The Current - Scott Galloway’s operating manual for being a man today

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Podcaster, professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway believes young men are struggling with feelings of alienation, loneliness, and failure. And that's a danger to all of us, especially when they buy into the dangerous rhetoric they hear online. We talk to him about his new book, Notes on Being a Man, what he's learned from his own life, and why this is such a passionate mission for him.

Hello there, it's me, Gavin Crawford, host of the long-running podcast, Because News, a weekly show where I quiz three funny friends about the most recent headlines. This week, we've got girl historian Carly Thorne, comedian Chris Siddiqui, and Jeopardy Legend, as well as host of CBC's bookends, Matea Roach. We'll find out the latest in brain science, investigate a Christmas crime, and why not grab a shot of sourpuss? If you're experiencing shorter days' invisible fatigue, you're either in the winter doldrums, or maybe you're the American president.

In either case, come hang out with us by following Because News, anywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Life for a man is harder than life for a woman. We need to have a lot of shit to be an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup. If you're truly beautiful, they could stay at home, they can find a man to rescue them. We don't get that.

If you're a man, you're only respected and love. You all jump to say that. Why do you all think that women are oppressed? You can't really name anything besides the wage gap. I saw this one and I had to pull it up. I lost my software engineering job in May and have taken up welding. That's right, boys. The women aren't starting to take up the trades that won't hire you.

On social media and on YouTube, young men get a lot of advice and opinions about what it means to be a man, the role they should be playing in society and why the situation that they find themselves in isn't fair. The loudest, most misogynistic voices in that ecosystem will often blame women. And while the blame may be misplaced, Scott Galloway says it is a mistake to ignore what is going on here. Scott Galloway is a business professor, an entrepreneur and the host of several very popular podcasts, and he believes young men are in a crisis and that they desperately need guidance. That is the focus of his latest book. It's called Notes on Being a Man.

Scott Galloway, good morning. Oh, thanks very much, Matt. It's good to be with you. It's good to have you here. make of what you've just heard. I mean, those are voices telling guys how to be men. It rattles me because I don't think what the voices you played at the beginning of the show, I don't think that there's any advice that could be more damaging to young men. One of the criticisms over the weekend that really hurt me and upset me was that I'm yet another

pipeline to the Red Pill movement. And I like to think of myself as an off ramp. First off, the notion somehow that women's assent has had anything to do with the struggles of young men is just not true. And I mentor a lot of young men, and I know when I can't save them and they've come off the tracks, is when they start blaming immigrants for their economic problems or women for the romantic problems. I mean, there's just no denying young men are struggling, but to just skip to the reasons, some of it's biological. Literally, their prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind. Much of it is economic. All young people have seen their wages decline as a percentage of GDP over the last 40 years. Some of it is educational. There is an education bias against boys,

twice as likely to be suspended for the exact same behavior. Five times as likely if you're a black boy, 7, 8, 80 percent of primary school teachers are women. And also, men of my generation are not stepping up and recognizing the incredible unearned advantage we garnered and taking that responsibility seriously to help young men who don't have the same wind in their sales. So I find that rhetoric really dangerous, does not solve or address the problem, and wants to take society and women and non-whites back to the 50s. The advice of these individuals you reference could not be any more damaging to young people. Why did you want to get into this, this space? I mean, as I said, very successful, you have all these podcasts. You could apply.

your megaphone to any number of issues. And yet for the last, anybody who listens to those podcast knows for the last couple of years, this has been a huge issue for you. What was it that got you thinking specifically about this, that you could make a difference? The moment was 2021. A young man named Alex Curran's 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Oklahoma. Got some errant messages from the stock trading platform, Robin Hood saying he was down $600,000. Furiously emailed the company, didn't hear back in the morning, took his own life.

And I reach out to the family, and I've focused on how big tech is really hurting young people, sequestering them from the rest of their relationships. And I started going on a rabbit hole of young adult mental health and found things like, if you go into a morgue and there's five people who died by suicide, four men. And just the more I looked at the data, you know, we have a homeless and an opiate problem, but more accurately, we have a male opiate and homeless problem. Three times as likely to be homeless or addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. and started talking about it five years ago, got a lot of blowback, was grouped into the individuals, which is the last group I would want to be grouped into of the people you played at the beginning of the show, and started talking about it. Also, just on a very basic level, Matt, I relate to these young men.

I didn't have a lot of economic and romantic opportunities when I was a young man, and thereby the grace of God go I, had it not been for big government lifting me up with Pell Grants, assisted lunch, great public education. I don't think I would have had the blessings I have now, and I see a lot of ladders being pulled up behind me, which I find very troubling. What do you say, and I want to talk more about your own story, but what do you say to people who would say that in the context of what you've laid out, by many measures, like wages and reproductive rights, women are still at a huge disadvantage. I think it's accurate and fair. I don't think this is a zero-sum game. I think we can acknowledge the huge challenges women still face.

And the overturn of Rovey Wade is the first time in the history of America that a right has been taken away and it's no accident. It was taken away from women. I don't even see it as an attack on women. I see it as an attack on poor women. Because the people who are against bodily autonomy want to make sure they have a backdoor in case one of their loved ones has an unplanned pregnancy. So I see the attack on women's rights is especially mendacious. And I think a lot of young men also agree with that. Non-white, Latino and black households in America, of an average net worth of 22,000, white family is 160,000. We could acknowledge there are still huge challenges facing women and non-white families, while also recognizing that young men are really struggling. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. How did it become a zero-sum game then? Because a lot of people see it as that. And to your point, and you write about this in the book, and I've talked about it, that when you start speaking about this and when you started speaking about it five years ago, it was a dangerous thing, in your words, to say, that young men were

struggling. Because the far right, to their credit, recognized the problem first. But the problem is their remedy is to take women and non-whites back to the 50s. You know, the kind of the Charlie Kirk notion that women were sold this lie that if they were economically successful and became professionally successful, they ended up alone, childless, and miserable. That's just ridiculous. The biggest source of stress in my life growing up was not that my father left us. It was that my mom had no money. It's just insane that we would do anything but celebrate women's economic progress. If it hadn't been for women in the factories in World War II, World War II would have gone on two or three years longer. If it hadn't been for women's entry into the workforce in the

60s and 70s and 80s, we would be a second rate power compared to China. We should be celebrating. Men should be the afterburner for our mothers and our sister's progress. But when you start advocating for men, there was a natural gag reflex that, oh, it's Andrew Tate with an MBA talking about how women should be home barefoot and pregnant and be sort of dominated and controlled so you can get your Bugatti and start trading Bitcoin. So one of the criticisms that really upsets me is occasionally I hear on social media, this guy's blaming women. I have never held women responsible for men's decline. But what I would say is the conversation has got more productive, and the people leading the conversation are mothers. You know, I get a lot of emails from single mothers. The conversation goes something like this.

Three kids, two daughters, one son, one daughter in PR, one daughter in grad school. My son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. One in seven men are neither in education, employment or training. They're doing nothing. 62% of men under the age of 30 say they have given up on dating. They're not even trying. How do you think men understand that? How do you think men understand who's to blame for the situation they find themselves in?

I think it's easy when you're not doing well to try and find people who tell you it's not your fault and to start blaming easily identifiable special interest groups. And I think as a society, as educators and quite frankly as dads and mentors, we have to show our young men that, while things are harder for you, you still have agency. I hate the term in-cell, involuntarily celibate. I would argue a lot of those men are voluntarily celibate. And I use myself as an example. I really wanted a girlfriend when I was a young man. I really wanted to have sex when I was a young man. But at 6-2, 140 pounds with bad acne and quite frankly, no plan, not a lot of skills. I was not going to attract a lot of mates. So I worked on myself.

and I worked hard to get into UCLA and I worked out. I took risks. I approached people. I applied for jobs I wasn't qualified for. I think a lot of these men should stop thinking that they are resigned to be alone and that it's someone else's fault and they need to level up their own game. At the same time, society has a responsibility to acknowledge a lot of the on-ramps of the middle class that made men economically viable have gone away.

75% of women say economic viability is key to a mate. It's only 25% of women. So I think men need to take more agency, but I also think that leveling up all young people, I'm not calling for some sort of affirmative action for men, but leveling up all young people and restoring economic prosperity through less costly housing, building more houses, $25 an hour minimum wage, universal child care will have a disproportionately positive effect on young men who are unfairly evaluated on their economic viability, just as women are unfairly evaluated on their aesthetics. How do they fight those in the book you call it weapons of addiction? Things, I mean, if they're in the basement, things like porn, things like online gambling, having a casino in your pocket. What is the influence of that on where young men find themselves now? That's the correct question, Matt. I think the elephant in the room, if I were to point to one, one anti-masculine, one anti- Youth enemy, it would be big tech.

And that is 40% of the S&P is 10 companies who do a variety of things, but primarily their job in the way to increase market capitalization is to sequester you from your family. family friends work in school by keeping you glued to your phone. And a young man's immature brain that is more hungry and sensitive to DOPA is finding more and more reasons to have a reasonable facsimile of life online. Why have friends when you have Discord and Reddit? Why go into work when you can trade stocks or crypto? And why would you go through the rejection, humiliation, expense of trying to find a romantic partner when you have synthetic life-like porn?

These companies are literally trying to evolve a new species of asocial, asexual, males. And we have unfortunately connected, I would argue, the entire U.S. economy to separating young people from the most important thing in their life, and that is relationships. This book is structured around notes, bits of your own life experiences that you want to pass along. And you mentioned your father, that your father left your family. And you write about your dad in the book. And, I mean, he's a complicated, or was a complicated guy. You wrote about how you would occasionally come down to find your father screaming at your mom. It looked like he was going to hit her, but he didn't. He would throw stuff at her. How, what did you learn from your

father about what it means to be a man? I mean, you're just saying that kind of jars me. And it's not, it's not, if I were running for president, I would have talked about. And then I stood up to my father and he backed down. And the honest truth is mad is I had no idea what to do and I didn't do anything. And I would argue that's probably the common response among nine-year-olds. Like, the thing I'm taken away from my father, and I coach young men around this, married men, I think the best thing you can do for your sons is to treat their mother well, even if you're divorced. I just think that's going to be their primary role model for how they approach them in the rest of their lives. I'm much more affectionate with my boys because my father was not affectionate with me,

and I just find it incredibly rewarding to, I kiss my boys. And they're sometimes uncomfortable with it, but I think it's something they're going to, remember it when I'm at the end of my life. The thing I did take away on a positive level is that my father did check an instinctive box and that he was better to me than his father was to him. And then later in life, he had tried to be very emotive and very loving. And one of the biggest unlocks I would advise anyone to take advantage of is I used to keep a scorecard and it wasn't very nice to my father as an adult man. And then I realized, well, what do I want to be? Don't think of it as a scorecard. I want to be a loving, generous.

on. And once I decided that, it really opened up our relationship. And then I took that same approach to all of my relationships. Don't think about what you're getting or not getting and keep score. Just imagine the kind of friend, partner, son, uncle, you know, co-worker you want to be and hold yourself to that standard and stop keeping score. That's been a huge unlock for me. Hey there, I'm David Kahn. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day, on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you've got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your

neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out, This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Where do you start the conversation with the young men that you mentor about what it means, what it means to be a good man? I have a process. The first thing I do is I say, your advantage is time. When my friends ask me to mentor their kids, it's usually they're trying to decide between going to work for Google or JP Morgan. And I say, you should be mentoring me. I don't take those kids. I take kids who are maybe dropped out of high school and are struggling a little bit. And what I say is your advantage is time. We're going to find eight to 12 hours a week of human capital in your phone. And I ask them to unlock their phone. And it's really easy, Matt, to find it in Twitter, X, TikTok, U-Porn, Coinbase. We take that eight hours and I said, I want you on your phone, eight to 12 hours less next week, and we're going to do three things. One, we're going to get fit.

We're going to work out. You're going to be less depressed. You can feel better about yourself. You're going to be more attractive to mates. Two, we've got to make some money. If you have a smartphone and you're able-bodied, you can make a little bit of money. Panera is looking for people at 18 bucks an hour, task rabbit, ride-hailing company. Because once you get a taste for the flesh of money in a capitalist society, you start learning how to operate in capitalism.

You need to make some money. And then the third thing we're going to do is we're going to put ourselves in the company of strangers working on a nonprofit, a sports league, a religious institution, and then after we're there for a month, we're going to make what I call the approach. We're going to express friendship. Do you want to grab a game this weekend or romantic interest? Do you want to grab a cup of coffee? And then the key in the objective and the goal is no.

And that is if they say no, you're going to call me the next day. I'm going to ask you, are you okay? You're going to say yes. I'm going to say, are they're okay, and they're going to say yes. and we're going to realize that every great yes in life comes from a series of noes, and you need to build those calluses and start getting to know. We're going to get strong. We're going to make some money.

We're going to develop the most important confidence for success in life, and that is the ability to endure rejection. What is that about, do you think? What is that all at its heart? What is that really about? It's about recognizing that nothing wonderful is going to happen to you unless you take some risks, and that the only really meaningful, profound things in life happen offline. I struggle with depression and anger, so I wrote a book on happiness.

And every study across ethnographies, geographies, cultures, income level says the same thing. It's the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. Your happiness, your success, your economic stability is going to be inversely correlated to the amount of time you spend on a strain. Get outdoors, touch grass. One of the things that you do is you boy, and you've hinted at this, but you boil what masculinity can be about down to being a provider, being a protector, and being a procreator. And the criticism that has come back to you, and I'm sure you've read this, is maybe one of the phrases that somebody uses it, it reduces it down to caveman status in some ways. When you hear that, you get a smile in your face, how do you respond?

I think there's some veracity or validity to that criticism. I think the criticism that hit me hard and hurt, which means there's some truth in it. is Scott, capitalism has worked for you. Making money and finding friends and romantic partners has worked for you, but it can't be the sole purpose or mission. A lot of men need to work on themselves and a lot of men aren't going to achieve those things. I think that's a valid criticism. I don't know if it's caveman. I would argue it's more capitalist. I just think men are going to be evaluated in our society based on their economic viability. I'd like to think we live in a world where character and kindness and service count more. They don't. That's not

to say it's also not masculine to occasionally get out of the way and be more supportive of your partner. When I first moved in New York, my partner was working at Goldman. I was a professor. I tried, you know, to step up and provide more what I'll call emotional labor. But I think a young man should start out with the basic notion that he needs to be economically viable for a lot of reasons, too, that prosperity immediately should default to protector. And this is where I think a lot of our male role models right now fall down. The people will always or men will always look up to the world's richest man in the president of the United States because they won capitalism and the most powerful person in the world. And I feel where they really fail the masculinity test

is they don't translate their prosperity and blessings into protection. They punch down. They conflate masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. I think a man's default operating system should be protection. Women should want to cross the street because there are men on the other side of the street. They should feel safe on the subway because there are men there. If people, it's not just physical. If people are being critical of someone behind, someone's back, your default operating system should be to protect that person. You may not think corporations need third bathrooms or that a six five transgender woman should be able to compete at a women's NC2A meet. But if you see a community being demonized, your default mechanism is a man. Your default

operating system should be one to protection. And then procreation. I think young men's desire for romantic and sexual relationships is healthy. And for the most part, it turns them into better men. They smell better. They shower. They dress better. They work out. They have a plan. You need to develop persistence. You need to be interesting, more well-read. I think the desire to have relationships and sex, quite frankly, if channeled in the right way, makes men better men. While there's overlap with great feminine qualities, I think a decent, you know, as I've been thinking about it, I'm kind of in some way saying a lot of these attributes just make you more human, be a better human. But I think a lot of young men relate to the notion of masculinity when it's

framed in an aspirational framework. And you're comfortable in it being, not even the caveman piece, but that it's characterized by some people as being old-fashioned? Yeah, I think there's some wonderful things about the traditional notion of a man, also recognizing that that doesn't necessarily mean women need to go back to the 50s. I think the greatest combination of happiness or alchemy of happiness in households is a mix of masculine and feminine energy. Does it mean that masculinity is sequestered to be people born as men? No, of course not.

I'm actually my closest friends, Matt, are actually my closest male friends are actually more feminine in nature. I like men who quote unquote nurture and take care of me. But there's no reason just as we celebrate femininity that we can't celebrate masculinity. But 95% of us born as binary, I think have an easier time leaning into certain attributes of masculinity or femininity. And when they're framed in a positive aspirational way that doesn't take away from the rights or the dignity or the grace we offer the non-binary community, much less women, that it can be a fantastic source of strength. And The far right conflates masculinity with coarseness and cruelty, but the far left suggests that men just act more like women or that if they were only more in touch with themselves or that they don't have problems, they are the problem.

There's got to be a middle ground. Have you gotten into spaces to talk about this that maybe square more with what we heard at the beginning of the conversation? I mean, being on public radio in Canada is one thing. Have you gone on Joe Rogan, for example, to talk about this? No, Joe hasn't invited me. What do you think that conversation would be like? Do you think you'd be welcome there? Oh, yeah. I find that Joe, and let me be clear, I mean, it's a little bit strange. I pulled all my stuff up of Spotify because I thought that we're being reckless about COVID misinformation, so I'm not one with Spotify and Joe. But I've been on a lot of conservative podcasts. They do embrace a lot of this. We have arguments over the mechanisms and whether or not the over-wokification has resulted in the problem. And I can see some of their point, but not. It makes for, I think, a productive doctor.

Do you think they're listening? I mean, again, it's not just conservative, but in those spaces where those conversations are on masculinity are about Mark Zuckerberg on Rogan talking, but we need more masculine energy in a boardroom, whatever that means. Do you think they're listening to what you're saying? I like to think it's having an impact. In the manosphere, I'll go on pretty much anyone's podcast and have a civil conversation and we can push back on each other. I think if you want to be part of the resistance, you have to go behind enemy lines and you have to talk about this stuff and understand, quote, unquote, the other side. There's got to be some form of masculinity that is somewhere in the middle that says, all right, boys need more exercise and are more rambunctious. And when you tell kids to sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise their hand, that you're just describing a girl and that our K-12 educational system with 70 to 80 percent female teachers might be biased against boys. I have to let you go. But let me ask you just, I mean, one of the things is about emotion and growing emotionally.

You write in the book that you cry all the time. I find my kids will mock me because I get weepy at the strangest things now that I get older. Talk a little bit about crying and being emotional, being visibly emotional, and what that says to you about the kind of man that you're trying to model. Yeah, it's not intentional. I didn't cry from the age of 29 to 44. I didn't cry when my business went out of business, when my mom died, when I got divorced. And now I cry a lot. I'm like you.

I can't get through an episode of modern family without tearing up. And what I would advise any young man or any young person or anyone for that matter, is. is that as you get to our age, time goes way too fast. And one way to slow time down and inform your life is to lean into your emotions. When you think something's funny, laugh out loud. When you're inspired by a piece of creative work, stop and think, why does this inspire me so much? And when you find something sad, lean into your emotions or moving and let yourself be emotional. And it forms your life, it feels really good.

And generally speaking, Matt, when I'm out with a group of guys and someone's talking about something and it makes me emotional and they see me getting emotional. I swear to you, all these masters of the universe surrounding the table, look at me, first and kind of surprise. And then I know they're jealous. They look at me and think, I'll take a six pack of that to go. And your kids who see you weeping are going to remember that about you. And what they're going to remember is that your father felt something, that your father cared about something, that your father was moved by things. And it's going to help them be more in touch with their emotions. Last thing before I let you go, what do you hope things are like when your sons are raising sons or daughters of their own? I just hope we have more empathy. What I would hope for, unfortunately, I think a lot of this is tied to economics. I think there's been a war on poor people and a war on kids. We just continue to transfer more and more economic opportunity to seniors, older people in capitalist societies to figure out a way to vote themselves more money. So it feels like my generation has not done what past generations have done and made forward-leaning investments in terms of investing in technology and education and just having more empathy for people who come from unusual backgrounds.

And all I wish for my children is that they have the most rewarding thing in life, and that is a series of very deep and meaningful relationships. If I could give young man or anyone anything, I would say I just hope that you have a lot of angst and grief in your life because those are the receipts. for love and relationships. Scott Galloway, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate you having me on. And congrats on all your success. Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business and the host of several podcasts, including the prof G-Pod and the co-host of the podcast Pivot. His new book is Notes on Being a Man. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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