Modern Wisdom - #1013 - Scott Galloway - How to Fix a Culture of Emasculated Men

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, a public speaker, entrepreneur and an author. Why are so many young men struggling today? In a world that often focuses on the oppression of others, it’s easy to forget that men are part of that story too. What’s actually being done to address men’s challenges, and how can both society and men themselves help turn things around? Expect to learn why men struggling is actually affecting women too, why the left haven't recognised the problems men face and deal with, what is broken in manhood for the current generation, the 4 variables every man should be solving for, the one stat the keep Scott up at night about the state of young men, what boys lose when men don’t have a father figure, the best kind of risks that build men, what healthy masculinity actually looks like and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Why are We Inserting Women into Men’s Issues? (15:03) The Quiet Return of Soft Bigotry (25:47) Are Progressives Finally Ready to Talk About Men’s Issues? (33:23) Are Men More Emotionally Fragile Than Women? (44:41) How #MeToo Movement Rewired Male Behaviour Around Women (55:16) Why Male Friendships are So Hard to Build (01:03:23) What is Broken in Modern Manhood? (01:11:56) Why Women Seek a Provider and Protector (01:22:01) How Sex Motivates Men (01:31:06) Kindness is a Man’s Secret Weapon Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Galloway, welcome the show. It's always great to see you, man. Great to see you here in London. Better to see you in person. It's the first one that we've done all the time that we've hung out in person and all the podcasts we've done. And those two things have never crossed over. We've never done a live podcast.

We've never done an in-person podcast. We've hung out and we've recorded, but we've never done the same two things. Oh, welcome to London, man. Thank you. You did an interview with BBC Global that was titled, Young Men are Struggling. What does this mean for young women?

this men struggling women most affected framing is wild to me yeah does that irritate you in the same way as it does me to have to do this weird sort of land acknowledgement to the challenges that women face even as we're talking about the problems that men are facing i like i think it's productive to think of it as a societal problem well moving to solutions i think the only way you get stuff done here or the most effective way to get stuff done. And the lesson is, I've sent the majority of my life struggling with this issue professionally, and that is, I think I'm good at being right. I'm not very good at being effective. And there's a difference. Okay. And if you really want to help young men, you want to get, think about starting a conversation that gets programs and a change

and a focus on the investments needed to lift up young men, I think it's done more effectively through the context of lifting up all young people. So the basic line is women aren't going to continue to thrive and the country isn't going to continue to prosper as long as young men are flailing. So this needs to be a collective effort. I do understand and I get the difference between ideological purity or, like, reality-based insight and effective communication, and press release and stuff like that, I had this conversation with Richard Reeves as well. I'm just so sick of this land acknowledgement thing where we have to prostrate ourselves and say, well, we know that women have, it's only been recent that they got equal access to

education and employment and we must not forget that maternity leave must improve and we mudda-da-da and after we've done all of this work we can say and now we can talk about male mental health and now we can talk about male suicide it we don't could you imagine if there was a video that was titled young women are struggling what does this mean for young men but that wouldn't happen at no point yeah does somebody do this disclaimer about the struggles of men in suicide in order to talk about female breast cancer that doesn't happen oh There's definitely, look, there's a bias, but it's understandable. For 99% of our time on this planet, there has been, you know, men of my generation had an advantage.

And so the muscle memory, the reflex reaction, the gag reflex is understandable. So, but, I mean, the bias is real. I'll say at a conference that women are doing better in college, right? 6040, they score better, 7 to 10 high school valetorians are women. prefrontal cortices of women are ahead of a man's until the age of 25, the gas on, gas off, executive function that lends itself well to academia, which to a certain extent has been shaped around the attributes that more easily come to a woman, has resulted in most graduate schools now, or what we think of as professional schools, have a greater representation of women.

So if I say at a conference that women have been showed a better bedside manner, better studies that make them better doctors, everyone politely collapse and nods their head. Even I think the people who may not agree with that, feel pressure to nod their head. If I say that throughout history, men have been more, needed to be more risk aggressive,

either to fight wars or immediately pick up a spear and go hunt something to feed the tribe, and therefore men have an easier time making the leap of faith to be entrepreneurs and they're more risk aggressive and start crazier ideas, there's a very uncomfortable pause in the room. You can say women make better doctors, better lawyers, better consultants, and people acknowledge.

And if you were to say, though, men might on average have the skills to be better entrepreneurs, at least initially. And by the way, none of this means that we shouldn't have, we should be biased against men in applying to medical school or we shouldn't be funding women as entrepreneurs. But you're allowed to acknowledge, well, the whole world should be run by women. Yes, wouldn't that? Go on. Well, okay, the patriarchy has sort of worked for 3,000 years.

Maybe there's something to men being leaders. Oh, no, no, no, no. You don't say that. By the way, I don't believe that. So there's still a lot of misandry, but it's understandable. People, because to the rights credit, they recognize the problem facing young men before anybody else. Unfortunately, I think that that void was filled by some voices that kind of conflated coarseness and cruelty with masculinity. And I think at least initially, and I think you've used to.

helped a lot, the conversation wasn't very productive. And it created sort of a reflex reaction or a gag reflex that when you start talking about these issues, that you're sort of leading up to what feels like a bit of misogyny where the answer for a lot of people have been talking about the problems with the young men is to return to the 50s where non-whites and women didn't have as much opportunity. So I kind of get some of the gag reflex. What I don't understand, though, And what I think people are just so blind to, have you seen this unalive dialogue online with women saying, why would I go on a date when I can be unalived, which means murdered? It's a politically correct way of saying I can be killed, okay, and that I'm taking a risk going on a date, okay?

And the fact, you know, the date is the following, that if you go on a date with a young man, he's 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you. you're four times more likely to die on the car ride over or drown or choke so the notion that you're somehow taking this huge physical risk by being around young men is that man or a bear thing as well right it's just not true i i get it

i understand the point that in order to in order to push a campaign for something that is politically unpopular at the moment You need to signal allyship and awareness of groups that may have an issue to this. I just find it quite exhausting and I find it quite irritating and I brought it up to Richard Reeves. He made a really great point, which was one of the issues you see with anybody that cares about something and campaigns a lot is as they continue in their career and they feel like nobody's listening, they ramp up the intensity of, of how inflammatory they are when they speak.

And, you know, you can see this with climate change activists, right? They're like, the planet's burning. Like, we need, here's orange paint on a fucking vango, whatever. I'm going to glue myself to the M25 because nobody's listening. And the odd thing is that that kind of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric just turns more people off and turns people on. But I get, even in myself, I think I'm a, usually pretty well regulated, I find in myself this rebellion, this desire to rebel against,

I can't be bothered to have to say, I understand, I want to do it once at the start of my career and say, hey, here are all of the things that women have had it tough in, but you need to do it each time. It's like landing a plane in Australia. Like every single time you're doing a comedy show, every single time that you do it, you need to say this thing. And it just feels like, true, Douglas Murray's got this. great line where he says true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does right and i think that that would be a lovely indication where okay the conversation around men struggling you know when that actually gets started when we know that that

is widespread accepted when you're able to talk about it without a disclaimer at the beginning i think that's fair so one example uh so title nine uh what 40 years ago it was 60 40 male to female college enrollment, we decided that was unacceptable. To have 50% more men in college, and college has been, and still is to a certain extent, maybe to a lesser extent, but still a fantastic ticket for economic mobility. And we decided it was unacceptable to have 50% more men in college than women. So we passed basically what was affirmative action, discrimination, unfair advantage for women. Same merit, same scores, lift them up. But it was headed in the right direction.

Women were ticking up. Where are we now? Exact same place, 60, 40, women to men. And it's headed in the wrong direction. It actually, the numbers even get worse when you look at graduation rates because men drop out at a higher rate. I've heard no discussion. Seven times more men dropped out during COVID than women as well, I think. Yeah, there's no.

It would be politically unpalatable to suggest affirmative action for men. But this is what's happening in schools. there's informal under the radar affirmative action because admissions directors will tell you they're having trouble getting men to apply. They don't feel welcome at college. And you know, you have a school system that's biased against men.

You've done a lot of this. Whenever they're same-sex schools, or excuse me, yeah, same-sex schools, the boys' schools end up having twice the amount of recess, right? They just need a different approach to education. As a father of two boys, I can tell you that my son... Rambulicious. The idea of my...

son, and he's getting better, he's calming down a bit. The idea of him having to be in French class doing French verbs for 80 minutes, I literally think it's torture for him, like physical, physical torture. Sit there, be quiet, don't move, don't get distracted. Be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described the activities that are much more easily adapted by a woman. But moving to solutions, I actually think the majority of the solutions that would really lift up young men are solutions we can apply to all young people. A more progressive tax structure that lowers tax burden on people through their current income. I make the majority of my money buying and selling stocks and houses and assets. My tax rate is lower than you. I would bet the

majority of your income comes from this, from earning money. Why is sweat taxed at a higher rate than money? It seems to me it should be flipped. Everything we do, I think, over the last 40, 50, years from a tax and legislative standpoint is nothing but a transfer of wealth from the young to the old. And part of the big problem with the male crisis, I would argue, is very crudely a lack of mating opportunities for young men. I think that they need the guardrails of a romantic partner or friendships. And men are just dramatically less attractive and they're not economically viable than a woman who's not economically viable. What Chris Rock said, Beyonce could have married Jay-Z if she worked to Kentucky Fried Chicken or KFC. The other way around couldn't look.

This is my whole tall girl problem thing, right, that when you have socioeconomic inflation artificially or naturally by women, either having the brakes taken off or being given a helping hand, that men comparatively get shorter. And if you are as a woman predisposed to date up and across, yeah, doesn't happen. If you're rising up through your own hierarchy, you're looking at this very rarefied strata of men. And as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, if you have an imbalance sex ratio, the power is with the rarer sex, and because of women's selection preference and this rising up through the socioeconomic ladder, they have created an imbalance sex ratio to the benefit of ultra-high-performing men who use and discard, don't

commit. Portia polygamy. Play the game. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, the, and what some of the research shows is the following, is that a lack of a romantic relationship, there's a cartoon of a woman in her 30s, like one of the biggest tragedies in the world is a woman in her 30s who hasn't found romantic love or a partner. She's alone, she's living with cats, on a rainy day in a big sweater,

staring at the window, thinking about what could have happened if she'd only found love, and her parents feel like they've failed, and society has failed her. The reality is, men need relationships more than women, and that if you look at the data around

what happens when a young man, when a young woman doesn't have the benefit of a romantic relationship, she oftentimes pours that energy back into her friends in her professional life. Men oftentimes, not all men, but a lot of men or more men pour that energy back into unproductive things. They go deeply online. They're more prone to conspiracy theory. One in three men who don't either cohabitate with a woman or aren't married by the time they're 30.

There's a one in three chance they're going to be a substance abuser. Widows are happier after their husband dies than when he was alive. Widowers less happy, right? men on average in a relationship live four to seven years longer women do live longer but only two to four years the reality is we is a great deal what's that it's a great deal for guys

partnership is a great deal yes yes yes divorce half the thing yes yes yes I understand sexless bedroom blah blah we benefit we benefit more it's a good deal and I've said says the man that's unmarried in the room I got you're in that 10% I get the sense life's pretty good for you but anyways the

the reality is men need those guardrails more. And one of the things I said on another podcast that got a lot of pushback was, I think at least initially in a relationship, I think men should pay for everything. What did the pushback come from, men and women? Yes, mostly women. Women immediately said,

you're using money to control me. This is the patriarchy. And my view on this is the following, that a woman has a much shorter window for propagation and mating. So her time during that, those fertility years, is more valuable. So scrutinize more aggressively?

Well, and the downside of sex, quite frankly, the risks of downside of sex are greater for a woman than a man. In addition, a man benefits more from a romantic relationship than a woman. So there's an asymmetry of benefit. You want to offset that financially? Well, I think it shows a certain level of commitment and a recognition of the asymmetry. The reliable signal thing, yeah. By saying, I'm interested.

in this. I'm serious. I recognize the asymmetry. I recognize that this is better for me and allow me to rebalance it a little for you by paying for dinner. And I think that's a, I think that's a great take. I would push back on what you said about how the woman in her 30s who's got the cat and is in the jumper thing. I think the archetype's gone. I think that it's very lauded and applauded now for women to be, you know, deep, deep, deep into their 30s and still just doing themselves. Yeah, because kids on their own. Again, there was this idea that I came up with when talking to Richard Reeves, actually, I called it the soft bigotry of male expectations.

So you were talking about how if you were to say women are able to be better doctors, better this, better that, you get applauded for it. But if you'd say that there are some things that men are better at, that's not. If you were to say that those things, CEO leadership, that is something that women should aspire to do, you would also get applauded for that if you would say developing your nurturing nature being more sensitive

being more caring being able to tap into your EQ as a woman is something that you should develop that's the sort of thing that you wouldn't I came up with this soft bigotry of male expectations thing when there was a study anthropological study that was redone on the amount of big game hunting

contributed to by women turned out that the data had been fucked with an awful lot the reanalyzed thesis was women did just as much big game hunting as men and sometimes even more. But there was loads of fuckery in the data. One hunt was counted to say, if you contributed to one hunt, that was one to one. It didn't count the number of times that that happened. So a man could have gone out on 50 hunts a year and the woman went on one, a woman went on one, and they were counted as one and one. It also didn't count what the women were hunting in terms of how big was the game, et cetera, et cetera.

And it made me think there was obviously an agenda to trying to put forward women as being able to do the thing that the men did just as well as the men, which implicitly derogates what the women can do that the men can't do. So we want the women to be able to do what the men can do. But if we laud what the women can do that the men can't do, that's somehow lesser. And I was like, that's really fucking sexist. that's really judgmental and superbly patronizing to women. If you were to say, well, being a mother, you know, alloparenting, coalition building

within a local group of aunts and friends and grandmas and stuff, like that's not, or local specialization and making sure that whatever the environment is kept tidy in a manner that men would struggle with or the cooking or the cleaning or the caring or the raising, like, no, no, no, no, you should be looking at big game hunting. And I'm seeing this, whatever men do is seen as desirable for women to do. And implicit in that is so much fucking sexism that the call is coming from inside the house. Like you do realize that you're like stereotypically cooking yourselves as women. You're saying what we can do naturally is implicitly less valuable.

Schultz told me this story of his wife. She used to work at Google and they would go shopping. and they would have their daughter with them. IVF, like difficult journey in order to be able to get there. And the ex-workmates from Google would say, so where are you now? What are you doing now? And his wife would give this answer, and Andrew said, fucking killed him.

He says, oh, I'm just a mum. And he said it was the just that made him feel like, oh, she can't. It is a very difficult needle to thread to be able to take pride in being a home builder as a woman. And in that, that is every, there are some women out there who don't desire a family and it's the right decision and so and so forth. It seems like eight in ten, childless women didn't intend to be childless. This is Stephen Shaw's work.

Four in five. And there's groups of grieve it. These women grieve families they never had. Yeah. And so there are some. There's one in five, whatever it is, that I've made this decision and that was my choice, so and so forth. that means that if you want to be a mum how do you take pride in that well yeah but what i would say chris is that the shame is even the unfair unfortunate shame is even greater when a man says

i'm a stay-at-home dad there's still an expectation that if a man isn't economically if he's if he there's a there's a general stereotype that a man who's a stay-at-home dad didn't choose to be at home. It's because it's not a real man and can't make a living. And so I think that there's shame across that whole decision to stay at home. But so I'm a proud progressive, liberal, whatever, whatever you want to put on me. And I think where we get wrong sometimes is that we have a general narrative that starts from a good place, good intentions, and we take it too far. And we know. Women should be able to perform well in the workplace and step into the boardroom when needed to anything which isn't that is less than. The example I was going to use is that 5% suppose about 5% of the populace

is non-binary. They don't identify as heterosexual, right? Hang on. The non-binary heterosexual? 95%. People, the data I've seen is that people think a third of America is Jewish, Lynn lives in New York, and is gay. And the reality is the non-heterosexual community, is about 5%. And that community has been demonized, victimized, persecuted, has had a shitty history in the United States. So wanting to feel protective,

wanting to have programs that lift them up, I think makes all the sense in the world. The problem is that we see it as a zero-sum game and that recommending that people, men lean into their masculinity or women lean into their femininity is somehow seen as taking from the non-binary community.

and is insulting so and if you especially on the on the on the the the male side if you tell if you say women are more nurturing women should lean into the fact that my partner can hear my kids get up in the middle of the night and knows exactly what they're doing and that they're about to come into our room and i mean i sleep through the whole thing my kid comes home from school and or from his soccer match and she says something went wrong he's not doing well i don't it seems fine to me i mean there's just an intuition but if you're to say that it feels as if well are you saying women aren't as good in the boardroom it's like no meanwhile being strong physically being prone to taking risks being more prone to action being in some cases aggressive those are wonderful

attributes that have served our nation and our society really well and people born as men have an easier time leaning into those things. But those things are positioned as violence and reckless. Unless it's a woman. Unless it's a woman. She's a leader. She's a baller. She's a badass. And the reality is you want when Russians pour over the border in Ukraine or a house is on fire, you want some big dick energy. And I think it's okay to celebrate certain masculine attributes and certain feminine attributes and realize that the most productive households in history, the most secure, loving, productive households in history, bring a mix of very distinct, masculine, and feminine energy.

And by the way, that masculine energy can be brought by two women. And that feminine energy can be brought by two men. I tend to, my male friends tend to be actually quite feminine. I'm drawn to men that take care of me. I'm their asshole fraternity friend who says inappropriate things. What do you think that says about you? I don't know, that I was, you know, born and raised in a fraternity environment. I don't know what the fuck it says.

I watched, I dream a genie for two hours a day when I was a kid. That's literally my training. In Charlie's Angels, you know, anyways, hello, angels. Genie, get in your bottle. That's literally what I was raised on. But a recognition that male and masculine energy is a great combination doesn't take from the fact that there are some people are non-binary. And so Democrats, I think, in an effort to be sensitive, to be thoughtful, to help lift up people who need a lift,

Now it's just gone too far, DEI on campus. There's 200 people in the DEI Department of the University of Michigan. And 55% of the freshman class identifies as non-white. So do you have 200 people working on getting more white males from Republican states? These apparatus get built up. They were needed. They're no longer needed. In 1960, there were a total of 12 black people at Princeton, Harvard, Yale.

That was a problem. Now, Harvard, 55% non-white, but the problem is of those non-whites, 70% come from upper-income homes. So we don't want to actually solve the problem anymore. We want to save the virtue. Diversity has never been diversity of class. And this is something that's being in the UK, I'm sure that you feel more closely. 100%. We need affirmative action.

I'm a beneficiary for affirmative action. It should be based on color, but that color is green. The academic gap between black and white used to be double what it was between rich and poor. Now it's flipped. It's double between rich and poor as it is between non-white and white. So if we really want to help society and help lift up people, Trevor Noah's kids aren't going to have any problem getting into college. They're not going to have any problem. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus.

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in the UK. I come from Stockton-on-T's. There was some comedians in earlier on and he said, you're from Newcastle. I was, oh, technically I'm from Stockton. He says, that is the worst place I've ever played. It's the worst place I've ever been on tour. And he's toured around all of the UK. So for me, I have this sort of, you know, huge fucking bee in my bonnet to say there's the real supposed group that was originally uplifted by liberal, progressive types.

It was supposed to be about class. It wasn't supposed to be about race or sex or orientation or whatever. So on that point there, have liberals and progressives started to pay? attention to the man problem or is it still just a cursory glance how much do they actually just started just started i went to the democratic national convention it was a parade of special interest groups the struggles of women the struggle of struggles of non-whites the struggle of the gay community the struggle of immigrants the only group that wasn't mentioned is the group that on any metric has fallen further faster relative to any other group and that is young men and if you go to the dnc website

And this has changed since I did the podcast with Michael Smirkanis. It used to be they listed 16 demographic groups under a section called Who We Serve. This is who the Democratic Party is here for. Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Black Americans, veterans, the disabled, seniors. I added it up. It was 74% of the population. The only 26% they didn't name was young men. And when you say you're averaging, purposely advantaging 74% of the population,

You're not advantaging 74% of the population. You're discriminating against the 26%. Well, they did have free vasectomies outside of the DNC. Don't forget about that. I don't remember that. I missed that one.

The most behaviorally genetic sepuku. Maybe that's what happened. Yeah. No, but there is still a lack of recognition, especially among Democrats. Here's the problem. The right recognized the problem, but unfortunately, I think their answer

is coercionist and cruelty. and sometimes conflating masculinity as a zero-sum game and returning to the 50s. I don't think their vision of masculinity is the right one. The far less vision of masculinity, their view is the following.

Men, you don't have a problem, you are the problem. That's not productive. And also, their answer, act more like a woman. That's not the answer. The main problem is your masculinity. And what's interesting is that,

while there's a kind of a public narrative, I think, for many women, I mean, this is anecdotal evidence, but it really is true. I'm not making this up. Women will consistently ask, how can they meet men at my age? A woman is divorced at my age. The pool of available men is really tiny. And they'll say to me, do you have anyone you could set me up with?

And about half the time, they'll say something along the lines, either way, and they look around and they go, I like a masculine man. Because their narrative and they're outward facing as they want a sensitive man. I mean, it's a snarky joke, but I think it's somewhat accurate. Do you really want a sensitive man? That just leaves two of you in the car crying

and the parking spot empty. And that is snarky and it's sexist, but I think there's some truth to that. I think women are drawn to men who demonstrate some of the traditional attributes of masculinity, despite this public narrative that I really just want a sensitive man, a man in touch with his feelings.

And I think there's some benefit to all of that. But I don't think we're having an honest conversation yet around the struggles that young men are facing how to fix it. My view is that you'd get 80% of the way there through programs that aren't even targeted. Maybe some targeted programs in school, red shirt and kids, as Richard Friedman talk about more men and more men in K through 12. But I think a lot of the problem would be solved by just programs that would be available to both men and women. I think the biggest, for example, if I could pick one program, it'd be mandatory national service. And it wouldn't just be from men, it'd be for men and women. Similar to what they do in Israel.

Because it allows you to, as a man, display competence, prestige. It makes you more attractive as a mate when you come out of that. It teaches you a lot of skills about orderliness and conscientiousness. It allows you to get your shit together. It gives you lineage and a path toward making your life better. Some of the lowest levels of young adult depression in the Western world or in Israel, despite all the existential threats. And I think it's because, and I spent some time with an IDF.

You've got 120 young, beautiful men and women. They're fit, they're outdoors all day, they're not on their phones, they're learning to handle very dangerous weapons, they're learning to serve in the agency of each other. When it also, I think, is fantastic for reducing discrimination. If I'm in a foxhole next to you, and my life might depend on it,

I don't give a flying fuck what your sexual orientation is, or if you're Bedouin or hardcore Jewish. Did you care if you're competent, though? I care about your character and your competence. and it starts instilling the right values in people. It also shows you that that rich guy maybe isn't a douchebag or the woman who comes from a certain community or is maybe gay.

She's just like you. She wants to defend her country. And if you look at the greatest legislation of the most productive time in America in the 50s and 60s is because everyone had served in the same uniform. Also, I think one of the things, you said the call is coming from the inside of the house. If you think about liberalism is an attempt

to give people liberty. Socialism is the belief that everyone should be equal. Fascism, which I think we're demonstrating a lot of evidence of in the U.S., is a belief that it's a problem from the inside, that it's the enemy within. It's your neighbor.

It's people who are challenging a current orthodoxy, that they're the enemy. And I think America would really benefit from all young people serving in the agency of their country and having a chance to see what, If you go out in the U.S., if you walk the streets of Austin, if you meet people, if you walk the streets where I live in New York or Florida or Colorado, I can't get over how wonderful other Americans are.

Because unfortunately, I'm extremely online. And I believe that's what America is. And the reality is it's not. It's algorithms lifting up the shittiest part of American-Americans. Misrepresenting it. And the really unfortunate thing about AI is it's crawling online. It's not crawling the real world. So I think getting young people out to serve in the age to their country, it would disproportionately benefit men who, quite frankly, at the age of 18, as the father of two boys, I know this, a lot of them are ready for college. They're still dopes. And they're just not ready. So I think a lot of these kids would benefit from two years. And by the way, it doesn't have to be military. It can be helping seniors. It can be a smoke jumper. It can be a clearing brush for a fire. It can be health, whatever it might be, taking care of our national parks. But meeting different kids from different regions, ethnicity, sexual orientation.

in realizing how fortunate they are to be in America. So a tax policy, there's a variety of programs. But I think just politically, it would be much more palatable to approach or propose a series of programs that didn't go back to where we've been the whole time and lift up certain people based on their identity. Yeah, I just, I get it, and I don't think that there's been fantastic policies

put forward by either side, but at least this is why guys are turning to the right, that they don't feel demonized if they go there. Well, and they don't feel seen. I feel like they're not going, I don't feel like they're, I don't feel like they're moving towards the Republican Party, I feel like they're leaving the Democratic Party. Agreed. I've got this short essay that I wanted to read you that I think is interesting when you talked

about the levels of vulnerability, sensitivity, sort of balancing, being in touch, not being sort of, how do you say, pathologically stoic with also being masculine. So this is the challenge of motivating men. some advice on how to support men men want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short men want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered to or patronized and made to feel weak men want to believe that they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough men want to be able to open up without being judged men want support without feeling broken men want to be loved for who they are not for what they do the tlDR is blending inspiration

with compassion is not an easy task. How do I set lofty goals which drive me to fulfill my potential without feeling less than if I don't get there tomorrow is a question asked by every guy ever? The desire for self-love and high performance comes into conflict inside the mind of everyone, men especially. Sure, some men are all driving goals with non-introspection and sure, some men are all reflection and inner work

with few external desires, but most men desire a mix of encouraged self-belief and understanding support. Inevitably, these two things come into conflict. basically every man just wants to hear I know you can be more but you are enough already and even if you just stay where you are

I'll be right here next to you you're going to be great but you don't need to be great and I'm with you no matter what or as said best by Sturgle Simpson's mum boy I don't care if you hit it big because you're already number one the reason that I think this is interesting is we often point the finger at women

and say look at how hormonal they are They change week to week. She says this thing but means something else. There's passive aggression and real aggression and subtext and that's complexity, difficult to decode. This is something that men need to accept. This is a difficulty in decoding it that even they struggle with. Men want to believe that they can be more without feeling like they're not already enough.

They want their suffering to be recognized and appreciated without being pandered or patronized. They want to aim high without feeling insufficient if they fall short. Like you struggle, man, you struggle with doing this to your. yourself. You have managed, you haven't been able to square this circle. So I think as men recognizing this complexity, which as far as I can see, is a real, a real core one, if we're going to say, hey, the, like, drink your problems or deny your problems away thing that Boomer parents did or do, probably not a great way to move forward, but we also know that the overly sensitive blob fucking Lubbubu man, like the performative male, is also not going to be a particularly

effective or attractive prospect as an eligible mate. So, okay, let's recognize some complexity that exists inside of men, especially men who are a little bit more introspective, who are the sort of people that listen to your show, listen to my show. And I think this, this blending of inspiration with compassion is not an easy task for us to do to ourselves. So then when we look for it in the world or from our partners or our friends, I think accepting the complexity is something that's really important. Yeah, two thoughts crossed my mind. I really like listening to that, and I feel like what you just described, if I were to summarize it or distill it all in the one word, it'd be dad. And that is, you just sort of described what I see as my mission

and purpose as a father, and that is, my oldest is applying to college. So I'm at home with him yesterday, and we're talking about his supplemental essay, and we sit down. And we sit down, and you know he said he was going to finish it in the morning and he didn't and I'm all over his ass I'm like okay you said that this morning you're up playing fucking video games get your shit together you're not 15 I mean I'm I'm on him and then he writes it and I'm like you know it's great and the reason it's great is because it's you and you're great you know it's a little bit it's a mix and I think I think very few people except a father figure and or an older male, can communicate both those things

in equal measure and have it really resonate with a boy. I just think there's certain things that men can do for boys that is very difficult for women, and vice versa. So when I hear that, I think all of it is true. And I think the people who are most effective at delivering that type of salt and vinegar kind of love and inspiration and motivation, and occasionally swift kick in the ass,

are a male role model. And if you were to look at where, I think, going to problems, if you look at the single point of failure, it's when a boy loses a male role model. But to even say that boys need men is to somehow immediately evokes this reaction, well, women can't raise boys. I was raised by single immigrant mother,

lived and died of secretary, lied to my life. But there's just certain things I couldn't talk to her about. Her sheer physical presence didn't threaten me. Occasionally you need a deeper voice. When I yell, when my kids are five and eight, and some people will say, well, you shouldn't be yelling. Okay, that means you don't have kids. There's just, that's just a different,

that mix of feminine and masculine energy is really important. And I think, have you had animation on the show, Dr. Animatian. No, but I think he's been on your show. Life of Dad. Yeah, she's been on twice. She's in Roy Baumeister's Lab here at University of Oxford. that you would adore. She's doing another book on dads.

So this is, this stinks of her. It's all, it's all. But if, if I remember her work on the work Richard's done, the moment a young man, a boy loses a male role model to death, disease abandonment, he becomes more likely at that moment to be incarcerated than graduate from college. Right. Yep. A girl will, while maybe being more promiscuous because she's looking for male approval in the wrong places,

she has the same rates of college attendance income and self-harm. Makes no different. And so essentially, while boys are physically stronger, they're mentally and emotionally and neurologically much weaker. And we don't want to even acknowledge that. Boys are weaker, neurologically and emotional. More fragile, perhaps, yeah, more tenuous. The study I saw was that two 15-year-olds,

a boy and a girl, both sexually molested, neither crime is less heinous than the other. The boy is sexually molested is ten times more likely to kill himself later in life. So I think there just needs to be a general zeitgeist that if for whatever reason a boy doesn't have male mentorship and role models in his life, that it's the mother and the community's responsibility to get involved, to get men involved in his life. There are three times as, and quite funny, men aren't stepping up. There are three times as many women applying to be big sisters in New York.

To big sister. Big sister. Like big brother, big sister. It's an adult who says, it's funny you don't know that. it's this wonderful program and it's like say you're a guy in your 30s or 40s maybe have kids maybe you don't you can apply to be a big brother and all you do really is just hang out with a boy usually a single mother but a boy who doesn't have a lot of male mentorship okay called big brothers it started a big brothers then they launched big sisters hugely successful program nationwide three times as women are

applying to be big sisters of new york than men are applying to be big brothers well so men aren't stepping up also there's this dangerous taboo chris where if you're a man say you're you're you're a single successful dude in your 30s. You could mean a lot to a boy. He's going to be impressed by you. And there's this weird notion that you have to be the CEO or a parent or a baller or the head of Goldman Sachs. No, you just have to show up. You just have to take an interest in their life. And quite frankly, save them from themselves because they make really stupid decisions and just ask some questions. Also, quite frankly, because of the Catholic Church or Michael Jackson, there's a suspicion of men who want to hang out with boys. So we have a last

You know, you've heard the adage for some boys in some communities, the first male or moral model they have is a prison guard. So I think there's some basics that we just need to get more men involved in boys' lives. Also, I just think there's a series of social and economic programs to lift up young people. People under the age of 40, 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago, people over the age of 70, 72% wealthier. We have slowly but surely implemented a series of tax policies that reflect the following. Old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money. So $120 billion cost of living adjustment in Social Security flies right through Congress. The $40 billion child tax credit that would benefit young families get stripped out of the infrastructure bill.

So there's some, I think we should start with the programs that lift all young people up. Because if you put more money in their pockets, quite frankly, there's just going to be more mating. If you think about the greatest, that's true. Where do men go? You know, in New York and Austin? If you think about online dating, right, what does a man need to do? What is it? 70% I think I'm parroting a lot of your stats.

70% or 80% of people who have been married longer than 30 years say one was more interested than the other in the beginning. And it was almost always the man who was more interested, right? You have a room of 100 people and there's alcohol. Almost all of the men at that moment would have sex with almost all the women. Most of the women would sleep with none of the men. They have a much finer filter. What happens over time?

I hung out with him at church or temple, and I really liked the way he treated his parents. I worked with him, and he was just so good at his job. We would meet up at after hour with friends for happy hour, and he was really funny. I like the way he smelled. Men have to demonstrate excellence. Where are the venues are the third places now that men demonstrate excellence? They're not going into work, a lot of them, because of remote work. And even if you were in work, there would be some policy against dating inside or a concern.

Don't be that guy. And a third of relationships used to begin at work. And by the way, about 99.8% of them are consensual. I've been using eight sleep for years and I genuinely can't imagine life without it. Having a mattress that actively cools and heats, each side of the bed is a total game changer. And the newest model, the Pod 5, takes things to the next level. It now includes a temperature-regulating duvet that works with the smart mattress cover

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go gentle with me on it um uh me too advice was absorbed uh disproportionately by men the men who probably needed to actually be more confident around women took don't be pushy to heart and the men who were just blowing through boundaries already disregarded it entirely And I think this has resulted in nervous guys having their fears confirmed. I knew I was too much for women. I knew that they didn't like me. I knew that I was already that this was crossing some sort of a boundary. And, you know, David Buses book Bad Men, or Men Behaving Badly in the U.S., identifies this perfectly.

It's not a thousand guys doing a bad thing each. It's one guy doing a bad thing a thousand times. And there's a small cohort of them committing all of the assaults over and over. This is why the, it's not all men, but it's always a man thing, which hides it's all men. Like the subtext is that it probably is or it could be or something like that. The same, the man of the bear thing was the exact same, that I'm not going to go on a date because I might be unlived. All of this just sort of reinforces the dangerousness of men. But you might have seen these videos of really attractive girls in New York, mostly, doing stuff like stealing finance guys,

Do you see this video? There's this girl doing a hair, really pretty girl, and she's saying her or her friends are stealing, going into sweet green and stealing finance bro's salads, looking at the name on the order that they've pre-ordered, looking at the name, finding them on Instagram, messaging them and saying, hey, so sorry, looks like I accidentally picked up your salad.

And in a desperate attempt to try and talk to them, there's another video, famous video of a girl party dress, She must be mid-20s, blonde hair, fully done up, big boobs, walking down the street going, I just want one guy to buy me a drink tonight. There's another one of a girl walking through Central Park, big naturals, no bra, skin glowing, and she calls it out herself. She's like, what does a girl need to do? To get some attention from here I am again, looking nice in Central Park, ready for

nobody to come and talk to me. And there is a bit I see in guys, and I see sort of in myself, this sense. sense of, well, what did you think was going to happen? When you said that the male gaze is toxic, when you said that any attention from a man to woman, 20% of Gen Z say that a man approaching a woman in person always are usually constitutes harassment. Men already had approach anxiety. What do you think the pickup artist movement was about? Like, what was it about? It was about overcoming approach anxiety, the single scariest thing that a man ever has to do because rejection feels like fucking existential pain. This is the end of my

genetic lineage. And we had all of this going on at the same time that the T app was happening. So you had in one breath women who were very attractive saying, I wish that men would approach me more. And when the data leak from behind the T app came out, I would say that the crossover between the rumor starting group from the T app was not the same as the big natural skin glowing party maxi dress, long hair, you know, nice girls from that. And you think, okay, so in one breath, you're saying we, women, want guys to approach us more. And in the other, there is an app that's number two on the app store that is dedicated to warning women off of men for how dangerous they are with substantiated and unsubstantiated claims. Trying to just blend these two walls together,

it did feel a little bit like the inverse of luxury beliefs that I don't know whether many of the really attractive women would be on the app submitting their rumors. I feel a little bit like if you're not getting approached much by men, it's very easy to be on an app that kind of castigates men for what they've done in dating because it wasn't happening to you. So a lot there. So I've served on seven public company boards, and there was a, during the Me Too movement,

I would say it felt like a third of the time, but maybe it was 10 to 20% of the time we were talking about. about sexual harassment claims. And it was almost always, there was a little bit of, I think sometimes, women feeling like they could grab virtue by being victims. I think some of the claims were a little bit over the top.

However, that was the minority. The majority of the claims were simple. It was powerful men who had been for too long told that they could do or say anything with no repercussions. Just to clarify, I think Me Too is an important redress to precisely that problem. I think that it was necessary, but it sought to sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior. And instead, it just sterilized all. So what's

happened is the following. So the question is, how did we deal with it? And my view is the following. I've had, I've started several companies, I've been to eight weddings of people who met at my work, right? So the idea that they both were exactly the same amount of attractive to each other and their lawyers met in the lobby and negotiated a coffee, people figure it out. And if you don't know the difference between harassing somebody and expressing interest while making them feel safe, you've got bigger problems. But my attitude was we used to have socials and we'd have alcohol. And the HR person, whenever I hear an HR person saying we've got to discourage relationships at work, it's almost someone who's already found their spouse. So we're

asking kids to work 12 hours a day. My companies were always high-growth, high-tech companies where it was like, look, you're not going to have any balance here. And it's almost always kids in their 20s and 30s. That's the kind of companies we had. So, of course, they started hooking up. And we never had a situation where someone came to HR and said, this person is harassing me. And one of the downsides of being a very attractive male or especially a very attractive female is you're probably going to have to learn how to politely deflect interest. And I would argue that doesn't mean you're open to nor should be subject to unwanted advances, but you're going to probably get more overtures from people that you aren't necessarily interested in. And I would argue that most women

and some men who face that wonderful problem figure out how to deal with it. Chalmingly. Yeah, just, oh, sorry, whatever. They figure it out. The difference between something that's romantic and something that's creepy is the perceived attractiveness of the approach, right? Brad Pitt has never accused of being creepy, right? So the question is, what we told men was young men that don't risk it. It could, and also the flip side of that is they have so much, they have such a low friction, low risk way of getting some reasonable fact. simile of that with porn, that you've said, okay, danger in the real world, it's getting easier and more lifelike in the online world. And I'm not exaggerating. If I'm ever, there's a members

club opening every two weeks. And you keep joining all of them. And I keep joining all of them because I'm in the midst of my midlife crisis tour, right? That's the bad news. Ferrari, membership club. I couldn't fit in a Ferrari. The good news is I'm going to grow out of it in about 20 or 30 years. I'm not exaggerating once or twice every time I'm out with friends women will say men don't approach me

they just don't approach me they never come up and I think that men have been young men have been taught okay don't approach women and I think there needs to be an adult in class or some sort of education that says

you need to learn how to approach express romantic interest while making someone feel safe and here's the key. No. If you're not getting a lot of nos, you're not getting to amazing yeses. What you have here, Chris, didn't just happen.

You just didn't show up and say, I'd like a top 10 global podcast. You got out a big spoon and you ate shit and you called guests and they said no. I think the first few times you reached out to me, I said, no. You did. You bastard.

Someone brought this up yesterday at this live event I was doing. This guy from the back of the room said, do you remember in 2019, I was on Aubrey Marcus's coaching program and you desperately wanted him on the show and you tried and he'd said no and then I got you. And it was some dude from six years ago

that piped up at the back of this event. I was like, man, thank you so much for doing that. Yes, the network, every single different bit that I could do in a desperate attempt to try and get fucking Scott Galloway on or whatever. Look at you know, I can't get rid of you. That's right. Now I'm like, hey, what am I coming on?

When are you in the UK? So look, young men have been taught that they can have a reasonable fact, simile of a low friction life online and not to risk no. And I think that part of Mel mentorship, I mentor or coach young men and I have two or three at any time. And one of the exercises I go through with them is, I need you to be at least once or twice a week in the agency of strangers doing something for something bigger than you. Volunteer group, church group, riding class. And this is what we're going to do. Three weeks in, we say, okay, I need you to ask

someone out for coffee or say, let's go to the pub and watch a game, it can be an expression of friendship and expression of romantic interest. And I said, and the key, the objective is no, because most of the time you're going to get a no, the soft deflection. And then the next day, you're going to call me, and I'm going to say, are you okay? And you might say you're bum, but you're fine. Because every great yes, I've gotten to, whether it's raising money from a venture capitalist, starting a company, getting a big client, having, getting a date with someone who was out of my weight class. The only thing that was, the only thing that, the only thing I knew that was involved in that was a lot of noes before it. And so what we're teaching men is that unless it's

100% certain, and there's never a sure thing, there's very rarely certainty. The risks of no are just too much of a downside. Why do you think it's harder than ever for men to form close friendships, you would assume perhaps? I think it's a lack of third spaces, not as many people going into work, and also keep in mind right now, the entire global market has been connected to rage and isolation. 40% of the S&P by market cap is 10 companies that are either in social media, online, or AI. A big part, not solely, but a big part of all of those things, they're trying to do one or two things, enrage you, figure out your political leanings, and then serve you content that confirms your belief

or gets you angry at the other side, so you keep coming back and commenting more enragement, more engagement, more Nissan ads, more shareholder value, or saying, okay, I've given you five or six talking points for your interview with Scott. Would you like me to put them in bullet form? Would you like me to make them more funny, more provocative?

And you're just sitting there looking at OpenAI or Anthropic for an hour or two hours. So now 40%, we talk about the S&P 500 in the U.S. It's not. It's the S&P 10. 70% of the earnings growth and the increase in the markets has come from 10 companies. And those 10 companies are in the business of attention and addiction and rage. So we've connected sequestering people, especially young people, who have a more risk-aggressive brain. We've sequestered them. We've connected shareholder value with enraging them and sequestering them from each other. So you not only have 40% of pubs and this is your business, 40% of pubs and nightclubs in London, have closed down since COVID. Remote work is a big thing. People aren't going to church as much.

So where do people come together, demonstrate excellence, and then they have the deepest pocketed companies with God-like technology trying to convince them. No, no, no, no. Don't spend more time looking at someone's face and talking to them. Spend more time looking at a screen. Come talk to us.

So we are, I feel as if we're evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males. We're literally planning our own extinction. Well, think about this. who does that leave room for? It leaves room for, yeah, sure, some guys that have got very holistic, integrated,

emotionally attuned, like escape velocity from that, but it also leaves an awful lot of room for the residual psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists and guys that blow through boundaries. So as you select out the cinnamon roll men who would have made great husbands if they'd just been given a bit of encouragement,

what you're left with are kind of the Viking raiders that would have been useful at Lindisfarne in fucking 800 AD but maybe a little bit less now. So just to be equal opportunity blamers, we're blaming technology, we're blaming corporations,

society, men who have... You, blame you, yeah. We've been seduced, we've seduced them or they've fallen victim to this notion they don't need to take risks. If you look at media online,

basically as far as I can tell TikTok and Reels and the media have basically told women one strike and you're out as a man celebrates you are a beautiful independent woman you don't need that man walk right out on them and let me just spoiler alert we're deeply flawed very few of us are going to get it right

we're going to forget to open your door we're going to maybe forget to order you the Uber we're going to maybe not make eye contact with the waiter every time. And there's, the basic zeitgeist of online is like constantly telling women to exit the relationship, that if he doesn't meet the following thing, everything is a red flag. And so it's sort of, it's sort of, okay, media's telling men, don't be that guy, don't be a creep, come over here, the online gaming of porn, and with women, you're queen and you deserve better. And the advice I give to men, I ask them very basic.

questions of men and dating. The first thing I say is, would you want to have sex with you? Right? Do you take care of yourself? Do you work out? Do you know how to dress? And if you don't how to dress, find a woman or a gay man who can dress you. Do you have a plan? You don't need to be a baller, but do you have a plan? Are you kind? Do you have a practice of being kind to people? Would you want to be with you? And the advice I give, and I don't coach nearly as many young women, is what I call a second coffee. And that is if there aren't sparks, I mean, if you If you really don't, if you don't like the guy or whatever, fine, I get it. But if it was just okay, maybe give it a second coffee.

Because the majority of long-term relationships, it wasn't, it wasn't nodding here. It wasn't like sparks in the beginning. I think you should be very skeptical of sparks in the beginning as well. Because what we assume is that that's something special between us and the person. What it is in reality is that person is sparky with everybody. That that person is just alluring or they're bewitching. beguiling in this way. Yeah, and they just have something that exists.

It's not, let me tell you, it is not predictive of a successful relationship. Quote from The Guardian, where young women are encouraged to seek out positive role models for their own good. Young men are frequently encouraged to seek out positive role models so that they treat women better. This asymmetry between women are able to look after women and men also should look after women in this way. There's a reason, I think it makes sense, at least from a supply and demand perspective, why it is that women have said, well, his red flag culture, he doesn't meet the criteria, because the likelihood is that there will be a line of available men coming in after. Talking about men's icks for women almost doesn't work, because implied in you have an ick

is you also have options. Whereas realistically, it's like, hey, dude, fucking be grateful with what you've got, right? Like, hold on to that thing, because there might not be another one coming. And this has been true for pretty much all of time. What is it, twice as many female ancestors than male ancestors. 80% of women reproduced only 40% of men. So you go, okay, yeah, fucking, whoa, whoa, whoa, you struck the lottery. Like 40%, it's not like great.

But the reality is, I mean, it's a harsh thing to say. We're disposable, right? Have you seen this? I learned this. I couldn't wait to drop this stat on you. In the trolley problem, 88% of participants would sacrifice a man over a woman. Yeah, but it's evolutionary because if you have a village of 100 people, 50 men, 50 women, 40 men go off and die on war. 10 very happy men.

Village survives. Forty the women gone, Village goes out of business. I have a friend who has a farm and he has all these deer, hundreds of, I don't even call them those female dears, and they're like, I need some stags to keep the thing alive.

All you need is two or three flags. You need one very, very well-stamined stuff. You just need two or three of them and it'll take care of it. So we're disposable. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, some things are built for summer.

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the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom you describe manhood as something that we solve for what's broken in the current equation well there's a general notion that it's a problem that women womanhood and femininity is a feature and manhood and masculinity are a bug and it's been really unproductive to conflate toxicity with masculinity and I've been saying there's no such thing there's violence there's cruelty there's oppression those are the exact opposite of masculinity and uh you know I've got this book coming out um you know I try to I think all young people need a code and that is and I don't think I had it and I think I really struggled it and some people get a series of principles that help you make

or guide you around the hundred decisions you have to make every day right how you treat others, how you treat yourself, what to do when you face a difficult decision. And some people get that code from their family. Some people get that code from the religion, from the military. You can even get it from work. I think the first code I got was from Morgan Stanley, like around professionalism and how you treat other people. But I think there's a lot of young men that are what I'll call codeless. They don't have anything to hold on to. And I'd like to think that masculinity for a lot of young men could serve as a great code, but we need an aspirational form of it, right? And for me, just be, be less this, be less that. Yeah, not, not avoid this. Don't do this. Don't do this. It's like, be this. And also lean into the fact that the majority of people born as men are going to have an easier time leaning into masculine features. It's going to come somewhat naturally. It's going to feel right. It's going to feel somewhat easy. And the three kind of legs of the stool are one provider. I just think in a capitalist society, men are always going to be disproportionately evaluated on their economic viability.

That doesn't mean you need to be a baller, but you need to be responsible. You need to make some money. You need to show a certain level of discipline that you can make money, save money, and be responsible and potentially provide. Now, sometimes that means getting out of the way of your partner who's better at that whole money thing and taking responsibility at home. That's also, I think, a form of masculinity. Challenging one to thread. Very challenging one to thread. Well, as I said that, I even thought I'm doing what you say I do.

I'm acknowledging the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 75% of women say economic viability is important in a mate. I think it's 90%. I mean, you've seen the stats. If a woman loses her job, there's no change in the likelihood of divorce. If a man loses their job, it's like a 50% increase. ED drugs go way up.

Yeah, 50% increase use in erectile dysfunction medication. There's just no getting around it. What I tell young men, you've got to be economically viable. And by the way... Just to pause on that. And I really want you to sort of hold where you're at. this I had a conversation with Dr. Robert King and he does this really great evolutionary psychology assessment of the female orgasm. Is it a spandrel? Is it a byproduct? Is it pointless? Is it a selection

criteria? What's it there for? It's interesting. It's not needed for conception. And he did something that no one's ever done when talking about this. He's very pro-woman. he did something that no one's ever done and he basically says the female orgasm is another selection criteria it's another hoop that men need to jump through and it's determined by

sensitivity and dominance and skill basically like thrust skill and I was like well you know this seems very sort of judgmental in a way it seems exclusionary it seems like kind of magical as well there's like all of this stuff that you

kind of don't control like dominant sensitivity, interpretation, as you said before, the attractiveness of the person that you're doing it with. And he just said, yeah, yeah, it is. It is. And I was that, he went on for a little bit longer. The point was he called out the fact that this game is not rigged, but it is difficult to play and it is biased. And I think when you're talking about, hey, guys, you do need to be a provider. And if you are not, you're going to be swimming uphill. Yeah. Just accepting that as a fact allows us to go, okay, allow me to play the game.

What feels really unfair as a man is to hear, we don't need no man. I'm an independent woman. I can do this on my own. I'm going to be the breadwinner. And also, somehow, in order to square the circle, I seem to be selecting guys who are above and across from me. It's like, look, just call out the game for what it is. call it out that don't

what I really want is a masculine man no say it because if you say it guys will go all right I know the game as opposed to this weird you want to have your cake and eat it too you want to say it's not needed and then still select for it that feel I think for a lot of

guys it feels a little bit like being gaslit it feels like like reverse gaslighting and that I think is important to say if there is an imbalance if it's like yeah guys you're really going to have to work you're going to have to work harder. The education system is more difficult for boys than it is for girls.

We can just say it. We can just say that that's the case, as opposed to having to do this land acknowledgement, neutralization stuff of trying to get the pH balance back to, like, someplace that it isn't in all areas. And there's other shit. The pH balance can be off on that and just calling that out too. It's like, hey, women, maternity leave,

it's really going to fuck, fucking suck. Like, it's really going to hurt. And if you're in America, it's going to hurt. it even more. It's not good and unfair. We can just have that. Yeah, the, like, I find comfort whenever I get into a discussion with someone and we're on different types of an issue, I find comfort in data. We talk a lot about luxury items. Primary a luxury item is there to make you feel closer to God or more attractive to the opposite sex. That's what irrational margins translate to making you feel closer to God or more attractive. The vebbling goods for God as well.

so the new luxury item hands down is marriage and that is if you're a male in the upper quintile of income earning households your age three quarters of them will get married if you're in the lowest quintile as a man uh one quarter so the new luxury item is marriage is your selection set of mates and the greatest innovation in history i mean the idea of the middle class man having an opportunity to mate that's a relatively new innovation and society. It used to be the top 10% men had 80% of the mating opportunities. Back to your notion that 80% of women have reproduced and only 40% of men. The greatest innovation in history isn't the iPhone or GPS is the American middle class. And it started with 7 million men returned from World War II to America in uniform. They were fit. They had demonstrated heroics. Pensions. And then we stuffed a bunch of money in their pockets. The GI Bill, the National Highway Transportation Act. Basically, America have monopoly on the global economy. The most productive nations in the world from manufacturing standpoint, Germany and Japan had been leveled. So if you

wanted to buy a crane or fertilizer, you had to come to America. Come to Daddy. So you had men who were fit, attractive, had money to buy a house, a car. Demonstrated competence. Demonstrated excellence. And what do you know, women found them really attractive. And we had the baby boom. We had a lot of And I'd like to think that liberal policies said, okay, this prosperity is so wonderful, let's bring non-whites and women into the same prosperity. So that, in my view, was the greatest innovation in history. Now what do we have? We have a group of men who, cry frankly, are just not very attractive to women. And I think a lot of it is economic. Some of it is a lack of confidence, them going extremely online, being more prone to nationalistic and misogynistic content.

But I think that's a function of them not having the same opportunities they used to. It's the arrow of causation is going in the other direction. It's a downward spiral. But my thinking is, in addition to national service, if you consistently make it harder for a young man to be economically viable, and you have to acknowledge that that is still the primary consideration, regardless of what MSNBC or the New York Times or even some women are going to tell you, if a dude is not economically viable, his mating opportunities,

are scant. Do I ever tell you about what I wanted to do with a live audience? I was going to go on some show, some big American show, live audience thing,

and I was going to talk about the tall girl problem. And I wanted to do a live experiment, and I thought this would be really funny. It's a little bit manipulative, but I thought it'd be really funny. So I wanted to get

everybody in the audience, and I wanted to say, ladies in the audience, would you be able to put your hand up, if you would be prepared to date a man who doesn't earn as much as you? And a lot of hands would go up.

Would you be prepared to date a man who isn't as educated as you? hands would go up so much consumer dissonance there would you be prepared to date a man who is not as tall as you maybe some fewer hands would go up

and say okay can I get all of the women in the room to stand up for me please that are in a relationship actually everybody we can use your previous boyfriends as well so everybody can stand up will you sit down

if your last boyfriend earned more than you dunk that's half the room do you sit down if your last boyfriend was more educated than you dunk okay would you sit down if your last boyfriend was

are as taller, taller than you. There's no one left in the room. Yeah. I'm aware that I've stacked three things on top and I did the other one individually. It was a bit manipulative. But you would show, okay, here is stated preferences and there are revealed preferences.

And it's all well and good with MSNBC or the New York Times saying, oh, you know, like who says that you need to have traditional, blah, blah, blah. It's all right. Tell me who you're dating. You're fighting 3,000 years in. Tell me who you're dating. Yeah. What's your partner look like?

Yeah. Oh, he's fucking six foot. to and built like a brick shit house. We're plaid shirts and hacks things on a weekend. Well, a lot of it, too, is the online, the online dating world. It used to be people met others at work,

through friends, through family, through school. Now the primary means of meeting people is online, and because you can't demonstrate excellence, it's not about smell, it's not about humor, it's not about body language. It's a little bit about persistence, but not, you know, the persistence can come across, this harassing.

Harassment. It's come down to a couple things, varied base things, your ability to signal resources. I work at KKR, I went to MIT, and somehow my Rolex ended up in my profile picture. And height, height has become, use a term that I wouldn't use, use the term big naturals. The new, the new term, the new big naturals from men is height, because it can be objectively expressed online. And women have decided, do you remember when Do you remember when Tinder did a, they did a April Fool's joke, and maybe it was Hinge,

did an April Fool's joke saying, we're now allowing you to have filter for height? They brought it in. They brought in the height filter. Well, it's become, it's become the, so people say that if a woman with a big chest walks into a room, something happens to the energy of the room. And the men are very focused on that woman.

supposedly the same now is true of tall men because women raised in an online dating generation one of the key criteria or one of the things they all talk about is height and you've seen the TikToks of women who want a guy who make six figures and six feet okay what is that 2% of men darling you're 5'5 foot three you don't know the difference

between 58 and 6 2 yeah I told you this story this is where the tall girl problem thing came from I have a friend whose sister is 6-1, and she saw this guy in the supermarket, pushing a trolley, 6-4, strapping-looking dude, like not too showy, just a nice, reliable, strong sort of guy, 6-4. She's like, wow, I could even wear heels with him. Apparently, she turned a car, he sort of went down this aisle, and she was going to follow him, down the aisle, he went down this aisle, and went down this aisle, and went and put his arm

around a woman who was, like, 5-4, she was like, this fucking bitch, she's like, you could have had 5-6, you could have had 5-7, you could have had 5-8, You had to take the guy that was six foot. That was for me. That was my market. You just dated like a foot and an inch higher than you. And you didn't need to. But yeah, you get that sort of capturing in that way.

So anyway, you said provider is the first one. Provider. I just think a man needs a plan, a young man. I tell young men, assume you're going to need a plan that makes you potentially a viable provider for a family. Because whether a woman decides to have kids or not, I think she's hard where it to be predisposed to an opportunity where she could have kids. The second is protector. I think that it's important that men,

you want to lean into your advantages. The male form, we celebrate, women can produce bones, organs, and give birth. That's singular, it's incredible, and I do think we celebrate it. Men under the age of 30, their flexibility, their speed, their denser bone structure, their double-twitch muscle, and then you pour over it this amazing substance. called testosterone, men, and you know, your example of this, I say jokingly, semi-jokingly, that any man under the age of 30 should be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real,

they could kill and eat everybody or outrun them. You should be really strong and really fast. Like, as someone who just turned 60 and has been working out my whole life, I just marvel and miss that young, ripped, really strong, really fast dude. And you could recover from what workouts within hours and do it again. You know what? It just felt great to be able to bang out 25 strict pull-ups. It just felt fucking awesome to feel like if I broke out at a bar, I could step in between the two and have the physical presence to de-escalate. That made me feel really masculine.

And if you think about the most masculine jobs in the world, cop, firemen, military, at the end of the day, what they do is they protect. And what I would tell young people is that, or people thinking about getting in a relationship and having a family, is the only time I have ever felt any real sense of peace. I struggle with more. And that is, no matter how much money I have, no matter how many social opportunities I have to be in something fabulous. I just went to a conference that had like seven of the ten wealthiest people in the world and former prime ministers. And I... So sorry to hear that.

Yeah. But in the middle, I'm like, how do I get to Allen and company? I haven't been to that conference. It's never enough for me. I always want fucking more. And when I was single, I wanted, by Friday, I was like, how do I get to more fabulous brunches? How do I get to an environment with more interesting people?

How do I get to date hotter women? The next member club. How it just like, the only time I have ever felt sated like, this is enough. is occasionally I come home and my kids are asleep and they're safe in a wonderful home. My partner is happy and everything is safe and I feel like I'm protecting. And my dogs come in and jump on me and I feel like, okay, this is like, or I'm watching a football game and my son's roll in and just instinctively throw their legs over mine, just instinctively because they're so comfortable with me and they feel a certain sense of calm,

that's the only time I've ever felt like, this is enough, this is it. I can't wait for that. And it's because, quite frankly, it comes from a protection instinct. Well, you're still doing something without laddering up to strive for more, right? You're contributing just by your presence.

Well, and it's important that we have a competitive instinct. Men are supposed to be competitive. Men aren't supposed to feel stated. Society wouldn't have driven forward particularly quickly if we didn't have to. Yeah, and I struggle with that. I think a lot about addiction, that is continuing to engage in something, even though it's bad for your life. I'm addicted to money and I'm addicted to the affirmation of strangers.

And both those things get in the way of my life. Have you made peace with that? Well, just being cognizant of it. I think everybody has a certain level of addiction and you just need to be aware of them so you can modulate them. I love alcohol and THC. I'm really good at it. I'm great at alcohol.

I'm horrendous at both. So you can take all of mine. Well, there you go. But you acknowledge it. I'm a much better version of me a little bit fucked up. I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. I'm emotional in a good way. I'm friendly. I'm funny. I'm outgoing. Sober. I'm fairly intense and boring. My kids do these auctions where people get to bid on dinner for me. And I just know they're going to be disappointed because they hear me on a podcast and they think I'm charming and warm. I'm not. I'm fairly intense and quiet. Anyways, but I love those things. But I'm not addicted to them. When I started at Morgan Stanley, I gave a pot. I'm like, shit's just got real. I got to show up. I'm not as well educated as my people. here. I just don't need substances. I got my high, my blood pressure went almost borderline. I just stopped drinking for three months. I uploaded air. I had all my blood tested. I uploaded

AI. I'll come back with the same fucking thing. Stop drinking. Yeah, drink less moron. And I'm like, how much you drinking when I'm really honest? I'm like, I was drinking a half a bottle of Maker's Mark every week. And it said stop drinking. So I stopped drinking. Fixed it. Fine. Done. I can't get past thinking about money every day. I'm done. I'm done. I've got enough. But every day I'm checking my stocks, trying to get into deals, working harder than I probably need to. Also, I'll have some weekends ruined and be less present with my family because of shit that was said about me online by probably Russian bots, right? That just shouldn't affect me.

So I'm addicted to those two things. But anyways, protector, you want the most satisfying thing is feeling like you can de-escalate, situations, that people look to you to protect them, that you absorb more blows, you notice their lives, right? You're somebody they look to for comfort and for security. That is the most satisfaction I've ever felt. And then the final thing is procreator. I think we need to embrace and appreciate young men who are really horny. And that is, I think I would, yes, I think wanting to have sex, there's fire, right? Fire can be bad. If it's channeled in bad ways, it can burn down a forest. But if you can put it in an engine with spark plugs, it can create tremendous productive motion forward. And if you use that desire to establish romantic and sexual relationships to be a better person, to demonstrate kindness, to be a better dresser, to have a plan, to be in good shape, to smell nice, I think it can be fantastic, to be well read, to be interesting, to have hobbies and passions, to learn how to fucking listen.

And when I'm coaching these young men and they talk to me about their dates, I'm like, how many questions did you ask her? I mean, ask her, like, instead of it just being, most dates for a young man are what I call controlled boasting, where they just, just, just diary of the mouth trying to talk about how awesome they are. Like, ask her about her and listen and follow up and ask questions and get to know her. Everyone loves to talk about themselves. It's also way easier to be interested and interesting. You don't actually need to have that much going on in order to be interested in somebody. Well, it's like having a great sense of humor. You can either be really funny, which is really hard,

or you can just laugh out loud at anything remotely funny, and people think you have a great sense of humor, right? And it makes everyone feel good about themselves. But wanting to have, wanting, I mean, this is what men are up against. I graduated from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA. You're British, so you don't know. That's not very good. Okay.

That means I was on academic probation three times. I was subject to dismissal twice. I came very close to being kicked out of UCLA. The things I primarily learned at UCLA were how to make bongs out of household items and every line from Planet of the Apes. I wasn't mature enough to be at college. I barely got through.

One of the reasons I graduated from college, one of the few reasons I went on campus, was any time you went onto the campus at UCLA, it was like a bad Cinemax film. There was so many ridiculously hot people everywhere, and they were all pretty friendly. We were all at UCLA. I saw that, I replied to you, I think, on Instagram.

I saw a photo of you with hair. Yeah. Holy fuck. You must have been doing damage at UCLA back in the day. Well, I'll come back to that. But, well, I'll stop there because I love talking about me. When I got to UCLA, I was 6 to 148 pounds with bad acne. I looked like Hickabod Crane with bad skin.

And I joined the crew team. And I put on in about two years, I didn't look like you, but I was pretty close. I put on about 22, 24 pounds of muscle. And I took this drug, which changed my life called acutane, cleared out my skin, cured it. And I remember, Chris, literally the moment that I was at a fraternity party. And I looked at this woman, Cecilia Barranca, I think her name was. She was a cheerleader, and she was so beautiful.

And I looked at her, and she looked back and smiled. And I thought she was looking at someone else. And I said, is she looking over here? And the guy next me goes, yeah, she's, she's into or whatever. It was the first time in my life that a woman had like, who didn't know me. Paid attention in that one. Yeah, because I would always use humor. I remember the first time that happened.

I would always have to work my way in and make a woman laugh. And by the way, that's a skill set. I've always said if you can, my interpretation of my imitation of a woman being snarky about humor is I'm laughing, I'm laughing, I'm naked. I thought, okay, the only way I can ever get a date is to get a woman to laugh. But UCLA, beautiful people everywhere. I used to go on campus a lot and go to class. Why? Because there was always a non-zero probability. I was going to connect with my mates, meet some women, invite them back to a party at a fraternity, and maybe somewhere down the line have an opportunity to be physical with that woman. That was so motivating. Now, if I'd had on-demand porn that felt really lifelike with ridiculously hot women and algorithms calibrating in all of my fetishes on my phone and on my computer readily accessible. I'm not sure I would have gone on campus as much. I'm not sure I would have graduated from college. So a guy who wants to have, I think young men need to,

I can't tell a man to, like, just cut porn out. I think that's unrealistic. But to modulate it, such at that fire of horniness leads them, I used to get so, you know why I approached Danish women at bars? Because I was really fucking horny. Not because I thought, someday. I'd like to have kids and be a productive citizen and pay taxes and own a home, I did it because I thought, I would really like to figure out a way to make my own bad porn at some point. So I'm going to take a risk and approach somebody and in a thoughtful, it's not rocket science. Hey, where are you guys from? Right? It's not rocket science. I think young men need to be more focused on how do they approach a strange woman, express sexual or romantic interests while making them feel safe. And to modulate their consumption of porn, sets at that fire, motivates them to be better men, take risk, be resilient. Oh, she's not interested. You're kind, you're nice, nice to meet you.

You go back to your friends, maybe order another drink, and then you try again. With that one. You try again. You text them, hey, around for coffee this week. You don't hear back. You wait a week and maybe text again. After two, you stop. You don't want to be harassing.

But it's okay. If you text someone once, maybe, twice and they're not interested, you're both going to be fine. And it doesn't involve HR lawyers or discriminate, you know, or harassment suits. I think men need to embrace their role as procreators. And there's nothing like trying and trying to punch above your weight class. And quite frankly, maybe she's not initially that interested. And then she gets to know you, gets to see what a wonderful guy you are, needs to see that you're kind, that you have a plan, and you establish relationship, that's what victory feels like. That's what it means to be a mammal.

That's what it means to be a man. So provider, protector, procreator, and then the net of it all is this wonderful thing I got from our friend Richard Reeves and that is surplus value. And that is I tell my boys, I say to them, when I get mad at them, I'm like, negative value. I mean, look at your school. They're in these amazing schools, a ton of resources, a ton of brilliant people. I'm like, are you doing anything for them? I mean, you're not doing anything for them. Granted, your parents are paying, but you're negative value. You're extracting from the system. You're using the roads. You're using the tube. If you get sick, we're going to go to the emergency room. The police protect us. We have the most talented young men and women in the world

defending our shores. It costs a shit ton of money. You're not producing any tax revenue. You are negative value. When you become a man, it's not about age. It's not about a religious ceremony. It's not about having a family. I think there's a lot of males in our society. They get older, but never become men. And that is, objectively, at what point are you adding more value than you're extracting? And there's different ways to do that. Do you notice people's lives? You know, a really good religious leader or a really good, someone says, comforts people, listens to them, absorbs more complaints than the complaints they make, creates more tax revenue, more jobs, right? Are you adding surplus value? I don't think I was adding surplus value until I was

almost 30. It was in graduate school, taking a lot of concern for my mother. My relationships are always transactions where if I didn't get more from the relationship than I was giving, I would exit the relationship. So that's the point. The point is to get to surplus value where you can see across the majority of dimensions in my life, I'm creating more economic value. I'm noticing people's lives. I'm generating more love, more empathy, more concern than I'm absorbing. I think of that is like at the end of the day, that is the measure of a man. Before we continue, if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with

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$100 off, meaning it's only $400 to get the exact same blood panel that I use. Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. kind of risk builds men risk something that we're all at least hardwired in part to do i imagine that there's some kind of risk that builds them up and another kind that destroys them well i think constantly trying to be in rooms you don't deserve to be in apply to schools you shouldn't get into apply to jobs you shouldn't get into or you shouldn't receive take a shot at girls that you don't have any express friendship with men more impressive than you probably the most important thing for a young

man is to surround yourself with, at least in the short term, men who you perceive as being higher character and more successful than you. You know that whole thing. You are the average of your five closest friends, so try and manicure your friends. I think you're the average of the five podcasts you listen to the most. That's it? Yeah. Yeah. That's where you are. Yeah. But take risk. Go up. They did a study on kids in high school. Who are the most popular? It's not the best looking. It's not the best athletes. It's the kids who like the most other people. The kid who says, Bob, great job at the football game. And it's comfortable saying that.

Lisa, what a great outfit and congrats on killing it on the math test. Sounds like agency is a lot of intentionality leaning in, making it happen. Being confident, being super nice, being, you know, really liking, really liking others. So when I think of friends, like expressing friendship, the first thing when I'm coaching these young men, I don't tell them to go up to the hottest woman in the writing class and ask her out. I say, find a dude that you think's kind of cool and has his shit together and see if he wants to grab a beer or something. Because, first off, it will really help you romantically. The best move on a date is to have a first date, have a coffee, maybe solo.

But the highest target-rich success environment is if you can get a group of friends together that are very impressive and invite a romantic interest. and if she sees you have impressive friends, right, she's going to be into you. Pre-selection. Especially if there's a girl or two in there as well. Yeah, like a group, a cool posse, there is no bigger turn on for someone than look at who this guy rolls with.

They're fun, nice people, and they're successful. I think the nice point is a really interesting one. I would agree that some of the more caricature examples of solutions to a death of. of masculinity is like a cartoon version of masculinity. And I think that that is an error. I also, I'm thinking a lot at the moment about that ambition, sensitivity, balancing that thing.

As a guy who self-identifies is pretty sensitive, but presents as somebody that looks like a Neanderthal. Trying to balance that is an interesting one. But the nice thing I think, I think it goes a long way. And increasingly, I've found myself spending time around people that are good character, upstanding, not pushovers, but empathetic, like they'll sit with you in this thing and they're not scared of emotions and they're not scared of allowing you to sit in yours. Hey man, that's really tough. I'm sorry that you're

going through that. And just being able to sit there and it's a different type of bravery. And if we rebrand vulnerability as speaking your truth when it's scary, that feels like, oh, I want that. I want some of that. I don't want opening up about your trauma. That feels like I'm on the back foot. That's sort of closed off. Speaking your truth when it's scary, I'll have a bit of that. That feels like aspirational. That feels like a hero's journey for me to do. And yeah, at least in my opinion, that niceness, underpriced by most guys and overpriced by other guys as well, right? No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover is a great book on that. Well, there's some nuance because, and that's a differentiation between being niceness and kind, and that is...

A pliability. Well, the studies on what women find attractive to men, one, their ability to signal resources. If you got the Range Rover and the Panerae, fine. But you don't even need those yet. You need to have a plan. I'm going to school to learn how to install energy efficient HVAC heaters. I got a plan. I'm going to be able to provide.

Two, intellect. The fastest way to communicate intellect is to be funny. But intellect's hard to fake. You can fake it by being real red, but intellect is, you know, that's not easy to say, well, I'm going to sound really smart tonight. Because people who make good decisions, the tribe is more likely to survive if they make good decisions. But the third thing, and it's lesser known, and I think it's kind of a secret weapon, is kindness. And I think there's a differentiation between being kind and nice.

I think women notice when you're being really nice to them, but you're not necessarily a kind person. That's interesting. How would you delineate between the two? Well, you're being so nice, complimenting her because you're hoping to get her to like you and have sex with you, as opposed to planning trees, the shade of which you won't live under. You know, holding doors open for people, being patient, small acts of kindness with no reciprocal expectation from other people. So sort of authentic, non-pliable, I have boundaries, but they're pro-social. Yeah, just trying to be good, trying to give time, energy, and empathy, you know, someone, the way I used to approach it as a younger man through some fucked up sense of masculinity is if someone cut me off in traffic, I thought I need to restore the balance of the universe by speeding up and cutting them off. If someone at the Delta Ticket counter didn't give me the respect I thought I warranted as a one K member I got back in their face.

And what I realize is that masculinity and kindness is not being walked over. but saying, oh, I'm sorry, ma'am, but this is, and if someone cuts you off, you don't know what's going on with their life, you don't know if their kid is struggling with diabetes, you just don't know. I think that type of kindness, and also, I don't think it's genetic, or some of it may be genetic. I think it's a practice. If you start trying to be really thoughtful and be nice and compliment people, I do shit I never used to do.

If I see someone, an older couple, and they look great, I'll walk up to them and I'll say, you guys just look amazing. It makes me feel nice. It makes me feel strong. I've loved doing stuff like that. I never used to do that shit. Compliments this range is such a good thing. I never used to do that shit, right?

And I think that women notice that because they say, and you don't get a chance to demonstrate that on the first date, but if it's sort of innate and natural to you, I think she thinks, because the reality is a woman is going to be vulnerable during gestation. And instinctively, they want to know someone is going to be kind. And even if that person, their partner doesn't bring a lot of value at that moment, that that person is innately a kind person. So there's, I think that's kind of the secret weapon. What I tell men is to start establishing a kindness

practice such that it becomes second nature. And women will notice. You know, the whole notion around the bad boy effect, I think that works in the short term. But I think ultimately who women partner with and who they're drawn to and the research shows is kindness. Yeah, there's a, wonderful idea from Seth Stevens Davidowitz, where he says algorithms can predict what you'll click on, but not who you'll click with. I think that's optimizing for the front end, not the back end. A lot of the things that we optimize for on the front end are totally non-predictive of long-term marital success, relationship satisfaction. And yeah, Jason Pagan, you familiar with him? Great blogger. He did this really wonderful breakdown video on Instagram. I wrote a 1500-word essay

about this insight he had, which was one of the weirdest subcultures that he grew up being siopped by was that you should always choose the emotionally immature, unstable, bad boy over the stable guy. The notebook, right, has a war veteran, business-owning CEO fiancé who gets defeated by a bloke that puts a house together. Right. Because true love is supposed to be. kind of like difficult and intense and and and give you emotional whiplash in this way in titanic you see uh the the husband who has fun by sitting down and having serious conversations and can provide being uh preferred less preferred to the one who has like loud parties and lives like a teenager um in uh twilight you have uh the dude that's the werewolf uh jacob i think

didn't do my twilight research that much Jacob is like grounded reliable Edward is a literal vampire who can't keep it together he's erratic and but that's the true love is that beauty and the beast literalizes this right

that true love tames this but that's not really the way it is looks are temporary but personality is pretty fucking permanent like this is the trait of the person that not only you're going to spend the rest of your life with not only that you're going to raise your kids with but it's the raw building blocks

behaviorally that your kids are made of. The best way to have calm, well-balanced, securely attached kids that are smart and funny is to pick that in a partner. Like, do you care about how tall your kids are? Maybe a little bit, but not that much. Do you care how hot your kids are? Maybe a little bit, but not that much.

Do you care how well-balanced and equanimous and securely attached they are? Well, that sounds pretty good to me. So, yeah, just this optimizing on the front end, not for the back-end type thing, is a, it's short-sighted for a lot of people. I understand why it happens, right? Everybody is, and how are you supposed to say,

oh, I must remember that I ignore the size of the big naturals or the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose or whatever in place of, well, you have to think about how kind they are. That's tough, right? But you do need to think, okay, am I optimizing for short-term mating? Because in that, wheels are off, or gloves are off, like, do what you want. Yeah, but it is shift. So guys, guys immediately kind of, we're less too.

Like our job, we've been taught our job is to spread our seat to the four corners of the earth. Any holes a goal as you're taught in England. There we go. And then women are taught to select the smartest, strongest, and fastest feed. So guys are immediately in lust and women need longer. And the problem is the venues by which you demonstrate

that excellence are slowly but surely going away. So men are at a bit of a disadvantage because they don't have the venues, they don't have the venues to demonstrate that excellence. But if you do, If you do get to the point where you can, you know, sort of demonstrate that excellence. I was thinking about I've given a few best man toast,

and I was give the same toast, and some of the things I've learned and where I've screwed up. The first is always express affection and sexual interest. I think women want to be wanted. I think any time, even if you have any inclination, if you're walking home for the movies, hold your wife's hand. You may not love holding hands.

She likes it more than you. I joke that women have a special relationship with cocaine and jewelry. We'll never understand it. Just acknowledge they have a special relationship with it. You need to buy your wife jewelry. Men don't understand jewelry. I've never understood it. I don't get it. It makes no fucking sense to me. Doesn't matter. It doesn't make any sense to me. You need to buy a female partner. You're romantically involved with jewelry. They also, you know, they're going to have a ton of things that you're not, you're just not going to appreciate. And it's sort of saying like, okay, I give in to these things. So the first thing is, sex and affection,

I choose you. Young people are really good at that. Young people kind of are very drawn initially. They want to check that box right away. They're good at that. They take care of that. The second is, and this is kind of the most important, is, and I didn't learn this, and this is the biggest unlock, I think, for me in terms of my relationships with my partner and my friends and my parents, was to put away the scorecard. And that is, relationships are a transaction to a certain extent. You might be providing economic security in exchange for nurturing. You might be providing your human labor in exchange for health care and money.

Relationships are a transaction. It's a function of currency and cadence. What I did, and I figured this out with my father, my father wasn't around, present, wasn't a very good dad. And I used to get resentful because I was a pretty good son as he got older and needed me. And I'd get angry because I'm giving more. And when I decided was, all right, put away the scorecard and just say, what kind of partner do I want to be? What kind of dad do I want to be? What kind of friend do I want to be? What kind of

friend do I want to be? What kind of business partner do I want to be? And live to that and forget about their contribution. Don't get walked all over, but it's human nature. There is a limit to this. You don't want to be a dormant. I've never had that problem. You're occasionally going to shed friendships. You're occasionally going to say, look, I'm not in this. This isn't working. But you're naturally going to inflate your own contribution to the relationship and diminish theirs. So if you're keeping score, you're always going to be unhappy. So put away the scorecard. Just figure out what kind of husband do you want to be and aspire to be that person. And by the way, if you go through periods of time, maybe even your whole life, or maybe you've given more than you've gotten, that's okay.

And then the third thing I say is never let a woman be cold or hungry. The majority of the blowups I've had with women have been when they're cold or hungry, Pashminas and power bars at all timed no matter where you go no matter where you go never ever let a woman be cold or hungry it's just going to go really ugly and what she'll tell the things that'll come out will be absolutely true but there'll be especially harsh and biting they'll be shit that you don't eat and not right now yeah yeah Scott Galloway ladies and gentlemen Scott you're great I appreciate you man what's the new book uh notes on being a man it comes out November the 4th I care I appreciate you man thank you great to see you in person back in the back in the back

in the home country. The conquering hero returns. I'm just slowly trying to kick you out one trip at a time. I have just, off mic, I was saying, Chris, I really want you to move to New York. I think you'd love it there. Uh, maybe. I could see a hundred and, how many days am I allowed to go? We're talking about tax avoidance now. You can go 183 days and keep your residence in, uh, in Austin, which you'd be able to do. Well, yeah. I could see me doing that. Yeah. All right. All right, so much. Great to see you, man. Thank you. new reading suggestions look no further than the modern wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever

read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillex.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.