The Bossticks - Scott Galloway On How to Build A Life That Feels Fulfilling - Even When Things Are Hard

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

#928: Join us as we sit down with Scott Galloway – Professor of Marketing at  NYU Stern School of Business, serial entrepreneur, & New York Times bestselling author. Named one of the world's top business professors, Scott has founded nine companies including Prophet, RedEnvelope, L2, & Section4. In this episode, Scott gets unfiltered about economic inequality, generational wealth shifts, & what real financial success actually looks like today. We explore the growing crisis facing young men, the psychological & cultural impact of social media, shifting gender dynamics, & why deep, meaningful relationships matter more than ever. Scott also shares impactful, practical advice for the next generation – and the parents raising them – on money, purpose, connection, & building a life rooted in true personal fulfillment.   To Watch the Show click HERE   For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM   To connect with Scott Galloway click HERE   To connect with Lauryn Bosstick click HERE   To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE   Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE   Head to our ShopMy page HERE and LTK page HERE to find all of the products mentioned in each episode.   Get your burning questions featured on the show! Leave the Him & Her Show a voicemail at [phone].   To learn more about Scott Galloway visit https://profgmedia.com.   This episode is sponsored by The Skinny Confidential Your skincare routine, reimagined. Shop The Skinny Confidential Face Towels today at https://shopskinnyconfidential.com/products/face-towels.   Go to Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, http://squarespace.com/SKINNY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.   This episode is sponsored by ARMRA Go to http://armra.com/SKINNY or enter SKINNY to get 30% off your first subscription order.   This episode is sponsored by Wayfair Get organized, refreshed, and back on track this new year for WAY less. Head to http://Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home.    This episode is sponsored by Hiya Receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal you must go to http://hiyahealth.com/SKINNY.   This episode is sponsored by Bobbie If you want to feed with confidence too, head to http://hibobbie.com.   Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Skinny Confidential, Him and Her show. Today we have Scott Galloway, a long-awated, long-awaited. requested guests on this podcast. He is an NYU Stern Marketing Professor, serial entrepreneur, and multiple time New York Times bestselling author. Some of the books that he has written, The Algebra of Wealth, The Algebra of Happiness, and his most recent one, notes on being a man, which is phenomenal. Scott also hosts a wildly popular podcast, the Professor G Show and co-hosts the Pivot Podcasts and writes the award-winning newsletter, No Mercy, No Malice. Like I said earlier,

Scott has been much requested on this podcast, and he did not disappoint. We talk all about how to impact the current reality we live in. We talk about shifting your mindset, insights on an impactful life, how to set up your financial future, how to think about raising children in the new age, how to think about how to interact now in the new social landscape that we all deal with, and so much more. Scott is an insightful thinker. He is always at the forefront of ideas and conversation, and we really enjoy talking to him. With that, Scott Galloway, welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and Her show. This is the Skinny Confidential, him and her. So you've been at the center of a lot of commentary around culture, entertainment, media.

If you were advising a young person today starting out, where would you tell them even to begin? Because there's so much, there's so many different things now. Oh, gosh. I think it's situational because I teach second year MBAs. And kids will come to my office hours and say, I have an offer from Google and JPMorgan, but I'm thinking about starting my business. And they think, because I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to go start your own business. I tell them, don't be a fucking idiot.

Got to work for Google. Because the American corporation is the greatest platform for wealth creation in the history of mankind. But literally 98, 99% of the American public can't get past security at these platforms. You have to have not only a degree, but typically you have to have a degree from an elite institution. You have to have a really solid resume. In exchange for that, what happens at these organizations is you get rich slowly. And they have fantastic benefits, six months maternity leave, profit sharing. they're incredible companies to work for.

So if you're one of the 1% that I have access to quote unquote the corporate American platform, I would say do that. If you, and I had that, I went to work from Morgan Stanley, but I was ineffective in a big company. And people say, oh, you're, you know, they assume that because I'm an entrepreneur, I'm some sort of baller and I have special skills. Most entrepreneurs do it reflexively as a defense mechanism because they can't make it in a corporate environment. Like every time people went into a conference room in Morgan Stanley, I thought they were talking about me. I was very insecure. I didn't I wasn't patient enough to

navigate. I resented I just wasn't very good. I knew I was smart enough to know even at a young age I can't be effective in a large organization. So I started companies. If you if you know, it's so much of a situational. My dad has this business hanging curtains. I'm 22 and I think I'm going to be double platinum Emmy, you know, Emmy Award winner or whatever. So I'm not going to go to work for his company. And then as you get older and you realize it's not easy to take care of your kids. It's not easy to have financial security. It's not easy to live in a city. It's expensive. And running a business can be kind of fun and the money's great. And before you know it, you might decide to go to work in your father's company. Some people are risk aggressive,

scrap. You want to work really hard. Have opportunities, maybe access to a little bit capital. That's entrepreneurship. Other people are good at school, good at navigating the corporate world. That's about going to work for a bigger platform. If you're just an economic animal, the place where I think is going to have the biggest growth is going to be the intersection between AI and healthcare. Health care, and it's always the boring stuff where you make a shit ton of money. Healthcare is the biggest, most disruptable industry and history. It's a $2 trillion business, four out of five people are dissatisfied with it in the U.S. And for example, a mother whose kid has diabetes spends five months of her year managing that child's illness between doctors, visits,

referrals, prescriptions, arguing with the insurance company, AI is going to give her one, two, three months back, I think. So if I were just an economic animal as I was, I'm not proud of this when I was your age. I didn't want to save the whales. I didn't want to be a better person. I wanted to make a lot of money. That was my kind of sole objective to be blunt. But I knew I couldn't do something I hated. I just wouldn't be good at it. What I would suggest is it's situational. There's huge opportunities in vocational programming. You know, all these data centers that are going to be built around the nation, we're going to spend more money building data centers and office buildings in the next five to ten years.

And that needs specially skills, construction, energy efficient, HVAC installation, repair of EVs, you know, building all this stuff, people, the trades, those people are going to make really good livings. So I just, there's no blanket one size fits all. I think what everybody needs is a kitchen cabinet of people who care about them and they can trust, but we'll give it to them straight. We'll say to them, no, that's a bad. idea. You wouldn't be good at that. I know, I know that industry and we wouldn't be good at it.

Generally speaking, though, and I'll wrap up this word salad, the sexier and more romantic in industry is, the shittier it is. And that is, if you want to start a restaurant, be a model, have a jewelry design line, a jewelry line, a fashion line, produce documentary films, fine, but just know you're going to make a lot less money than anyone with the same level of talent doing something really boring. I don't invest in anything cool. A friend of mine is starting a members Club downtown for actors and musicians. I'll join because I want to hang out with people younger and cooler than me. There's no way I'll invest. Another friend of mine starting a AI-driven SaaS platform that helps health care maintenance workers scheduling. It sounds like I would want to put a gun

in my mouth before I'd work there. It sounds so awful. That's where I'll ride a check. You want to go where capital, human capital is not going. The romance industries attract too many people, so as a result, the industry can pay them less than their worth. Yeah, even something, I mean, listen, we've done this show for a decade, and the company that I run day-to-day produces close to 100 shows. And we obviously doing what we do, we get a lot of inbound for people wanting to do this. But what I do most of the time when those people come is I actually try to talk them out of it. Yeah.

Because it is really hard, as you know, to make a living in media and break out in media compared to other things. If someone's like, I need to do this to support my life, and that's the thing that they're looking to answer all of their financial ambitions. I agree with you. I think there's so many easier paths. And I kind of like, the reason I try to talk people out of it in the beginning is I want to see if they actually have the fire so deep inside that they're going to do it regardless of that advice. But if not, if they can be talked out of it, it's not easy to do. Well, let's talk about broadcasting.

So I rode crew at UCLA and there's been 3,500 oarsmen and oars women and 10 of us have gone to the Olympics. I was not one of those people. So you had approximately a 0.3 chance of going to the Olympics. There's 1.6 million podcasts, 600,000 put out content every week. So let's say 600,000 podcasts. Generously, 600 are self-sustaining. That's, I don't even think 3 through 600 are self-sustaining, but let's say 600. That means 0.1% of podcasters, one out of 1,000 are self-sustaining, meaning that growing crew at UCLA,

I was three times as likely to go to the Olympics than it was to have a self-sustaining podcast. Podcasting is like, kind of like the NBA. Like there's, you know, several million high school basketball players. And there's something like eight NBA players that are there after two or three years. That's podcasting. Now, if you get, you make the jump to light speed and you're in the top 100 or 150 podcasts, it's an extraordinarily profitable business because this costs a certain amount of money. And once you get above that in terms of ad revenue, it's almost all margin.

But it's definitely like most things in our economy, win or take most, if not win or take all. I read, I think the top 10 podcasts are responsible for 30 to 40% of the listens, just 10 of them. And they're probably responsible for almost half the revenue because advertisers want scale. They don't want, rather than doing three podcasts with 100,000 people, they'll pay four times as much for one with 300,000. It's quite frankly, it's just easier for them. So this is very much, if you want to be in podcasting, be in it because you see other benefit raising awareness, you enjoy it, you have something to say. But thinking you're going to go into this industry and make good money, there's much easier ways to make money.

One of the clips that's gone viral for you or one of the ones that I see you have pinned is when you're saying you can have it all, but you can't have it all at once. I'd love for you to elaborate that on a little bit. And one of the things I think you also said in that clip is that two decades to become financially secure. Hopefully. When I query my kids, I do a survey at the end of class, when I send my kids my students. I ask them where do they expect to be economically. And granted, some of its proximity bias, because I'm with a group of very ambitious kids. Second year MBAs in NYU are very ambitious.

They expect, 80% of them expect to be in the top 1% of income running households by the time of the 35, which is $700,000. Which sounds like a lot of money unless you live in New York. And you just came from JP Morgan and you're getting your MBA. You think, my boss was making that. I'm going to be my boss. So then I asked them what their priorities are. And a lot of them put at near the top, number two, and number one balance. And like those two are just not compatible.

And so I know you have a four-month-old, a three-year-old and a six-year-old. All right? Yep, roughly. Yep. You're in this, I mean, you are literally in fucking Vietnam right now. To have three kids under the age of six and trying to be managing, manage a startup, that's just like, that's just like, okay. that's literally hand-to-hand combat every day.

When I started my last business in 2008, and my oldest had the poor judgment to come marching out of my partner, you know, I don't even remember those 10 years. It was like, all right, who's got the kids this morning? My partner was working at Goldman. She was working 12 hours a day. I was trying to start a business or I, you know, is someone home to get the kid from school?

It was just constant. work. And if you expect to be in the top 1%, generally speaking, I believe you have to do almost nothing but work for 20 years. And you need to support a partner. You need to have alignment with your partner around things like how much money you save, you spend your willingness to sacrifice in terms of work. You know, I used to leave the house. I was always in businesses that were, I had strategy firms and analytics companies. My clients were, was global multinationals. So I would leave and be on the road sometimes for three weeks. And I remember coming home. And were you speaking then as well? I mean, technically communicating, but I was running a business intelligence firm. So I'd go meet with

LVMH, keep rotating around the globe and go to Samsung and Korea and then get on another plane home. But I'd be speaking to them about their digital footprint, using a bunch of data to try and make better recommendations, whether it was customer acquisition or more engagement on social. But I would get home. And sometimes I'd be gone for two or three weeks. And I'd, you know, first thing I want to do is I want check in so I look, I remember several moments opening the door to my kids room and noticing that they had grown and really thinking like, am I failing as a dad? Like, what's the whole point if my kids are growing and I'm not here, right? But at the same time, I also recognize in a capitalist society, I've always felt a real obligation to provide. And to provide at a level that's

probably abnormally high, I think it's important to take stock of your addictions. I think I'm addicted to money. I didn't have much growing up. And so I've always wanted a lot of money and it's never quite been enough for me. And the definition of an addiction is something you continue to engage in, despite it having negative impact on the rest of your life. I don't regret that because I don't think there's balance. I just think there's tradeoffs. And the reason I have so much balance now and I'm going to get to take my boys to Singapore and I get to take my boys to Premier League games and do amazing things with my partner is because I had no balance then. So I think you just have, And by the way, my way is not necessarily the right way.

Some people say, I'm going to move to the suburb of St. Louis, coach Little League, me and my partner are going to have good jobs, but we're going to have a simple lifestyle and we want more balance. I get it. But what I find a lot of young people don't have a sober conversation around their expectations around economic viability and what's required to get there. So the statement of you're going to be in the 1% is a bit of a delusional statement if you're not willing to accept what it takes to actually economically get to that 1%. Do nothing but work for 20 years. Occasionally go drink with your friends, occasionally check in on your kids, but it's a competitive environment out there. And there's some people that are so talented at what they do that they work out.

They have a good relationship with their parents, a great relationship with their spouse, money pours on them, healthy relationship with their kids. Assume you are not that person because in this competitive economy to really break through and be in the top 1% in terms of influence or economic reward, the bottom line is, it's just a shit ton of work. And I don't care for Beyonce or, you know, Dick Wolf, who's the producer of law and order. They all have one thing in common. They work their asses off for a solid two to three decades. I'm not saying you have to do that. Some people work to live. But if you want to be in the top 1%, I hate to tell you this, you probably need to live to live.

work for a couple decades. Why do you think there is a disconnect with people not realizing what it takes? They're told their whole life in college that they're going to have a fragrance named after them or be senator. Right. And then on Instagram, it seems like everyone's on a golf stream and in Ibitha, but you. And the people you know who are vomiting some faux bullshit version of their life, all this wealth-born being expectorated across people, they're like, well, I'm as talented as that person. And so that's what it means to be working. I get to go see black coffee at some amazing, you know, party in Abitha. And, oh, I should be on a yacht because she's on a yacht.

Well, no, it's her uncle's friend's yacht that she took pictures on. By the way, nobody who has a jet ever takes pictures of their jet. It's just not. So Instagram and social media creates this unrealistic expectation around if you weren't having an amazing life and also making a shit ton of money and also having to be in great shape and figure out a way to be hot at the same time and figure out a way to have a boyfriend with a ripped abs that somehow you're failing you're not living and that's just not the real world the expectations that we set up for younger people and they impose on themselves is so unrealistic that i feel like

it's very difficult you know if you asked the average 25 year old american woman or man. Are you meeting, not quite meeting, or exceeding your expectations professionally? I think less than one in 10 say, I'm exceeding my expectations. So I think it's really difficult for young people. And then you have a series of policies where your life, you have less opportunity. I wouldn't say less opportunity. You have more economic wins in your face than I had at your age. Housing is a lot more expensive. Child care is much more expensive. If you want to go back and get a graduate degree and certification, that's much more expensive. And essentially, all of our fiscal policies the last 40 years have taken money out of your pockets and put it in mind. The average 60-year-old is 72%

wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average 30-year-old is 24% less wealthy. So if you look at our tax policy, it's basically a rig game to take money out of your pockets and put it into mine. And explain to people that are wondering about that statement, like how that mechanically happens. Sure. Two biggest tax deductions, mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and makes their money from buying, selling assets like stocks? People my age. Who makes their money from current income, working, and rents?

People your age. Right? The greater 40% of tax revenue goes to the support of seniors who should be, who are the wealthiest generation in history. Are the people who are the recipients of the most federal aid? are the wealthiest generation in history, seniors. Child tax credit, help young families. $40 billion get stripped out of the infrastructure bill,

but the $120 billion. Cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through. The D& democracy is working too well, and that is old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money. Corporations have kind of washed over Washington, and they're paying their lowest tax rates since 1939. So for your generation, everything's gotten more expensive, but you're getting less government assistance and less help.

And your taxes, my guess is based on what you've told me, you probably make what's considered an exceptional living. But it's all current income. If you're living in L.A. and making an exceptional living, let's say between the two of you, your ballers, you're making $6 or $800,000 a year, maybe in a million bucks a year. Let's use an abstract. Mom's a baller at a law firm.

She's a partner. Dad's a chiropractor that make a million a half bucks. They've played by the rules, get to the best degrees. If they live in LA or New York, they're probably paying 52% tax rates. Because I made the jump to light speed and sold a business and now I make the majority of my money investing in companies buying and selling stocks and I live in Florida. My tax rate's kind of 17, 19%. So when I was at your age making a great living, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, I was paying 30 something, 40 something percent tax rates. Now that I'm making millions of dollars a year, my tax rate has plummeted.

So the tax code is progressive until you get to the 99th percentile. It's the workhorses that get screwed. They pay 50 plus percent. But once you make the jump to light speed, your tax rate plummet. So the 25 wealthiest families in New York pay an average tax rate is 6%. So our tax policy essentially is like this tilted table taking capital from young people and shifting it to old people through social services tax policy, even COVID. We decided that a million people dying would be bad, but if I got less wealthy or boomers got less wealthy,

but the incumbents got less wealthy, that would be tragic. So we flush seven trillion dollars into the economy. Where do we get that money? We used your credit card. It's debt, right? You're going to have to pay it back. I'll probably be dead by the time America defaults on its debt, but it will probably happen. And when you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant by giving them all sorts of capital,

all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 25-year-old recent graduate of a culinary academy that wants her shot. So the reason I'm wealthy now is in 2008 we let the economy fail. Apple went down to eight bucks a share, right? So as I was coming into my prime income earning years in my late 30s and early 40s, I was able to buy Apple, Amazon, and Netflix for $8, $10, and $12 a share. Netflix today is at $1,200. We decided that in this last go-round not to let the markets fall, but to keep high, such that the people already own stocks nor their own assets could stay wealthy. So it robbed young people of those buying opportunities? 100%.

Where does a young person find value? Like, where? You know, I was able to buy a home in, I was able to buy, you know, a really nice home on the water in Florida for, I mean, I won't even say it's, and since then, it's up fourfold. And through COVID, it didn't go down because we flushed the market with stimulus. I read your entire book, their last book of the algebra, and I will read your new book. Congratulations. We're going to talk about that. But one of the things that I have said on this podcast that I got a lot of shit for is that a home is not necessarily an asset anymore. It's a liability in many cases.

And I think a lot of young people have been taught to, you know, seek out the American dream and buy a house. But I say in many cases, because of these economic situations, that a home a lot of the time is a huge liability for people, especially of our generation. I don't know if you would agree or disagree with that. Again, I think it's situational. If you bought a Austin three years ago and you just stretch beyond all imagine to try and pursue the American dream and now my understanding is the Austin market's off 20 or 30 percent. It's down no you. You basically lost your down payment and you can't move because you can't afford to pay the bank back so you're stock. That can happen but at the same time if you can get in at a what I'll

call a relatively decent valuation looking at the kind of the yield or the ratio of rent to price and you can do this using AI or Zillow or Street Easy. A home is still a great way to save and build wealth because it's not necessarily because it outperforms other asset classes, but because it's a forced means of saving. You have to pay that mortgage. People are really remiss. People will stop, you know, contributing to their Vanguard fund. They usually don't want to get kicked out of their house. So they continue to make those payments and they plan around it. It's a means of forced saving and building equity. And over the long term, housing still does show a decent return. And also, there is a certain psychic value to it, right?

It feels like you're committing to someone. You will actually paint the walls. You will actually buy a sub-zero refrigerator because you own it. So, but I think it's situational. I think you want to talk to people and say, am I buying at the top of the market? Or is this a good way for me? Can I afford this home? Is this a good way for me to start building wealth?

I've always owned homes. I've done really well. But quite frankly right now, I think you're smart to say, would we be better? In New York right now, you're better off rent. If you do the math, you're better off renting. That was the nuance of my argument for young people. And I wonder as a follow-up, if the home is currently not the best place to put your money, where would you advise young people to start saving or investing as an alternative?

It's a tough one because I think I'm naturally pessimistic and I think that I think everything is overvalued right now. So what I would suggest is the following. Guys like me don't know. And the reality is nobody knows. What I would suggest is a forced savings plan where you invest in indices, low-cost funds. Because right now the markets look overvalued. They're being driven by 10 companies.

But when guys like me say the market's overvalued, usually that means the market's about to run up another 30 or 40 percent. So we knew the market was overvalued and I'm old enough to remember the Dobb Bomb implosion. We knew it was overvalued, but we all kind of came to consensus it was overvalued. The experts did in 1997. And since then, from that point to 1999, the market doubled. So you missed all those gains. Now, it did crash. Amazon lost 90% of its value from 99 to 2001. The only advice, solid advice I would give someone is every month try and spend less than you

make and put money into low-cost index funds that are diversified. The enhancement to that over the last couple of years is if you're just in the S&P, even though you think you're investing in 500 companies, you're still not diversified because 40% it's measured on it's weighted by the index. 40% of it will go into just 10 companies. So now I'm suggesting that people also have some international exposure. But if you're young and you can force yourself to save a little bit of money every month and you invest in low-cost index funds, you're going to be fine by the time you're my age. Most people refuse to take my advice because everybody likes to think they're smarter than the average bear and they want to pick their own stocks.

That's fine. But just limit it to say 30% of your assets, have some fun and then you're going to figure out like all of us. you don't know any more or any less than anybody else. And if you look at the entire hedge fund industry, private equity, all the quote-unquote smarter people than us, their returns are exactly the amount of their fees below the S&P. So how do you get rich? I know how to get you rich. That's the good news.

The bad news is the answer is slowly and it's through boring, diversified, low-cost, ETFs and index funds. When you look back on your entire career, what are some things that you wish you did differently. Well, I've had a lot of failures. So, you know, I wish I hadn't started an e-commerce incubator in December of 99 because it was kind of, even though I didn't know it was over by March, because the market just collapsed. You know, I would like to take my failures back, but you don't get to every company when I started, I'm convinced it's going to be successful. So I don't know if you get those do-overs. I think more significantly, my biggest regrets is that up until the age of really

40 or 45. I don't think I was very kind. I don't think I realized that I had a lot of capital to make people feel better about themselves. I've always run businesses, not big businesses, but 10, 50, 200 employees. And just a kind word every once in a while, just going out of your way to recognize a situation that's someone in, you just have so much power in a good way to make people's lives nicer, even if it's just a word of encouragement, weighing in, you know, someone's going through a divorce, maybe offer them a little bit of money. I just, there's just so many things I had, the power to do was never mean. It wasn't a bad person. But I look back on my younger years and think, I wasted so much opportunity to make people feel better about themselves, give them a little

bit of money. And I'm trying to catch up now, because if you're economically blessed, if people like your work, if you run companies, you're just in a position to create so much psychological goodwill. And I don't think I was very kind. I was never mean, but I never really, it was all about me, fucking me all the time. And I finally started to recognize and reflect on that as I got older. And I regret not having quite frankly just been a better,

higher character person to be blunt. That's very self-aware. Did someone point that out to you for you to have to notice? Or is it something that you've reflected on yourself? I don't think anyone really pointed it out. I've always been fairly successful or ahead of my class, if you will. And so what happens is you surround yourself or people just naturally gravitate towards you and give you an inflated sense of your reality and your worth and your success. Because of the achievements. Well, when you're the boss, you have economic power over people. So they have a tendency to laugh at your jokes and make excuses for all your shortcomings. So Mia was just a reflection on being around high character people and seeing the effort they made and. noticing the power of generosity and kindness and just kind of, I don't know, just quite frankly,

just maturing. You know, just you're going to realize when you're young, you're trying so hard to make it and you're so focused on your own thing. And I don't think I had great role models in terms of generosity and being kind. So I didn't figure it out until later in life. But I, you know, I got there. I just got there a lot later than I should have. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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I don't like thinking about 18 different things with Armour Colossum, like I said earlier, it packs a punch, whether you're wanting to strengthen your immune health, fortify your gut health, ignite a healthy metabolism, hair health, better skin, and fuel performance and recovery. So if you're ready to reclaim your extraordinary,

Armacolacom can help you do so. Of course, we've worked out a special offer for our audience. Received 30% off your first subscription order. Go to Armra.com slash Skinny or enter Skinny to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's A-R-M-R-M-A-com slash skinny. Again, armor.com slash skinny. Quick break to talk about Wayfair. The new year is here. It's time to get back into at-home

routines that you love so that you can elevate your space and Wayfair can help you do so. From bedding and mattresses to storage solutions for every home in the house, Wayfair is your one-stop shop. I love efficiency. I love going to places where I don't have to make hard decisions. And I love being able to get a bunch of different things in one place so that I don't have to have 18 different checkout processes and clunky experiences. So whether you're looking to refresh your living room with accent pillows, full plants for way less or more, Wayfair has you covered. If you want to update that kid's room as they grow and refresh and get them back on track for the new year, they can also help you do that. They have home decor for a

fresh updated look. They have storage for every space, whether it's storing outdoor furniture, bathroom, which Lauren and I always use storage in our bathrooms to kind of update and organize our bathroom space. And anything that help you get organized. They have kitchen essentials, and they have things to set up an office so you can work from home, whether it's desks, office shares, bookcases. Wayfair really has you covered when it comes to everything and anything in the home. And their huge selection makes home decor items easy to find and gives you exactly what you're looking for. Again, no clunky experiences, no going to 18 different websites, and everything is cost effective. Lorne and I in the New Year have been incorporating

more color, a little bit more pop into the house, giving it a little bit more of a lived in feel, moving away from kind of the muted tones. And so with Waifer, we love that we can get into the home decor section and start to fill accent items into the house that we weren't looking at before and that add a little bit new flavor profile or a little bit more of an ump to the space so check him out get organized refresh and back on track this new year for way less head to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home that's w a y f a ir.com wayfair every style every home you mentioned your childhood and maybe not having the resources obviously that you have now yeah did that play into this i don't want to call it trauma i grew up what i call upper lower middle class my mother was

a single immigrant mother who lived and died of secretary. Our household income was never over $40,000. So we were never poor. We were never hungry. But we were different. You know, after Little League when we won a game and everyone was going to Farrell's for ice cream, my mom would kind of just sort of shuttle me into the car because she wasn't sure who was paying and she didn't have money. You know, I remember the like fear of when my mom was going to come home because I had lost my second jacket in a week and jackets cost $30. Like, and I think people who don't grow, up. Did you guys grow up with money? My family did well. Lauren. My middle class. Middle class. Okay. I think when you don't, when you grow up with some money, you can sympathize

with people who don't have money, but you can't really empathize. I feel as if this ghost was following me and my mom around and constantly whispering in our ears, you're not worthy. You and your mom fucked up. Because I think about America, this notion that anyone can make it is a wonderful thing, but there's a dark side of that. And what it is is if you haven't made it, it's your fault. And not recognizing that some people just have headwinds in their face and are a lot of their success and a lot of their failure is not their fault. But money was a, well, money was my biggest source of stress growing up because I inherited that stress from my mother. It was just very stressful for us, always not having enough money. We were not broke. My mom worked. We never

wanted for essentials, but it was clear we were different. And I didn't get into UCLA when I applied. And people would say to me, well, why don't you get on a plane and go to Michigan or apply there? Like, I don't have a credit card. I'd been on a plane twice in my life. I was going to apply to fucking Michigan. You just, you don't have sophistication. You don't have confidence. And we like to think, who all poor people who are nice must be remarkable and they are geniuses on math tech. No, 99% of us are not in the top 1%. Especially young men, they don't mature very early. So, and then kind of the thing that really changed my life was I was sort of sleepwalking

through life. I think it was like most men. My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed until I was 25. And my mom got very sick. And that was so upsetting at the time because I couldn't afford to take care of her. And it was very stressful. She was underinsured. She got cancer.

And I remember thinking, like, it is time for me to get my shit together. And I got very hungry and worked very hard because that was the thing I thought I could control. And now my biggest challenge as a parent is I think, okay, if I had what my kids have now, I wouldn't have what I have. If I had the money my kids have, the only thing I know I would have had in my life would have been a rangerover and a cocaine habit. I was not that motivated. I was not a good person. I was not that ambitious. I liked parting. I was lazy. It was not having money and seeing in a capitalist society that money means health, money means a broader selection set of mates, money means opportunities. And I figured out at a fairly young age, in America, it's the hunger games. And I wanted out of that, I wanted out of that, you know, bottom quartile. That was very much. motivating for me. And to a certain extent, that is one of the advantages of capitalism. It creates an incentive structure where you figure out pretty early there's a big difference between being poor and rich. And there's a huge difference between being middle class and wealthy. And that disparity

has grown. The difference between my father and his boss was he had a bigger house, his boss, but we were kind of in near, kind of close neighborhoods. We all belong to the same country club. they all went to the same church. He had a Cadillac. We had a Grand Tarino, but they were both great American cars. Now there's economy, economy coverage. Flying on Spirit Airlines, it's like bad for your health. But then there's economy, economy plus, economy comfort, business class, first class,

fractional jet ownership, full jet ownership, CJ3, Falcon 3, you know, Challenger 300, Falcon 9. I mean, the difference between having a middle class income and being rich is now this. And the difference between a CJ3 and a Gulfstream is also much different. You can keep going up. It's just, and that's what a capitalist society does. It encourages, it creates incentives like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have your own plane? And don't you want the new trijet or the new Gulfstream 700?

I mean, it just keeps, you guys were at Eden Rock. I stayed there. I got a room there and granted it's in the middle of in the middle of can. My room was 5,000 euros a night. They don't give you a choice either. And they make it sound like you're lucky to get that room. And then it's like, oh, wait, an Ocean View room just came available and it's only 6,000 euros.

And I sit there and I think, Jesus Christ, I'm spending on a night what my mom made in two months when I was growing up. But there's always another level. And a capitalist society always will figure out a way for you to try and earn and spend more money. And there's some incentive to that. The downside is it can be very damaging on your psyche. Obviously, you have two kids and you are wealthy. So what are you going to do to teach them the value of money? The honest answer is I don't know. I struggle with it. You do the basics. You give them chores. You try and give them do sports. You try and get them involved in philanthropies where they

see what it's like to not have money, right? But this is something I really struggle with. And I don't think I have a playbook on how to create grit. Also, the good news is the following. You're still at the age where you delude yourselves into believing that you're engineers, that you can engineer the perfect child. And what you're going to see is your kids get older is you're just a shepherd. You get to choose the grass they eat. You get to choose what direction they graze in, but the sheep comes to you.

My oldest, I went and bought him a great cashmere hoodie that I thought was cool. I want him to feel secure about himself at school. I bought this beautiful cashmere hoodie from Sunspeil and I think it was like, I don't know, 300 pounds or something. Michael loves that brand. It's the James Bond. It's the James Bond casual wear brand. Mark Muley told us. Yeah, it looks better on you than me. Anyway, so best t-shirts, best basics. There you go. Great basics. And I gave it to my son and he liked it and I made the mistake of leaving

the receipt in it and you saw the receipt and he took it back and just had my credit charge. I don't want to spend 280 pounds on a cashmere hoodie. And I'm like, dude, I've worked so hard. We're very successful. He's just not comfortable wearing a 280 pound. Whereas my oldest would take my black card and go buy a fucking Ferrari if I'd let him. He would literally, if I said, well, you're 15, you're going to have your driver's license next year. Go pick out any car you want. He'd show up in a Lambo. So my point is a lot of the stuff that you do your best. You try and still character and reason and gratitude and a kindness practice. But I'm telling you, they come to you. They come to you. My oldest used to get in bed with us in the morning on the weekends and then he would

pop up and say, Dad, let's make a plan. It was like something out of the Hallmark Channel. He's the sweetest pleaser. My youngest is constantly assessing the house for vulnerabilities so he can strike when we're at our weakest. He's a fucking terrorist. And we just haven't treated them that differently. So if you want to know, if you, you know, we'll follow up at some point, if you want to believe in nature over nurture, just have more than one kid. Because the only thing I know about your three kids is they are entirely different. We're starting to realize that slowly. That is, I, I am just starting to realize that. You're right. You do feel like you can control the outcome. And it sounds like you don't have any control. You mentioned grit. Grit is such

an important part to success. That makes me nervous that you can't instill that. Do you have any tips on that? So my go-to and how I got grit was through sports, what I call slow-dopa, so not all kids are interested in sports are born with athletic ability. I learned through sports that you can push yourself really hard and pushing yourself really hard pays off. And the problem with kids now is they have access to so much on-demand dopamine through video games or social media or TikTok that they lose the patients in discipline for slow dopamine. So I've tried to get my kids working out at an early age because what happens when you work out next to your store? It sucks. Week later, nothing. Month later, still nothing. But then my son has noticed, my oldest son, he's been working out now,

he's starting to get a six-pack. And I see him looking in the mirror and admiring a six-pack. It's the best feeling when you're a young guy and you start to see that for the first time. And he's like, all of a sudden, he's got veins in his biceps. He's like, dad, look at the vein. Look at the vein. So what is success? My favorite definition of success is a success is a series of small acts of discipline every day. You know, we always talk about if you save 10 bucks a day from the age 18, you're going to be a millionaire, a little bit of studying for the ACT every day, a little bit of working out every day, a kindness practice every day. These things aggregate and compound just like investments

and trying to connect studying every day for the ACT a little bit, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, for three weeks and then you show up and you substantially improve your score and then celebrating that investment and that what I'll call slow dopamine is really powerful. So sports and then finding and celebrating ways where they connect what I'll call small efforts every day that pay off not immediately but over the long term. But I want to be clear. I think most of my kids' positive attributes are not my fault. I think they've just sort of figured it out. The most important thing to a kid's character and well-being and success and outcomes is their peer group. And we like to think it's us that you're going to have these talks and these momentous things and that your love and that

your guidance is going to shape them. More important than you. I mean, unfortunately, the two most important things are how much money their parents have. Kids from wealthy households score 250 points higher on the SAT, middle income people score 120 points less than lower income. Money is really important right now, unfortunately. But in addition, your kids generally become the average of their five closest peers. And so if you could manicure anything, you'd want it to be their peer group. You've got to watch who they're with and what they're doing with with the people that they're with. To the extent you can. Switching gears a bit, I told you off air before we started, that we did an interview on the show and I won't name names, the audience can deduce.

And it was with an individual that had a very pessimistic view on dating, marriage, having children, men and women. And it was interesting to see this audience, which is primarily women, kind of not really resonate with that message. A lot of them said, I'm raising young boys. I want them to have a chance. I want them to be stand-up citizens. And a lot of your book now is talking about raising young men. In addition to that, there's a recent article from Vogue. I don't know if you saw it came out, said, is having a boyfriend embarrassing?

now. I've not read the entire article, probably not the audience, but I wonder just your perspective on dating young people in general. I see you've been talking about a lot more lately and the state of that. And I think frankly, for men, many young guys that I talk to just not knowing where their footing is. So I wrote a book on happiness. I struggle with anger and depression. I have blessings of this and mood of this. I wanted to change it. So I read every study on happiness and I wrote a book on it. In every study distills down to one basic conclusion. your happiness is a function of the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. At work, amongst your friends, and by far the most rewarding relationship is if you can find someone to partner with, you're mutually supportive, and you get to raise loving, secure children.

That is the whole shooting match. It's the first time in my life, I felt a sense of purpose. I did not want children. I did not want to get married. It's kind of my everything now. Is it my everything? I don't know. I'm still pretty addicted to success and money, but I like to think that's my purpose.

That, you know, all the shit, all the relevance and the money, that's the means. The ends is occasionally I do feel a sense of purpose when I'm with my boys and I'm raising them with someone I care a great deal about. So, no, I think that's total bullshit. I think that the most beneficial, wonderful households in the world bring a mix of masculine and feminine energy. And that's not to say the non-binary community shouldn't, doesn't deserve the same rights and privileges as the rest of us. But I have seven and a half billion pieces of evidence that the greatest alliance in history is the alliance between men and women. And unfortunately, the genders have done a great job of convincing themselves that the other gender, that their problems are a function of the other gender's fault. And young men who have an absence of economic and romantic possibilities, go down a rabbit hole, start listening to really negative voices and start blaming women for their romantic problems and start blaming immigrants for their economic problems. And it's always easy and accepted to criticize males.

So let me criticize women. There's a lot of young women now on TikTok. I've seen this movement, the unalive movement. I'm not dating because I could be unalived, which is murdered. There are women, young women now. There's a big movement on TikTok on Reels saying that women are taking their physical safety, putting their physical safety at risk when they date a man because young men are violent and pathological.

But the data is the following. If you go on a date with a man, he's 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself. You're more likely to die on the car ride, four times more likely to die on the car ride over or choke and die than you are to be harmed by your date. Young women have started pathologizing men. And I think some of that is a reaction that there's just not enough economically and emotionally viable men, right? One in three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship, two and three girls, excuse me, women under the age of 30 in a relationship. Well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating old.

because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. So they're leaving the younger guys behind? Yeah. Based on that stuff. They want guys who have, quite frankly, have their shit together. And what you have in America right now is no group has fallen further faster than young men. They're four times as likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue and there's five people who've died by suicide, four men.

They're three times more likely to be homeless, three times more likely to be addicted, 12, times more likely to be incarcerated. In the next five years, we're going to graduate two women from college for every one man. I mean, more single women own homes now than single men. There's more women seeking tertiary education globally. The number of women elected to some form of parliament globally has doubled. And by the way, these are wonderful things. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. But meanwhile, we have to face some realities here. And that is women mate socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. Beyonce could marry Jay-Z if she worked at McDonald's. The flip is not true.

Women value economic viability more than men do in a mate. So when the pool of horizontal and up continues to shrink, there's just less mating and less connection. And so if we don't have economically viable men, what you end up with is a lack of household formation, a lot of loneliness, a lot of young men who will become the most dangerous weapon in history, and that is the most unstable violent societies in the world, have a disproportionate number of young, broke, lonely men. Now, you say, well, Scott, why isn't your hair on fire about lonely women? I'm not suggesting that women aren't lonely and it isn't an issue.

But the reality is when a woman doesn't have a romantic relationship, she oftentimes pours that energy into her work and her friend network. She finds that relationship, love, and satisfaction in other places. When a young man doesn't have a relationship, if by the time he's 30, if he hasn't cohabitated with someone or married someone, there's a one and three chance he's going to be a substance abuser. Men need relationships more than women. There's this cartoon of a woman in her 30s that didn't find romantic love.

What a tragedy. Living with cats. So sad. The reality is men need relationships much more than women. men in relationships live four to seven years longer than women. I'm sorry, four to seven years longer than men not in relationships. Women lose two to four years longer. Widows are happier after their husband dies.

Widowers are less happy. So if a guy loses his wife, he's less happy. And if a girl loses her husband, she's happier. Exactly. Perfect. Not saying they're happy, but they're happier. So what it ends up is that men need guardrails in the form of relationships, more than women. And you have the most, you have the deepest pocketed companies with Godlike technology

all trying to convince young people they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online without relationships. And men with what I'll call a less mature, more dope, a hungry brain are especially susceptible to this. So what you have is a series of men who aren't connecting to women. If you think about a young man right now, what he's up against, why would I go through the hassle of the pecking order and trying to establish friends when I've done? Discord and Reddit. Why would I put on a tie and try and get a job and navigate the corporate bullshit when I can trade stocks or crypto on Robin Hood or Coinbase? And why would I go through the effort, the expense, the humiliation, the resilience, the rejection, the emotional trauma

of trying to establish a romantic and sexual relationship when I have life-like synthetic porn? And you end up with a group of young men who believe they can have a frictionless life and don't make the effort and don't develop the skills to have real-world relationships. And many of them end up at 30 obese, anxious, depressed, and sequestered from all relationships. We're mammals. If you want to see a mammal go crazy, put an orc on a tank alone, see what happens. So you're saying that a lot of these men want frictionless lives. Why do you think they want that?

Because it's more comfortable? Well, okay. Yeah, if you think you don't need to get a degree and apply to a job that you can make money trading crypto, that sounds pretty good to me. Why do I need to figure out the pecking order and find friends and figure out a way to be funny and be cool when I can find people who are into the shit I'm into on Reddit or Discord? And for God's sakes, like going out and meeting women is hard. Quick break to talk about Haya children's vitamins. Everyone's talking about their New Year's resolutions, but here's the one change that could impact your first. family for decades to come. Your kids' health. We spend so much time on this show and as adults

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That's fresh. New skinny, confidential drop. Okay. This has been something that I have been working on for the last year. introducing face towels. Your skincare routine has been reimagined once again. There is no more using butthole towels on your face. There is no more using the towel that your boyfriend is used on his balls. You are going to be using the cleanest face towel on your face with no formaldehyde, no inks, no fragrances, no dyes, no BPA. Our towels are so thoughtfully designed. They're vegan,

they're cruelty-free because your skin deserves the best. I a long time ago wrote a blog post about how a lot of people are washing their face and then they're drying their face with the same towels that they're using on their body or they're using a towel that maybe has a bunch of, I don't know, detergent in it. So I wanted to create something that was fresh to remove your makeup, to remove your oil without irritation. I wanted it to be buttery soft. I wanted it to be 100% sustainable bamboo, silky soft. You never have to worry about build up with these towels. It's just like a breath of fresh air for your face. So how I use them is two ways. The first way is I will cleanse my skin with an oil cleanser and then I'll exfoliate it. And I'll do this in the shower or in my sink. And then if I get out of the shower or I'm done with my sink, I'll take my towel and I'll pat it across my face and my neck to dry my skin off. My skin feels so much cleaner doing it with a facial towel. Then, you using some random towel that who knows where it's been. So if you want to support a healthy skin barrier and you want something really sensitive, especially if you have acne or you have hyperpigmentation,

this has a really gentle texture. It's absolutely beautiful. I'm such a fan. I've been using them for a long time. I know you guys have maybe seen them in my Instagram stories. Each box includes 50 disposable face towels and like I said, they're made from 100% sustainable bamboo. This is the travel size. It's like a little box that you can throw in your makeup bag. And then we also have the one that can sit on your vanity. It's a box that you want out. It's so cute. It's baby pink. And I should tell you, the towels are shaped like a doily. So that's fun too. Go to shop skinny confidential.com to grab your face towels today. I hear this a lot from a lot of my guy friends who are single. I talk to a lot of guys about this. It's hard. They don't want to put the effort. They don't want to

spend the money. They don't want to date someone from another city because then they got to fly there. They got to fly her out. It's a constant wheel of reasons that they can't do it. I hear it from men everywhere. So I barely graduated from UCLA. I graduated the 2.27 GPA and just for your listeners, that's not very good. A big motivator for me to go on campus was I wanted to see my friends. and also to be blunt, there were so many beautiful women on campus at UCLA. There was a remote but non-zero probability I might meet somebody and eventually have a relationship with them, which is Latin for I wanted to have sex with hot women at UCLA. That was very motivating for me.

And if I'd had life-like synthetic porn iterating a million times a second to figure out my fetishes and make it more lifelike and in 7K and ready there for me on my phone, on my phone 24 by 7, I'm not sure I would have gone on campus as much. And if I'd gone on campus just a little less, I wouldn't have graduated. We need to stop pathologizing men's horniness. I think that wanting to have sex, wanting to establish relationships is fire. It can be used destructively. If you start objectifying women, if you have unreasonable standards,

if you just think of women as a vehicle for your satisfaction, that is fire that destroys things. But most of the time, that sexual desire is fire that's put in a steel casing and creates an engine of progress. You want to dress better. You want to smell better. You want to work out. You want to have a plan. You start figuring out the demonstrating kindness, having good manners, following up, developing calluses and getting used to rejection, taking a chance and walking across the bar. and learning how to approach a stranger and express romantic interest while making them feel safe. Let's celebrate that. That's important. And I think a lot of men are getting mixed signals.

And then they think, you know what? It's so goddamn expensive to go out. I don't have the confidence to approach women. I don't know how to dress. I don't know how to deal with this. I like this one woman. She rejected me. I'm not used to rejection.

My synthetic AI character is always nice to me. and always says yes to me and always shows performs erotic acts for me and continues to tell me how wonderful I am relationships are the hardest thing in your life and that's why they are the most rewarding thing it is hard to have friendships it is hard to figure out a way to have a podcast and three kids and be sympathetic to each other and stay attracted to each other and express affection and that's why when you figure this shit out it's what real victory feels like and there's just a ton of young men who are never establishing the skill set to really register what real victory feels like we're evolving an asocial, asexual species called young men. It's as if we're planning

our own extinction. And when I go out, I go out a lot. I love to drink. I love New York. I go out with friends. When I speak to women, they'll say generally speaking, I'm out, I'm single, I'm ready to mingle, I look fucking amazing, and not one man has approached me. Not one man has approached me. Not one man has approached me at all. Like they don't, they don't come up. It's almost like they're scared. And some of that is because they lack the skills and the confidence, but also society has taught them, you don't want to be that guy. You want to be the creep. What if you make an approach, it's not welcome, you say something stupid or indelicate, and oh, it ends up that you work at the same company and now you're that guy. You're the creep. And also rejection for a lot of

these kids when they have rejection-free synthetic relationships, they don't know how to deal with it. And mating is hard. I mean, it really is hard to kind of get your act together and demonstrate excellence. I mentor young men. And they start with, what do you want to do? Let's figure out the end state goal and let's reverse engineer a series of actions and disciplines to get to that end state. And it usually goes something like this, not necessarily in the same order. I want to move out of my parents. All right, we need some money. How are we going to make some money?

Well, do you have a smartphone? All right. Download the Lyft app and become a driver. Go to task. You can make money. And just making a little bit of money gives you a taste for the flesh. You're making money. And you start getting excited about it, learning how to navigate.

You know, anyway. The second thing they usually ask is, all right, I want to move out. I want to start making some money. And ultimately, they all end up the same place. And they say it almost as if it's embarrassing. I'd really like a girlfriend. I'd really like a girlfriend. If you, that survey they just came out, conservative men, their number one priority was having

relationships and kids. It was like number 11 for women. And I say to them, the first thing I say to them, I'm okay, I get it. But the first question I asked them is I say, would you want to have sex with you? Are you in good shape? Are you kind? Are you nice? Are you willing to approach women?

And if they're not initially interested, you're fine. Do you have a sense of humor? how do you demonstrate excellence? Like, what is excellent about? How do you, how do you develop, how do you develop and show excellence? Are you putting yourself in random situations where you might meet somebody? Are you learning how to do the approach? I think every father has an obligation to teach his son how to express romantic interest while making that person feel safe. I also think women in society have an obligation to say that 99.9% of initiations from men are benign and productive. And men aren't, you know, most men are, if a man wants a relationship

in sex, that should be celebrated, not pathologized. That's not a bad thing. I didn't see my wife initially and think, oh, I'd really like to buy a better rate on auto insurance with her at some point. I wanted to have sex with her. That's why I approached her. And I, we both figured out that we enjoyed spending time together. And then we both decided we really like to have a kid together. We think we could build a great life together. But it starts with attraction. So the point is, is women should not necessarily be offended that a man shows that attraction. Because that is the...

I'm not offended by that. Well, I mean, listen. I would be very pissed off if you looked at me for the first time and thought about auto insurance. I hope that you were thinking about having sex with me. No, but I think that's why when I saw, and I thought you're the perfect person to talk about this, when you see a headline, like, is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? Like, that is a signal to men and women that I think is not productive for society. I don't see how it's helpful. Yeah, I don't know the data on that.

I think that I think some women find there's so few economically and emotionally and emotionally viable men out there. They're not graduating from college. There's something like one in seven men now. It's what's called a neat. They're neither in education, employment, or seeking training. They're just doing nothing. And the top three reasons a woman is sexually attracted to.

to the man or the following. Number one is their ability to signal resources. And women get offended when you say that. There's tons of research showing that your ability to signal resources is the number one source of attraction for women. Now, you can do that by showing up with a rangerover and a panorai. But the good news is it's signal resources. That's one way to signal resources. You own a rangerover.

Another way to signal resources is, quite frankly, you have your shit together. So it could be maybe you don't have them yet, but you show you have the capability to one get them? Women are drawn to guys who have big muscles and are in great shape, not because of the aesthetics, but because it shows he can show up in his discipline, which probably means he might be a good provider. The number one thing for me, I always say this, with a man is capable. He's got to be capable. Competent. Yeah, that's, it's so important. You're the, you're not the idiot ordering a bottle of gray goose to tell you I am. You got to get up because you got shit going on. Yeah. You have a plan. You're like making documentary films, or you're in business school,

or you're getting training to install HVAC energy efficient heaters. You have a plan. You're You're smart, you're disciplined, you make sacrifices, you're organized. You have a good social network. People say, a woman will say that guy is signaling resources. He will be competent. He will be able to take care of me when I'm vulnerable and I go through gestation and I'm taken out of the workforce for a while. Number two is intellect. It's very instinctual.

People who make better decisions for the tribe. The tribe is more likely to survive. I totally agree with you. So we're drawn to smart. And quite frankly, the fastest way to communicate intelligence. Funny. Humor. Humor.

Humor. Those are my top three things. I don't care what you look like. If you're not capable, funny and intelligent. It shows you quick. I'm out. Humor is the fastest way to communicate intelligence. It's hard to give someone your IQ or, but here, and this is snarky, but I do it anyways. This is my impression of a woman. I'm laughing. I'm laughing. I'm naked. If, if you're able to make a woman laugh, you're able to punch above your weight class romantically. And also what men need to realize is it's not easy to you can't say, well, I've decided to be funny. Half of a sense of humor is you laugh at other people's jokes. Yeah. You appreciate humor. You want to laugh. You laugh out loud. And the third thing, and this is the secret weapon in mating for men, is kindness. Women know at some point they might

be vulnerable. They're more focused on family harmony. They want a dude that is kind. And I think a kindness practice, like I said earlier, I didn't start off kind. But I think if every day you practice small acts of kindness where you do nice things for people without a reciprocal expectation, it starts to become muscle memory. It starts to be just who you are. You start with good manners. But then every day you make an effort to be kind to people. And before you know it, it is who you are. And women are very drawn to kindness. So those three things are, you know, those are what women are attracted to. And I have a fourth one, but I won't say it. on air. Does it doesn't involve anatomy or height? Big, big, big, big personality. Big personality. Anyways.

Anyways. But what's happened now is that the TikToking and videoization or reeling of our young people, basically women, it comes down to two things. Signaling resources and height, it's really weird. There was an article saying height, become the big boobs of our generation for men. And that is men are disproportionately evaluated for some reason on their height. And I think it's because it's an objective metric that people, you know the whole, I want someone to make six figures into six feet. That's 2% of the male population.

Wow. If you take out men that are married, divorced men, obese men, and men under the age of 50, it's like 2% of the population. You know, it's so interesting what he's saying because you talk about this off air to me all the time about how you haven't used the word victory, but you feel like one of your biggest, I will call it a victory now, is being in a relationship for so long and you wish that your friends. I think as a young man, early days, obviously you seek financial security and resources and you're trying to signal. And I probably had a little bit of the same kind of thinking that you have, which was helpful

to me to get financial stability. But as I've gotten older, I think what I take victory laps for is that I found a mate and have children. and we figured out how to be in a loving, productive relationship. And, like, that has brought me way more satisfaction than any of the economic stuff. Now, the economic stuff is obviously nice and helpful and it enables us to live a certain way. But as a man, like, I have felt much more fulfillment from that and much more happiness from the other stuff. For sure.

When I was your age, the word I would use is more. Well, I made a lot of money this year. I want to make more money. Oh, I'm dating a hot woman. Or could I date a hotter woman? I'm going to St. Bart's. Is there something better than St. Bartz? Oh, I have a BMW 5th.

Well, I went to 7th. It was just more, fucking more all the time. It was never enough. The only time I ever feel sated and feel like, okay, I get why I'm here is these random moments with my family. You know, we're watching a football game. We live in London right now. My kids roll in and just naturally throw their legs over mine.

They trust me so much that these expressions of affection are just reflexes for them. And when I'm alone at night with the dogs, my partner feels loved and noticed. I've worked my ass off. We're all have incredible opportunities in health care. And my kids are safe and worried about stupid shit and not real stuff because they don't need to be. That's the only time I thought, okay, this all makes sense. If God forbid something happens to me tomorrow, I mattered. That's it.

And I do think that there's research that shows. I think the same is true for women. that that's the end game. And I worry that not enough people are connecting for a lot of reasons and will not enjoy that. And it's worse for men. Women can find more happiness more easily than men without relationships. Men, I mean, it starts at a very young age. If single parent homes, we have the most single parent homes in the world.

We're tied with Sweden. When a boy loses a male role model through either death disease or abandonment, death divorce or abandonment, at that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than go to college, or graduate from college or excuse me. A girl in a single parent home has the same outcomes. She might be more promiscuous because she's looking for male attention in the wrong places, but same rates of college attendance, same income. It ends up that the majority of the research shows that while boys are physically stronger, they're neurologically and mentally and emotionally, much weaker.

Two 15-year-olds, a boy and a girl, sexually abused. Both heinous crimes, neither are any less or heinous than the other. The boy is 10 times more likely to kill himself later in life. Boys are weaker, and they need male involvement and they need relationships. Women are just, quite frankly, are just emotionally and neurologically stronger than men. So in a big part of my book is that men my age need to recognize the disproportionate advantage we registered. And we need to pay it back by getting involved in young men and boys' lives. And we also need to recognize societally that young men are really struggling.

So as you've taken on these topics and you've done the media circuit, do you get pushed back for advocating for young men so much? Is it like, what about the women? Or is this mess? Oh, yeah. Okay. But I will say this got a lot better. When I started talking about this five years ago, like, oh, Andrew Tate with an MBA.

And where were you when women were? And I'm like, well, my answer would be we were there for you. When women were 40, 60 college enrollment, 40% women, 60% men, we realized college was a huge upward lubricant. So we passed Title IX. Now, it's like, if you look at college graduation rates, it's like 65, 35 the other way. No one's talking about male affirmative action. And quite frankly, I think it's too much of a political hot potato. to do it. And women will say, I understand the gag reflex. Scott, you've had a 3,000 year head start, right?

And to be fair, from 1945 to 2000, America with 5% of the population garnered 33% of the economic growth. We had six times the prosperity of the rest of the world. And then you take that six-x prosperity, and we further crammed it into one-third of the population that was white heterosexual and male. So being born a white heterosexual male in the 60s as I was was literally hitting the global lottery ticket. So I understand that people resent me. I get it. But should a 19-year-old boy with less opportunity than any 19-year-old boys had in a long time and less opportunity that is ever had, should he be paying the price for my privilege? And the question is the following.

Our country's not going to flourish. women are not going to continue to flourish if men are failing. And you know who wants more economically and emotionally viable men? Women. And the thing that has made kind of my work more accepted and my biggest supporters are simply one cohort, mothers. And it goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters, one son, one daughter's a pen, one daughter's in PR in Chicago, and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. Parents see the distinct difference between the progress and maturity and success of their boys versus their girls. And they know something is wrong. So I got a lot of pushback in the beginning. And also I want to

add that it's not a zero-sum game. We can still recognize the immense challenges, special interest groups and women still face. When a woman has a kid, she goes to 73 cents on the dollar for a man. There's still a lot of misogyny in the United States. We have 26% of our elected officials are women despite the fact that they're graduating from college, that means we are, quite frankly, anti-women when it comes to elected leaders. We just are. There are real issues here. But at the same time, we can recognize it's not a zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people, gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. So why would we acknowledging that young men are struggling and we need to have empathy and programs for them to provide them with opportunity?

That's not going to take away from women. Yeah, funny. I mean, you'd have little context on the company that we run, but it's primarily, it's a female-driven audience, right? And a lot of female hosts. But what I always tell, and people would early days give me shit and say, well, you're a man that is doing this. And I said, well, if you look at the organization, it's men and women working together in a very productive way to further the goals of men and women. It's not a bunch of women just pushing women or a bunch of men pushing men or push. It's together. And I think that there's made the company more productive. and as we've done this show together as men and women. And what I've noticed is that there's been this narrative where it's like one or the other. And I think that that is harmful because I think together you can further everyone's goals and objectives. The greatest alliance in history is the alliance between men and women. I think the happiest households bring a mix of masculine and feminine energy.

And by the way, sometimes women bring that masculine energy. My closest friends tend to be guys that are more feminine. I like to be taken care of. I like a more nurturing person as a friend. I'm not sure they appreciate me saying that, but I'm drawn to more feminine men. And two women living together can bring masculine and feminine energy. But essentially, masculine energy protects,

feminine energy heals, and together we make great humans in very prosperous, loving households. And we've been celebrating feminine energy for 40 years, and it's wonderful it needed catching up. But we have been demonizing male energy. when Russian soldiers pour over the border in Ukraine, when you have a burning house, when you want someone to be aggressive, you know, occasionally big dick energy comes in handy. And we need to celebrate young men. We need to celebrate the risk aggressiveness. We need to celebrate their valor. We need to celebrate their strength. And recognize that my prosperity is not their fault. And if you look at the data, if any group was killing themselves at 4.000,

times the rate of the control group, we wouldn't be saying, well, if you were just more in touch with your emotions, or don't you realize that this is the system you created? Fucking 19-year-old boy didn't create this system. He's not part of the patriarchy. He might be a victim of it. So I don't think of it as men against women. I think of it as liberal versus illiberal thought. The far right recognized the problem with men first to their credit.

To capture them. The problem is their solution is to take women and non-whites back to the first. 50s. That's not the answer or to blame women or they see that there's an invoice correlation between women's progress and men's dissent. No, it's not. Young men need to celebrate women's progress. It's amazing that our sisters and mothers are doing better. That's a key component to the health of our society and loving households. At the same time, what I would say to young women is saying to a young man, you don't have problems, you are the problem. Or if you only just acted more like a

woman, that's not an answer either. So what I'm trying to figure out is how do we develop a more modern form of masculinity, celebrate it, and realize it doesn't come at the cost, but is a benefit to women and restore the greatest alliance in history, and that is a mutually supportive alliance between men and women. I think it's very thoughtful. Where can everyone buy your book? Say hi on social media. Anywhere. Anywhere. What is the book we should start with? Look, the book I like the most is the one that sold the least well, the algebra of happiness. Algebra of wealth is my biggest selling book. The four is probably the most famous. Yeah, my book out is called Notes on Being a Man. I think this is going to be your biggest one because I think this topic is very important right now.

And to your point earlier, I think young mothers want to raise healthy young men. And it's universally applicable to everybody. I hope so. I loved this conversation. Oh, thank you. You can come back anytime there's so many directions to take with you. The hard thing about interviewing you is there's a million directions to go into. We could have gone down the political rabbit hole, but I figured we'd start with saving young men. Well, just let me say one thing about, because I can't resist a chance to be political. Young men will naturally look to the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, and to the wealthiest man in the world because we live in a capitalist society. So our two primary role models for young men are Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And I

think it is very difficult to think of two more anti-masculent figures ever. And that is masculinity is about providing. And they both do a great job of that. They're both wealthy. They're both risk takers. Donald Trump was born a rich kid. But they're both good providers. Where they miss the boat, where they lose the plot is the only reason you want prosperity

is so you can move to protection. And that is the key. If you think about the most masculine jobs, cop, firefighter, military, their jobs protect. And that is what a man's job is. And these guys have missed the whole protection side of masculinity. You don't cut off snap benefits to people. You don't cut off aid to HIV positive mothers. Elon Musk is being sued concurrently by two different women for sole custody of their child because he has not seen that child. That couldn't be any more anti-masculine behavior. And what I worry about is some of our most public figures and role models for masculinity can inflate masculinity

with coarseness and cruelty and have missed the whole shooting match. And that is the reason we work hard, the reason we make money, the reason we're strong, the reason we're emotionally resilient is such that we can protect others. And they have missed that. And I worry that young men are getting the wrong signals from people who do not represent masculinity. They represent coarseness and cruelty. Well, the next time you come back on our podcast, we'll make it a political.

There you go. Yeah, we'll make it political because there's so, like I said, said, there's so many different directions to go with you. Big fan of everything you're doing. Thank you. Thank you for so much for coming on the show. Thank you. We will see you at breakfast with Percy. There you go. Michael. Yeah. The pigeons? Oh, no, the birds. No, they're not pigeons there. The seagulls. Yeah, yeah. And the and the and the, and the, and the, and the hawks. Yeah, well, congratulations on your success. Thank you, Scott. And congratulations on the book. And by the way, if you're just ridiculously fucking stressed out and looking at each other and

resenting each other and stressed and thinking, this is really, really hard, you are exactly where you should be. You are exactly where you should be. Same Michael? No, the kids, we are in Vietnam. Yeah, for sure. You're in the mix.