Why Young Men Are Falling Behind (A Lost Boys Special)

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2:00and role model to unpack the data and explore why young men are falling behind. Hope you enjoy. We'll be back soon.

2:17Thanks for joining us for this new limited edition podcast we're calling Lost Boys. I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and I've been really concerned about what's happening to young people, specifically young men today. I grew up in a blue-collar family with a very tough father. He wasn't always easy, but still there were a lot of adult men in my life that served as real role models for me and a lot of men like me. We knew what men were supposed to be and supposed to do, but I worry that today, between the morass of social media, the confusion about pronoun usage, and the whole change in the culture, it's a lot harder for young men to thrive.

2:54Young men are just doing much worse than ever before. Last summer, I started talking to my good friend, Professor Scott Galloway, about all this. Many of you know him as the professor, businessman, entrepreneur, and podcaster. And it turns out he is very passionate about this issue. And the more we talked, the more we both felt, let's see if we can do something about it. So together, we're starting this podcast, Lost Boys, to talk about what the problem is and then figure out what we can do about it. In our first couple of episodes, we're going to talk with the author and researcher Richard Reeves, who has probably done more to shine a light on this problem than anyone else.

3:35I'm sure you'll find this as interesting as I do. Here's part one of my conversation with Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves.

3:47I'd like to introduce now my good friend, my dear friend, Scott Galloway, who will introduce Richard Reeves. But guys, thank you so much for joining me. I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of moms that are going to tune into this podcast. Trust me, I've been all over the speaking circuit talking to moms about this very issue. So take it away, Scott. Yeah, so first off, Anthony, thanks. This is Anthony's vision. And I was an easy yes. I think Anthony is having a, for lack of a better term, a moment as sort of an interesting kind of thought leader or commentator on the state of the U.S. So I wanted to be supportive of anything that brought attention to the issue.

4:22And the issue is pretty straightforward. I would argue that no group has ascended faster globally than women. And by the way, that's a wonderful thing. The number of women elected to parliament has doubled in the last 30 years, more women seeking globally tertiary education than men. And no group has fallen further, faster in America than young men. And Richard will go into some greater detail as he's my Yoda around this stuff. But effectively, you have, if you go into a morgue and there's five young people who've died by suicide, four of them are men. three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated.

4:57And I relate to this on a personal level because I was one of those men. When I was younger, I didn't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects living with my mother and kind of lost. But America sort of loved me and picked me up by the scruff of my neck and flung me forward in the form of the University of California, assistance and welfare for my mother. And I don't find that some of those same programs and some of those same opportunities are the way society operates. Had I been that kid today, I worry that outcomes would have been different. And so this is something that's a passion project and immediately found the person to kind of, I don't know, serve again as my sensei, if you will, or my Jedi master is Richard Reeves.

5:42Richard is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, born in Petersburg, United Kingdom, educated in geography at Wadham College. Am I saying that correctly? Yeah, you are. Amazing. Crazy, right? Right. And has a PhD from the University of Warwick and has had several pretty high-level positions, including joining the office of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. He's also was at, was it the Hoover Institute? Where were you? Demos. Demos. There you go. IPPL, yeah. and has, and not only that, is not just a bureaucrat. One of the things I respect most about Richard, he not only wrote kind of this landmark book or David Brooks described it as a landmark book of boys and men, but he's an entrepreneur.

6:31And that is he went out and started a foundation or a research think tank. What do you call this? A think tank? A think tank is probably the best term, yeah, I guess. Sounds important though, doesn't it? The American Institute for Boys and Men and immediately was able to raise a lot of capital People have a ton of respect for him, his research, his kind of thoughtful, almost sort of nonpartisan approach to this and saw the need. And just one, just to do some name dropping, I believe you received a$10 million grant from the Melinda French Gates Foundation. Is that accurate? Pivotal Ventures. There was 20, most of which I had to give away, which is great.

7:05There you go. Well, we can help. Anyways, with that, Richard Reeves. So, Anthony, do you want to kick us off with a couple of questions for Richard? I think so. I want to start out by making a statement, Richard, if you don't mind, and get you to react to it. I feel like things were more easily defined when we were growing up. Scott and I are contemporaries, both born around 1964. And I feel like we had some definition to our lives. You know, there were certain things that boys did. There were certain things that girls did. And again, I'm not trying to be overly parochial. And I understand that we want to be accepting in our culture for varying lifestyles and so on and so forth.

7:45But, you know, Scott said something to me that really penetrated a few months back. He said, you know, there's no advocacy for white males. There's maybe 75 different affinity groups at NYU, but there's no white male affinity group. And not necessarily saying that there should be, sir. But I guess I'd like to ask you first, the statistic that Scott's giving, what happened in our sociology? What happened in our world, our culture that's led to this problem that we're all facing? Well, the first thing to say is that I think Scott has been a real leader in terms of elevating this as a cultural conversation.

8:27So there's a danger now that you just get some praise inflation between me and me and Scott now. but let's get that over with. But he was really leading on this before I wrote the book. He's one of the people. I want the praise inflation, Richard. I mean, you don't know me, but I need it. I have a very fragile ego. So don't focus on Galloway. Just like find subtle ways to praise me. I'm sorry, continue, Richard. Anthony, please. So, so far, Anthony, I have no reason to object to you. How about that? All right, sounds good. So someone sort of said like, he's a friend in the sense that he didn't mean me active ill will.

9:00Let's start with that, Anthony. I'm thrilled you're doing this. So yeah, I think that's right. And it's interesting the way this is both like a factual problem in the sense that like we've got all these facts, some of which Scott's referred to, but like in education and wages and employment. And that's my background, right? I'm a fact guy. I'm a researcher, policy guy. But I think there's something behind that, which is what you're both talking about, which is this identity question. So beneath the surface of facts, there's this question about identity. And I do think that there was a clearer script.

9:36That's the way I like to think about this, is that the old script was for women, wife and mother. You're going to raise the kids, you're going to, et cetera. And the old script for men was you're going to be the economic provider, head of household, breadwinner, right? That was a script my parents had. And I had a great upbringing. I'm very lucky, et cetera. But there wasn't like a question that they had to ask about how they're going to divide it. We tore those scripts up, I think, Anthony. I see how you both react to this. I think we tore them up and we said to women, your script is no longer housewife, mother.

10:10It's anything you want it to be. It's CEO, it's leader, it's you go, girl. It's amazing. And as Scott said, that's arguably the biggest economic liberation in human history. Amazing. So the script that girls and young women get now is around autonomy, of independence, assertiveness. it's all uplift it's incredibly empowering we tore up the old script for men which was breadwinner head of household etc and we didn't replace it with anything we just tore up the old script and so what that means is a lot of men now feel like they're basically improvising they basically don't have a script or if they do it's a negative script i really fear that one of the problems now is that the script around what men you know what men treat is more defined negatively it's don't be toxic don't mansplain.

10:55So there's a long list of don'ts now for men, most of which we would probably agree with. But what about the do's? What's the to-do list for a 24-year-old man now? And we don't have a good answer to that question. That's created a massive vacuum, I think, in our culture and our politics. But Scott, what Richard is saying happened for what reason? Through osmosis, a backlash to masculinity or male toxic masculinity? What caused this to happen? Or did it just happen naturally? Well, and I'm going to do like a rich little version of Richard here, and he can correct me where I got it wrong or where I got it right.

11:37But the right will claim that it was, if you tell men that they're idiots and predators for four or five decades, they start to believe you. I think that's part of it, but I would argue that it's much more nuanced and that the primary culprits, if there is a culprit, are much harder to solve and less political. The on-ramps into a middle class were, you know, for someone who wasn't cut out for college or education, a lot of those on-ramps have been taken away. Simply put, but we've outsourced a lot of our manufacturing jobs. One third of jobs used to require a college degree. Now it's two thirds.

12:19What happened to wood shop, metal shop, auto shop? There is a bias. Now that we've leveled the playing field in education in my industry, women have just blown by, men. You know, the attributes to be a good student just come more easily to a woman than, you know, at NYU, we don't like to talk, we don't say this out loud. There are certain graduate schools in NYU where if we were admissions blind, they not only would be 70 percent women, they'd be 70 percent Asian women. And so there's just the natural attributes of a woman lend themselves better to education. I also think economically, we've passed a lot of legislation that has transferred money from young people to old people, people of the age of 70 or 72 percent wealthier than they were 40 years ago, people under the age of 40 or 24 percent less wealthy.

13:07Well, that affects men and women. Yes, but when men don't have money, quite frankly, they're just less attractive. That is more of a hit to them than it is a hit to women. So you have an education system that's biased against them. You have, Richard can speak to the actual biological reasons, prefrontal cortex, societal, economic. I think those are the primary culprits. I think it's a little bit, and Richard, I'm curious to get your opinion. I think it's a little bit lazy to say that it's people not respecting men. I think that's part of it, but I think it's a more complicated—there's a bunch of dimensions here that are probably bigger contributors to the fall of young men.

13:48But I'm open to pushback here, Richard. Yeah, I think, in some ways, I think that the discourse around men and the toxic masculinity, what that's done is put fuel on the fire. There are all these more structural, longer-term problems, as you say, Scott, around education. The labor market has really turned against particularly men with less skill. I mean, the fact that men without a college degree are earning no more today than they were half a century ago, like stagnant male wages for most men, that is a massive economic fact and therefore a cultural fact. But I do think that the fuel on the fire has been to say, if men are struggling, it's sort of their fault.

14:34One of my criticisms of more progressive-leaning people is that they can't accept that men have problems because they're still convinced that men are the problem. And that's created a blindness to the reality of these problems of men, or a tendency sometimes to say, if men are struggling, it must be their fault. So if men are committing suicide or having mental health problems, that's because they won't get help. If men are dying of COVID, it's because they wouldn't get the vaccine. If men are not doing well in school, it's because they can't be bothered to crack a book, etc. And so there's this weird sort of blame thing that happens with men, but only men now, rather than saying, well, maybe the education system's not working very well for men.

15:14Maybe the workplace has changed. And so I think you're right, Scott, that these are deeper challenges. But I also think you're right, Anthony, that it does make things worse if we actually then not only say men aren't having problems, but also point to them as the problem. So it's a really unfortunate set of circumstances. The reason men are struggling is not because people are being mean to them. But that doesn't mean people being mean to them doesn't make things worse. And I certainly think it makes them open to much more reactionary voices who can then credibly claim that mainstream institutions and people don't care about them because they're too busy pathologizing them.

15:52And I do think if you want someone to really kind of feel threatened and alone, then threaten their identity. That we do know that. And masculinity has become part of that problem. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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17:40Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. But to Anthony, to your point around misandry, you never hear the word. You hear misogyny all the time. You never hear misandry. You know, I went on Theo Vaughn and I was talking about struggling young men. And I get what I always get. Dozens if not hundreds of comments along the lines of, well, if young men just got their act together. Now, imagine me saying that about the black community. Well, if black people just got their act together, what would be the response? Well, if women were just in touch with their emotions, I mean, it is open season on it.

18:26If you're at a conference and you say, well, women are better managers, they're more thoughtful, they're more nuanced, they make better doctors, they're more nurturing. Everyone just kind of claps politely and nods their head. If I were to say men are more risk-aggressive and on average make better entrepreneurs, what would the response be? So it feels like we can't even have an open, honest conversation because it's open season on one gender and the other from just even if you're trying to have a science-based conversation, it's a third rail. You can't say anything that might imply that women are, you know, might be contributing or the role women play that this might be part of the, you know, they might be part of not only the solution, but also part of the problem.

19:17You can't even go there. it's really interesting scott if you look there is some really interesting research where if you show people evidence on sex differences if you say there are some on average differences between men and women say on risk taking or conscientiousness or something if you say and that makes women better people are much more likely to accept that there are sex differences than if you say it the other way around and so there's this real asymmetry here which is that people are much more willing to accept sex differences when women come out better from them than they are the other way around.

19:52And that's just intellectually bankrupt. And you understand why it's happened, but it also, you understand why if we literally have nothing positive to say about masculinity and men, then no wonder so many of them feel under siege. And it means that we don't get to tackle these serious problems that Scott and I are both so exercised by. I want you both to react to this because this is something I see in my children, which I'm trying to combat and maybe you could offer me some advice on how to do it. I feel everything that you said is true. And I feel that there is an undercurrent of this lack of advocacy for men.

20:26They can't advocate for themselves. And the other thing is they can't express that they feel the way that you guys are suggesting, meaning you can't have a 15-year-old say, Professor Galloway, you know, I feel left out of the equation or I feel one way, but if I assert myself and say X, Y, Z, I'm not heard. or people come down on me like a ton of bricks. I guess where I'm getting to is a lot of these guys, my children included, they'll find recluse in the Internet. They'll go on the Internet. They fall prey to some conspiracy theories. Some of these guys think the moon landing didn't happen. I've got to listen to all this sort of nonsense that goes on on the Internet.

21:08And I feel like they're falling into a trap of despair without the tools necessary to stand up for themselves. Do I have that wrong? And if I do, tell me what I have wrong. And if I have it right, is there a solution? Richard? Yeah. So I think you have it right that the question of what am I supposed to do today as a man? How am I supposed to date? What about money? What about sex? What about fitness? All those questions. Like, what's the script? What's the story? How am I supposed to be today? That question is on the lips and the minds of almost all young men today. So the question is not, is there a question?

21:52It's who's providing answers. And you're right that if they're not getting answers in the classroom from their fathers, from their scout groups, from their churches, from wherever, and they don't have that conversation, those role models, of course, they'll go and look online. And so the solution is to have this kind of conversation, is for us to be having a conversation, to be having a good faith conversation about advocating for our boys and men. I mean, Scott already mentioned the suicide statistics, but just to put a sharp point on, we lose 40 ,000 men a year to suicide now. And since 2010, almost all of the rise has been among young men.

22:31So the rise in suicide among men under the age of 30 has been 30 % just since 2010. We have a crisis of loss of male lives in this. And if we can't, and by the way, it's higher among white men. There are lots of other issues that go the other way. But if we can't have that conversation honestly and openly and tackle it, someone else is going to have that conversation. The question is not, are we having this conversation? The question is, who's having it? But Scott, how low have you gotten in your life, Scott? Oh, you know, I've often said that my worst days are better than most people's best days, but I was never, I'm pretty blessed, Anthony.

23:14I've had, you know, I've lost, like most people, I've lost people I've loved. I've had a business go out of business. You know, some big business failures, personal failures, been divorced, but never got to the point where I think some of these young men get, where they feel as if, I mean, the saddest thing I saw, I read, was that with young men in suicide, a lot of it is depression, drunkenness, addiction related. The most rattling information thing I read was that with men our age who kill themselves, I read a psychiatrist said that it's a rational decision. This is an individual who does the math.

23:59It typically, like the path to suicide for them, or a very common path, is they have a financial, they have financial strain. They lose a business, they go broke, they're no longer a provider. Their wife, who no longer sees them as a provider, is less attracted to them and divorces them. 70 % of divorce filings are from women. And we all like to pretend that all women are Lisa Simpson or Marge and high-character people. I can prove statistically there's a lot of good women, some not so good women. There's a lot of good men, some not so good men. And then the man, so the man loses his wife, his primary relationship.

24:39He oftentimes loses access to his kids. I'm going through this with a lot of my friends right now. They have teenage girls or kids and they get divorced. And quite frankly, the kids want nothing to do with them. It's like dad shows up, he doesn't live here. He's not part of my ecosystem. And all of a sudden the dad goes from having all this great kind of what I call garbage time, hanging out with his kids, and he's no longer in the same house. Family court is sometimes biased against men. And then he just has no role, no purpose, and he makes a conscious decision to check out. And that to me was just the most devastating that it's a quote unquote rational decision.

25:22And what Richard was saying about the conversation, I think it's gotten remarkably more productive in large part because of some of Richard's work and research. But American households, millions of them, felt this and saw it happening for the last two decades and no one was talking about it. And unfortunately, that void, into that void slipped some unproductive voices that said, be proud of yourself. And the problem with these unproductive voices is it starts positive. Be fit, be action-oriented, take control, go up and approach a woman. and then it comes off the rails. Then it's like, now invest in crypto and don't let that bitch go to the club with her friends.