The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - What Did Men Do to Deserve This? — with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Scott Galloway speaks with Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves about why so many young men are struggling today. They discuss how technology, education, and economic shifts have changed the path to adulthood, why boys need structure and challenge to develop, and what it will take to rebuild purpose and opportunity for the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now playing in select theaters and on Netflix, November 21st. Episode 374. 374 is a country code for Armenia. 1974, the Heimlich maneuver was introduced. Someone asked me if I'm in a room with a hundred dicks. How many do I choke on? And I said, I'm that good.

Go, go, go! Okay, so folks, you may have been, you've been listening to Prof. Chief, Behind the scenes, making the music, the joke I wanted was I was having sex with someone, and they asked me to choke them, and I said, Mom, you're making this weird. I thought that was better. The team thought that was too much, so I went with the last choking. joke. Anyways, welcome to the 374th episode of the Prof G-E pod. What's happening? Things are finally slowing down, seven cities and seven nights, going home tomorrow, which I'm super excited

about. So with that, here's our conversation with Jonathan Haidt and my Yoda, Richard Reeves. All right, today we have a very special episode. We have our guest. Jonathan Haidt and Richard Reeves. Jonathan is a colleague at NYU's Stern School of Business, but what most people would consider or refer to as a real professor, a Ph.D., tenured, like, not how they refer to me as the Kim Kardashian whore of academia. He's legit. And then we have Richard Reeves,

who's the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and also from Brookings. And let's be clear, the last 10 days... I have essentially been parroting Richard Reeves' work on every media outlet that has a pulse. And I was saying to Jonathan that I really should start sending royalties to Richard. Like, between the two of you, I am, whoever it is, like, it swoops in and takes all of the credit. But I am essentially parroting the two of you. I'm just louder, and I just want to acknowledge that up front.

Anyways, guys, where does this podcast find you? I'm in my office at NYU, a few floors below where you're supposed to be. There we go. If he was a real professor. There you go, right. She wasn't gallivanting around the world. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, no joke. Okay, good.

Well, I'm at home in East Tennessee, and Scott, I have absolutely no problem accepting a share of royalties. I will say, however, that what this means is that when people get mad at you, as they have done in a couple of recent publications, they also throw me under the bus with you, right? So I'm like, it's like I'm manacled to you. But I will say that the New Yorker essay, which sort of has a go at the kind of centrist manosphere or whatever, it attacks Scott at some length, this piece. The first four words of it are describing Scott as white, bold, and jacked. And the trouble is that the next three and a half thousand words attacking him. Just, he didn't, he didn't. hear any of that. He just, all he heard is he stopped at jacked, right? Yeah, no, it's, I don't know. This makes

for a longer conversation, but I still am unable to dis-sac. I recognize that pushback is important, and if you're not, you know, if you don't get any pushback, you're not saying anything. But some of these comments, I just want to write back, and I don't engage in the comments, I just want to write, did you read the fucking book? Did you actually get, I mean, did you, you know, they, I'm sure you guys are used to this, they make a cartoon or total misinformation of what you said so they can weigh in and get their kind of guardians of gotcha or virtue signaling pill. And I still, I'm not used to it. I still have a difficult time separating myself from some of the, like, I mean, it is incredible some of the things people say on the pushback. I imagine, especially you,

Jonathan, when your book come out, you must have gotten a lot of pushback. Well, two things. First of all, Scott, you are treading into a minefield that no one has ever exited alive until Richard came along. When Richard started this project, you couldn't really talk about boys because that meant that you were ignoring what boys are doing a girls, what men are doing a women. And Richard has the political skills to sort of walk through it carefully, and he was very reassuring in the book, and he really opened the way. And then people like, you come gallivanting and you say all sorts of things. Like, I want my kids to people should drink more, Scott. Like to say, you know, so you're wild and crazy people love you for it. But the thing is, you step on some minds, you say some things. And then, of course, those who want to write gotcha journalism, they've got a lot of targets for you and a lot less on me and Richard, because we're super careful about this. But that's part of what you do. And that's why it's so much fun to listen to you.

And it's also this is part of the work, right? You need, I think, a bit of both. But the also, the other thing I would say, Scott, I agree with what John just said. And I know this is not necessarily what you want to talk about, but it's live right now is what I find helpful is to really think hard about is this a good faith disagreement. And this is obviously John's, you know, a lot of John's work has been along this line. And if it's a good faith disagreement that is something important, then I typically will respond to it. If it's clearly just not, like it's bad faith or kind of ill-informed, just ignore it. So Jessica Gross wrote a piece in the Times criticizing me for my view about needing more male teachers. And she was citing some statistic. She was taking me on on the substance, and John has had a lot of this, right? And then you get others where it's just clearly just ad hominem. It's not a good faith. They're not trying to advance knowledge in this space by constructively disagreeing with you. And I'd say that's been true of some of what you've had, Scott, as well. It has been more in that combative sort of space. But if

someone makes a good point, then I think it's really useful to engage with that. Yeah, I agree. And Some of the pushback has been, I've learned from it, and it's thoughtful and is right, and I don't, yeah, I agree with you. I actually try, I do learn from some of it, and some of it has been, you know, the stuff that really hurts, it means that there's some veracity or there's some truth in it. That's what I find. When something really punches me in the gut, it's like, oh, they're right, and I didn't think this through. Anyways, right now we're seeing two major shifts. People are having fewer children, and they're unhappier. And these trends show up early in the lives of young men, economically, socially, and romantically.

And so what I – and I'll start with the biggest and the hardest question, and I'll start with you. I'll start with you, Richard. What is your portrait a recipe for a thriving young man in today's world? I would start by saying you knew what to be skilled, right? You're just skilled and self-efficacious, feeling like you've got the skills to go out into the world. that's relational skills so that's about dating but also the workplace a degree of self-efficacy that you are actually guiding yourself through the world there's this word that I nearly used in my book

but couldn't quite make it work which is actually from Welsh and I've just been talking to my mother who's Welsh so she's probably top of mind now which is Hoyle it's H-Y-W-L almost impossible to figure out how you say and it means wind in your sails means you feel like you're under your own propulsion and the literal translation is wind in your sales And I think that sort of sense of moving into the world purposefully, with that sense of the wind at your back, with agency, with skill, and with a degree of kind of confidence in your direction, that's really what that's about.

And that takes, I'm never going to get into some of this. That takes education. That takes being, takes self-control. That takes being able to steer away from some of the dangers of the internet that John's just written about. But if I was to say anything, it is really would come down to that sense of conducting yourself into and through the world with a degree. of skill and confidence. Jonathan? I will add on to this.

What does it take for a boy to turn into a man? And the last time we had this three-way conversation, I think I went through initiation rights. But very briefly, human societies forever have dealt with the issue of how do you turn a girl into a woman, a boy, into a man. They have a procedure. They have initiation rights.

But the thing is that girls, it'll sort of happen automatically in the sense that they begin to menstruate, and that's always taken as the marker of adulthood, and then there are all sorts of things that happen. But it's sort of like going to happen. in. Whereas with boys, it's much more likely they have to prove themselves. They have to do something. They have to have the foreskin of their penis cut off while they do not flinch. If you flinch,

you're shamed forever. So boys have to sort of go through more trials and tribulations, especially in warrior cultures or honor cultures. So it's a harder transition. They need more help. And I also want to bring in a finding from psychology, which is that on most things that you can measure, boys are more variable than girls. So, you know, there are, you know, there are more represent at the high end, at the low end. And the point here is that in traditional, in most societies, of really success, the difference between the successful 10% and the least successful 10% is gigantic for males. It's a much more fraught.

There are much more, there's many more ways for them to go awry. And so they need to develop skills, as Richard said. But what I'm thinking about here is all the ways that the path to develop skills requires doing hard things over and over, requires developing long-term dopamine. That is, you know how to pursue a project over days, over weeks, you know, eventually, you know, you build something, you build a tree house, or you get a girlfriend over a long time. And at every step of the process, the technology is there to say, don't do it. Just do this. It's more, you know, get your dopamine real quick. Don't do it. Don't do hard things. So I think we, for boys, even more

than for girls, we have to look at the necessity of hard challenges that can involve even physical pain or hardship. When boys don't have that, when they have easy electronic pleasures all along, they simply don't make the jump to manhood. And that's going to be, that already is a reason why we're seeing marriage and sex decline. And it's going to get a lot worse as Gen Z becomes the main generation that is marrying. I've been using Richard's definition of manhood. And I love the notion that some people born as males grow old and never become men. And I just love the term that Richard coined surplus value, or I think you said approaching relationships from a generative standpoint. And I've actually incorporated that into my fathering.

I've said to my boys, you realize that you're negative value, right? You go to school, all of this infrastructure, all of these smart, talented people, all adding value to you, and you add almost no value back. In the home. quite frankly, and I've said this, guys, we love you, we get a lot from you, you're getting more from us. When you use the roads and the tube, and if you called 911, someone pick up the phone, you are getting more from the government. There are brave men and women defending the shores, a lot of skill that you are not adding a tax revenue to. You are negative value right now. And one of the reasons we are trying to give you the right skills and right character is that

someday when you become a man is when you add surplus value. You generate. more jobs and income than you're absorbing. You provide more love, more care than you have received. You're planting trees, the shade of which you'll never sit under. You absorb more complaints than you give. You notice people's lives. And don't make the mistake I made of falling into this sort of capitalist trope of every relationship I have to be on the plus side of. That's trying to avoid manhood. And they sort of get it, but I love this notion of surplus value and I've been and I got that from Richard and I just think it's such an elegant way of saying you know some men be clear some males never become men it's not a given I want to just add

something on that because you've said maybe mine's a slightly softer version of it but I call my I call my kids cost center number one cost center number two and cost center number three and cost center number three has just come off the books I'm delight to say this a big moment And I'm saying, and at some point, you will flip into profit center number one, profit center number, and I expect the flow to come back. But I also just thinking about this point about John's doing things that are hard and doing things that require you to do stuff on a sustained basis. I think that a lot of that used to be work.

I mean, you've given ideas about rites of passage, and I agree with that, actually. But one of our sons was really struggling to actually even go to high school, let's be honest. He is now a teacher, I'm delighted to say, but just really struggling in education. And my wife is incredibly worried about him. And I said, he gets up at 7 a.m. This is in the whole, in a vacation, 7 a.m. every day and does his landscaping job. He comes home, showers, changes, and goes off to do his job, actually a Jewish after-school center, where he's a teacher until 7 p.m. And he does that every day, and he's never missed a day of work.

He is going to be fine. Like, I just know he's going to be fine. I don't know what he's going to do, and I know he's struggling in the education system. But I'm going to tell you, any 17-year-old who can get himself up every morning and work two jobs every day, it's going to be fine. I don't know how. If he's got the discipline, and that's something that boys can grow up without more easily than what else do. And you're right, John, you have to learn it. You have to be institutionally. Here's the difficult thing is that you have to be institutionalized or institutionally scaffolded, as you say, into masculinity, into mature masculinity. And it's very hubristic of any society to think that we don't know. need to construct and maintain those scaffolds, and that we don't need to be careful at the things that might corrode those scaffolds. And both of those things have happened right now.

We've dismantled too many of the scaffolds, the pieces of scap that we do the institutionalization through. And as John's work shown, we've also been corroding it in many ways, particularly with what's happening online, with these quick fixes. So I just want to contribute to this discussion of surplus value. The saddest graph in the anxious generation is, the one that shows the percentage of American high school seniors who agree with the statement, my life often feels useless. And another one is, you know, life often feels meaningless.

There are a couple of questions like that. And what you see is that it was about 9% of boys, and boys, here there's not much of a sex difference, boys and girls. About 9% agreed with that statement from the 90s through 2010, 2011. There's no sign of anything changing. And then all of a sudden, around 2012, it just zooms upward and it doubles over the next eight or 10 years. Young people feel really useless because they are if they're just always pulled off the road of producing anything and always given entertainment and stuff to consume.

At the end of the day, all they've done is scroll through videos or watch other people doing things. And that makes you feel useless. So young men have always had this issue, but what I want to contribute to this conversation is the technology pulled so many young men off the path. And now with gambling, with AI coming in, it's pulling even harder. And so we really have to change the technology. We have to do a lot of things so that our kids are doing things so that they are useful to others. Now, of course, they'll still be net negative. But it's a big difference between we're all investing in you and you're just watching video games and porn.

And that's the way you're going for 10 or 15 years. And at that point, you're in your 20s. And you really are useless. Your life really is useless. And that is a tragedy that we've set the world up. to lure kids, but especially boys and men, into that. So we've got to let them feel that they're producing value, let them do things, let our kids run errands,

let them take challenges in which they actually do something useful. You said something, Jonathan, that I've been talking a lot about, and that is we talk a lot about the means, the economy, you know, education, how you build up to something. And I sometimes think we need to be reminded that the ends is a meaning of purpose. a meaning of contendment, and that that comes from, almost everyone I think would agree if they really think about what is the value in my life. It comes down to relationships.

And those relationships, the really important relationships, all have one thing in common, and that is they were hard. They were hard to establish, they're hard to maintain. It's not easy to stay married. It's difficult to figure out your place in the pecking order with friends. It is really hard to navigate the politics of NYU. or start an institute focusing on boys. I mean, the only thing these relationships have in common is a lot of friction, and they were really hard, and these online synthetic relationships all have one thing in common, and that is they attempt to make them as easy and as frictionless as possible, and they end up being

empty calories, and I worry that these young men wake up at 30, 40, or older, and they never really have a sense of victory. They never worked to find a mate and endured the rejection and the kindness and the perseverance and found someone to love, that they never get to that. They never found an organization where they could deploy their skills, their certification, their hard work, and navigate it to making, I just worry we're going to raise a generation of men that never really get to bask in victory. Like, this was worth it.

was so hard, but it was worth it. I think that's right. A lot of research in psychology shows that if you want to predict happiness or you want to understand what makes people feel a sense of flourishing, relationships is the number one. That's one of the most basic truth in psychology. That long Harvard project tracking men since the 30s, it was the state of your relationships was the best indicator of who aged well and had a sense that their life was good. So, of course, yes, relationships.

And it's also another basic truism. of psychology, that women care more about relationships. They invest more in them. Even within marriages, the woman tends to, is more likely to manage the social relationships for everyone. So women, they invest more in them, they understand them more, and they end up with more of them, whereas men are much more at risk of ending up with nothing. And both of you have collected statistics on the degree to which, I mean, those horrible statistics about the percentage of young people or people who have, say they have no close friends, and I believe it's much higher for men. So you'd come in on that just a moment. But the point I want to add here,

is that Scott, when you said, you know, ultimately, you know, what makes a, what makes a successful life is relationships. My first thought was, well, yes, but also accomplishments, that for men more than women, when you look back on your life, it's not enough that for many men, it's not enough they're like, yes, I raised these children and they're flourishing, I did my job. No, men more often feel the need to have made a mark on the world, to have done something, something that they can then be proud of. And so, yes, we are raising a generation of men in a world in which, the opportunities to do something big are harder and harder. And that's what's so exciting about, this three-way collaboration,

the three of us have had a few wonderful discussions, because we each bring a piece to it. And, Scott, you are, you know, you're bringing all these issues about, you know, redistributive tax codes and all the economic challenges that I didn't think about at all. So actually, in terms of paying royalties, yes, Scott, you cite both of us, you can definitely pay us royalties. But the thing is, we're all like learning from each other.

we each have a piece of the puzzle, and so we can sort of each, you know, circulate these royalties among the three of us. A shared pot of royalties. There we go. I've got to tell you, right now, that sounds good to me, Scott. Given where we are on the Amazon rankings right now. But I was just, I want to build on, I think, of both the points you've made, which is that John's right that, on average, men are investing less in relationships and struggle a bit more

with that relationality. But on the other hand, I think that masculinity and mature masculinity in the surplus value way we've talked about it is defined through relationships. I think we have to make a clear distinction between relational masculinity, which is defined and exhibited through those victories at work, which is relational. It's through what you're providing to others as opposed to a lone ranger masculinity, which is you go your own way, you're your own man, you're separate from over the people. other people. And so there's this weird paradox here that I'm just throwing out to both of you, which is on the one hand, we sort of think about relationships. We think, oh, women are good at relationships. They build them more, etc. But on the other hand, I think the idea of being a successful and a flourishing man, when we think about that, what do we think? We think, what kind of father

are you? What kind of husband are you? What kind of colleague are you? What kind of father figure are you? So actually, weirdly, in a way, I think it's even more important to think about the relational around men. I think about me, you know, the way my dad expressed his masculinity was by the way he was a dad and a member of the community and so on. And so you, if you'd be alone in the woods on his own, he wouldn't, I don't think you can be a man alone. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Train Dreams, the new film from Netflix. Train Dreams is a film that stays with you. It's about a man standing alone against the backdrop of a changing America.

What makes it powerful isn't the scale of the story, but its simplicity. It's a reminder that a life doesn't have to be big to be meaningful, that quiet endurance, grace, and decency are their own kind of heroism. In a world obsessed with progress, trained dreams asks us to take pause and reflect on our relationship with loss, nature, and the need to belong. And maybe that's the modern journey, not domination or conquest, but learning how to live with change, grief, and tenderness without losing our sense of purpose. Train Dreams captures the tension between progress and preservation between the machines that build our world and the nature that still defines it.

In a time when we're all searching for purpose, train dreams feels timeless because the frontier isn't just a place, it's a state of being. Train Dreams, now playing in select theaters and on Netflix, November 21st. Support for the show comes from Vanta. Startups move fast, and with AI, they're shipping even faster and attracting enterprise buyers sooner. But big deals bring even bigger security and compliance requirements. A SOC2 isn't always enough.

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be more male CEOs. The land acknowledgement is like men have bigger egos. But what I really, what I find is the following, that men get more reward from impacting things that aren't in their proximity and women get more reward from impacting things really in a deep, meaningful way, in their direct proximity. That they have a different reward system. Your thoughts, Jonathan? I agree with the general approach, but not your specific metric there of close versus distant. In all of my work, I always try to take both an evolutionary perspective and an evolutionary perspective and an anthropological perspective.

How did we evolve? What is human nature? What are our desires? But also, how does that vary across cultures? And in this case, one of the key things to keep your eye on, especially any discussion of young people, we must discuss mate value. Young women are in a constant competition for mate value.

And here I'm only addressing the heterosexual dating market. That's the dominant one. But young women, from the time they're approaching puberty and they get on social media, it's incredible the way they're so conscious about clothing and hair and makeup and all the things that they're going to be judged on. And that's true for women throughout their lives.

And so women are very, very tendered to mate value, whereas men are just not as concerned about how we look or looking youthful. You know, across societies and eras, the great majority of women will have a child and the great majority of men will not. That's the way it's always been. Many men, of course, traditionally,

the most successful men, before there was monogamy for the thousand years, or whatever it was that monogamu was dominant. The most successful men will have multiple wives, and most men will not have any. And so because of that, males, there's some speculation that males are designed with more of an all-or-nothing strategy or go for it.

And you have to stand out. You have to do something to become excellent. You have to do something to rise in status for your mate value. And so if you imagine young men who are threatened by being pulled down into nothingness and being a drone, you know, a useless one that will not procreate. Men are more drawn to doing the big spectacular thing, and even sometimes that's violent.

It gives them fame for a while. But my point is it's not just that they want to impact things far away. They want to do things that will make people look up to them. And in a healthy society, it's through all the things that Richard said. It's somebody who would be admired for having created a successful company and had a, you know, has been a loving father and be, you know, have strong relationships in the community. But in some environments, if men can get prestige just from being the biggest asshole or from destroying something, well, then that's what many men will be motivated to do.

We have to look at the incentives, but really keep your eye on mate value, I would say. Slight corrective to that, at least I think it might be a corrective, John, First of all, I buy the evidence about risk-taking, higher levels of risk-taking, on average, being driven by this all-or-nothing. Joe Henrik, I think, who we both know, is written about that. I'm convinced by that. I think there's two things. One is that there's a tendency, then, to take a difference of these overlapping distributions

and use it to explain much bigger gaps than it can actually explain. That's my big disagreement with Jordan Peterson on this, for example. So he correctly says that under conditions of equality, probably going to have, say, fewer engineers, as it was another example he uses, right? But it's probably 30%, right? And the same the other way around with male nurses, right? It's not 5% or 10%.

Right, yeah. And so what happens is that in the wrong hands, the truth of a difference at the average between the sexes is used to justify differences that could not possibly be plausibly justified by that, right? So it's not going to be 50-50, but you have to be very careful not to use it to justify very low levels. But on this mate value thing, I've just to be reading

a pre-publication book by Paul Eastwick called Bonded by Evolution, which has a really good critique of the mate value thesis. Doesn't say it's wrong, but says actually the whole idea of a like a marketplace for romance is a very modern idea, right? Actually, if you think about it, right, having Tinder and thousands of people to choose from, that's not how we actually evolved. We actually evolved in small tribes, about 150 people. And it makes the quite strong argument that actually spending time with people, people who you know, and being compatible with them, that's actually what seems to matter in the long run for relationships. So mate values very much about this immediate thing in a marketplace, right? But actually, we're evolved. So the book's called Bonded by

Evolution. We're evolved to seek out people who are going to be compatible with. And they're probably going to be drawn from friendship groups, people we already knew to some extent. Now, I think what that means is it makes it even more important, John, that we do have real-life relationships and experiences and so on because you're more likely to have a successful mating strategy if it's friend of a friend. And you know all the social cues that come from that. So I think it's just, he's not even saying that the mate value thing is wrong. He's just saying it's overweighted by comparison to some of these other things. I want to follow up on the notion of mate value, and that is, I worry that we're returning to, I don't want to call it the

natural order, but how society is typically played out, and that is 80% of women have reproduced, but only 40% of men, that typically most societies digress to a small number of men through inheritance or talent or luck or violence, aggregate a disproportionate a disproportionate of resources, and then an exceptional amount of the mating opportunities. and then we have to invent wars or something or nationalism for the young men to get out their anger. And just along the idea, I want to acknowledge that that attempting

to make a dent in the universe and impress other people sometimes leads to awful examples of violence, right? My understanding is most political violence, most mass shooters are hoping to score some sort of massive increase in social capital through what they see as a heroic act of violence. So it can be very good, obviously, but also very bad.

But my question is, to both you, my sense is, if we're not careful, if we don't, and let me use the R word, if we don't consistently redistribute capital and opportunity from the most fortunate and the most lucky, back to the middle class, we regress to what I'll call the natural order of a small number of men aggregating the vast majority of the mating opportunities. Thoughts, Jonathan? Oh, I think that's great. I think that's absolutely right.

There's a book that really influenced me when I was writing The Righteous Mind is by Chris Bone called Hierarchy in the Forest. And he addresses the mystery of our human beings innately hierarchical or are we innately egalitarian? I mean, Hunter-Gatherer groups are always egalitarian,

so that must be our nature, right? But his answer is no. Actually, we are innately hierarchical, like most primates, not all, but most primates are very hierarchical, and especially the males, and dominance is worked out through brutality and the ability to dominate violently. But what happened was, as humans developed technology and spears and all sorts of things, we developed the capacity to suppress alpha males. And at a certain point in our evolutionary history, it's now clear we're cooperating and hunting, we're sharing resources, we're dividing labor, we've got a gendered division of labor. And those are all egalitarian because what hunter-gathered groups do is they're very sensitive to any guy acting like he's the alpha.

And so they have gossip and eventually violence to take him down or kill him or ostracizing. And then he points out that then as soon as we become sedentary and we start farming and we start having resources, now someone finds a way to get most of them or more of them. And so then you instantly get hierarchy back. It comes roaring back. And so I think you're right to say a good society is. one that's able to check that return to our primate, you know, I mean, you know, you read accounts of chimpanzee society. It's pretty brutal. And so, yes, redistribution of, not just raw redistribution of opportunity, making sure that you have to have some churn, you have to have

things opening up. If young men feel that they have roads forward, then they can be attracted to do that. If they feel they're blocked as so many do nowadays, then it's like, what the hell, there's nothing I can do. Why not just sit home and, you know, in my goon cave or whatever, you know, the word is? So yes, we especially, you know, for all of our kids, but especially for young men, they're easily discouraged if they don't see a road ahead to success. Richard? Yeah, I think that's why economic mobility, which is the issue that John and I first met over. I think even before we met over Mill, the middle class project that we've all been involved in and what's happening to gender and the economy, they all come together.

If there aren't these genuine opportunities, economic opportunities, to have a good life, to flourish, for your investments to pay off in a pretty reliable way, then you're just going to lose people, and especially you're going to lose young men, and that's what's been happening. So I know, Scott, you've been very interested in the whole marriage thing, and you and I've talked about this before, but you look in the communities where the marriage rates are higher, if they're low income, it's where the low-income men are doing better. And so there's just a very clear link between economic flourishing, family formation, relational growth, capital growth, et cetera. And so the huge achievement of modern societies in many ways has been to gradually, in a faltering way, to share the opportunities more, right? And Scott, you've talked a lot about the growth of the middle class and so on. And that's combined with monogamy, and again, Joe Henrik's written a lot about this, to actually create a decent, sense of the fact that, you know what, we can all do well. And a society where you can, to a reasonable approximation, say, we can all do well, we can all reproduce, we can all be generative, we can all

contribute, we can all flourish. That's an unbelievably radical idea, which has driven modernity. And if you lose that, I think you lose a huge amount. And it should be no surprise, given everything that we all just said, that maybe the canary in the mind that we're losing that will be young men, because young men are precisely the group who you would expect to be getting those incentive signals, right, very, very early on about the need to go in and flourish and do well in a society that's reliably signaling, yep, we can all do well. As soon as young men start to believe that we can't all do well, I think that's when the pathologies will start to strike. So you said a word, Jonathan, that I'm triggered, so I've got to address it.

you mentioned the word gooners and there was this Harper's magazine made me want to go grab drinks with Angie Dickinson at the polo lounge and not the 60s. I hadn't heard that brand in 40 years. Anyways, this article went viral about these guys called Gooners and Goon Cave and it's supposedly a community of young men who masturbate to exhaustion and brag about masturbating for 8, 12, 48 hours. So I could only get halfway through it because I just refused to believe this is an actual thing, that this is anything more than just a tiny slice that this magazine has created a sensationalist article around, or at least that is my hope, and I don't have data around this, but I was so just rattled and, quite frankly, offended by this thing, that I

refused to believe this was anything more than clickbait. And do either of you have any data? Have you read this article, and do you have any data on this? I have read the first part of the article, too. I have no data. on its frequency. But I'm very interested in existence proofs. That is, if there is a group that can be constituted this way, and if it has lasted for several years, that at least shows us that this is possible. And what I'm interested in is the way that cultures and subcultures have been formed forever with inheritance from previous generations. And so if you have inheritance from previous generations, but then you have variation too, that's just straight Darwinism, you'll get

change, but it'll be connected to what people have done before. It'll be connected to what people have found works or flourishes before. And what we've had since 2012, I believe, is a largely a severing of all links between generations. So young people now are growing up in a world, many of them if they're really online, in which almost everything coming in was made in the last few weeks, and very little is 10 years old. And so humans can create all kinds of bizarre societies. Humans have created all kinds of intentional communities and cults. They tend not to last, you know, decades, but they're ways that people can live.

And so I took the Harper's article to be showing, here's what happens when you take a bunch of young men, separate them from everything that's ever been learned or known or done in human history by previous generations, give them lots of porn, and connect them in ways that allow them to create a whole new world. So unless someone can show me that this didn't exist, I do take this as a sign of just how degraded

and inhumane and in human, you can get a group of young men to be if you put them in this incredibly toxic online environment and don't give them these roads out to actually make something of their lives. Richard, what do you think? I think I hadn't heard existence proof. I think that's really interesting.

The danger is that people will take the exceptions and assume that it's the rule, or at least as much broad. so they don't see it the way you've just seen it as a warning sign, right? What they see is like, they just go to this trope. And I'm going to just be Tribune of young men for a moment and say, young men are awesome. I'm going to try this out because I'm in a lot of rooms right now,

left-wing rooms, right-wing rooms, where the basic consensus is we can all agree that young men suck, right, in various ways. And so I'm just going to be, and I'm a bit worried about that narrative, to be honest. And I think I've contributed to it. I think we've all contributed to it. We have to be careful about it because violent crime rates are down, young men attending to be kind of more liberal.

There's lots of good stuff happening. And one of the things that gives me a bit of hope is that you see these, let's call them experiments in living, John, quoting John Stuart Mill, is that you get these experiments in living, like this example, and then other people look at it,

including other young men, and go, how's that working out? Does that look good? Should we do that? And I see increasing numbers of young men saying, nope, that doesn't look good. So I'm betting you that for every guy who's a Guna, I tell you, I'm struggling with Guna, Scott, because it's also shorthand for an Arsenal supporter, as you also, you know, as a gunner. So it's like, I'm really struggling with it.

And I know you met Arta. There is a distinction between the two. I know you met Arteta, so we're not going to go down that line because that would be too exciting. But I bet for every one of those, there is a young man who is actually sworn off pornography. and masturbating to pornography, 10 of them, right? I don't know, but like there's this real movement online now where I think young men are trying in faltering ways to find better ways to form themselves,

better ways to be in the world. They're seeing what's happening with this. I don't, and it's very important that we send the message to them that we're with them and that we want that to succeed and that we see these genuine efforts, I think, on the parts of young men to figure this out. Now, thank you for turning the conversation in this way. Richard, can you tell us about these headlines that we read about how young people are

returning to religion, but it's especially young men and it's especially really the harder, the more intense, not the sort of easier forms of religion? Yeah, again, it's existence proof and very small data points at the moment, I think, right? Ryan Bergey's writing something for us on this now. And I'm convinced that there is something there, right? that it's not just to kind of blip in the data. And I think it goes along with some of these other things that we're seeing even online,

where the way I put it is, I think there is a genuine search among many young men who are feeling somewhat lost, somewhat underformed, if we can put it that way, for good ways to form themselves to be better. I think that hunger to be better is incredibly strong, including among very young men. And that might lead them to bits of the,

online, it might lead them to cold plunges and whatever. It could also lead them to more demanding forms of religion. It can lead them to the kind of no masturbation pledges that they're getting online. You've mentioned Jordan Peterson earlier, Scott. I think that some of what he was doing, some of Charlie Kirk's messages, et cetera. I think one of the reasons that these kinds of resonate was they were saying, look, these are hard things, you should do them. And the call to be better, I think it is one that a lot of young men are at least attempting to answer. I think it's on us to give them the places and the spaces in the room to do that. And even when there is a bit of a turn to religion or a desire for family,

there was an NBC poll a while ago saying that most of the men who vote, the top one priority for men who voted for Donald Trump was to have a family. They're going to be better men if they have people to rely on them. Maybe that's a good thing. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. We say this all the time on our show, but it bears repeating. Running a small business isn't just a full-time job.

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the downloaded two ghosts in the machine available now only from audible we're back with more from mrs we're back with more from jonathan hyatt and richard reeves let's move to solutions richard i know you've talked about more men in k through 12 but i think that's probably going to help, but not fix this problem. There really is, it seems to me, and I think Jonathan, I think, I don't appreciate your view on this, I think we're part of a bit of a rejectionist cartel where we create artificial scarcity, freshman seats, such that we have pricing power to raise our tuition, fast, and inflation, and the results has been especially hard on young men who aren't doing as well, K through 12, for a variety of reasons. But Richard,

if there was one or two policies outside of bringing more men, which I think most people, people agree with into K through 12, where there's only 20 or 30 percent. What are some policy ideas for helping men reestablish some momentum in terms of what is still one of the primary lubricants for upward mobility, and that is secondary education? I think that higher education should be mounting an all-out campaign to arrest the decline in male enrollment. The fact that men are no more likely to enroll straight into college today than in the 60s and the numbers are falling is huge. And that gap you just mentioned in the, like how many women are on campuses right now, nine million and six and a half million men. That's two and a half million gap.

Right. Think about that gap. And that's, I was just looking it up. That's the population of New Mexico. And there are 13 states that have fewer people in them than that gap. Right. So we're talking about a decent sized state level gap just in the number of men and women on college campuses. We can do better. They've got to do better. They can do more outreach. The ROI on higher education is not that different for men and women, frankly. And so I do think that there has to be an all-out effort. Now, the trouble is, Scott, that we just collaborate on some research to show this, is that young men are increasingly falling for the lie that it's not worth it. You won't get a return. You should be entrepreneurial. You should invest in crypto. You should back to this John's point about the short, term thing. This work that we worked with this group on, the young men kept saying, well, I just need to get a passive income as soon as possible. And one of the things I really like about what you say, Scott, it's like, if you want to get wealthy, here's what you have to do, get as educated as you can, get a job, work hard at it, keep working hard at it, keep saving, save the money,

that will then generate, right? Boring, boring, boring, but true. And so I don't know what that looks like from a policy perspective other than countervailing narratives. And the other thing I'll point to, again, it's something you've written a lot about is it wouldn't matter quite so much. We'll never get back to 50-50 in higher education because of some of these developmental differences. It wouldn't matter as much if the US had something resembling an alternative. Like the underinvestment in apprenticeships, vocational training, trade schools, etc., in the US is bad period, but it is a catastrophe for men in a period where we're getting fewer than through higher education. Just being bottom of the OECD table, failing to pass the apprenticeship bill, just the continued failure

of the U.S. to invest in that. It's just a massive anti-young male policy. So a huge investment in vocational training and apprenticeships is, I think, got to be right at the top of the agenda for young men. Thompson? So I'll agree with everything that Richard said, but what he's proposing are very expensive things that take a long time to work, and I have one, which I think will have a much bigger impact very quickly with almost no cost. And that is to age-gate the internet and try to get boys up to the age of 16 or 18 without having multiple addictions.

And so, for example, so I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing, where 19-year-old sophomores have to, for the semester, they have to work on a project. And there are a couple of projects that they tend to pick. And now I have a rule. If you are on social media for three hours a day or more, you must start there. There's no point in doing anything else until we get your digital habits under control. And these are NYU students. These are at the top. And a really important finding that I got from Richard's book

was when you graph out how men and women are doing, how boys and girls are doing, if you look at the wealthiest or most educated strata of families, the gap is quite small. And so you might not even notice if you're in these sort of elite circles that boys are doing so badly. And, you know, my friends' sons are doing fine.

But when you look at the bottom half or two-thirds, certainly bottom half, the boys are plummeting down while the girls are either dropping a little or maybe not at all. Oh, and also we know that lower SES and also black and Hispanic kids, they are online much more often, 10 hours a day on their phones as opposed to six or seven, four more upper class or, you know, high SES. So what I'm getting at is in low SES families where you're more likely to have a single mother who has multiple kids, they put them on iPads because that's the cheapest babysitter. So iPad babies are going to are especially common among younger kids, among, I'm sorry, among lower.

SES. And these kids, boys and girls, have a much darker future. They have much more disruption of neural development. So I think if we want to understand why, you know, if we want to change things in the lives of young men, I think the most urgent thing that we need to do, starting today or tomorrow, is protect them from the digital environment, the, from the addictive elements of it. And that's the, well, no, video games is complicated. I'm not saying no video games. But video games is where the addictions start. And then it's porn, it's vaping,

it's sports betting, it's crypto investing. There are all these companies that are addicting boys. And as Anna Lemke says, she wrote the book Dopamination, addiction research at Stanford, as Anna Lemke says, if you get addicted to any one thing, your brain is now changed, your reward system has changed, that you're more easily addicted to

everything else. And so that's where I would start. That's the biggest bang for the buck. And it is especially devastating to boys who are more easily distracted and they get off the path. There was this study, wasn't there, of age verification of porn hub in the UK? And if you saw this drawn, it had a huge effect because there's been a lot of skepticism about whether an age verification would actually have an effect.

Now, that may not be getting the ones you're always worried about, but it had a massive effect in the positive direction in the sense of reducing pornography use, right? Yeah, if you put up obstacles to something, some people go around it, but in general, use will drop. Same thing with, you know, if you make marijuana legal, use does go up. It's not, you know, so, so we have to start, and this is also a public health message. This is not just a law thing. This is a public health message. We've got to give kids the space, the mental space to grow up in the real world. And that's the place to start. I think everything else is smaller compared to what the digital environment has done to kids since 2012. I would just like to ask a question more as a, like, dad, to dad, I'm in the midst of what I call the greatest manufactured stress that I've been through recently, and that is my son is applying to college. And I just want to come out of the closet and say, I will be devastated if he doesn't get into an elite school. All of the progressive school doesn't matter, and he'll end up where he should. I am that narcissist that wants to signal to his friends

that his kid got into a great school. What the fuck is wrong with me? Richard. You don't understand the concept of regression to the mean, which means that you can't possibly have each generation doing as well as the previous generation on average, right? Secondly, you're massively overstating the actual value of those things. And thirdly, you just said it.

You're being a narcissist. And that actually what you're doing is you're making the fundamental mistake of seeing your kids' educational outcomes as in some way something that you can take the credit for and that it's your medal, it's your badge. I remember when this, because none of my kids went to elite colleges and they're all doing great, fantastic, and I'm much less poor as a result.

But I remember this, one of their friends got into Harvard or something, and I said, oh, congratulations. He said, well, don't congratulate me. Congratulations my parents. They did everything. And I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't want that. And it would be great if you're, kids do, Scott, but I think that this is a real trap that people got themselves into

that as parents, and I think it can ruin kids' lives if their parents are invested. He's so heavily. Just, FYI, when I ask for tough love, I mostly want love. Oh, well, John's going to, John's a psychologist. That was rough. That was rough. You asked. Yeah.

I'll be, yeah. Keeping it real. You're right. You are a narcissist. That's my new coffee mug. Jonathan, you have the last word here. Sure. So I went through this two years ago with my son,

who now goes to USC and starting it with my daughter, who's now a junior in high school. And the one thing that I learned from going through it with my son was that even if you have the insights that Richard has, we parents are all in a collective action trap. I think that's what he was saying. Like, we all are bragging rates. But the kids are too, especially if they go to a,

you know, an elite high school or a high school where everyone's going to college, thanks to social media, everybody sees everybody's reaction video to opening the letter and everybody knows who got in where and your kid, and especially, as we said, boys are very sensitive to status and their status will affect their mate, all that stuff. So I'd say you're not wrong to worry in that your sons will really, they will probably feel shamed, given the, you know, given the schools I assume they go to, they'll probably feel ashamed if they don't get into a good school

and they go to what they consider a safety school. So all of this is to say, we adults are in a collective action trap where there's a limited amount of prestige. Our kids are in a collective action trap. So our whole system is kind of inhumane. Now, the one thing we can say is it's not as bad as South Korea. I mean, South Korea is even worse

in funneling people to just three schools, otherwise you're useless. But it's a systemic problem. And I hope that, you know, if people read Richard's work and realize we have to open up many more paths, to success, trade schools, creative endeavors. We have to get it to the point where our top schools aren't rejecting 96% of the applicants. Of course, that's going to make everyone crazy.

So it's a systemic problem. I wouldn't blame the parents on this. We have to think of ways to make it better. I think actually Richard's work points to a lot of the way. I just want to say, if you're giving you the last word, I just want to say, so the anxious generation, we're coming out with a children's version, a version for eight to 12-year-olds called the amazing generation. I'm not the only whore on this call. Thank you, Jonathan. If you have kids, boys or girls, 8 to 12, this book is coming out December 30th. Because the thing is, the kids know that this stuff is causing problems.

If we can all do this together, we can get out of the trap. Nice. Well, gentlemen, this has been great. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Anxious Generation, probably the best-selling book in the world for the last few years. Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he started, his vision started it up, and it's now a fairly, you know, an important institution doing a lot of great work. I think of us as sort of the three tenors. One of you's Pavarotti, the other one's Placido Domingo. I'm definitely Jose Carreras. No one's heard of me. No one is literally you're, you guys over, you guys argue over who's Pavarotti and Domingo. I'm the third guy that nobody knows. with the biggest platform No, I'm the guy

I'm the guy bringing out the chairs Yeah, I don't buy that Gentlemen, this is to be continued Thanks very much That was great as always This episode This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez Our assistant producer is Laura Janair

Drew Burroughs is our technical director Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media Support for the show comes from train dreams, a new film from Netflix. A man stands alone in the wilderness and watches the world move on without him. What makes train dreams so powerful isn't the tragedy. Instead, it's the quiet resilience and the reminder that you don't need to live a big life to live a meaningful one. It's not about conquest or control.

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