Are Men Okay?

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1:27Welcome to another episode of The Prop G-Pod. We typically share an episode of Raging Moderates on Tuesdays, but the dog is traveling. So in place of our regularly scheduled programming, we're sharing an episode of The Gray Area, a podcast hosted by Sean Illing, a journalist of Vox Media and the co-author of The Paradox of Democracy, Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion. The episode we're sharing today features yours truly. We discuss the state of young men, including the struggles men are facing today, how parents can navigate the current moment and the challenges Sean and I each faced as young men.

2:00So with that, here's the gray area. Are men okay? What's going on with men? There's a growing body of evidence that men are falling behind in education, in the labor market. And when you look at the numbers on drug overdoses and deaths by suicide, it's pretty bleak. And it's not just a problem for men. It's a problem for women and for our culture and our politics. The fact is, we have an alarming number of lonely, alienated, and disaffected young men in this country. And whatever the reasons for that, and however justified they may or may not be, this is something we have to deal with. You can see this playing out on the political front.

2:54Donald Trump made explicit appeals to men and it worked. He gained ground with men, especially younger men, and not just white men, but also Black and Latino men. For me, personally, the sort of masculinity that Trump models isn't appealing. I think he's a bully. I think he's a liar. And he projects a kind of strength that's divorced from any sense of restraint or obligation to other people. But the fact that he appeals to so many men says something important about this cultural moment. I think about this a lot because I'm raising a young son, and I ask myself, how do I raise him to be a man who's strong and capable, but also compassionate and honest?

3:47I'm Sean Ealing, and this is The Gray Area.

3:55Today's guest is Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at NYU and the host of the Professor G-Pod on the Vox Media Podcast Network. And he spent a ton of time researching and thinking about these issues. He's currently working on a book, actually, about men and masculinity. I've wanted to talk to Scott for a while about the research he's doing, what he's learning, and how it's changing the way he thinks about his own sons, how he's raising them. It's a conversation I was going to have outside this podcast, you know, just talking to the guy. But I know a lot of you are also wrestling with this question of what makes a man, whether you're parents or not.

4:45So I invited Scott onto the show to talk about masculinity, about the struggles men are facing, and about his advice for parents who are also struggling to navigate this moment. The conversation got pretty personal, which I think is good. If your definition of masculinity includes dudes can't talk about their feelings, well, you're about to be surprised.

5:17Scott Galloway, welcome to the show. Sean, thanks for having me. I'm really glad you're here. You've been great on this topic. And it's something I think about a lot. And I have found that it is a complicated conversation to try and have with people. Um, men are obviously not the only ones struggling and, you know, people are very used to seeing men in power and in charge that it's hard to reframe this conversation in, in a productive way. So I just want to start by trying to understand some of the headwinds here and just give people a snapshot of the data. So when someone wants to know what you mean when you say that men are struggling, how do you sum it up?

6:06What do you point to? Well, it's just data. Men are four times as likely to kill themselves. If you walk into a morgue and you see five people who died by suicide, four of them are men. Men are not attaching to school. They're not attaching to relationships. They're not attaching to work. One in three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. Two in three women under the age of 30 has a boyfriend. And you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. And the gag reflex you get from progressives and women when you start talking about, you know, struggling young men is understandable because no one was talking about it.

6:48And then some very unproductive voices entered into that void. And this kind of manosphere emerged where it was more what I would refer to as thinly veiled misogyny, where, you know, it starts off good. It starts off, take control of your life, be more action oriented, be physically fit. And then it starts to go to these really ugly places, basically treating women as property, showing them who's boss. I would never let my girlfriend go to the club alone, buying some sort of expensive douchey super car. And by the way, take my crypto university and learn how to be a baller. And so the voices that entered this discussion initially were really unproductive voices.

7:27So I think the natural gag reflex was somewhat understandable. The conversation has become much more productive because one, the data continues to get worse. And two, the conversation is now being led or inspired by a demographic that has more credibility, and that is mothers. And that is you see a lot of mothers who consider themselves feminists saying, there's just no getting around it. I have three kids, two daughters, one son, one daughter at Penn, one daughter in PR in Chicago, and my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. And the data is just overwhelming. And you need to acknowledge that, one, men have had a 2 ,000-year head start, so you can understand why people don't feel sorry for young men on a kind of macro-level basis.

8:15But also to recognize that empathy is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. And while acknowledging that women still face a lot of challenges, to have empathy for the very real and increasing struggles young men are facing, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And a 19-year-old kid in Appalachia who's being raised by a single mother, has no male role models, has very few economic opportunities or on-ramps into the middle class, is struggling perhaps or has gambling apps on his phone, sending him notifications 50 times a day to bet on the Kansas City Chiefs game, who has social media addicting him and maybe radicalizing him, has a few meeting opportunities.

8:59it's okay to have empathy for that kid recognizing that yeah maybe scott galloway and maybe even sean you're younger than me had had more advantage than they deserved but should that 19 year old male pay the price for the advantage i registered so i think the conversation actually over the last five or seven years has become much more productive and if you want to understand why we should be thinking about it just look at the data we are not women are not going to continue to flourish nor is the nation if men are flailing. Why do you think it's so hard to accept this idea that empathy doesn't have to be a zero-sum game?

9:35I think a lot of it is our fault. When I say our, I mean progressives. There is a certain, I think, sort of, okay, these people have advantage and are naturally more likely and prone to be oppressors than the oppressed, and there's very little empathy for them. In a society that is dramatically changing where men don't have the same economic role they used to or the same economic opportunities, there are some second-order effects we need to talk about. And that is, if we're going to have an honest conversation around mating, we have to have an honest conversation around mating. So men mate socioeconomically horizontally and down, women horizontally and up.

10:13Three-quarters of women say economic viability is key to a mate. Only a quarter of men, now I think it's a third, say it's key to a mate. How many times have we heard, I know all of these great women who are high character, attractive, have their act together, but they can't find a man. Well, actually they can, they just can't find a man they want to date. So what you have is more and more reasons, including political bifurcation where young people aren't connecting, falling in love and mating and forming households. And we have declining birth rates. If it wasn't for immigration, we'd be in decline.

10:46And I think it leads to a lot of second order effects around loneliness and depression and anxiety. And then just to wrap up here, it's different for men than women because when women don't have a romantic relationship, oftentimes they will channel that additional energy into relationships with friends, family, and their work. When men don't have the prospect of a romantic relationship, they kind of come off the rails. They're less likely to be employed. They're more likely to engage in misogynistic content. And some, without the prospect of a romantic relationship, men become shitty citizens.

11:22Women don't have an obligation to mate with anyone. I'm not suggesting they lower their standards, but the reality is we're producing the most dangerous person in the world by the millions, and that is a young, lonely, broke man. And the question is, all right, what does that mean for society? Because the thing that the most violent, unstable societies have in common is a disproportionate of young men who feel as if they have nothing to lose because they have no economic or romantic opportunities. So I think this is a big issue for society. And I just come back to the same thing. Empathy is not a zero-sum game.

11:53We can acknowledge that women still face a lot of challenges and we should be focused on those. We should do nothing to get in the way of their progress. But at the same time, we can recognize that a young man should not be paying for the advantage I received by not acknowledging the data around just how many headwinds young men are facing in our society. I suspect that the numbers on so-called deaths of despair, drug addiction, suicide, these sorts of things, have always tilted in the direction of men disproportionately. But how much is that gap growing? And how much is it growing particularly among young, younger men?

12:34It's staggering. Richard Reeves, who started my Yoda on this and kind of inspired my thinking on this. But Richard did this analysis and he looked at deaths of despair, overdoses, drunk driving, accidents, you know, getting way too drunk and then doing something stupid, suicide. The incremental increase in deaths of despair amongst men since 2004. This isn't how many men have died since 2004 based on the percentage of people that were dying from deaths of despair to that point. But the increase in the number of deaths of despair since 2004 has taken the lives of 400 ,000 American men. That's how many men we lost in World War II.

13:17So the incremental deaths of despair amongst young men over the last 20 years has taken as many lives as World War II. And if you were to reverse engineer all of this to where a boy or young man kind of comes off the tracks, like where did these problems start? You can typically reverse engineer it to one point in their life, and it's the following. When they lose a male role model. Well, I think the ultimate expression of masculinity is to take an interest in the life of a boy that isn't yours. And unfortunately, I was on Bill Maher and I said, I made this speech about men need to get involved in boys' lives.

13:55And he said, whoa, I get involved in a 15-year-old boy's lives and everyone's going to say, well, what's he doing? What's wrong? And because of the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson, there's now this feeling that if a man wants to get involved in a young boy's life, that there's something wrong with him, that he might be a pedophile. And this just isn't true. There are a lot of great men out there who have loved to give fraternal and paternal love and would like to coach a young man. And they don't need to be ballers. They just need to be trying to live a virtuous life because I can attest to this as the father of two boys.

14:25It is not hard to help them. Why did you decide to go to school without shoes today? Basic questions. I'm coaching another young man who's decided he's going to quit a decent job and move to Alaska. And I'm like, why are you moving to Alaska? He's like, well, I saw a program out and it looks cool. I'm like, so you're going to give up your job? You're going to give up your support system and you're just going to move to a – I mean, there's some – it's not that hard to add a lot of value to a lot of young men's lives right now. So I think we need to stop the suspicion and the demonization of anybody who wants to get involved and help a young man or get involved in a young boy's life and suspect them of something much more malicious and create a culture of mentorship and helping young boys.

15:10So one call out is if you're a man who has love to give and there's a lot of them out there, you don't have to be a baller just living a good life. There are young men everywhere and boys that need your guidance. Well, to your point about, you know, the most dangerous person in the world being a young man who's broken and alone, I think we have this loneliness crisis intersecting with the rise of digital technology. And it really is impossible to overstate how ugly some of these online spaces are. If you've seen an Andrew Tate video, you know what I mean. And someone like Tate is a weak man's idea of a strong man in the same way that Trump is a poor person's idea of a very rich person.

15:57But the reality is that Tate is the dominant model you're going to encounter online. And if you're trying to make sense of this journey people take from loneliness to resentment to conspiracism and fascism, just put on some fucking gloves and scroll through Tate's social media feeds and see how easily it drops you into this whole constellation of bad ideas and shitty politics. And more and more people are being sucked into that abyss. Yeah, and I do think there's actually at this point, I think Andrew Tate is just kind of an irrelevant footnote in history. I think he's going away almost as quickly as he's popped up.

16:39I think a lot of people have realized that this kid, you know, spending time three months in a Romanian prison for sex trafficking is not anyone's ideal of a successful person. and all this bullshit, this grift of join my crypto universe. He's not even worth the oxygen talking about. I actually think that Trump and, to a certain extent, Elon Musk are a bigger problem for young men because these individuals have taught young men that coarseness and cruelty is conflated with masculinity. And their success, especially Elon Musk's success, is so impressive and inspiring for young men. I get why he is and should be a role model on many levels for young men.

17:23At the same time, attacking people online, disavowing your transgender daughter, saying that she's dead to me. You know, it's just Trump. This is an insurrectionist, 34 felony counts, and people say, oh, you have Trump derangement syndrome. No, I have democracy addiction is what I suffer from. And at the same time, inspiring an insurrection. These are just not great role models for men. And I worry that this vision of masculinity has been conflated with some very ugly attributes. Coarseness, cruelty, misogyny. That's basically what it is. And attacking, always on the attack. I mean, I have 14 and 17-year-old boys.

18:11is their first role model, the first role model of any child used to be the president. That was the person you were supposed to immediately look to as success. That's what it means to be successful in America. Is that our definition of success now?

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20:27My son's five. And so this one's personal for me, too. And, you know, I don't want to see him screwed up in the way I see so many other young men screwed up. I don't want to see him undone by his own resentments. And I don't judge these men, even though I can see how much destruction they're causing, because I can see myself in them. I can see myself tumbling down the same rabbit hole when I was younger. I was pretty lost. I was caught up with drugs. I was close to falling right over the cliff, you know, but I had a family member who said something to me one night that probably saved my life. It was my get your shit together moment.

21:13And soon after that, I was in the military and the whole trajectory of my life changed. And that's how close any of us are to going the other way. I really believe that. Well, but what you just said is really powerful and it moves to solutions. And I'm trying to be better about proposing solutions because I'm such a glass half empty kind of guy. I think I can articulate the problems really well. I've got to get better at articulating the solutions. But I think mandatory national service would benefit America, young people, and especially men. I spent some time in Israel after October the 7th, and I got to spend some time with a battalion or a squadron.

21:52I don't know what the term is, about 120 kids from the IDF. And these are 19-year-olds, men and women, fit, thin, handling semi-automatic weapons, serving in the agency of something bigger than themselves, meeting lifelong friends, meeting co -founders of businesses, meeting mates. And they all serve in the same uniform. So I think national service, and it doesn't necessarily need to be military service, it can be senior care, it can be planting trees, whatever it might be, helping kids in low-income neighborhoods. But I think saying to all young people, you have to spend 12, 24 months serving the agency of something bigger than yourself with people from different income groups, ethnic sexual orientations, recognizing that America is worth investing in.

22:42I think that's one idea in terms of a solution for getting around some of these issues. so if it's not tate it's not trump it's not musk what do you think the healthiest model of modern masculinity looks like or ought to look like i think they're i think they're examples but they're not unfortunately i don't think there's you know i have a tough time people always say to me who are the role models and i do think there's just millions of men who get up every day, add surplus value. They create more tax revenue than they absorb. They listen to more complaints than they complain. They notice other people's lives.

23:23They're in great shape. They try to achieve. They plant the trees of which the shade they'll never sit under. I think there's millions of those men around. I mean, this is an odd example. I read Chris Christopherson's obituary. I don't know if you know him, the country singer. He was a golden glove, played high school football, became a Rhodes Scholar, got a master's in English from Oxford, and then decided he was going to go serve his country, rose to the level of captain. He was a helicopter pilot, was known as kind of a poet in his music, and had this reputation for being very generous with other artists.

23:58I mean, a gentle, generous soul who wanted to serve his country was physically robust and outstanding at what he did. Now, I don't think it's realistic to think any of us are going to be Chris Christopherson, but I think there are men everywhere who are trying to add surplus value and can be really good role models. I think there's a lot of them in government. I think there's wonderful role models in the service and in services. I think they're everywhere. unfortunately because of social media and the algorithms because of the rage that people feel i think that we're more drawn to the media is like a tyrannosaurus rex it's drawn towards movement and violence and when it sees people making outlandish provocative stupid aggressive mean things it gives those people more organic reach so there's a confluence of really unfortunate factors.

24:56And that is the algorithms love Elon Musk accusing an honored serviceman of treason and saying he will pay a price. You just don't, I mean, this is the kind of behavior we never would have tolerated, but now the algorithms love it. And there are now so many people living their own reality that they believe Elon Musk, because he inspired the EV race and sends rockets into space, that he must be right, that he's onto something. And so I think there's unfortunately the men who gain the most notoriety, the algorithms love their coarseness, their cruelty, and what I would call anti-masculine behavior.

25:31And that is, I don't even like to use the word toxic masculinity because I don't like to put those two words next to each other. But this is anti-masculine behavior. This is deciding that you need to show your toughness by being coarse and cruel and attacking people that are less powerful than you. For me, the problem isn't toughness. It's not warrior culture. It's not the celebration of strength and fitness, which is now stupidly coded as right-wing. The problem, as you're saying or have said, is that when all of this gets unmoored from any sense of purpose or community, any sense of service to people and things beyond yourself, And that's part of the reason why I think the loneliness crisis is so central to this whole conversation, not just about men, but really everyone.

26:21It's practically a civilizational crisis at this point. Yeah, look, but I have a couple questions for you because I don't know much about you. You said you suffered from addiction and then you went into the service. What was your addiction and what branch of the armed services did you serve in and how long did you serve? I wouldn't say it was addiction. I was using a lot of drugs. I was selling drugs. And I was 18, left home, and I joined the Air Force. And I did my just under four years, and I got out, and I went to school. But obviously, so you're selling drugs and using, and something went off that said, okay, I need to get my shit together, and you turned to the Air Force.

27:08And by the way, I think that's a great, that's a way out. That's a way to get your life back on track. And unfortunately, something like 60 or 70 % of the people now, of the men who decide, I want to take that path, can't because they can't pass a physical fitness test because of obesity or a mental wellness test because of anxiety and depression. But that for you, it sounds like that was really kind of the turning point in your life. Is that accurate? Yeah. I was living in a shitty apartment. with a bunch of drugged out people that I was valet parking cars at the casino with. And I had an older cousin who grew up next door to me.