Scott Galloway: America Abandoned Its ‘Unremarkable’ Young Men

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21:32Ross Douthat:Why don't you like the term toxic masculinity? I don't think there's any such thing. I think there's coarseness and cruelty and criminal behavior. But I think masculinity is strength, service, stoicism, demonstrating strengths and skills such that you can establish resources and strengths such that you can then protect others. I think it's optimizing for service, not for attention. And unfortunately, a lot of criminal, violent, psychopathic behavior has been conflated with masculinity. I don't think there's any such thing, just as I don't think there's any such thing as toxic femininity. So I don't like how the phrase toxic masculinity gets used.

22:19Ross Douthat:But I think it can be a useful phrase because of what it implies, right? It implies that there are vices that maybe are not exclusive to men, but are disproportionately male. Men are more violent than women and so on, right? But then that there are also virtues that are, again, not unique to men, but are sort of associated with masculinity in certain ways. Now, I think you were just describing some of them. And in the book, you have the three Ps. To me, it's your description of virtuous masculinity. So tell me what the three Ps are. So provider. I think a decent goal for a young man starting his career is in a capitalist society, just acknowledge the way the world is and that if you want an absence of anxiety, if you want healthcare, if you want to be attractive to a mate, you're going to need to have a plan to make yourself economically viable.

23:17And that might be getting a trades license, getting a bachelor's of arts, just working real hard, whatever it might be, that you're going to need a plan to be economically viable. And by the way, that plan will change, but you have a responsibility to develop some sense of a plan for economic viability in a capitalist society. Once you develop a series of strengths, it can be character, it can be kindness, it can be economic power. the next move is to protection. It's a tragedy in me that women don't feel safe on the New York subway. Women shouldn't cross the street when they see a group of young men.

23:54They should cross the street to be around young men. Your job is to protect. Who breaks up fights at bars? Big, strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don't like themselves. So I think strength immediately moves to protection. And then the third thing, and I get more pushback on this, is procreation.

24:14Ross Douthat:Not on this show you won't, Scott. Don't worry. Well, I think we need to stop demonizing and start celebrating young men's horniness. It makes them better men. It makes them want to shower. It makes them want to have an economic plan. It makes them want to have girlfriends so they can figure out a way to behave around other women. It makes you kinder. My first girlfriend told me that if I didn't stop smoking pot every night, she was going to stop having sex with me. And guess what? I stopped smoking pot. A movement I hate, Ross, I hate the incel movement. I think it is such bullshit. This notion that women have such high standards that they can never be successful.

24:50Well, welcome to the work week, boss. For 99 % of history, 99 % of men have been involuntarily celibate for 99 % of the time. There are few men that wouldn't rather be doing something else more right now than having sex. And it's a motivator for us to be better men. No man has the right to reproduce. You got to work for it. And I hate this movement where men throw up a BS excuse and they abdicate and they stop putting in the time and the effort and the energy to be better men that are more attractive to women who understandably are raising their standards because they're no longer economically indentured to men.

25:27and they're excelling. And so they have the right to have higher standards.

25:32Ross Douthat:So the incel movement and everything associated with it is pretty much by definition a movement for men who feel like they're not succeeding generally. For men who are succeeding, right, who are sort of attractive in the dating pool, if you're telling them, go out, have sex, be horny, whatever else. How do you get that to be connected to protection and providing rather than just being a different P, which is predatory? To be clear, I don't mean rape and sexual assault predation. Just being a player that's not failing. Exactly. Just treating women badly in a dating market that benefits you because all these other men are failing.

26:17What I would say is that one, you're talking about a minority of people and -

26:24Ross Douthat:Not all men, right. As they say. Look, well, men not doing well and struggling with their career or the romantic possibilities, I think that applies to 95 % of men at some point in their life. I know it applied to me for a large portion of my life. I don't know about you, but there's definitely moments in my life where I was insecure about my professional and romantic success and opportunities. Never true for me, Scott. Never. Not even once. Not you, Ross. Never. But what I would suggest is that we need more third places. Men aren't going into work. People aren't going to church or to temple or to mosque.

26:57There are no venues anymore for young people to fall in love with what I'll call non-curb appeal, non-Brad Pitt remarkable men. If you talk to couples that have been together longer than 30 years, 80 % of them will say. One was much more interested in the other in the beginning. And it was usually the man who was much more interested. But this is what happened. I saw the way he treated his parents at church. He was funny. I liked his friends. He was great at his job. So I think that the problem around mating and connection and falling in love, there's very few romances that mimic a romantic comedy where they bump into each other in a bookstore and there's this wild gaze into each other's eyes.

27:37It usually doesn't pan out that way.

27:39Ross Douthat:Listen, I spent hours, weeks hanging out in bookstores, waiting for that to happen. I was in the fantasy and science fiction section, so maybe I had chosen poorly. But yes, I agree. But so is the argument then that basically if you have this sort of potentially predatory a male elite that's doing well. One of the best ways to fix that problem is to elevate the rest of the male population so they feel more pressure to be good guys. I think you're talking about a small slice of the dating market because the incentive system is the following. There's research on what attracts a woman to a man as a mate or sexually.

28:21The number one thing, we don't like to talk about this, is signaling resources. Women naturally feel they might be vulnerable during gestation, they want to protect her. And in a capitalist society, strength oftentimes is conflated with resources. Now, the good news is you don't have to show up with a Range Rover and a Panerai, which is a good rap, but the key word in that is signal resources. So are you the guy that has a plan that leaves the bar at 11 because you have work the next day, is organized, is thoughtful, disciplined, has a plan, trying to better himself? That is very attractive to women.

28:57Number two is intelligence. And again, all of this is anthropological. The person who makes better decisions for his family, that family is more likely to survive. And the fastest way, by the way, to communicate intelligence is humor. And you can't tell someone to be funny, but what I tell men is laugh, laugh out loud. A great sense of humor is being funny, but that's hard. But it's also just laughing out loud and laughing at yourself and not being easily offended. And the secret weapon that women are most attracted to in a relationship is kindness. They want someone they know that if they're vulnerable, it's going to be good to them.

29:34And I think young men, and I think it can be learned. I think a kindness practice can make you kinder.

29:39Ross Douthat:Whose job is it to teach them? Who is teaching young men the three Ps that you describe? So what's the infrastructure for healthy masculinity? productive masculinity and loving, secure households and good men. Well, yeah. Where does it come from, especially in a society where there's lots of divorce, lots of men are raised without fathers? Where does it come from for someone who's in the position you were in, right? Divorced, your father's not in the picture. How do you transmit? Well, you said it. It comes from you and me, Ross. I was afraid of that, yeah. If you look at the bricks and mortar of what builds good men or not, it can be reverse engineered to a single point of failure.

30:24You know, when air disasters, they try and reverse everything to what is the single point of failure here? The single point of failure for when a boy comes off the tracks is when he loses a male role model through death, divorce, or abandonment. And the moment a boy loses a male role model, at that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. And what's interesting is that girls in single-parent homes aren't nearly as affected. They have similar rates of high school graduation, similar rates of self-harm. Now, they're more promiscuous because they're looking for male attention in the wrong places, but generally speaking, they have the same rates of success as dual-parent homes.

31:02What it ends up is that while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls. And even acknowledging that boys need men five years ago was triggering for the far left. It was what women can't raise boys. I was raised by a single immigrant mother a lot of my life, but she immediately got men involved.

31:23Ross Douthat:And just just who were those men like who were the most important men in your life growing up? I still stay in contact with some of my mom's boyfriends. There was a guy across the hall who noticed that I was being raised by a single mother and used to come over with his girlfriend and say, we're going horseback riding. Do you want to come with us? I joined the Boy Scouts. Larry Nobler, a chemistry teacher, used to invite me over to wash his cars with his boys. I immediately, there were men involved. And unfortunately, because of, I don't know if it's Michael Jackson or the Catholic Church, there's a lot of men in their 30s who are wonderful young men who have paternal and fraternal love to give and are reticent to express interest in mentoring a teen boy for fear they'll be suspected of something.

32:06And so they're reticent to get involved.

32:08Ross Douthat:I mean, there is also a dynamic, right? It sounds like you were fortunate, but where boys with single mothers, the boyfriends do not always treat those boys well. There are dangers to boys from non-parental male mentors that aren't just about sexual abuse. Well, the likely sexual abuser is a step-parent, right? But what I would say is while those examples get a lot of, as they should, outsized attention, there's a lot of good step-dads. It just comes down, beyond the economic policies, primary education fixes, vocational programming, national service, the number one solve for this problem is that if we want better men, we have to be better men.

32:54I think the outer ring of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours.

33:00Ross Douthat:One more question on politics and your own relationship to liberalism and progressivism. And then I have just a couple of economic questions. But on politics, I'm a conservative. If you tell me that we need to teach young men that they should be providers, protectors, and that they should procreate. I'm all in. But I know lots of people, lots of parents who don't consider themselves part of the far left, who just consider themselves sort of normal, liberal, progressive people, who I think would just be kind of allergic to that formulation that says, oh, there's something distinctive about protection that we want to teach our sons that's maybe different from what we teach our daughters.

33:48Ross Douthat:Imagine someone who isn't on the far left, but they're just a, you know, they're a Kamala Harris voter. They're like, really? Isn't that just bringing back patriarchy, Scott? I think it's a fair criticism. I think one of the things I got wrong in the book was that I reverse engineered my success to having money and finding a mate. And the reality is that that isn't a whole shooting match. And if I had, if I could write about the moment you write the book, you're like satisfied for two minutes and then you start thinking about everything you got wrong. And social media is really good at helping you identify those things.

34:18I think if I were to add in some additional dimensions, it would be one, service. And two, I love the idea of the notion that Richard Reeves, the test of becoming a man isn't a religious ceremony or a birthday. It's surplus value. At what point do you create more economic value or tax revenue than you absorb? Are you the dude that more people complain to than you issue complaints? Do you love more people than love you? Do you protect more people and protect you, the idea of getting to surplus value. And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs or be a baller and have a lot of money or date a lot or have a lot of sex.

34:55I think if I did it again, I would have focused more on service and surplus value. But you're still trying to pull progressives towards, I guess, just a slightly less

35:10Ross Douthat:gender interchangeable view of the sexist. I think that's what you're trying to do. Look, okay. No matter what hostile reactions you got. Put a bunch of eight-year-old boys and eight-year-old girls in a room, put dolls and cars and Hot Wheels in a room and see what happens. And I think that talking about politics, I've advised a lot of democratic candidates running for president. They all claim they're not running for president, but they want my views. Anyways, I think there needs to be an era of renewal, a renewal of alliances between America and Europe, a renewal of alliances between moderate Republicans and Democrats.

35:48But the greatest alliance in history that is in most desperate need of renewal is the alliance between men and women. And I have seven and a half billion points of data to show it's the greatest alliance in history. The genders have done a great job.

36:00Ross Douthat:It's carried us a long way so far. Yeah. The genders have each done a great job of blaming the other for their own problems. It is time to realize empathy is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights did not hurt white people. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. Women and our society aren't going to continue to flourish if men are flailing. Let's celebrate young men the way we have finally and deservedly started celebrating young women.

36:48Ross Douthat:The New York Times app unlocked. Everyone knows the Times is behind a paywall. Only subscribers have access to all the reporting. But what if you could explore the Times for a month for free? without putting in a credit card. Now you can. When you download the New York Times app for the first time, your first month in the app is free. A month to go behind the paywall to see what Times subscribers get every single day. All the investigations, the reviews, the recipes, the deeply reported fact-based journalism. If you don't already subscribe to the New York Times, download the Times app today and get free access for 30 days.

37:31Ross Douthat:Okay, let's now a pessimistic economic question. I look at the data for job creation, and the American economy is creating jobs in healthcare sectors, service sectors. It's creating jobs that right now are disproportionately held by, and the people disproportionately interested in them are women. But it does seem like there is something anti-male about the trajectory of the economy. And you either need the economy to be different, or you need lots and lots of men who are willing to become nurses. And I'm just curious what you think about that as just sort of like where we're going. Whatever we do with mentorship or anything else, we're going to a world where the future of work is currently female coded.

38:23Ross Douthat:What do you do about that? Well, one, that's true. And some of that is if women make better lawyers and doctors, then they deserve the economic accoutrements of that. So a couple of things. One, solutions. But the question is like, if men right now, if there's tremendous opportunities in nursing and men - Understood. For that, you know, trucks and dolls reason you just described aren't enthusiastic about nursing. What do we do about it? I think just as we've been successful, it's somewhat de-gendering leadership roles in companies and recognize that women bring great attributes and leadership skills.

39:00And we've seen the number of female C executives increase dramatically over the last 20 years. We need to de-gender some of the healthcare. And I don't know if that's a marketing campaign or what it is, but it's ridiculous that in any way it's less masculine to be a nurse. I'm less sanguine as you are, less pessimistic, because I think all of the spend, the CapEx spend, mostly tied to AI is going to create a boom in vocational jobs and trades jobs, which disproportionately benefit young men. Good.

39:31Ross Douthat:All right. That was my follow-up question. What does AI mean for the economic picture for men? So say more about that. Is the AI era good for young men? Well, okay. So I'm an AI optimist. I think all the catastrophizing about the job apocalypse is basically fundraising and techno-narcissism, that I built something so incredible it's going to destroy the economy. So invest in this round and get rich while the world crumbles. It's total bullshit. I think like every technical innovation in history, it's going to have short-term job destruction, just as automation did destroy some jobs on the factory floor, but we didn't anticipate heated seats and car stereos.

40:08And there was more people working in the automotive industry than pre-automation, I think AI is going to create more jobs than it destroys. A record number of new business permits were issued. I believe it's going to create more jobs than it destroys.

40:18Ross Douthat:But the kind of jobs, you talked about trades, right? So again, in a world where men do not yet all want to be nurses, is there something that this new economy offers them that wasn't being offered five years ago or 10 years ago? We're going to have tens of thousands of open jobs for just the anticipated nuclear power plants we need to build. We're going to need pipe fitters. I mean, we're going to spend more money building data centers next year than building office buildings. And we're going to need trades people there. I would say the biggest opportunity for a young man or woman right now is to go find a small business in trades, whether it's hanging curtains or installing soapstone marble, if you're good at the carpet cleaning, and find the local business in your area.

41:03And there's a very good chance it's being run by a baby boomer whose kids don't want to take over the business. there's going to be enormous opportunity in small businesses and trades jobs for all young people, but those businesses do disproportionately attract young men. So I'm actually quite optimistic.

41:19Ross Douthat:But there's a tension, right? Because clearly AI also feeds into everything that you started out in this conversation by describing the way that tech is addictive, immersive, keeps you in your room. It feeds you slop. You scroll all the time, right? So it sounds like in your telling, AI is giving opportunities, but you still need a world where the young men can actually take them and not just be further captivated by their gambling app and streaming video and porn, right? Bespoke pornography, whatever else AI generates. There's competing forces. If you're motivated, can get out of the house, have the discipline to develop a skill, I think the future actually looks pretty bright.

42:03Ross Douthat:Let's end with your own sons. Tell me, I mean, you can tell me anything, but I'd like to know one, how you think they're doing. One is in high school and one's going off to college, right? And two, what for them in particular, don't generalize, be specific. What are you most worried about?

42:23I come from a position of privilege because a lot of the things we talk about are largely assuasur abated with money is the reality. And look, I just -

42:33Ross Douthat:Sure, but I come from a position of privilege too. And I have a lot of kids, sons and daughters, and everybody, every family has temptations and issues and inherited things. And I just want to know in the Galloway family, what do you worry about? Oh, hands down on the phone, biggest source of tension and anxiety. I wrote a book on big tech. I'm considered someone who understands more than your average bear about technology. The phone is the biggest source of anxiety in our household. I joke, my son will sneak, my son will, my youngest. How old is he? He's 15. And he's better now, but during COVID - When did he get a phone?

43:12Way too early. Way too early. I screwed up. And during COVID, he developed device addiction. And he's, you know, sometimes, I won't say which son, but one of them would fake stomach problems to go in the bathroom to be on TikTok and lock the door. And I jokingly say I would bang on the door and say, start masturbating and get out of there. Look, the phone, the biggest challenge facing my kids is addiction from godlike technology that's tested a billion times a day that has connected shareholder value to sequestering you from the key relationships in your life. The most encouraging thing, or one of the most encouraging things just happened to me.

43:55I just took my kid to orientation at UVA. I dropped him at his dorm. He hugged me, shoved me out of the door. And I realized that I had achieved what I'm supposed to achieve. And that is I am now obsolete. For now.

44:08Ross Douthat:For now. We'll see. For six months. Until the tuition for next semester rolls in. Well, or until, you know, I mean, I feel like there have been moments when my dad has felt successfully obsolete in my own life. And then there have been moments when, you know, even as an adult, he's become incredibly important, incredibly important once again. So I imagine that you and I will both go through that. But I think that's a good place to close. I hope your son has a fantastic time. And thanks for joining me, Scott. Thank you, Ross. And congrats on your success. You're everywhere in my feed right now.

44:44So well done.

44:45Ross Douthat:Well, you know, it's the three Ps, Scott. There you go. Take care. Thanks again for being with us this week. Next week, sadly, is my last episode as host of Interesting Times. And I'll be interviewing Brian Johnson, a man famous for his quest to live forever. I hope you'll watch or listen, or both. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been part of this show's audience so far. And since we're still living in interesting times, the show will be back with new episodes in the fall. Thank you.