Why We Ignore Young Men’s Struggles (A Lost Boys Special)

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1:28Hey everyone, Scott Galloway here. It's Scott Free August, which means we're continuing the Lost Boys series, the set of conversations we hosted with Anthony Scaramucci. The Mooch! Surprisingly well-read and insightful and thoughtful. I really have enjoyed developing a friendship with Anthony. Anyways, Anthony and I discussed the struggles facing young men today. In this second episode, we're back with Richard Reeves to ask, why isn't anyone talking about this? We dig into the silence, the concerns many mothers are quietly raising, and why we need a positive path forward. Let's bust right into it.

2:08Welcome to Lost Boys, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the unique challenges young men face today and an exploration about what we can do about it. In our last episode, Scott Galloway and I spoke with author and researcher Richard Reeves. He wrote the seminal book about the challenges young men face today called Of Boys and Men. Last time we talked about how, by nearly every measure, young men are failing to thrive. They're doing worse in school. They're doing worse in relationships. They're doing worse in the workplace than ever before. Today we're going to talk about why the challenges young men face is an issue that's been ignored.

2:48And we'll ask the question, for men to do better, doesn't that mean women will have to do worse? The answer, of course, is no. Here's part two of my conversation with Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves.

3:05I'm going to play the progressive here. I'm going to say, guys, I hear you, but there was five, six, seven hundred years of white male privilege throughout European society, eventually spilled over into American society. And frankly, the women were not even allowed to vote 125 years ago. They got the vote 105 or so years ago. And a result of which everything that's going on today is a counterbalance to what's happened over hundreds and hundreds of years. Again, I don't believe all that. I'm playing the devil's advocate because I want you to respond to it because that's some of the policy pushback.

3:46Well, it's some of the resistance that you get to the conversation, which, you know, until you have the conversation and get the data, you can't even have the conversation. You can't have a conversation about solutions to problems that people aren't agreed are problems. And of course, it's uncomfortable to start talking about boys and men when we still know that there are so many things still to do for women and girls and because of that history. But just because it's uncomfortable shouldn't mean we don't do it. The failure to have the conversation has been a huge problem. And actually, let's put it very bluntly.

4:22Yes, it's true that we've had a society where most of the inequalities went the other way. Do we now want a society where we don't care if we just reverse all of that? Like either we care about gender equality or we don't. And right now there's a bigger gender gap in US colleges than there was in the 1970s. It's just the other way around. So women are further ahead of men now in college than the other way around. So we cared about it then when it was women who were behind. The question is, why would we not care about it now when it's men who are behind? And if the answer is, well, because they've had their turn, it's our turn now.

4:58That's a horrific way to think about communities. It's zero sun. It's pessimistic. And by the way, it won't pass muster with mums. If you say to my wife, you've got three sons, but you know, we've had 10 ,000 years of patriarchy, so we don't really care about them and we don't care about their mental health and their education, then get ready for a berating. Because the idea that two wrongs make a right is actually offensive, but it does get in the way of this problem. But once you acknowledge that there's discomfort and you acknowledge the history, then I find that most people want to have a good faith conversation.

5:36So you played the part very well, Anthony, but it's almost nobody who actually thinks like that. Thank God. Yeah, I call it the Red Army effect. When the Russians liberated Berlin or came in, they were pissed off. And there was a lot of unfair and unnecessary violence and just brutalization and criminal acts. And I was on MSNBC and I was talking about, So, you know, are we going to hold a 19-year-old kid from Appalachia responsible for the advantage I received? Is it their fault that I was sort of born on third base because I was white, had outdoor plumbing, and was born in 1964? Should he pay the price for that?

6:20And the host said, well, of course there's going to be an overreaction and we should expect that. I'm like, you're justifying injustice. And but the flip side of that is that I think the people on this podcast, having recognized the advantage we did, the unfair advantage we had, I didn't even it's so weird. You didn't even write about you guys at the time. I didn't even realize it was an advantage. I was raising tens of millions of dollars in my late 20s and early 30s in San Francisco and the Internet generation. And I didn't stop to think, why are no women or black people raising money? Is it because they don't want to be entrepreneurs?

6:56It just never dawned on me. I didn't think I had advantage. And then as I've gotten older, I recognize I had enormous advantage. So I feel as if we do have a debt and we have to try and make sure that people of all genders, races have the same types of opportunities we did. But also at the same time, I think we have a debt to say, OK, if a young man doesn't have a fraction, if it's gone from advantage to disadvantage, we also have a debt to those young men and young people. But I have been shocked at people's willingness to accept, well, your dad and your granddad had big advantage, so we're going to penalize you.

7:41I mean, that just makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. We don't need to throw anybody under the bus, do we? That's the problem, is the debate. Absolutely not. But I just... Who are we going to throw under the bus here? that that's that's the pushback and i think you've done a good job of rebutting the pushback but let's let's talk about the moms moms are very concerned i'm not trying to inject politics into this thing but uh you know people thought that uh vice president harris was going to do better with women it turned out that 54 of the white women voted for donald trump and when they did the exit polling 47 of all women voted for donald trump 54 of the white women they did the exit polling.

8:18They said, well, we voted for our sons. We sort of feel like the playing field has gotten unbalanced, the rhetoric in the community, the language usage, the threat to white men. We voted for them. So let's talk to the moms for a second. So Richard, what would your message be to a concerned mom? Let's use the three children. She had three sons, ages 10 to 14. She sees the anxiety in them. She sees this cultural shift. What do you say to her and how do you get her to feel better and how do you get her to do actionable things that help them? If you're worried about your sons, you're not alone. You should be worried about your sons and you should be worried that the education system and broader culture is not serving your sons very well.

9:05And so you should absolutely acknowledge that that is a real concern and that we're not going to get anywhere by pathologizing her boys and saying there's something wrong with them. There's a slight problem in schools in particular where boys are treated like malfunctioning girls. It's like, why won't they sit still? Why aren't they more like their sister? Why aren't they more like their female classmates? And so if you feel that education system is not quite working or society is not, you're right. And then I would say, so are you advocating for more male teachers? Are you advocating for more technical work at school?

9:37Are you doing the change? Great. I hope so. And then I would say, but by the way, that's not because women are doing better. It's not because the woke feminists left have taken over the world and have a conspiracy against men. This is largely the unintended consequences of some policies that we have to address. And so what's happened is that the more reactionary message is boys are struggling. We're not paying enough attention to their concerns. That's because the woke feminists have taken over. And the problem with the argument is it's only the third that's wrong. The first two are absolutely right.

10:14And so I see this as partly a reaction on the part of many parents to a sense that the political establishment, especially on the left, has been woefully neglecting the real problems of boys and men, and at worst has been pathologizing them and blaming them for their own problems. And there is enough truth to that to make a very strong political argument. Scott and I were among the people banging our head against the brick wall to say, for the love of God, talk more about what's happening to boys and men. Talk more about what's happening to boys and men, particularly to those on the left. And on the right, we would say, have some positive solutions for boys and men.

10:54And so I'd say to that mom, you're right to be worried, but don't fall into the trap of somehow blaming women for the problems of your boys, which by the way, most people do not. They don't. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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12:47But Anthony, you'll you'll have a view here. I think I think that Donald Trump was reelected because of this issue. And if you look at the three groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red, who switched, it was first and foremost Latinos. The second group was people under the age of 30, who for the first time aren't doing as well as his or her parents were at the age of 30. That's never happened before. So they're like, okay, I feel rage and shame in my household because I can't move out. I don't want the incumbent. I don't care who the incumbent is. I just don't want, you lost me at incumbent or the establishment and Trump painted Harris and Biden as the incumbents pretty easily.

13:37And then the third group that swung hardest from blue to red with respect to 2020 versus 2024 was women age 45 to 64. And my thesis is that that's their mothers. So when your son isn't doing well, you don't give a flying fuck about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine. You don't care about transgender rights. You just want change. And let's be honest, he represented change and he flew into the manosphere. He wasn't apologizing for men. He wasn't pathologizing them. He was crypto, rockets, Joe Rogan. I mean, he flew. He said, I am where I call him President T. This was supposed to be an election or the election was supposed to be a referendum on women's rights.

14:26I thought it was going to be. Guess what? Women's rights didn't show up. It just didn't show up. What showed up was people was mothers and young people saying the kids are not all right. So I don't care. I just want change, even if it means even if it means chaos. us. And what I, you know, the example, I went to the Democratic National Convention. It was a parade of special interest groups. Make sure we have a disabled veteran up there. Make sure we have Asian Pacific Islanders up there. Make sure the gay community gets a mic. Everyone, every topic, you know, well, maybe someone needs to tell the president that this may be one of those black jobs, you know, just all these righteous.

15:09And I'm inspired by that stuff. And I can see why it gets us excited and ginned up. No one got up there and talked about the struggles of young men. And if you go to the DNC.org site, the Democratic National Committee's website, there's a page that says who we serve. And it lists 16 demographic groups from Asian Pacific Islanders to veterans, the disabled, immigrants. I counted it up. I think it adds up to about 74 % of the population. So when a party says we're purposely and explicitly advocating for 74 % of the population. You're not advocating for 74 percent of the population. You're discriminating against 26 percent.

15:45And guess who that 26 percent are? Young men. So the Democratic Party basically instituted into its policies a bias against the group that, quite frankly, is arguably struggling the most. And what do you know? Young people, including young women who want more viable young men and their mothers, who had traditionally been Democratic voters, swung towards change and chaos. I don't know what you think, Richard, but I completely agree with every word of that. And by the way, like or dislike Donald Trump, he's got good political instincts. He's still hammering that. We've had a plane crash and he's talking about DEI policies facilitating it, whether that is true or not.

16:30It hammers the bludgeoning, if you will, of the issue. Yeah, his consistent, I guess, consistency on that. But yeah, I shared Scott's frustration. And in fact, somebody told me when the Democrats put out their economic opportunity agenda, somebody said to me, look at the photographs of Harris and Walt meeting voters and see which demographic you think is missing. and I couldn't quite believe it, but of the every single photograph features female voters, there isn't a single man. It's like... I got myself in trouble because I said about the Democratic Convention to one of the senior leaders, I said, I watched it on TV.

17:08If I was an alien coming in from Mars, I would have thought that the only people on planet Earth were blacks and women because the only people they were showing on the television and they got really mad at me for saying that, you know? You know, and what's so infuriating about this is that I think too many people felt that in order to be credible with women, they had to not, they had to ignore these issues. And I got to tell you, like I talked to some super progressive young women and I said, as long as they continue to talk about the issues you care about, reproductive rights, whatever, would it upset you if they also launched a campaign on mental health of young men, a campaign for male teachers, a campaign, a coach for America program to connect young men to underserved communities.

17:53If Tim Walsh stood up and gave a speech saying, we have a plan for our young men, would that upset you? And not a single one of them said yes, because they're worried about their brothers and their boyfriends and their dads. So it's back to this point about Scott's point about not zero sum. It was actually, I'll go a step further, it was insulting to women to think that they couldn't advocate for men without those women thinking that somehow they weren't going to care about them. let me key off of the coach for america and i agree with what you just said because that's where i think we need to go i think i think that there needs to be a system you know and i've said to scott i call it belay that's the term when you're rock climbing and you're trying to help somebody up the up the rock mountain you're belaying with each other the the system of coaching what would the components be richard if you were going to devise a system of coaching i love that Belay idea, by the way, because it speaks to this idea of helping each other up and actually of older men and older boys helping and mentoring kind of younger ones.

18:55So it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful image. Well, I'd just point to start with some facts, which is that one of the reasons I care about male teachers is because between 30 and 40 percent of male teachers are also coaches. And so if you want more, and there are lots of schools now where there just aren't enough coaches and the share of boys doing sport is going down. That's what the Aspen Institute project play work shows is that we're seeing fewer boys doing it. So what would it look like? First of all, more in schools. I think we should pay teachers a lot more, period, but we should definitely pay them more for doing extracurricular.

19:25I think we need to find ways to encourage volunteering through things like Big Brothers, Big Sisters, etc. So the underserved communities can connect to young men who are looking for a coaching opportunity, get past some of the suspicion that we've had around all of that. And there are organizations doing this, to be clear. But I think that the underlying message has to be, two young men, we need you. The tribe needs you. I've come to believe that there is always a contest for the allegiance of young men. The question is, who wins it? And I think young men always need a bit more structure, a bit more script.

20:07they need a cause an institution a tribe a community a nation to become part of and we have we are failing to say to young men just address the group of young men and some of them said who should be the role model for kind of kids who don't have fathers and are struggling and I said well how about you how about you all go out of here and volunteer for big brothers big sisters find your local scout group find your local school that will be desperate for an assistant coach for their soccer team and then find ways to have dollars, federal and state dollars flow to support that because the share of men volunteering and coaching and mentoring is collapsing.

20:47And that is a disaster, not just for the men who end up lacking kind of purpose, but for the boys they would otherwise be serving. Yeah. And that goes to a call out. It's, and this is, this is virtue signaling, but I have found it so remarkably easy to positively impact a boy's life. And that is, you don't have to be a baller. You don't have to be have training in it. You know, I have boys. I know as a practice say, I want you to bring one of your friends. Yeah, because what's strange is or what's interesting, even if it's not the son of a single mother, which I think corporations have a role here to figure out mentor programs for young men who have paternal and fraternal concern and love to give.

21:31They just don't know where to put it. Maybe they don't have their own families yet, identify women in the organization who maybe have single mothers who have boys who could use a little bit of guidance or just male companionship. These boys are everywhere. And you literally like invite them over to help you wash your car. They just start asking questions and then they get comfortable with you. And then they see that you find value in them, that you think they have worth. They start asking you questions and you can tell them very basic, except no, your mom's not your enemy. Stop it. Like how often are you getting high?

22:05Well, no, no, no. I'm getting high three, four times a week. Okay. Is that a good idea? I mean, it's just not hard. The bar, it's not hard to add a lot of value. And, you know, and there's a very unfortunate dynamic. I experienced this when I was on Bill Maher. I said, if we want to be, if we want more, you know, if we want better men, we have to be better men. We have to get involved in a boy's life. And I'm like, they're everywhere. And Bill Maher said, whoa, I get involved in a 15-year-old boy's life and people are going to suspect me. We have to stop that. I have said Michael Jackson and the Catholic Church fucked it up for all of us.

22:43There are a ton of good men out there, heterosexual and gay men. When I was planning to be a big brother in L.A., basically the entire due diligence process was trying to figure out, in as polite a way possible, are you gay? And the reality is there's no more greater instance, incidents of pedophilia among gay men than straight men. So you want to check for evidence of pedophilia, but it doesn't matter what their sexual orientation is. And I think there's a lot of men out there who, there's a great, I think it's a Paul Thomas Anderson film called Magnolia. And this bartender says, I have loved to give, I just don't know where to give it.

23:19I think there's a ton of really good men in their 20s and 30s and 40s who wouldn't mind hanging out with a young man or a teenager or a boy every once in a while or including him in their family activities. But they feel like they're going to be suspected of something. And then just going very meta, and I'd love to get Richard's reaction because this is one of the few topics we haven't talked about. When I think about, I worry that we're falling into the same trap we fall into the middle class. I feel like sometimes the right believes that the middle class is a naturally occurring organism and it'll just heal on its own if you let the market do its own thing.

24:03The middle class is an accident. You know, we had 7 million men return from World War II. They had proven heroism. They looked good. They were in shape. They were in uniform. And we gave them a shit ton of money and formed the National Highway Transportation Act, the GI Bill. In sum, we made them very attractive to women. And then that set off the baby boom. And we had this incredible rush of prosperity where people had generous, loving households and said, let's bring women into this prosperity. Let's bring non-whites into this prosperity. And it kicked off this wonderful liberal society. But it took massive investment.

24:38And now there's this notion that the middle class will survive on its own, and it doesn't. I worry that the same notion that men will figure it out on their own, because if you look throughout history, what generally is the norm is a small number of men get all of the economic and all of the mating opportunities. 80 % of women have reproduced, only 40 % of men. So if we don't actively move in, and the reality is if you have a tribe of 50 men and 50 women and 30 of the men die, the tribe survives. If 30 of the women die, the tribe goes out of business. So men have always been a little bit disposable, But if you don't weigh in and figure out a way to lift up young people through investment, we're going to go back to where we've been through most of our history.

25:24And that is life is awesome for a small number of men. And it is really difficult and awful for the majority and a violent place for the majority of them. I love this. I love this thought, Scott. It's the idea is that mature masculinity is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. And I strongly agree with that. In practice, in every known human society, we have to make men. Boys don't become men just with the passage of time. You need rites of passage. You need institutions. You need a call. There has to be a call. There has to be a role. And that will change in different societies at different times.

26:14But we have to make our men. And I agree that there's a real naivety about the idea that we just don't need to do that anymore. Right? They'll figure it out. It'll be on the internet. It'll be somewhere. Right? We don't need to curate or form our men anymore. But we do. We've always needed to form our men. And we need to continue to do that. the question is just how and i was thinking a bit when you were talking scott uh about the institutions that used to do that i think to some extent you do you need institutions that help that formation of boy whether that's schools churches clubs boy scouts camps i don't you know whatever what wilderness rides i don't care like every society will do it differently but but you do need to do it it has to be an active thing and it takes men to do it comes back to your point about we need men to staff those institutions and run them.