Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Introducing: Lost Boys with Anthony Scaramucci and Scott Galloway

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Why are young men struggling more than ever before? Anthony Scaramucci and Scott Galloway kick off the Lost Boys series with Richard Reeves, author of the seminal book, Of Boys and Men, uncovering the startling data and the unique challenges young men face today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and on this episode of Open Book, we're going to be doing something a little different. We'll still be talking about a book, a great book by Richard Reeves called of Boys and Men. But we're doing much more than that. I've been concerned about what's happening with young men lately, so I teamed up with my good friend, Professor Scott Galloway, and we've started a new podcast together called Lost Boys that digs into the challenges young men are facing today and what we're. we can do about it. So today we're going to share the first episode of Lost Boys where Scott and I talk

to author Richard Reeves. For anyone who cares about young men, this is a must listen. So check out our first episode and be sure to follow Lost Boys wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for joining us for this new limited edition podcast we're calling Lost Boys. I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I've been really concerned about what's happening to young people, specifically young men today. I grew up in a blue-collar family with a very tough father. He wasn't always easy, but still, there were a lot of adult men in my life that served as real role models for me and a lot of men like me. We knew what men were supposed to be and supposed to do, but I worry that today, between the morass of social media, the confusion about pronoun usage, and the whole change

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

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

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

When I was younger, I didn't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects, living with my mother and kind of lost. But America sort of loved me and picked me up by the scruff of my neck and flung me forward in the form of the University of California, assistance and welfare for my mother. And I don't find that some of those same programs and some of those same opportunities or the way society operates. Had I been that kid today, I worry that outcomes would have been different. And so this is something that's a passion project and immediately found the person to kind of, I don't know,

serve again as my sensei, if you will, or my Jedi master is Richard Reeves. Richard is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, born in Petersburg, United Kingdom, educated in geography at Wadham College. that correctly yeah you are amazing crazy right right yeah and has a PhD from the University of Warwick and has had several pretty high-level positions including joining the office of deputy prime minister Nick Clegg he's also was at was it the Hoover Institute where we're demos there you go IPPR yeah and has and all like that is not just a bureaucrat one of the things I respect most about Richard you not only

wrote kind of this landmark book or David Brooks described it as a landmark book of boys of men but he's an entrepreneur and that is he went out and started a foundation or a research think tank what do you call this a think tank think tank is probably the best term yeah I guess sounds boring though doesn't it the American Institute for boys and men and immediately was able to raise a lot of capital people have a ton of respect for him his research his kind of thoughtful almost sort of nonpartisan approach to this and saw the need and just one just to do some name dropping believe i believe you received a 10 million dollar grant from the melinda french gates foundation is that accurate pivotal ventures that was 20 yeah most of which i have to give away

which is great there you go well we can help anyways with that uh richard reeves so anthony do you want to kick us off with a couple questions for richard i i think so i want to start out by making a statement richard if you don't mind and get get you to react to it i I feel like things were more easily defined when we were growing up. Scott and I are contemporaries, both born around 1964. And I feel like we had some definition to our lives. You know, there were certain things that boys did. There were certain things that girls did.

And again, I'm not trying to be overly parochial. And I understand that we want to be accepting in our culture for varying lifestyles and so on and so forth. But, you know, Scott said something to me that really penetrated to me. a few months back. He said, you know, there's no advocacy for white males. There's maybe 75 different affinity groups at NYU, but there's no white male affinity group and not necessarily saying that there should be, sir. But I guess I'd like to ask you first for the statistic that Scott's giving, what happened in our sociology, what happened in our world, our culture that's led to

this problem that we're all facing. Well, the first thing to say is that I think Scott has been a real leader in terms of elevating this as a cultural conversation. So there's a danger now that you just get some praise inflation between me and me and Scott now. But let's get that over with. But he was really leading on this before I wrote the book. He's one of the people. I want the praise inflation, Richard. I mean, you don't know me, but I need it. I have a very fragile ego so don't focus on Galloway just like find subtle subtle ways to praise me i'm sorry continue richard anthony please so so far anthony i have no reason to object to you how about that all right so someone sort of said like he's a friend in the sense that he didn't mean me active ill will let's start

with that anthony i'm thrilled you're doing this so yeah i think that's right and it's interesting the way um this this is both like a like a factual problem in the sense that like we've got all these facts, some of which Scots referred to, but like an education and wages and employment. And that's my background, right? I'm a fact guy. I'm a researcher policy guy. But I think there's something behind that, which is what you're both talking about, which is this identity question. So beneath the surface of facts, there's this question about identity. And I do think that there was a clearer script. That's the way I like to think about this, is that there was an, the old script was for women, wife and mother you're going to raise the kids you go and the old script for men

was he going to be the economic provider head of household breadwinner right that was a script my parents had and I had a great upbringing I'm very lucky except but there wasn't like a question that they had to ask knows about how it how they're going to divide it we tore those scripts up I think Anthony I'll see how you both react to this I think we tore them up and we said to women your script is no longer housewife mother it's anything you want it to be it It's CEO, it's leader, it's you go girl, it's amazing. And as Scott said, that's arguably the biggest economic liberation in human history.

Amazing. So the script that girls and young women get now is around autonomy, of independence, assertiveness. It's all uplift. It's incredibly empowering. We tore up the old script for men, which was breadwinner, head of household, etc. And we didn't replace it with anything. We just tore up the old script. And so what that means is a lot of men now feel like they're basically improvising.

They basically don't have a script. Or if they do, it's a negative script. I really fear that one of the problems now is that the script around what men, what men should be like is more defined negatively. It's don't be toxic, don't man's blame. So there's a long list of don'ts now for men, most of which we would probably agree with. But what about the do's? What's the to-do list for a 24-year-old man now?

And we don't have a good answer to that question. That's created a massive vacuum, I think, in our culture and our politics. But, Scott, what Richard is saying happened for what reason? Through osmosis, a backlash to masculinity or male toxic masculinity? What caused this to happen? Or did it just happen naturally? Well, and I'm going to do like a rich little version of Richard here, and he can correct me where I got it wrong or where I got right.

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

Now it's two thirds. What happened to wood shop, metal shop, auto shop. There is a bias. Now that we've leveled the playing field in education in my industry, women have just blown by men. You know, the attributes to be a good student just come more easily to a woman than, you know, at NYU, we don't like to talk. We don't say this out loud.

There are certain graduate schools in NYU where if we were admissions blind, they not only would be 70% women, they'd be 70% Asian women. And so there's just the natural attributes of a woman lend themselves better to education. I also think economically, we've passed a lot of legislation that has transferred money from young people to old people, people over the age of 70 or 72% wealthy than they were 40 years ago, people under the age of 40 or 24% less wealthy. Well, that affects men and women. Yes, but when men don't have money, quite frankly, they're just, less attractive, that is more of a hit to them than it is a hit to women. So you have an education

system that's biased against them. You have, Richard can speak to the actual biological reasons, prefrontal cortex, societal economic. I think those are the primary culprits. I think it's a little bit, I'm Richard, I'm curious to get your opinion. I think it's a little bit lazy to say that it's people not respecting, not respecting men. I think that's part of it, but I think it's a more complicated. There's a bunch of dimensions here that are probably the bigger contributors to the fall of young men. But I'm open to pushback here, Richard. Yeah, I think, in some ways, I think the discourse around men and the toxic masculinity, what that's done is put fuel on the fire. There are all of these more structural, longer-term problems, as you say, Scott, around education.

the labour market has really turned against particularly men with less skill. I mean, the fact that men without a college degree are earning no more today than they were half a century ago. Like stagnant male wages for that, for most men. That is a massive economic fact and therefore a cultural fact. But I do think that the fuel on the fire has been to say, if men are struggling, it's sort of their fault. one of my criticisms of more progressive leaning people is that they can't accept that men have problems because they're still convinced that men are the problem and that's created a blindness to the reality of these problems of men or a tendency sometimes to say if men are struggling it must be their fault you know

so if men are committing suicide or having mental health problems that's because they won't get help if men are dying of COVID it's because they wouldn't get the vaccine if men are not doing well in school is because they can't be bothered to crack a book, etc. And so there's this weird sort of blame thing that happens with men, but only men now, rather than saying, well, maybe the education system's not working very well for men. Maybe the workplace has changed. And so I think you're right, Scott, that these are deeper challenges. But I also think you're right, Anthony, that it does make things worse if we actually then not only say men aren't having problems, but also point to them as the problem.

So they're a really unfortunate set of circumstances. You know, the reason men are struggling is not because people are being mean to them, but that doesn't mean people being mean to them doesn't make things worse. And I certainly think it makes them open to much more reactionary voices who can then credibly claim that mainstream institutions and people don't care about them because they're too busy pathologizing them. And I do think if you want someone to really kind of feel threatened and alone, then threaten their identity, that we do know that.

masculinity has become part of that problem. But to Anthony, to your point around Ms. Andry, you never hear the word. You hear misogyny all the time. You never hear Ms. Andry. You know, I went on Theo Vaughn and I was talking about struggling young men. And I get what I always get dozens of not hundreds of comments along the lines of, well, if young men just got their act together. Now imagine me saying that about the black community. Well, if black people just got their act together.

What would be the response? Well, if women were just in touch with their emotions? I mean, it is open season on, if you're at a conference and you say, well, women are better managers. They're more thoughtful, they're more nuanced. They make better doctors, the more nurturing. Everyone just kind of clapped politely and nods their head. If I were to say, men are more risk-aggressive and on average make better entrepreneurs, what would the response be? So it feels like we can't even have an open, honest conversation because it's open season on one gender and the other from just even even if you're trying to have a science-based conversation.

It's a third rail. You can't say anything that might imply that women are, you know, might be contributing or the role women play that this might be part of the, you know, they might be part of the, you know, they might be part of not only the solution, but also part of the problem. You can't even go there. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of our new podcast, Lost Boys. Check out our first episode and be sure to follow Lost Boys wherever you get your podcast.