the kids say, glaze you here.

2:20:25Andrew Huberman:You're winning on every dimension and you got two health, what sounds like healthy, productive boys. Like you got it all, man. I think a lot of it comes down to very just base things, and that is a fear of death. I mean, I'm afraid of getting old and being unhealthy. I don't mind the death part. Also, just a fear of just wanting to feel young and vigorous and masculine and feel like that's slipping away from me. Biology is undefeated. So I think I'm a little bit youth-obsessed and a little bit ageist. So I think I have just a fear of aging. but just the call out about paying it forward and the call out to your, I know a lot of young men and a lot of successful men listen to this podcast.

2:21:09I think my generation on a lot of levels, we're talking about tax policy, but men aren't stepping up with respect to young men. If you look at the single point of failure, if you were to reverse engineer when a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model through either death, divorce, or abandonment. when a boy loses a male role model, and 90 % of the time a single parent is headed by a woman, as mine was, at that moment he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. And men aren't stepping up. There are three times as many women applying to be big sisters in New York as there are men applying to be big brothers.

2:21:47And some of it is a taboo that men are concerned or self-conscious about expressing an interest to get involved in a boy's life because of sexual abuse from the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson and the rest. But there are a ton of men out there in their 30s, I think you have a bunch of them working with you, that may or may not have kids of their own. You don't have to be CO Goldman Sachs. You don't have to have a degree in adolescent psychiatry. You just have to be a good man trying to live a virtuous life. And as someone who mentors young men, I can tell you it is so easy to add value. Just showing an interest, answering basic questions.

2:22:23this is a question i literally got now six weeks ago from a young man i'm entering i'm on this new diet i'm just drinking pineapple juice and creatine okay i don't have a medical degree and i can tell you that's wrong another question i got eight weeks ago i saw this amazing thing i'm moving to alaska scott what are you moving i saw this amazing thing on national grave i've decided i want to move to alaska you have a good job and your mom is sick right Yeah. Why are you moving to Alaska? You're going to quit your job and move to Alaska? If you just ask basic questions, you add value to these young men's lives.

2:22:56Just real basic stuff. I'm feeling depressed. Did you get outside? Are you working out? There needs to be a societal zeitgeist that a moment a young man doesn't have men in his life, that the tribe moves in and injects young men into their life. And the call out to men is, you know, there's this great quote in one of the Paul Wes Anderson movies, Magnolia, where the guy says, I have love to give. I just don't know where to give it. I just don't know where to put it. It's such a wonderful statement. I think there's so many men out there that have real, like, I think some of the most rewarding types of love is to give fraternal and paternal love.

2:23:35My purpose, my thing in life is to try and prepare my men for others, prepare my boys for others. That's my job. It gives me purpose. I think there's so many men out there that could offer so much fraternal and fraternal love to a young man or a boy, and they don't do it, either because they're too lazy or they're not stepping up, or they're worried that people will suspect them of something. And there's so much need. And this is what you do. You find a single mother in your workplace and say, going to a game, does your son want to join me or join me and my boys? Does your son want to hang out, washing your car, going to a game, whatever it is?

2:24:10that is the, in my opinion, that is the easiest solve that doesn't involve the government right now. But the bottom line is men of our age aren't stepping up. And I couch it in masculinity. You take care of yourself. That's the first circle. You affix your own oxygen mask. You can't take care of other people unless you're economically and emotionally somewhat viable. You take care of your family, take your extended family, take care of your community. But the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. And not enough men are doing it, even really successful men.

2:24:42They're not stepping up. They're not helping young men. And the easiest thing to do, and it's so rewarding. I can't tell you, it makes me feel, and I don't do enough of it, but I do mentor young men. It's just so easy to add value. They make such stupid fucking decisions. My job with my sons is to be their prefrontal cortex. No, you have to wear shoes to school. I know this is right. Wear shoes to school. So anyways, is the call out. If we want better men, we have to be better men. I don't think you can really hit the pinnacle of what it means to be successful in masculinity unless you're involved in the life of a child that isn't yours.

2:25:18We have the most single parent homes of any nation in the world. We used to be number two to Sweden. We'd pass them two years ago. But that's what I would call, I constantly talk about government fixes because I'm a lefty. The easiest societal fix is quite frankly, is just male mentorship.

2:25:34Andrew Huberman:Yes, yes, and yes. Totally agree. I was very proactive in going out and seeking them. One feature of that that I just wonder if we can kind of superimpose

2:25:46Andrew Huberman:or superimpose some solutions on top of, would be a better way to put it, is, for instance, that I had no interest in playing football, but kept getting hurt skateboarding. So I learned how to weightlift and make my body stronger from the football coach, who was this amazing guy who wrote the original script for Mr. Mom that he wrote a play, Wait Till Your Mother Gets Home, that became Mr. Mom. He's like a big buff guy, his wife. Michael Keaton, Terry Garr. That's right. But so people would say he didn't write that, but this guy, Bob Peters, was like a physical specimen. And he also played the piano and he raised these kids and his wife dared him.

2:26:17Andrew Huberman:She said in the early 70s, she said, you couldn't do what I do. And so that was how the whole thing came to, he realized you're right. It's really, really tough. So I went to him for working out advice, but not for other sources of advice. I went to different men for different sources of mentorship. It'll become clear what I'm saying here in a moment. My academic advisor, my PhD advisor was an incredible woman. So I was mentored by women too, but that's characteristic of academia. Was your father very involved in your life? He was. I mean, we had, my parents split up at a, you know, at, at an adolescence.

2:26:51Andrew Huberman:And so we had our, you know, our challenges over the years, over time. You know, my dad had been a scientist, first generation immigrant. How old were you and your parents split up? 14. And did other men kind of move in or was your father still very involved? I sought out other mentors at that point. I resented science. I resented what he was a part of. We eventually made amends. He's actually been a guest on the podcast. He's a physicist, really helped me understand his trajectory and, you know, and we've worked out our stuff. But at that time it was, you know, it was skateboarding, it was lifting weights.

2:27:19Andrew Huberman:It was, I want to become I'm a firefighter, actually took fire science courses and did that. And then eventually tripped and fell into science and mentored, menteed myself to a wonderful professor at Santa Barbara. And then the story unfolds. Yeah, and you're going to gag on this, but you're exceptional. Most 14-year-olds aren't exceptional and go out and find mentors. Mentors have to find them because they don't even know. Most 14-year-olds don't even know they need mentors. They don't even know the concept. And my mom was smart enough to get men involved in my life really quickly. and it was everything for me, everything.

2:27:53My mom's boyfriend gave me 200 bucks and said, I started asking about stocks. And he said, if you haven't spent this or bought stocks by the time I'm here next weekend, I'm taking it back. So I went to Westwood and Wilshire Boulevard and walked into Dean Witter and this guy with a big Jufro came walking out, Cy Saro, and said, hi, I'm Cy Saro. And every day I would call, I didn't have a lot of friends at 13. Him from the Emerson Junior High payphone, 20 cents. And he'd give me lessons on the market. I bought 12 shares of Columbia Pictures. And he'd be like, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a hit.

2:28:30That's why the stock is up. Casey's Shadow is a bomb. When there's more buyers for the stock and fewer sellers, the stock goes up. And he taught me about markets. I've been investing in stocks since I was 13. I've made a lot of money selling my companies. I've made a shit ton of money investing in stocks. And just this guy, and by the way, he came to one of my live podcasts about two years ago. He's now 82. Just this guy's interest in me, like, just meant the world. And also, and this is a weird story, but he recently just passed away. You know how in media, there's that second family people talk about?

2:29:01The dude who has a family, and you find out he has a second family? My mom and I were the second family. My mom's boyfriend and my kind of male role model had a family. Unbeknownst to her. No, unbeknownst to her. But we didn't have any money, and I'm not going to judge my mom, but I'm not going to judge him. And he was actually a really good man to me. He was really a good mentor, but he was only around every other weekend. But I had some great, my athletic coaches took a really nice active role in my life. And when I think about what it would have been like, because the reality is you have this healthy instinct as a boy to start rejecting your parents at a certain age.

2:29:37And not only that, I see it with my boys. Their mom's voice literally becomes white noise to them. They like stop hearing it. and they take her seriously or literally but not seriously. But even just saying the boys needed men five years ago, this dialogue has come so far was triggering to some people. What, women can't raise good men? No, my mom raised me a lot of my life. But if I had not had a bunch of men who just naturally stepped in, there was a guy across the hall who noticed that it was just me and my mom. He would come over with his girlfriend to me every other week and say, do you want to come horseback riding with us?

2:30:14Right? Because he knew I was being raised by my mom. It was a natural instinct for him to come over and take me out. And I worry that we've lost that, that we don't have enough male mentors. Wow. We're going to have to do 10 podcasts.

2:30:27Andrew Huberman:You know, I've got so many more questions. I didn't get to a lot of things. Scott, I have to say, it's been amazing to get to just sit with you and learn from you. I'm delighted that we had this conversation. I appreciate that. The fact that we had it, I don't know how polarized people view us as, but that alone was important to me. But I'm going to think a lot about many of the things you've said. You've talked about having a code, this notion of really being a provider and a protector, building a financial foundation for oneself, putting service over attention to self, and just so many things of value.

2:31:02Andrew Huberman:This is one that I know many people are going to come back to over and over again. And I'm just grateful for you doing what you do. You defy all the stereotypes of the groups that people assign you to, which is my favorite kind of people. I appreciate that. And again, you're killing it on the health front. Whatever you're doing, man. It's probably your boys. They're probably like, this is what it's like to have vigor. Well, tonight I'll go through everything I do, and I want you to edit it. But just in the mutual fan club here, one of the things I don't like about podcasting is it's emblematic of American politics.

2:31:33And that is the more outrageous you are, the more ratings you get. So the podcasting algorithms encourage people to say outrageous things. And sometimes they're not very informed. And I'm guilty of this sometimes. I've fallen to this Dunning-Kruger where I think I know something about something because I know a decent amount about marketing or business. And I think in our leaders, we need to make intelligence and honesty and science cool again. And you're doing that. And I worry sometimes a lot of our most senior elected officials on the health side are not making intelligence or science cool again.

2:32:06Andrew Huberman:I have friends there, and I'll just tell you, like, they're not biologists. They need to talk to the biologists. That's my point. You have real domain expertise. I think you are making science and intelligence cool again. And I think the nation is in desperate need of that. That certification, domain expertise, being measured about your comments, citing data, putting out disclosures, telling me, no, Scott, you don't understand DOPA. This is what actually is going on. I think that's important. And so I think you're a really positive influence for young people who are getting seduced by the algorithms.

2:32:32and there's got to be people like you out there that young men aspire to be more like that say no. Training, domain expertise being measured in science matter. You're making that cool again.

2:32:43Andrew Huberman:Thank you. Well, it's a labor of love and a bit of a compulsion, so I plan to continue. But I'm excited for whatever comes next, especially in these very tense political years. You're a brave one. Go on. You got balls and brains, man. That's how I'll wrap this one. You got balls and brains, everything the whole time. like, and you're willing to take risks and make mistakes. And clearly you're making more better decisions than less good ones on average compared to your peer group and then some. So come back again. Appreciate it. Thanks again, Andrew. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Scott Galloway.

2:33:18Andrew Huberman:To find links to his new book and to find links to his various podcasts and other resources, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.

2:33:49Andrew Huberman:If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.

2:34:21Andrew Huberman:And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast.

2:34:58Andrew Huberman:Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to Hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email.

2:35:31Andrew Huberman:And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Scott Galloway. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.