Male Roles, Obligations and Options for Building a Fulfilling Life | Scott Galloway

And getting to one of the top ten podcasts in the world, getting to a person as a partner who's higher character and hotter than you, getting to make more money than you would have ever guessed that person would have made. anticipate no.

And as today's conversation also covers on the socio-political landscape. Today we mainly talk about masculinity and what men, young and old and everything in between, are facing today in terms of their roles to take in work, in relationships, and their health.

And today we don't just review the data. You'll hear statistics, so Scott is very grounded in quantitative data, which is important, but he also shares several clear actionable steps that you can take daily to ensure that you're making progress in work and relationships and finances.

We also get into a bit of debate, or more, about things like alcohol, the benevolence or lack thereof of big tech and social media, and we talk a lot about the male-female dynamics in terms of the consequences of single-bomb homes and divorce, but just generally male-female dynamics. So while today's episode does include a lot of exploration of different topics that frankly I didn't anticipate.

It's also very proactive. Scott delineates the things that you can do and frankly should do each day. These aren't just lists or hacks, but effective tools that come from knowledge, data, his deep thinking, and that reflect the landscape we are in now.

I'm very grateful that Scott took the time for this conversation. You'll see that we agree on many things, we disagree on several. He's a very deep thinker, extremely smart, obviously. He also cares about people. That comes through over and over again. And he's extremely generous today on your behalf, with indeed tough love knowledge.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Scott Galloway. Scott Galloway, welcome.

We might think we know. We don't know what it's like to be sixteen, twenty five, thirty, forty year old men and we'll also talk about women today, but probably mostly men. in 2026. And so how do we reconcile that in a discussion like this? I just wanted to ask you, how do you think about that? Because so much of your content and what you're teaching out there is about timeless truth.

But there's also a lot of things that are happening now, not just pain points, but maybe opportunities that I don't know, how how do you think about? Do we really know? Like, how how should we pass along information in a way that's truly useful to people? Because that's what obviously we both want this to be about.

And having a casino in your pocket, a Netflix in your pocket, and porn in your pocket. It's just hard to relate to what they go through. I think the first thing is just acknowledging y you know, you don't know what you don't know. And then turning to data, because there are people who look at the data. And I try to counter my biases or my, you know, my uninformed theses with data. And uh so I try to find good people, good research.

And inform it. Also, it helps I have fifteen and eighteen year old sons. I ask them a lot. I observe them a lot. I hang out with them a lot. And you start to pick up on stuff. But I think the first is just being open to People pushing back and recognizing, unfortunately, every once in a while in the comment when someone points something out and going, if it really hurts and it's upsetting, it's usually because they're right.

And they found some soft tissue and they've pressed on it. So and I'm trying to be open to learning and and, you know, just acknowledging when I I got it wrong.

So what helps is a code. Some people get that code from religion, the military, there are really strong family connections. I actually got my first kind of code from my first job. There I worked at Morgan Stanley and there was just a certain level of professionalism. I got code from sports.

At UCLA. Uh but I I wonder there's so many lost men right now, I wonder if masculinity can be a code or some sort of aspirational form of masculinity where people born as males might have an easier time leaning in. And I should also say that I don't think masculinity or femininity are sequestered to people born as males or females. I'm drawn to men who are more feminine as friends. My close friends kind of take care of me and are more nurturing.

But I think for young men, if they feel like they can lean into some positive masculine attributes that it could serve as a code. So I loosely break it down into three very reductive qualities and that is the first is to be

support and labor if your partner is accelerating economically. When my partner had a kid, she was working at Goldman Sachs, she was making more money than me. I was a new academic at NYU, I was making

a hundred and sixty thousand dollars living in York, which is may sound like a lot of money, but it wasn't, and she was making substantially more. So I tried to pick up slack and and and provide more labor at home and take charge of our finances. But I think at the outset Trying to find a plan to be economically relevant in a capitalist society is really important because whether we like to admit it or not, a male from a self-esteem standpoint, from a sexual currency standpoint,

from the esteem of the tribe or the society is going to be disproportionately evaluated based on your economic viability. So from an early age, try and have a plan. You may not have to stick that plan. I'm not saying you gotta go to Harvard and go to work at Goldman Sachs, but maybe you're gonna go to trade school, learn how to install energy efficient HVAC, but you just need a plan to be moving towards something. The second

Is protector. If you think about the most masculine jobs, fireman, cop, military, the notion is you develop skills and strengths such that you can protect others. And the most, if you will, manly, masculine satisfied I ever feel is a night when I feel as if my family feels protected. The kids are asleep. My partner feels loved and supported.

And I've I've been able to hopefully through partnership, through economic valuability, been able to provide a warm, comfortable life for them so they can focus on the things that are important to them. And I think unfortunately a lot of men that we should look up to, whether it's the president, I apologize for getting political, or the wealthiest men in the world who are naturally going to be seen as male role models, they seem to have skipped the protection part.

That the whole shooting match, the whole reason you make money, that's the means, but the ends is such that you can protect others. I find that's the most rewarding thing in the world. And then finally, procreator, and that is uh I think we need to stop demonizing young men's desire for relationships and sexual desires. I think a young man wanting to have sex is can be a tremendous motivator.

to be a better man. It's like fire. It can be incredibly destructive, but if you put it in a steel casing with spark plugs, it can create tremendous progress. And the story I use is that I was at the Raleigh Hotel in Miami.

And I saw a very attractive woman, and it was the middle of the day, and without the benefit of alcohol, I didn't have the confidence to approach her. But I promised myself I was gonna approach her, and then I went out to get my car from the valet and was sitting there with the car and I'm like, God, you're such a fucking wimp.

So I ran back in, went up to her, and said, Hi, I'm Scott, where are you from? Anyways, long story short, eighteen months later, our son's middle name is is uh born was Raleigh. And I I didn't look at her, Andrew, and think I'd really like lower rates on auto insurance. I looked at her and thought I'd really like to have sex with her.

And I think young men's desire for relationships and sex, if channeled correctly, makes you want to be a better man. Have a d a kindness practice. Demonstrate excellence. Shower for God's sakes, work out, have a plan. Have resilience, have perseverance, demonstrate excellence. So in sum, provider, protector, procreator, where I think I missed it in the book, and I'd love your response'cause I'm open to criticism here, is one

That's what wor worked for me. And I think a lot of younger people, there's different forms of masculinity that don't necessarily involve being economically secure or finding finding a a mate. And also the component I've really missed. is service. And I think a great, great kind of one question or proxy for masculinity in terms of what you do every day is are you optimizing for attention or service?

Right? And and then the litmus test that Richard Reeves kind of gave me, uh who's sort of my Yoda on this stuff, is This notion of surplus value. That some men are born males but never uh they die never having become men. It's not about a religious ceremony and age.

or, you know, some sort of experience or ritual. It's about at some point can you honestly look in the mirror and say, I add surplus value. I create more tax revenue in jobs than I absorb. Everyone absorbs tax revenue if you're in America. I listened to more people complain than I complain, right? I love more people than love me. And I didn't get that. I don't think I really became a man well into my 40s because I was always I had took a capitalist approach to relationships.

I was wanted more. I wanted a girlfriend that was better to me than I was to her. I wanted a job where I was getting paid more maybe than I was contributing. And then what you realize as you get older is the whole shooting match. is to to create surplus value, provide be a better friend, be a better partner.

There's no way my kids will ever be able to return as much as I've invested in them. I mean, we have these, you know, the Hallmark Channel and insurance commercials will tell me that I'll have these moments, and I get those, but my kids are never up at 2 a.m. worried about me. They just aren't.

Right? I've I'm spending a ton I would say to them, you're adding negative value. Just be clear. You go to these amazing schools, all these talented people, negative value. Me and your mom, we are constantly investing in you. This would be impossible for you to pass back. figured out as that's the whole shooting match. As I'm finally finally, Andrew, finally at a place of surplus value. I apologize for the word salary pr provider, protector, procreator.

Um are you are you uh optimizing for service, not attention? And do you can you really say that you add surplus value?

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I love all that. I don't have anything to add. I do have uh two questions and one reflection. The reflection is that What you started with that every day you're making decisions all day long. And you want more of those to be good decisions than bad decisions relative to your peer.

I think that's a a terrific way to think about striving. And I've never heard it posed that way, so I really just want to bold underline and highlight that for everyone. For the eighth grader, for the twelfth grader, for the college junior. The forty year old man. Make better decisions than the average around you. The problem I have, I guess I do have one caveat here.

Um that most people won't remember this, but that show Jerry Springer, I think, was so popular because people like to focus on all the people doing worse than them because it makes it easy to stay right where you're at. Yeah. So who are the comparison points that one can keep in mind as they strive to make these better decisions each J? Because I think that first statement you made is touching into some serious wisdom.

So who is the comparison point and how do you keep that framed? Because you study markets, you understand markets. What's the market comparison point in this? Make more better decisions than worse ones relative to the average as you progress through your years?

And I think we need to puncture that narrative and say you should strive to be successful. And success might mean certain things for other people. I didn't grow up with money, so for me success for most of my life was trying to get economic security. I I was Anxiety plagued my mom and I, economic anxiety, and it was like a ghost following us around telling us we weren't worthy. So my role models were always people who'd figured out economic success.

And people have to pick their own role models. I always thought masculinity was getting back in someone's face who wasn't Git didn't give me the respect I thought I deserved. I was that asshole that when someone cut me off in traffic felt like I needed to speed up and cut them off. That if the Delta Ticket Counter representative wasn't kind to me or was busy, I would get back in their face. It's like, well, do you realize I'm a 1K member?

And then, you know, a decent reference point is just men you admire and they're everywhere that perhaps don't can take blows. They realize someone might be having a bad day. But you said something did that inspired a thought in that what I just outlined is pretty meta. You know, kind of themes that sometimes aren't that actionable. So I just want to bring it down one level. As we were talking about off mic, I try and mentor two or three young men at any given time.

And these are young men that quite frankly need mentoring. Uh they're struggling, most of them might be still living at home. You know, they're not these aren't people who went to Brown and are working at Goldman Sachs. And so some just some more tactical things that I think serve as a reference point for how you succeed or how you make progress. The first thing I do, the first hack is I say, Unlock your phone and I'm gonna look at it. And there's a little bit of nervousness.

So what I do to loosen them up or lubricate it is I say, okay, let me tell you two things. First is I gamble. I don't gamble on fan duel. I gamble with options. I know it's stupid. I know I'm gonna lose money over the long term. I'm a smart guy, I love markets. But that dope a hit I get is too seductive. So I sell calls and and and put

Uh I consume porn. That's sort of not i that's not a that's an embarrassing thing to say at sixty one, but yeah, I still consume porn. But I tell them that and it lubricates or it it It makes them more comfortable. I open their phone and everyone has an advantage. Most young men who are not excelling, if you will, by traditional Western capitalist standards, their advantage is capital specifically their human capital. They have time. And within about

Five to seven minutes, I can find eight hours a time from TikTok, from X, from porn, from gambling sites, from YouTube. I'm like, we're gonna find eight hours. You tell me we're gonna we're gonna reduce this eight hours. And next week, I'm gonna check. And we're gonna reallocate that capital into three things. The first is we're gonna get really fucking strong.

I just think the best antidepressant is moving weights, building some bulk, or running far. I've I've jokingly said every man under the age of thirty should aspire to be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real that could kill and eat everybody or outrun them. Like there's different forms of fitness. You can be fast, you can be flexible, you can be strong, but there's no excuse. The male form is blessed with.

you know, more bone density, double twitch muscle, all the things you talk about, this incredible substance that pours over it called testosterone, you're gonna look back when you're my age and think, why wasn't I just fast, sleek, a monster, just strong. So we're gonna work out at least three times a week. The second thing is we gotta make some money. And I want you to make money outside of your house.

You know, I don't care if you're a Lyft driver, Tasrabbiter, Panera's hiring people at 18 bucks an hour, and only one out of ten that accept a job actually show up the first day. So if you make, if you really make the effort, you can make decent money. And the great thing about getting a taste.

For the flesh of money is you start learning how to make more money. If you want to make a lot of money, unless you're smart enough to be born to rich parents, start off by making a little bit of money and you'll start to figure out capitalism, right? And the final thing is at least three times a month.

We're going to put ourselves in a group sitting where we are trying to achieve something great in the agency of others, a nonprofit, a church group, a sports league, a writing club. And then the second phase of that is we're going to do something what I call as the approach.

Hey d hey man, do you want to go watch the Jets game, right? An expression of friendship. And then if you're really comfortable, an expression of romantic interest while making them feel safe. Would you like to grab a coffee sometime? And this is the goal. The goal is no. Because you're gonna get no

And then I'm gonna call you after you've made the approach, you're gonna text me I did an approach. Did you get a no? Yeah, I got a no. That's exactly the point. That's the goal. Because everyone you admire, everyone you think has killed it, the only thing I can guarantee you is there were a shit ton of no's.

And getting to one of the top ten podcasts in the world, getting to a person as a partner who's higher character and hotter than you, getting to make more money than you would have ever guessed that person would have made. To anticipate no. And unfortunately, big tech is setting up an algorithm that convinces you that a frictionless life is a good life. And that you never need to endure no. And what you end up with is a lack of skills to to per persevere.

to realize you're okay. And that's what I asked the kids the next day. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm bummed out, but you're okay. If a man under the age of thirty works out three times a week, works thirty hours a week outside of the house Right, and is volunteering, that immediately puts him in the top eight percent of all young men. And I apologize for the word salad here, but something I hate is the incel movement. Involuntarily celibate, right?

Throughout history, ninety-nine percent of men have been involuntarily celibate for most of their lives. There's few things young men would rather be doing than having sex. Only forty percent of men have reproduced throughout history, eighty percent of women. So no man has a birthright to reproduce. In the West, it's actually now seventy-five percent. So young men have more agency than they ever have. Now, if you do those things, right?

Just those three things, work outside of the house, work out, have a kindness practice, uh volunteer in the service of others, you're immediately going to put yourself in the top decile of young men. And if you're in the top decile of young men, I can guarantee you, over time, you will become voluntarily incelibate, which is awesome.

Because you'll establish a relationship, and young men under the age of thirty, a lot of the research shows, benefit more from a relationship than women. Yet only one in three men under the age of thirty is in a relationship, whereas two in three women are in a relationship. And you think, well, Scott, that's

Mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. So I'll circle back to the more tactical recommendations. Get fit. Start making some money, have a plan, and start doing things in the agency of others. I think the ultimate hack for depression, or if you're feeling bad about yourself, is to start helping others and to always keep in mind.

And this is the hard part, that the antichrist of your progress is a young man, the devil, the fucking enemy, the villain here, the bond villain with trillions of dollars is big tech. They are trying to figure out with AI a million times a second how to convince you to spend one more second a day on your phone sequestered from your relationships.

Because they're a shareholder value. Forty percent of the SP is ten companies whose sole mission is to monetize your time. And unfortunately, they're not they're not bad people, but what they're doing has resulted in a small group, a cohort of men. It's not small. Millions of men who are evolving into a new species of asocial, asexual males, who wake up at the age of thirty thinking they've had a frictionless life, living at home, obese, anxious, and depressed, having never developed a skill.

That they need to do well professionally, personally. So big tech is not your friend. If you do not figure out how to modulate, big tech products, whether it's Instagram or YouTube, you are falling into a trap of eventually being sequestered and not developing the skills to establish the most important thing in life, and that is relationships.

when discussing the importance of being a protector. I understand the political side, well let's just for the moment, I will just set Trump aside, um very polarizing figure. Happy to go there if you want, but I know your stance on him. But the the mention of Elon in as a non protector surprised me. Mm-hmm. Because I think of Elon as somebody who seems to Love his children very much. Uh he's organized family differently than most, but he certainly has the capacity to take care of them.

is committed to big projects. Mm-hmm. I mean a a superhuman level of of output in terms of just Neuralink, the field that I'm closest to, right? Um phenomenal progress. And that's just one of the SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, X, etcetera. So I'm just curious what um motivated that um makes you uh Because I don't see him as a non protector. I I don't know that I see him

as a protector of a particular kind in his personal life, but I don't have access to that. But in terms of his motivation to pr protect our species, I personally believe his desire to get to Mars is a genuine one to have an option Uh, for humanity. So I see him as a protector. And I'll probably piss off a lot of people by saying this, but that doesn't mean I universally adopt everything he says and does.

But I see him as kind of an awesome figure in our history who's like, let's get to Mars in case this Earth thing doesn't work out. And also let's get to Mars because it's awesome.

He inspired the EV race, which is good for the world. The problem is with the word net. And as it relates to masculinity and as a role model for young men, he's probably one of the best role models in terms of being super aggressive, taking risks, ignoring the noise. And just being laser like focused, telling an amazing story, garnering capital. I mean, there's just no getting around it. The guy's just an inspiration. I think the whole shooting match is if you become the richest man in the world

I think he moved to protection. I would argue that he's not a great role model and that he has not done a great job of convincing younger men that protection And taking care of others. I think the way he acquits himself online by punching down when he says something mean about somebody.

And I know this and I'm fine because I have I have money and I'm not dependent upon any one person's opinion of me. But if he says something negative about you and calls you names, his 120 million followers come for you. And I think as a general rule, and this is true for everybody, but especially for men, you never punch down. You just don't.

Anyone I'm I'm openly I make personal attacks on people. This is technically a personal attack on Elon Musk. To call someone not not not good for a good role model, that's a personal attack. But I never make personal attacks of anyone who isn't markedly more powerful than me. And I find that a lot of these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have no problem punching down. So again, it goes back to this. Is he a net good for the world? I acknowledge the point and I would even argue, yeah, he is.

But that doesn't w he should also be held accountable for his blessings. I can't stand the fact that he should post America in the government. If you look at the most successful companies in the world, they're littered up and down the coast we're on right now, whether it's Qualcomm and San Diego SpaceX and Snap here, head north to Salesforce and Meta and Google. Keep going. You hit Amazon and Microsoft, and then it stops

Once you get to the Canadian border. And then you have to go all the way up to Lululemon to find a multi billion dollar company. Come back down to where you teach at UC San Diego and those great companies, and it stops. And you gotta go to another Севен тазан кілометр секта Марка Лібра і Буену Сарес. Тер сам тим баба Америка.

That creates unbelievable opportunity that creates the wealthiest men in the world. And I find that these tech brothers have a total lack of appreciation for the sacrifices in the system built in America and are the first to shitpost the government. and complain about regulation and things getting the way. I find that especially obnoxious.

But let me acknowledge the point. I think on the whole, Elon Musk and big tech are a net good for the world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable and ask why would you do these things when you're so blessed?

Arguing with their ex on sometimes online, you know, you see that. Their kids sometimes will will be apparent who they are. You know, it's interesting. My my dad. Uh first generation immigrant who came here became a scientist and he he's from Argentina and he along these lines, he always said it was funny to him that when you would go to somebody's office in the United States, a professor or a businessman or something, the picture of his family was facing out.

Mm-hmm. He said that was so weird. He said in Argentina of your wife and your kids and your and your dog facing in. That's yours. You don't share that with the person coming to your office. Like who would do that? This oversharing thing if it when you look back is a kind of a a a longstanding theme in in American business and it it shows up even more so of course online.

So to me this this idea of okay, Elon, for instance, but very different um role model figure, someone that I consider a close friend, Jocko Willink, incredibly impressive. True warrior, yeah, great dad, great husband. I know his family, uh amazing human being in so many ways. And he's kind of like the tough football coach that a lot of guys didn't have that younger guys. I think that's one of the reasons people gravitate towards him.

You don't wonder whether or not he really can do what he says you ought to do, because he does it every day and he posts it on his watch. So Jocko's a really good example. of somebody that people admire. And I consider Jocko one example. So why not look at public figures? Mm-hmm.

m you and perhaps even me, for instance, and just look at it these people as a buffet of options to adopt certain traits but not others. Be doing great things and assuming that the other things they're doing aren't you know truly atrocious, right? I mean criminal, atrocious, you know. I don't know that we're asking the people who are role models, leaders, business leaders,

Well, I don't think we're placing a reasonable expectation on them. I don't say this for any personal reasons. I I've known a re replete with flaws for the very long time, so I don't claim to not have them, never have. But then young guys are might be thinking Well, I have to be perfect too. And if I'm not perfect and I don't have 150 million followers, I better have a fraternity of people to protect me.

This is the kind of the underlying current that I think has driven the toxic end of the hate the word, the manosphere. I hate it because it's become too mishmashy. Mm-hmm. It's not a it's not even a continuum. It's just a mess. So what do you have to say and think about the expectation that the leaders of the world, the role model,

not have these flaws. Mm-hmm. At the same time telling guys, hey, like ask and get told no. Mm-hmm. I mean you and I both know I I don't know if it's real world data or if it's statistical data, but I have many women friends in my life and I have a sister. If an attractive guy rolls up and on a woman and says, Hey, you want to get coffee sometime?

But that guys get blacklisted basically not because of sexual assault, but because you know, they get called out as like a bad kisser. He didn't smell so good or something. This is the stuff that used to be in private discussions among women. I know this'cause I have a sister, right? Women talk. I listen through the wall, right? What do they talk about? And

Now it's public. There's parallel construction here. I'm sure you're tracking it. But for everyone listening, it's like this is a serious problem. I mean, can't we acknowledge that somebody like Elon, let's just stay on that example, is a It's a phenom that probably has never existed in a hundred at least a hundred years. has huge vision. Sure, he might have some like issues in his in his life that are none of my business and

Yet he has a lot of good example to set for young men. I believe that. And it also gives permission to not be perfect. Without harming people.

Value to tearing down people. So you've had best sellers. I've had best sellers.

So there is not only a healthy check on people's power, more scrutiny, the president should get a lot of scrutiny. The president deserves to have his business and personal life. Uh to a certain extent, at least where it demonstrates character, looked into and examined. And I think a certain amount of power and healthy check on power is probably a healthy thing. Unfortunately now there's economic incentive.

Around tearing people down. Like I don't know about you. I do have a real fear. I am highly imperfect professionally and personally. I've engaged in a lot of professional and personal behavior that I am not proud of. I've been divorced. I haven't been as kind to people that have worked for me as I should have been.

And I'm worried it's all gonna come crashing down. And a lot of times I feel like the stuff I'm saying on podcasts like this, I'm trying to portray myself as being better than I actually am. I have huge imposter syndrome. And big tech has an economic incentive in trying to find as many guardians of gotcha pins as possible.

Because if you get to a certain point of fame or credibility, there's just too much money in trying to find the soft tissue on you. So there's a very unhealthy attribute in our society where we're all just waiting. for bad news and there's economic incentive to say, well, this person isn't perfect. Look what this person did. So I agree with you we need to demonstrate a little bit more grace. Something I really hate about my party, I consider myself a proud progressive, is these purity tests.

Right. You know,

And that's just part of it. And that's a small price to pay for a certain level of success. But the algorithms immediately grab that and elevate it because there's money and antagonism. A thoughtful, nuanced conversation online and a positive, reinforcing comment.

If you can create a fight online, if you say mRNA vaccines all to your DNA, you're gonna get a lot of comments and the algorithms love that. And it'll elevate it. So unfortunately, we have attached forty percent of the market value to the SP. To incendiary content that tears us apart. And the result is people now don't believe that Russian troops pouring over the border in Ukraine is their enemy. They believe that their neighbor with a Trump sign is their real enemy.

or someone who doesn't believe your ideology around gender politics is your enemy. And unfortunately it's being I believe and I know this sounds paranoid but doesn't mean I'm wrong, these poorest platforms that have an economic incentive and antagonistic content are being fueled

uh by bad actors, whether it's the GRU or the C C P who look at America and say, We can't beat them economically, we can't beat them kinetically, so let's get them to hate each other. And that is Americans now perceive other Americans as the biggest threat.

So one, it is healthy to look at powerful people that have huge influence, such as you and to a lesser extent me, and question their beliefs and write critical articles of them. It crushed me when the I can't remember if it was the Atlantic or the New York or New Yorker came out with sort of a critical review of my book. It was really upsetting to me. And I think part of the thing that was so upsetting was When we were talking about this off mic, it meant some of it was true.

That's healthy. It's healthy when there's thoughtful criticism around your book. But when I have hundreds of comments, Accusing me of shit that never happened. And then you look at it and it's Dog Mom Wisconsin 331 with three followers. That's a bot.

And the fact that these platforms choose not to screen out those bots because they know more incendiary comments that create more comments and more Nissan ads, I think that is tearing at the fabric of America. But I just want to acknowledge the point.

I think maturity is realizing people aren't perfect. Learn from them what you can. But I do think the wealthiest man in the world and the president should be held to a higher standard. I think they have extraordinary blessings. I think their decisions matter. And I think it's I think the scrutiny they come under is warranted. And I will say this, I think the president, to a certain extent, Elon Musk, have created a lot of cloud cover for our imperfections.

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I disagree um vehemently with one point which is that I'm more influential than you are. You're incredibly influential. In fact a a uh an ex girlfriend's sister w uh who went to NYU asked me if I knew who you were. I said, Of course and and she said her words for our generation, Scott is like a father to us. It's like we and she happens to be in venture capital, but um so maybe there's a finance link there too. And I

But I pressed on that a little bit and and just asked and and she said, Yeah, you know, that we we look up to him, we listen to him, he's he's very paternal to us. So I thought you might appreciate that. Uh

Is I mean it's not but your fear, your fear of criticism. If you're gonna be successful, you're gonna face criticism. Starting a business is subjecting yourself to public failure. I wanna go back to something you said about approaching women and guys being afraid to be that guy.

I think some of that is a little bit exaggerated in that most women, if you are respectful, the vast majority of women, if you are respectful and approach a woman at a bar, hi, how are you? and she's not interested, you're gonna be fine and you're both gonna be fine. And just as I think there's two myths that are damaging to the mating market, which is really upsetting to me. One

That men think that all women are looking to, or a lot of women are looking to embarrass them and they might get canceled professionally. If you're respectful to a woman and approach her and make her feel safe.

And then if she's not interested, politely exit, you're gonna be fine and so is she. And I don't buy that your career you're taking your career in your hands. I think that's just bullshit. And an excuse to be an incel. I just don't buy it. And two, what really has been an enormous unlock for me. is I believe in my atheism. I believe at some point I'm gonna look into my kid's eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end.

I was fucking their age. You got a bunch of young dudes in here who look like former Abercrombie and Fitch models. I remember they look like they're twenty five, they're probably thirty-five. It was yesterday I was their age. Which means just in an instant, I'm gonna be again at that moment where I know I don't have much time left. And in a hundred years, no one's gonna give a shit what I said or thought or did or the mistakes I made.

And embracing that and accepting that has given me so much courage, right? To start businesses, to make dumb investments that might be crazy, to tell men in my life finally that I love them or I'm impressed with them. When I was their age, I had this weird sense of masculinity that if I said, Oh dude, look how handsome this dude is, that it took away from my prestige somehow.

that I couldn't tell people they were impressive. I couldn't tell a woman, God, I'm just crazy about you and I'm I would give anything to spend more time with you because I was worried that she wouldn't return my affection and I would be just too hurt and I had to be cool and like not need her or not all this bullshit that got in the way of me really having a good life.

And what I realize is every failure I've had, people go, oh, his business went bankrupt. Okay. And then they go back to thinking about themselves. So everyone you're worried about really doesn't give a shit about you. And by the way, the dude that's not very good looking and is with a ridiculously like high character hot woman is one of two things as rich parents or two. or two, is willing to endure rejection.

And forty thousand men a year kill themselves. So if you go on a date with a man, the man is sixteen times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you. So what I would say to men is make the approach, take the risk, and as long as you're respectful, you're gonna be fine as so is she and you are not taking your professional or personal reputation into your hands.

And what I would say to women is if you go on a date with a guy that you met on an app, there's all sorts of digital breadcrumbs. And it's a lot you you are and I can statistically prove this, the ride over an Uber, the Uber was a lot more dangerous than the date itself, and you are more likely to die of choking during dinner than to be hurt by that man.

So what what I hate is that there's all this inflammatory content being boosted on online media that's getting in the way of the most rewarding thing in life. And that is to find someone who you are physically attracted to, who you sync up with spiritually, and you decide to build a life together. And not enough of that is happening. We're in a sex recession, right?

And online is making it worse. The dating apps have an incentive in you finding a bigger, better deal. And the genders have done an amazing job of convincing each other it's the others' fault. And I think one of the big foci that need to be really um pay more attention to is what I call renewal of alliances. I'd love to see a renewal of alliances between us and our great allies in Europe.

Renewal of allies who are moderates. I know nothing about you. I just don't I just can't believe you're an extremist on the left or the right. I just don't know. Bullseye. There needs to be a renewal of alliances between what I'll call moderate lefties like me and moderate conservatives. that are everywhere. Like we're all Americans, but the most important alliance that needs r renewal is the greatest alliance in history, hands down, and it's the alliance between men and women.

The integration of female and male energy, the ability to find someone you want to procreate with, to build something together, that is the most rewarding thing in life. And I can prove it's key to the species. progress and existence. And men and women have been taught not to trust each other and to blame each other. I hate the fucking manosphere and I hate the, quite frankly, some of the reactionary notion on the left.

Where it's misandry cosplaying is social commentary. There's a lot of bullshit misandry online where you're assuming every young man is a predator, and quite frankly, that every billionaire is evil or that every white person is racist. But the alliance between men and women needs to be reformed. It's the greatest alliance in history. And online it's teaching men to blame women for their problems. No, women's ascent saved our ass. Women in the factory

And World War Two is the reason we won the war in four years, not in seven. Women going into the workforce in the seventies and eighties in protections of their rights for fair pay is the reason we're not a second tier power to China right now. If women hadn't ascended, we'd be really squarely and duly fucked, right? And their ascent is in no way inversely correlated or correlated to men's descent. Men have to stop that bullshit. An immigrant didn't take your job.

He made it such that you could have lower rent, a meal for a reasonable price, and have someone take care of your mother when she's older. And at the same time, if you're having romantic problems, it's not her fault. Women are ascending and naturally They have higher standards because they're no longer economically dependent upon men, which should be a motivator for men to level up, not to start blaming women. And all this shit.

is being totally inflamed and taken totally out of proportion by online because it creates more attention, it's interesting, it's novel, and it creates more Nissan ads. But I I'm trying to figure out what is the economic incentive to try and figure out a way to get more men and women appreciating the other gender beyond just the basics, right? How do we renew that alliance?

And it landed in front of me and it said, the way you destroy a society is to get the men and women to hate each other. And as a biologist, first and foremost, I thought, well, that makes perfect sense. Right. If you want to eradicate a a population of any species, you get the males and the females to start hitting each other, not just because they don't mate, but because

You throw off the mating dynamics in a way that then can create infighting among the males. We see that too, infighting among the women. Although I don't know. I I think that there's a lot to explore around this sort of what the standard is that we're holding the opposite sex to. It's an interesting question. I I I can't say I've really evolved my thinking around this enough to

to maybe dive into it, but I know you thought about this. I think a lot of males hide behind this notion that they have to be everything. They have to be tall, they have to be rich, they have to be jacked, they have to be kind, they have to be you know, hopefully that everyone's kind, but you know what I mean, that they uh they can't say the wrong thing even once. You know, so they're hiding behind that. And if they go out and look, they'll get plenty of evidence.

Mm-hmm. Right? No men no protectors, no this. Actually I I brought I r I did something I rarely do. Um which is I brought my phone into this because right before I came in here, a woman that I've known for 20 years wrote an asked me if I would t ask you a question. No. And it's directly related to this. So I'm gonna do this. Of course I'm not gonna say who this person is. And she said,'cause I mentioned that I'm speaking to you today, and she said

Please tell Scott that I'd personally like to thank him for his efforts encouraging men to embrace their duties as protectors, providers, and generally just being accountable, because we have a serious shortage among hetero dudes. She lives in San Francisco. Particularly in the Bay Area. And I said, we'll do, but can you tell me what you mean by accountable? Serious question. I want to make sure I'm specific.

She said, When I say accountability, I'm referring to the fact that many times in romantic relationships, men seem to want to avoid feelings of shame and guilt to such a degree that they often respond to their partner's feelings towards them without empathy or accountability. I find that here in San Francisco, there are many women in San Francisco. I don't think I outed her here. Or perhaps all major U.S. metros, chivalry is dead.

Men are afraid to assert their desires because they don't want the obligation that it might entail. Interesting. They give up when something requires internal growth or leveling up. They shy away from acting protective of their partners in favor of egalitarian dynamics. Which is flawed since men's clear since men clearly have more physical strength. Oh my God, this goes on and on. This is almost overwhelming me, but I think I'm, you know, can grapple with it.

Oh thank you. I swear I didn't plant this. She said not none of this has ever applied to you in case you're c serious. Thank you for that one, by the way. She says they're wimpy. They avoid relationships that require work and responsibility because they don't want to feel inadequate. They avoid difficult conversations and repair because they don't want to feel shame or guilt. They avoid asking for anything explicitly because they don't want to feel obligated.

Or complimenting a woman or giving her flowers or romance. They're all scared to do it. It's so odd. Anyway. That's it.

That's a lot. That's a that's a that's a tall building right there to scale for a guy who's trying to figure out how to work out three times a week, get off porn. Anyway, I thought I'd share that and uh just get your reflection.

Teen suicide has skyrocketed since social went on mobile. It's not the only reason, but it's either number one or number two, according to my colleague Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twangy at San Diego State. I don't believe there's any reason that anyone under the age of sixteen should be on social media where they are encouraged young girls are encouraged to sexualize themselves.

But if they start having s suicidal ideation, they are sent an email that says verbatim, here are some images on suicide we might we thought you might find interesting. But also it's created unreasonable expectations for a lot of young men and young women about what they need to look like.

if they haven't made millions of dollars, if they aren't on a private jet going to Coachella, if they don't have a boyfriend with a six pack, if they are if they don't look just amazing all the time, I think it creates tremendous anxiety and unreasonable expectations. But I do You know, so I would argue that who's okay, so who's at fault? We're at fault.

In that as we keep hoping or waiting for the better angels of tech CEOs to show up, that's not going to happen. I've been working my whole life with CEOs. They're gonna make incremental decisions to do whatever moves the stock price up. That's their job. That's capitalism. Their job is to take a set of resources, figure out an offering where they get more than they

paid to garner those resources and create shareholder value. They will do anything to do that. That's their job. And then we're supposed to tax them such that we can build our roads. take care of our veterans and have a set of laws so they don't get out of control, so that they don't lie and say, no, smoking's not addictive. And then our mothers, our sisters, and our dads start dying, right? We have regulation.

We are net beneficiaries from fossil fuels and pesticides, but we still have an EPA and an FDA. There's absolutely no regulation on big tech. There's more regulation in this mic than there is on big tech because they have weaponized Washington and money and Citizens United. There are more full time lobbyists living in Washington DC.

working for Amazon, one company, than there are sitting U.S. senators. So they have very effectively avoided all regulation to the point where they basically run unfettered, whether it's bots, whether it's harm to children, Whether it's letting bad actors try and influence elections and they in my opinion, if your content can be reverse engineered to self-harm among teens.

If your podcast, if we could prove statistically that your podcast was resulting in self-harm among teenage girls, this podcast would be shut down. You would be sued, and you would eventually decide to go out of business.

That was their first piece of evidence that if you create an account and you say you're a twelve year old girl, within hours they were getting overtures from known sexual predators. So the fact that this company can target you and know that you're that I'm wearing Warby Parker's and start s serving me ads by looking at the screen or know that I'm at Coachella listening to David Byrne and start serving me albums of David Byrne's greatest hits.

then they can figure out that a 12-year-old girl shouldn't be getting overtures from 55-year-old men.

And these companies are now the fastest growing expense line amongst big tech isn't AI as a percentage basis, it isn't R D, isn't CapEx, it's lobbying. Because the the greatest ROI in history is spending money on politicians. I give money to politicians'cause I'm getting more politically active.

And it doesn't surprise me that they're whores. The most disappointing thing is what cheap whores they are. If I get fifty thousand dollars to a senator, he'll have dinner with me when he's in New York. Or she. Because they have to, because the system is set up such that whoever raises the most money gets elected, and big tech has figured that out. So until we have a lot of people who have a lot of people

The judgment to elect people who are willing to stand up to big tech and actually implement safe and common sense regulation. I don't want them to go out of business. Let our thoroughbreds run. I actually believe the American model of less regulation versus more is one of the reasons we're much more successful than Europe, which hasn't grown in twenty years.

But this has gotten to a point where we seem to have a total lack of regard for our children's well-being and the fact that Americans hate each other. And that we're kind of eating ourselves from the inside out. So again, we need an EPA and an FDA or some sort of equivalent for big tech, especially with AI. But I want to acknowledge the point, none of this could have happened without fossil fuels.

There is a trade-off here, right? Pesticides are important for our food safety, but there is an FDA. We have decided to just let big tech run unfettered. And I think it's been gotten to the point where it's pretty damaging for society. I think we've robbed kids. My kids are in the kill zone, fifteen and eighteen. I think they've been robbed of a lot of their youth.

I understand this shit, and I have a son who has device addiction who will lie, take his phone, say he doesn't feel well, take his phone into the bathroom for forty-five minutes, and I have to bang on the door and jokingly scream, start masturbating. Because this kid is addicted to TikTok.

What the British did to the Chinese in terms of getting them addicted to opium, I think that the Chinese, via poor s uh via porous platforms that are shareholder-driven in the GRU, are addicting our youth. And we're going to raise a generation of civic nonprofit and military leaders. who fucking hate America. We are teaching kids to hate each other, hate America, hate every special interest group, hate hate every ideology that doesn't fit their own, and there's no grace.

around what it means and how fortunate are we w to be American. And I think at the center of it is a total lack of regulation amongst these incredibly brilliant companies. The most technologically sophisticated, deepest pocketed companies in the world are trying to sequester our youth from us and they're stealing youth. The number of kids who see their their friends every day has been cut in half the last twenty years.

There men between the ages of twenty and thirty are spending less time outdoors, Andrew, than prison inmates. We are robbing youth because we refuse, we refuse to um regulate these companies. So do I want these companies to go away? Do I think they're bad people? No. But we have a system that values wealth and shareholder value above all. And so tech CEOs and their boards will make a series of incremental decisions regardless of the equation.

of the the damage to the public and we have a set of elected leaders that don't do their job and that is they're there to prevent a tragedy to the commons. And it's Democrats and Republicans. So it comes down to very boring shit. Unless we reform Citizens United, unless we de gerrymander uh the United States Congress, money is gonna win. And these companies have more money. But no, I would push back. I think these companies are starting to do a lot of damage to our youth.

I'm worried my kids are gonna grow up so used to getting DOPA so easily and squeezing it so fast and this is your field that we're flushing into society. a series of of young people who are so ready for addiction because they're so used to getting an automatic DOPA by just flipping out their phone really fast.

The behavior within social media, but phones generally is a lot more akin to true clinical grade obsessive compulsive disorder. Colleagues of mine that work on obsessive compulsive disorder, I just wanna give a shout out to the the pioneer of this field was a woman I I just adored, uh Judith Rappaport, she passed away recently. People can look up her O bit. There's a really nice one in the Times.

Identified the brain structures associated with this thing that we call OCD, right? Hand washing, scratching, hair pulling, you know, all the variations of it. What defines obsessive-compulsive disorder is that the engagement in the behavior, the c the compulsion, doesn't relieve the obsession. So to call someone OCD because they need everything perfect, but then when it's perfect, they're like, okay, I can relax. That's not OCD.

O C D is when you engage in a compulsive behavior over and over again and all it does is is served to reinforce the obsession. That to me more closely mimics what I see in terms of phone use than the idea that it's like, no way, this amazing thing on the phone. That comes every once in a while. But after you've spent a day or so on social media or on YouTube, we are all engaging it in a much more passive, slow degradation kind of way.

That I'm sure impacts the dopamine pathway. In fact, OCD is directly tied to the dopamine pathway. So I'm not divorcing it from dopamine. But I think if we started to look at our relationship to the phone as more of an induced obsessive compulsive disorder than an addiction. I actually think that's one of the potential ways out. Not just can because words matter and concepts matter, but because I think

In order to get out of that loop, you have to see yourself from the outside and you have to realize that you're being hijacked. I think right now there's just so much incentive for being on it, for being in the bathroom, you know, looking at the phone. Look, I'm not addicted to my phone. But I will tell you there are days when I feel like I pick up that thing even though I don't want to. Yeah. And that's different than addiction.

I know what addiction feels like. That's not addiction. That's happening just reflexively. Like people aren't even thinking about it. The lack of awareness is is just not there. So, you know, forgive me for going on this on this tangent, but

As you're saying everything today, I'm trying to think solutions. And and I I know Mark. I actually am am friendly with Mark. So I think they care. I do think they care. I think they've created something so big that it's very hard to to navigate and keep up with shareholders and all this stuff.

or might be from a bad foreign actor, we're not gonna allow it. I think there's a lot of parents and a lot of people that would like to be on that platform. The game's over. They've won. I d I don't think Google should have been allowed to buy YouTube. And people say, well they're great companies. If YouTube was divested from Google, you can see that the U.S.

The next day, Google uh YouTube would decide to start a basic search algorithm and Google would start another video platform and we'd have two competitors and there'd be lower rents on labor and on advertisers. Competition is an amazing thing. These companies are a set.

of distinct monopolies that extract rents from labor, from the consumer, and from the well-being of America. So Antitrust, Senator Clobichar's done great work here. Basically she says, I'm overrun. She's like, I got a staff of sixty people, there are two hundred lawyers. hired by Meta and Facebook who are doing nothing but getting in the way of anything to do with antitrust and giving money to people who will delay and obfuscate anything around antitrust. Two.

removal of section two thirty for algorithmically elevated content. Their basic premise is we're not in the we're not a media company, we're just a platform. We're just putting stuff on a board. Well, okay, but if you decide this content gets more views, they elevate it. They make the decision to elevate it. And sometimes the content they elevate is not good for the mental health of America.

It tears the fabric of America. I think if you uh algorithmically elevate content, you should be the subject to the same liability as, say, News Corps. When News Corps and Fox told its on-air anchors To repeat a lie that they knew was a lie, that Smartmatic voting machines had been weaponized by Hugo Chavez and they knew it was a lie, and then Smartmatic sues them and says you cause us economic harm, they had to pay seven hundred and fifty million dollar fine.

What happened on Fox was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud of what happened on Facebook that day. But these nascent platforms, which in nineteen ninety seven we were trying to give them running room, those protections are in place for tech platforms that are not in place for media companies. So if you algorithmically elevate content, you are now a media company. You should be subject to the same liability

As every other media company. And then finally, three, age gate this shit. The downside of Instagram and YouTube. for fifteen year olds is way greater than the upside. And people who say to me, Scott, this is about parenting, that's a tell for they don't have kids.

This is where they get their homework. And my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter, who also has an appointment at the psychology department, said when you take kids off of screens totally, it actually is more damaging to their mental health because they're ostracized from all social activity. So and what's happened, the greatest uptick in school scores in recent history is when they do what my buddy Jonathan Hyde suggests do, these schools do, and they ban their phones.

So I think there are common sense solutions. They keep a lot of the good stuff these companies do while recognizing, well, maybe a 14-year-old shouldn't be spending seven hours a day on TikTok or Instagram while his or her single mother is at work and can't police it. So I think there are common sense solutions in a meeting of the minds here, but everything I propose, they will spend tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to get in the way of and make sure it never happens again.

They care enough to pay attention. I mean, look, many of those guys, it's mostly guys running those companies now. YouTube used to be a woman, but now almost all of them are run by guys. They have kids. I can guarantee their kids don't spend a ton of time on their phones.

But there's basic common sense regulation that should be applied that they've managed to delay and obfuscate and ensure it never happens to them.

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Glad you mentioned the Navy. Recently I w was invited out to the Naval Academy in Indianapolis and was uh had the privilege of giving a talk to four thousand midshipmen, which includes both young men and women.

It was an amazing experience. I'll tell you this. Uh uh a guy who's been a a guest on this podcast was the one that organized this, Coleman Ruy's has an amazing life story. He's not particularly public facing, but amazing story um of his own life. Um And okay, so you go there and all these young men and women are of course

in their, you know, cadet fatigues and going about. They live two to a dorm room. Um, they do PT physical activity every morning at five A. M. Lunch was the most incredible experience. You walk into a dining hall with thousands of men and women, tons of noise. A bell goes off. Everyone's quiet, everyone sits down, a bell goes off, everyone starts eating. Fifteen minutes later, bell goes off, everyone stands up and walks out. Everyone has to play play a sport competitively.

Everyone there is forbidden from using their phone most all of the day and night. One member of this dorm room might be studying while their roommate is sleeping. Every single question was about how to be a better human being physically, mentally. emotionally. Um and this visit was right in the like early days of the the recent uh war with Iran. So they had a lot to worry about.

And they're very close to all these things. A young woman came up to me and told me that she's part of the uh you know the the space program now, the military space program. Amazing, like just a complete contrast to everything that we're talking about. I thought to myself like Like these people, young people like this still exist. Yeah. All firm handshakes, all eye contact. And by the way. Every color you could possibly imagine.

Every color you could possibly imagine. You know, um every stature, every

And I thought to myself, Okay, there's hope. Like we we came out of there, our team was like, Yeah, like there's hope. Okay, it's associated with the military, I'm sure people will will scratch at that point. But Like thank God that these kids and this thing that we call the Navy exists. Mm-hmm. Because it gives it was so inspiring. I it made me level up as a fifty year old man who thinks he's got shit mostly together, emphasis on mostly.

I was like, whoa, I like step it up. Now probably their only quote unquote flaw. was I did a poll, there were a lot of questions about nicotine. Mm-hmm. And I asked approximately what percentage of the room takes nicotine every day. And I would say about twenty to thirty percent of the hands in the room went up. Nicotine is in major use in young people.

Very uh vocal. Um, and perhaps our most popular episode ever was the episode on alcohol. I didn't foresee that, but Um and the deal is zero is better than any if we're strictly looking at health. Yep. Two per week is probably fine if you're gonna drink more. You should probably do a bunch of other things to reduce inflammation and and offset it and get good sleep and et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not telling people what to do. They should just know what they're doing. You've made the argument quite aptly that alcohol can be an important social lubricant for young and older people so that they can socialize and have a life.

socializing. You've mentioned bars a couple times. Alcohol as something that can bring people together in a positive way. Mm-hmm. Um if you don't mind if you could elaborate on that and maybe I'll just toss out cannabis as as another one because cannabis has problems and I I'll acknowledge benefits of its own.

And uh also we you have to get a recommendation from a senator and it was just so ridiculous that we were even there. I was just not of that quality and that standard. But my dad was in the Royal Navy and decided go to Annapolis because we don't have to pay for it. Anyways, but that was last time I was at Annapolis. But if I could have one policy

So I'm advising a lot of Democrats running for president, which is like forty of them right now, who all claim they're not running. They're all running. If you call me and and say you're really interested in my viewpoint, it means you want my money and you're running for president. And I just say, look, that's fine, come on the podcast and I'll write you a check.

If I could have one policy, one blank if I had a magic one, one policy, it'd be mandatory national service. If you look at the lowest levels of young adult depression in the West, it's two countries, it's Israel and Singapore. And despite all the existential threats facing Israel, uh they what what does manit uh mandatory national service do? It gives you the sense that you're serving the agency of something bigger than yourself, it gives you purpose, you're handling dangerous equipment.

It's the great equalizer. You don't care that this gay kid is totally different than you. You you respond to his or her character and competence. Because if you're getting fired on, you don't give a shit how rich their father is. All you want to know is is this person good at what they do? And you put people's lives in your hands and they put their life in your hands. And you're serving in the in the agency of something bigger than yourself. I spent time with an IDF battalion, uh

In Israel and I had the same kind of experience it sounds like you had at Annapolis. These are young, beautiful, fit people outside all day, meeting friends, mentors, and mates. In Singapore, the president there, who's arguably one of the greatest leaders of the last century, said this is the most religiously diverse society in the world. We're gonna have ethnic violence. There'll be a strong man who will weaponize this diversity.

and get people to turn against each other. So we need a different religion and it's gonna be the flag. And we need to we need to get people praying to the flag again. And if you look at the great legislation in America in the sixties and seventies, which was probably the most productive unified

Time in America, it's because many of our elected leaders had all served in the same p uniform. And they saw themselves as Americans before they saw themselves as Republicans or Democrats. And I'm not just saying military service, senior care. Donating time at a no-kill animal shelter, being a smoke jumper. There's a lot of ways to serve. But I think young Americans would benefit so enormously from getting outside of their own circle and seeing just how wonderful America and Americans are.

And and having a chance and not only that people say, Well it's easy for you to say you've aged out. I can tell you as a father of boys, if we set it up well and invested in it, I think they would really enjoy a rotation through different parts of America and different opportunities to serve. So the one thing I would do going back to Annapolis and the IDF and what they do in Singapore is mandatory national service on drinking.

First, my acknowledgement as it relates to the intake of any substance, if it's Andrew Huberman or Scott Galloway, defer to Andrew Huberman's advice. I just want to say that up front. You just have the qualifications and the domain expertise here. I think personally the risks to a twenty five year old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation.

And I worry that with forty percent fewer pubs now post COVID in Britain and a lack of mating and a lot of c connection, that the data I've seen and correct me if I'm wrong. That 95% of people are able to integrate alcohol and drugs into their life without serious consequences. If you have a history of addiction, If you uh for whatever reason don't enjoy it, then by all means avoid it. If people are telling you that you're having an issue or a problem or it's getting the way of your work life.

Or you're one of those people that gets violent or mean under the influence, then for God's sakes, tone it down. But what I ask people is to look back on their younger days and say, what is the most important thing in your life? Relationships, friendships, finding someone to mate with. And I asked them, did alcohol play a role?

You know, it's not easy to come in and lean in for a kiss without a glass of wine. Or let me put it this way, it is easier with a glass of wine. It's a lot of fun. I smoked a lot of pot and I drank a lot of alcohol in my twenties and in college, and it created a lot of wonderful bonding moments.

And so what I'm saying is there's a balance and a trade-off. And what I would suggest is that everyone needs to make their own decision. But what scares me is the anti-alcohol movement in remote work has led to a level of isolation and fewer moments. where people can bond, where people are willing to take a risk and go up to a strange person and say, hey, what's going on? So I worry that the anti-alcohol movement, what I see among young people, is that while they've demonized alcohol,

It's not that they're not getting high. They're just doing a shit ton of drugs. And the thing I don't like about many of these drugs is that they're more solo activity or small group activity. I think alcohol is a group of people I like to think. Meeting new strangers. Whereas when I was in college, all the dudes who were doing cocaine where it was because they had no sexual currency and they would sequester a woman who liked cocaine and go into a bathroom.

But I believe, and I've said this, and I've said this on Bill Maher a bunch and I've gotten some shit, but I think there's some truth here. I think young people need to drink more, go out and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off. I don't think there's anything wrong with some alcohol. I I I worry that the risk of loneliness

far outweigh the risk of alcohol and that alcohol has been demonized as something that if you take one trip of alcohol a drink of alcohol, you're gonna get cancer or you're gonna become an addict. And I don't think the data's there to support that.

It's not that I was casting it toward a particular age group, but there are many people who hit their forties or fifties and they're like, God, I'm aging fast and I look like shit and I sleep like shit and my workouts are no good and You might be drinking too much, right? And then there are the optimizers. There are people that are really just going for maximum vitality, not just longevity, but maximum vitality, which is to me one of the most important things. In any case.

People should do as they wish but know what they're doing, provided they're not harming anyone else. There's one thing that I want it Kind of you know, lump in with this discussion about alcohol and your statement, which on the top contour I totally agree with. Go out, drink, and make a few bad decisions and probably some good ones. But Badish. Badish. Right. So this is the thing, phone.

With phones around, stupid shit is recorded. When stupid shit is recorded, it can be very harmful. And when you're drinking,

And probably should exist in a lot of young women too nowadays, based on what we've u observed in cancel culture. In particular, I'm just gonna say a lot of white women are afraid of the Karen movement. Mm-hmm. Right. that if they say anything, I think even beloved Billy Eilish, whose music I love, was called out for something she s uh she did a sort of impersonation of a Asian person sometime.

Right? Okay, always gonna happen. Right. But people see famous people get into these situations. They go, Oh my gosh. So do I think Billie Eilish is a race? No. And I love her music. And she was mortified and she apologized. But it's enough to make people go

So there and there's been a bunch of movements where a lot of young people did things I really disagreed with on campus after October the seventh. I was less angry at them than some of the faculty because I'm like, I cut an eighteen year old a lot of grace, right? Or I try to. The thing I would push back on is that I think there's certain looking glasses in a people's soul. And one of like how they treat their pets and how they behave when they're drawn.

And what I find is for people who for every person who would say something stupid, there's more people when they get drunk who say, you know, I just think you're wonderful. I'm so impressed by you. Or walk up to a woman and say, I just love your dress or God, you'd have such a beautiful smile or just walk up to her to begin with and say, and express interest. Expressing interest to someone is a wonderful thing.

And when I would when I was younger, I don't know if you ever did this, when I had a few drinks, I used to call my mom, you know, and tell her how much she meant to me.

And also have the courage to reveal those things to other people. And I worry that there's so many barriers now that people, young people just aren't connecting. So I just want to acknowledge the point. I think you have to be really cognizant It's not a great idea unless you know you can handle alcohol to drink at work, at a at a professional function. It can fuck up your whole career.

The it was like the happy hour was like sort of the highlight of the meeting for many people. And it became the place where l you know, in theory, everyone meets at the bar to talk about the data from the day, right? Like at these meetings. In reality ninety percent of the problems that existed between faculty and students and postdocs and faculty and faculty that were independently married and all that stuff. Alcohol facilitated that. I really believe that. I saw it over and over and

you know, it could be far better, but you know, at least the cuts that were gonna happen didn't happen. So I I I I the NIH funded my career. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the N. IH. I had grants, uh reviewed grants, et cetera. But the idea that you could spend money on alcohol Right back way back when and then pe people were gathering around alcohol, it created a lot of problems. Now students drinking with other students, less of an issue.

And when my son comes home, he doesn't do it as often as I would like, but when my son comes home on the weekends from boarding school, I like to take him to a local pub and we have a beer. And I found out that after one beer, he's more inclined to tell me a little bit about what's going on with him. And as a father All you really want, you just really want conversation with your kids. You wanna know what's going on with them.

And so he doesn't get drunk, he d he's not into alcohol. He listens to you, he listens to other people, he's very wary of it. But I find that easing young men and young women into alcohol As opposed to twenty one and then they kinda go, I don't know. I wonder if I wonder if we should be lowering the drinking age. And the reason we raised it was mothers against drunk driving were very effective and very on point because of all the young people who were dying in automobile accidents.

Now I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble winding my brain down and I take edibles. I do edibles probably twice a week. If I'm amped or d think I'm gonna have a tough time sleeping, I'll take a five milligram edible, the stuff that takes you down, I forget which one that is. And it's been an enhancement to my life. But I'm reading a lot of stuff about potential psychosis or whatever.

And this was twenty July of two thousand and four. And I thought, Jesus Christ, here I am on a street corner in this weird place in Vegas trying to score marijuana for my mom who has stomach cancer. So, you know, I I I think there's some benefits to well, I'll stop there. But THC usage I enjoy. I think it's been added into my life.

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Yeah, I think with THC it's highly individual. Uh young males in particular who have a predisposition, genetic predisposition to psychosis or bipolar disorder, need to be really careful, especially with high concentration THC, not just the edibles, but they do need to be careful. I think that Um young, again, mostly young men who are challenged with um apathy, obesity, self-loathing, porn masturbation, addiction, shouldn't be using THC.

Yeah, I I don't see why that couldn't be a part of their week. Uh it'll nuke their REM sleep, uh you know, if to be specific, if they come off their dreams are gonna be wild'cause they'll get more REM sleep. But Creatives, there are a number of creatives who can use it uh appropriately to increase focus, get them out of anxiety, or get them to cope with anxiety.

And then there are just as many people that take it and it makes them incredibly anxious. So I think it's it's sort of on what backdrop. And I think the alcohol thing also is on what backdrop. If somebody's overweight, not working out. You know, a a a guy in their twenties or thirties that's dealing with let's just paint a picture here. He's like playing video games. He's not like

morbidly obese or anything, but he's like kinda overweight and he's kinda feels like shit. He shouldn't be drinking and smoking weed. He should be going to the gym and get himself in shape and then maybe have a couple beers a week with his buddies. So the context really matters.

I mean, if you look at what, again, I go back to big tech, big tech's trying to convince young men. Why go through the pecking order and the effort of trying to develop a friend group? When you have read it in Discord.

Why go through the bullshit of putting on a tie and trying to go into the office and make a good living and navigate the corporate world when you think you can make money trading stocks or crypto on Robinhood or Coinbase and why would you go through the effort, the expense, the potential rejection?

of trying to have a kindness practice, look good, work out, endure rejection, all the expenditures of going out and trying to get a date when you have lifelike porn. And I'll use myself as an example. When I was at UCLA, I graduated from U C L A with a two point two seven GPA, which isn't easy because it means you almost

I I failed nine classes, right? And I still graduated. And by the way, talk about a different age. We were both children of the University of California, UC San Diego. Talk about how blessed we are. Talk about how just what winds hurricane like winds We had in our sales the prosperity. When I applied to UCLA, admissions rate was 74%, now it's nine. Graduated with a 2.27. You know what happened? Berkeley let me into graduate school with a 2.27 GPA.

But anyways back to UCLA. One of my motivators for going on campus was that I there was a non-zero probability that I might meet a woman, establish contact with her, see my buddies, maybe get her to a fraternity party or get her to go on a date with me, and maybe at some point be physical with her. That was an enormous motivator for me. If I had lifelike porn on my phone, on my computer screen twenty four by seven, I don't know if I would have been as motivated to go on campus as much.

And I there was little margin for error in terms of going on campus a few less times. And I worry that that mojo, that desire to quite frankly go out and make your own bad porn is being reduced so much with lifelike porn that men aren't evolving into risk taking aggressive in a positive way, men who are motivated to dress well, to work out, to approach strange women, to go through

I mean it is hard. It is hard to find a partner. And what I say to these men is, welcome to the fucking work week. It's been hard forever. That's the whole point. Women are choosier than men and there's a reason, right? We're trying to spread our sea to the four corners of the earth. They put up a much finer screen to pick the smartest, fastest and strongest seed, and that's the reason why our kids are gonna be smarter and taller than us. That's the way of the world.

But when you reduce that desire, it's gonna get in the way of not only you finding a mate, but developing the skills to be successful in all other parts of your life. So back to the basic premise. I wonder and worry if porn is the most under researched addiction in the damage it's having on young men, because what I see amongst my colleagues, and I'd be curious if I actually spoke to a really thoughtful woman about this whose uh addiction

Professor at Stanford. I'm sure you know her, I forget her name. Analemke.

And so I worry that we really don't know the impact. And what I see anecdotally is that I see a lot of young men who don't have that healthy fire. Because they think that they can just they think, oh f it's like in the In the last twenty years, the guys who didn't have their own game or didn't want to be that successful, they would go to some low income country and basically become sex packs.

This has become I think a much broader version of that. That rather than level up, you'd rather just sit home and get a reasonable facsimile of a relationship or sex with porn. I wonder if that is more damaging than than people than uh people estimate right now.

where they can or South America where they can essentially buy whatever experience they want. Right. In general, I have to assume I've truly never done this, uh, nor do I have any interest, but I have to assume that these are men who just basically figure, well, that's low effort once they have the money. And

real dating, real real sex, if I may, you know um, is it takes some work. Uh it takes some learning and it, you know, especially if you want to be told genuinely good job and and uh and know that it's true. It's gonna take you're gonna you have to get some reps in there. So, um, put your ego on the line. Um, learn to communicate, learn to listen, all that stuff. The idea that porn is is the much broader and and more destructive um analogous thing I think is is

bullseye at you at the moment. So I'm like, I think people need to hear that. Do you want to be that guy? I think I think with any behavioral change, you know, the neuroscientist in me says, okay, we have circuits for kind of like things that are aversive to us, like you have to engage the aversion.

And you have to engage the the appetitive aspect, right? Like so that there's a win and then there's something to avoid. I I really think in order to get any real behavioral change, you need to push away from something and towards something else. Okay. So I think that porn I mean, it's our most fundamental wiring. The two the two circuits in the brain that really crank out dopamine.

Okay. Circuits for reproduction, sex, mm-hmm, and anger. There's this incredible study by a very uh controversial guy named Robert Heath in the nineteen sixties. He was a a neurosurgeon who would stimulate different areas of the brain.

And um unfortunately he was um into conversion therapy. So you know, he appropriately got run out of science for trying to make gay people straight by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Yeah. He was kind of a piece of shit person, but again, let's look at what he did separate from that. Immediately people are like, I don't care about his data. But he gave people with electrodes in their brain in certain studies the option to stimulate anywhere they want.

They could stimulate and get sexual arousal. They could get laughter. They could feel drunk. All the things we're talking about really. They could feel soothing of the sort that their mother was holding them. The area that they chose to stimulate the most is in the central midline nucleus of the thalamus, an area that my lab has spent a lot of time on in other situations, and they would just lever press and lever press and lever press for the feeling of mild frustration and anger.

Because the arousal associated with it is its own reinforcement. A student of mine who's now hopefully soon to be a faculty member, I won't name the university, but she has an offer from a phenomenal university. Her name is Lindsay Soleil, and she's worked on this. i in a very, very mechanistic way, when we're angry, when we're frustrated. The link to the dopamine circuitry is just pounded out. We just all day long. And what's amazing is it doesn't attenuate.

There's no threshold for anger. The more angry you get, the more frustrated you get, the more arousal you feel from that, you never say shade. There's no postcoital bliss. There's no my belly is so full I feel like I'm going to going to explode. And so this gets to the social media thing too. That's the circuit that I worry about. And I think that's the circuit that, yes, I think tech, big tech has tapped into whether they want to or not.

And I think that that's the one we really have to be careful of. And um and I've experienced it myself. I think I actually in this moment I'm experiencing a little bit of it, like that kind of arousal of like, yes, the the forward center of mass that we feel.

But when it's fuck them, like fuck the Republicans and you know, or fuck the left or the extreme will I mean that's people are just high all day long on their own anger and frustration. And I think we just see it everywhere. And I and I raise my hand, I'm sure I'm guilty of this at times too.

Testosterone can be leveraged for good versus bad and maybe even I don't know that we put everyone on testosterone. I'm not suggesting that it can nuke your fertility if you don't do other things to offset it. So uh kids, be careful. But What are your thoughts on testosterone and just sort of proactive male behavior, testosterone in adults. Older generation.

So I'm an advocate for it. I'm you should do it under the guidance of a doctor, which I'm doing, but I'm a fan of it. And I think you've done really interesting work about hormone replacement theory. I've listened to a lot of your work on it. The argument around testosterone and masculinity, I think, is a really important one in the political spectrum because to the far right's credit, they recognize the problem with young men before anybody else.

The problem is they conflate masculinity with coarseness and cruelty and their solution was to take non whites and women back to the fifties.

And that they conflate masculinity with toxicity. And there has to be something in the middle. There has to be an aspirational form of masculinity. And I would argue that we need to celebrate that initiation, aggressiveness,

All right, you know, Jimmy Carr, who's one of my idols now, says, All right, you can you can demonstrate cruelty or you can demonstrate valor. You can be a lover or you can be an addict. And Richard Reeves has this great saying, he's like, you want a man to be Invaluable in a shipwreck, but acceptable at a dam.

So there is a certain needle to be threaded here, but the Carnegie Award, which is given out to people who put their own physical safety in danger to save someone else's physical safety, it's literally the running into a burning house award. You see a car on fire, you put your own safety in harm's way to try and protect someone else's physical well being. They gave at eighty three awards last year, seventy five of them were men.

Men are more prone to take those types of not only bad risks, but good risks. And we need to celebrate that. Now you need both. You need both on the by the way, on the combat field, because men are more likely to rush out and try and save their comrade. But women are more likely to say, let's not be stupid, let's think this through. You need both of those. But we seem to be very um suspicious of that masculine energy right now.

And I think it needs to be celebrated. There needs to be someone who sees movement in the tribe and immediately grabs the spear and goes and tries and kill it for the benefit of the community. Who wants to put people on Mars and tr makes these crazy, ridiculous investments that make no sense and is super aggressive around these things. I think that's a wonderful energy. And when I went to the Democratic National Convention, I saw a parade of special interest groups.

Talking about the very real issues they all face, but I didn't see one mention of the group that has fallen further faster than any group in recent history, and that is young men.

As long as we can't talk about toxic femininity, these were clearly men writing to me, then um this whole discussion feels imbalanced. That's how they feel. They feel like There's the this idea that they're good men and they're bad men and they're really bad men. Totally agree. I you know, I'm I've got the optics of a You know, macaque monkey blindfolded on L S D when it comes to certain things.

members of our species, but when it comes to men, I grew up in a l big group of boys, et cetera, big group of men. I get it. That statement is true. They're great ones, they're uh ones, and then they're like really bad dudes. So When you talk about Manosphere, you know, the I would say it the if I had my way, Manosphere would apply to just the really bad ones, because that name has become synonymous with really bad men. Okay, we can come back to that perhaps.

There is this issue that no one is allowed to say there's Wonderful femininity.

That they've that women feel this is what I was told, so I'm regurgitating, that they've suffered so much at the hands of men that we need like a good twenty or thirty years before we're ready to get to that conversation. Which of course for young men growing up just pull like makes them feel like, okay, it's all it's all on us.

And that's good. Like agency advocacy for one's own life is important. Stay out of the really bad men category and ideally the not so good men category too. But this the the polarization I think is set by the fact that Sure, we can talk about toxic max masculinity, we can talk about the male crisis, but why aren't we talking about the suicide rate?

Well, because women's issues we're I think at a in a good way we're still thinking that we need to protect and provide for the women and the children in our society. We're holding that as in the highest regard. Like those they get the life rafts on the Titan uh when the Titanic goes down. Uh you know, it's it's it's complicated and there's a lot of off limits terms and I'm glad that they're coming up today just organically, because those off limits terms I think are the potential bridges between

the where we sit now, where we look at men and we go, shit, they're a mess. There's some of them are just like downright awful. We look over here and we go, Well man, they're really dissatisfied. The assumption is if a woman is dissatisfied or somehow not doing well that a man failed. That's a presumption that a lot of people make. I don't make that presumption.

And I can look back to times in my youth where nineties narrative probably fed that a bit. But now I think we we need to really like pull back the veil and go like who are like take a real hard look at ourselves and try and, you know, do this mesh that we're talking about.

it was just a lot harder to participate in that uplift if you weren't in that group. So men of my generation, born with my sexual orientation, skin color, and gender, Arguably had fifteen to eighteen X the wins in their sales. The question is, should a young man now pay the price for my privilege? And I understand the gag reflex when I start talking or advocating for men, because they look at me and they say, You had an unfair advantage. 100 percent guilty as charge.

But now a young man who is four times as likely to kill himself, three times as likely to be addicted, twelve times as likely to be incarcerated, and men of my generation aren't stepping up and providing the mentorship Or voting for the programs that might take a little bit of money away from my generation to support all young people and bring them up. And most of the programs and policies I advocate for would would advocate for all young people. The average seven year old

is seventy two percent wealthier than the seven year old forty years ago. The twenty five year old is twenty four percent less wealthy. And then every day it's speedballed with a hundred and ten notifications telling them that they're failing. And what do you know? They're the most obese depressed and anxious generation we've had in a long time. And there really isn't an honest conversation. And I've said this on stage and it gets some pushback. I'll say I think women make better managers.

I think that they are more emotionally in touch with other people. They have higher EQ. I think they'll probably make better doctors and lawyers. I think their attention to detail genetically or Or anthropologically, whatever you want to call it, their bedside manner, and there's more women in both law school and medical school now, especially medical school. If I say that, women are better managers, we'll make better doctors.

Nodding. Everyone everyone the women agree and the guys will look around and go, nod, right? If I say men on average make better entrepreneurs, and that's not to say that women shouldn't be offered the same opportunities and they haven't been. Right? Ninety five percent of the capital has been not only allocated to men, but the majority of it has been allocated by men who went to one of two schools, Harvard and Stanford. There's a I don't feel safe around you.

I barely hang out with anybody, so I've got a very small world.

And when you say you're advocating for seventy four percent of the population, you're not advocating for seventy four percent. You're discriminating against twenty six percent. And basically the only people they didn't mention were young men. So I understand the notion that men have had so much disproportionate advantage that there needs to be a catch up period, but I would argue it's gone a little bit overboard. Our school system K through twelve I would argue is biased against boys.

A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior adjusted basis as a girl. A black boy five times as likely. Seventy to eighty percent of K through twelve teachers are women. Who do people naturally advocate for? The people to remind them of themselves at that age. Seven to ten high school alectorians are girls. It's now sixty forty female male in college.

And so the bottom line is we level the playing field and there's a little bit of bias and women have totally blown by men. Fine, more power to them. But what do we do now that young men, just quite frankly, don't have obvious paths to prosperity? And young people aren't as economically prosperous relative as they used to be, and young men are disproportionately evaluated in society, especially in the mating market.

On their economic viability. And I get a ton of pushback saying, no, I'm just looking for emotionally in touch mail. I think that is such bullshit.

So if we don't figure out a way to level up all young people economically such that where there's more past for economic viability for young men. I think it's just gonna tear at our society. We're gonna have uh lower birth rates, fewer people to support, the very expensive programs which make up forty percent of our government spending now on people over the age of sixty five.

And we're gonna have real issues. And people say, well, that's repackaged violence, that men are more violent. I'm like, no, it's just the reality. If you look at every unstable violent society in history, it always has one thing at the core of it.

And that is a group of young men with a lack of economic or romantic opportunities. I don't care if it's Weimar Germany or some of the most unstable places in the Middle East or Africa. When you have the most dangerous person in the world is a young man who is lonely and broke.

And we are producing way too many of them. And by the way, I don't think the remedy here is affirmative action for men. I just think that's too politicized. But we have to stop transferring wealth from people their age to people my age. Why the hell Are we transferring every year$1.3 trillion from a generation that is the most anxious, depressed, and obese in American history to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet called Social Security? That's our third well in politics.

I'm not suggesting anyone should die in poverty. Should you and I get social security? No.

I mean, it's just there's my generation, I don't even think of us I'm ha I'm on the edge of Gen X baby boomer. The best way to describe my generation would be the vampire generation. We were never drafted into war. We never really had to serve. And what has my economic complexion been in America? Unprecedented prosperity, but the lowest taxes in in modern history. So a lot of these solutions I just think are common sense. We need to do away social security tax, right?

Six percent up to one hundred sixty thousand. So a kid working for me making one hundred and fifty or one hundred sixty K, good living, they pay nine thousand dollars. I make a lot more than that. I pay nine thousand dollars because it tops out at one hundred and sixty grand. Why does that make any sense? Who two biggest tax deductions, mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and stocks? People our age.

Who rents and makes their money from current income? All the dudes in this office, the young kids, right? We are literally transferring trillions of dollars from young people to old people. And we wonder why young men feel anxious when they are disproposed. Seventy five percent of women say economic viability is key to a mate. It's only twenty-five percent of men. Women still look at men as economic providers.

And so you have this entire generation of young men who feel like they have no purpose, no on ramps to the middle class, and are being evaluated on a set of criteria that get harder and harder for them each year. And then this like unbelievable set of expectations that they're taught they should have, because it seems like everyone else is making a million dollars selling East.

Or is an amazing shape or has a ridiculously hot boyfriend or girlfriend and has artist passes to Coachella. So i it'd be shocking if they weren't oppressed and obese.

And so it was very interesting right before the Trump administration came in, I started logging into these NIH hearings. And and I think our previous NIH director and I will go on record and saying and our current NIH director, Jay Bodhacarya, both Very good directors in different ways trying to do important, different things. And you'll notice the budget was not cut under Jay and IDC for the academics out there was not cut.

But an interesting problem was outed at the kind of end of Carolyn's role at NIH, the former director. And it was the following: someone said. What is the deal? Why are people living longer and young people are killing themselves? And we have all these mental health issues, mostly among men, but also a young among young women. And she said, It is true that we've been very successful in medicine at getting people 65 and older to live much, much longer, to treat.

late stage diabetes, to treat cancer, to treat uh we don't have cures for these things, but we've extended life for the older generation and to a large degree the quality of life, especially if they're willing to get sunlight, exercise. probably not drink alcohol at that age or drink a lot less, not smoke. People are living longer and longer and longer and tons of research money is being poured into this. There's this enormous gap.

Where many of the problems that are most important to young people to thrive in every way, not just health, but mental health, et cetera, they're just not even being studied. So there's this top weighting. of age and of seniority, clearly in what you're describing, but also in the science and that that we're funding and that clearly, clearly harms young people because

No one's studying porn addiction in a serious way at scale. Nobody's studying social media addiction in a serious way at scale. I think what Jonathan's done is fantastic and others are now getting involved in this. You know, it it's a problem if you look at the numbers, as serious as cancer for people who are, you know, in their fifties and older. And actually cancers and diabetes and and um deaths of despair. as our previous uh you know, Surgeon General pointed out.

They still have health care. Their kids still probably went to college partially for free, the inside ball of these schools that you and I work at, right? This whole network. Let'em retire. Let them keep their office. I don't I do believe there's a lot of wisdom in the older generations.

He would talk to the students and give them amazing ideas. I think that generational wisdom passed down is great. Guess what he wasn't doing? Consuming grant dollars, consuming square footage on campus. He was shedding knowledge for free because the system had taken it.

And they leave feet first. And the result is young people who could bring a certain creativity, a new way of looking at things, there's no room for them to come up. And I want to go back to the notion of vampire generation. We talk about sunlight, being social, eating well, sleeping well, all the keys, right? I would argue the number one predictor of longevity is one thing money.

China's gone from an average life expectancy of forty seven to seventy seven in sixty years as their wealth has gone up. You're in the bottom decile, I believe, of income. You live twelve years less long than someone in the upper decile, right? It's about money. And all we have done is not only suck money from young to old, we have sucked life because we are so selfish and so unwilling to pay it forward.

Old people elect even older people to vote themselves more money, and what they are doing, maybe unwittingly, but they are doing it, is they are robbing life and happiness from young people and transferring it to old people. There not only needs to be term limits, Washington, D.C., the people allocating capital has become become a cross between the Golden Girls and the Land of the Walking Dead. Enough already. We have totally robbed not only money, we have robbed life and health.

from young people because money in our society is help.

And the great state of California used to send coupons to my house. They were the same color as the kids would buy in school so I wouldn't be embarrassed. Right.

If 20 percent of your degrees aren't for nontraditional things such as nursing or specialty construction or vocational programming, you don't get access to tax-free money. In my opinion, mandatory national service. I think there's a ton of things we need to do. I think we should tax the shit out of private schools and reinvest that in public schools. We need to disassociate house property taxes from the quality of the schools. Think about the disadvantage.

Kids the average public school spends fifteen thousand dollars a year on a kid. The kid uh schools in poor era is nine thousand. The average private school spends seventy-two thousand dollars a year per student. So if you're fortunate enough to go to a private school like my kids, we're spending eight hundred and fifty grand on them, and some kids we're spending one hundred and twenty grand.

And you want that kid to compete against another kid to get into an elite university. And we all tell ourselves this myth now that oh with AI to college doesn't matter, it's never been more important. And if you had a drug that can make it twice as likely that you get married, half as likely that you kill yourself, three times as likely that you become a millionaire, ten times as likely that you run for office, four times as likely that you become an officer in the military.

Three times less likely that you become obese. Would you hoard that drug? And then when someone gets into the the working environment or the or the economy, would you create a tax policy that just transfers money from you to the wealthiest generation in the world? So many basic common sense solutions around higher ed and K through twelve that we come up with all these reasons we use terms like network effects.

or globalization or tech, and it's nothing but thinly veiled bullshit to transfer more money. The bottom ninety nine percent in young people are just nutrition for older people. And it's just i to me it's fairly obvious they're just common sense solutions and higher ed has become, unfortunately, an emblematic of the rejection LVMH of America.

Where you either at the age of eighteen have to be freakishly remarkable, are you captaining your lacrosse team and building wells in Africa? Then fine, come in in and we'll put you on a glide path to potentially being a billionaire or president. But say you're unremarkable, sorry, you're shit out of luck. Maybe maybe you can build a data center somewhere and maybe get into the middle class. And by the way, we don't even have an apprentice culture in this environment. So many parents

feel so shamed when their kid doesn't get into elite university. Eleven percent of LinkedIn profiles in Germany and the UK say apprentice. It's three percent here because parents feel shamed if their kid doesn't get into an elite university. We need to dramatically expand vocational programming, freshman classes, and stop this insane transfer of wealth and health.

From young people to old people. And higher ed, unfortunately, our industry is at the tip of the spear of fomenting this rejectionist bullshit culture where we've identified we're the arbiters of success. You know who gets into Stanford and NYU? Two cohorts.

The children are rich people, you're 77 times more likely to get into elite university if you're in a top 1 percent household, or the freakishly remarkable. And here's the thing, I can prove to us all mathematically that 99 percent of our children are not in the top 1 percent. America loved the unremarkable when I was a kid. It no it's fallen out of love with the unremarkable. Is America about identifying a superclass to become billionaires?

Or is about planting as many seeds as possible because no one can be the arbiter of greatness at 18. No one was going to see me at 18 and go, someday you might have an impact and you'll be wealthy. No one would have known that. And we've decided, no, we're about the children of rich people and we're about the freakishly remarkable. And everybody else, in my opinion, hopefully, hopefully gets to the middle class. But if you don't

There's big tech waiting there to addict you. There's a tax policy that might impoverish you. I think that young people, people people say about young people they're entitled. I think they're entitled to be enraged. I can't imagine the rage they must feel right now.

They that they look up, they look sideways, and they see all this prosperity. And they look at my generation and see the benefits we've accrued. And we want to spend two billion dollars two trillion dollars a year on their credit card. We spend seven trillion dollars a year.

We take in five trillion, and that two trillion is all going that incremental two trillion is all going to seniors. I'm in the club doing rails of ketamine and champagne, and the closest a young person gets is they get to throw their credit card in and I'll keep swiping it. I mean it is literally morally corrupt what we are doing in terms of deficit spending and how we are prioritizing our budget. Our budget reflects our values, and our values are all fucked up and have said, let's party.

Right? The baby boomers, let's party like there's no tomorrow and the o and the young people, well, they're gonna have to clean up the house and the garage is on fire and the dogs are gonna be pregnant, but that's their problem'cause I'll be dead by then. This generation, my generation, for some reason does not feel the same obligation to pay it forward or back and create infrastructure and investments for young people. And it's it to me it feels fairly obvious.

And the solutions are fairly common sense, but we'll have thoughtful conversations and social security will be a third rail and we'll have thoughtful reasons for why when I sell my business the first ten million dollars should be tax free. The last business I sold the first ten million bucks is tax free. What the actual fox is

They say, Well, Scott, entrepreneurs are more productive. We we we want to unleash our productivity, our most productive I have no idea what tax b people don't start businesses because of tax policy. Did you know what the tax did you know about twelve oh two? If you sell this business, the first ten million bucks is tax free if it's a I think it's a C Corp.

That's not why people start businesses. No. But every day there are new tax policies that do one thing, transfer money from those dudes to us, more me than you, because you're ten years younger than me. It needs to stop. There's basic tax policy. basic health and human services policy, right? Why on earth you're a doctor?

For God's sakes, we spend thirteen thousand dollars per individual for more obesity, more anxiety, more depression than every other G six nation. We should absolutely have nationalized socialized health care. The the bottom ninety-nine percent again are just a fucking body bag of nutrition for the top one percent, monetizing health care. I uh I'll put that to you. I absolutely think we need single payer.

socialized medicine right now. I think it is indefensible to healthcare in this country. Forty percent for I apologize I'm going off script here. Forty percent of households medical or dental debt You don't have kids, do you realize how what kind of shame you would feel as a father if your sixteen year old girl gets a screaming toothache and you have to go into debt to get her a root canal and that hangs over you for the next two or three years?

I do think we are a very top heavy culture. And maybe because I want to, I consider you Gen X as opposed to Boo.

you're gonna be among the best in shape for your dec for your decade. And I think, I mean, look, you you look great for a 40 year old. Like you're you're killing it. You know, you're fit, all this stuff. So but I wonder, is this kind of shame around it because your peer group kind of sucks in the way that you're describing? Or is this actually about age? Because to me, one of the mo one of the best things is to feel like Your friends, your people, the people you associate with are awesome.

And your generation, I loved, I think Gen X is an incredible generation. As this conversation continues. I'm thinking more and more about the responsibility and both the failures and the opportunities to to remedy things for the next generation. That's how we started this conversation. So two questions there. First of all.

Is that what that's about? Like your peers kind of suck and you don't want to be a part of it? Because I consider you Gen X and I'm not just trying to, what do the kids say, glaze you here? You're winning on every dimension and you got two health what sounds like healthy, productive boys, like you like you got it all, man. Like

Um but just Just the call out about paying it forward and the call out to your to your I know a lot of young men and a lot of successful men listen to this podcast. I I think my generation on a lot of levels, we're talking about tax policy, but men aren't stepping up with respect to young men. If you look at the single point of failure, if you were to reverse engineer

When a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model through either death, divorce, or abandonment. When a boy loses a male role model, And ninety percent of the time a single parent home is headed by a woman as mine was. At that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. And men aren't stepping up. There are three times as many women applying to be big sisters in New York as there are men applying to be big brothers.

And some of it is a taboo that men are concerned or self conscious about expressing an interest to get involved in a boy's life because of sexual abuse from the Catholic Church. And Michael Jackson and the rest. But there are a ton of men out there in their thirties. I think you have a bunch of them working with you.

that may or may not have kids of their own. You don't have to be C.O. Goldman Sachs. You don't have to degree in a have a degree in adolescent psychiatry. You just have to be a good man trying to live a virtuous life. And as someone who mentors young men, I can tell you it is so easy to add value. Just showing an interest, answering basic questions.

This is a question I literally got now six weeks ago from a young man I'm mentoring. I'm on this new diet. I'm just drinking it pineapple juice and creatine. Okay. I don't have a medical degree and I can tell you that's wrong. Another question I got eight weeks ago. I saw this amazing thing. I'm moving to Alaska, Scott. What do you what you're moving to Alaska I saw this amazing thing on National Graveyard? I've decided I want to move to Alaska.

You have a good job and your mom is sick, right? Yeah. Why are you moving to Alaska? You're gonna quit your job and move to Alaska. If you just ask basic questions, you add value to these young men's lives. Just real basic stuff. Well, I'm feeling depressed. Did you get outside? Are you working out? There needs to be a societal guide sidekist that a moment a young man

Doesn't have men in his life, that the the tribe moves in and injects young men into their life. And I would the call out to men is. You know, it there's this there's this great quote in one of the Paul Wes Anderson movies, Magnolia, where the guy says, I have love to give, I just don't know where to give it, I just don't know where to put it. It's such a wonderful statement. I think there's so many men out there that have

real uh I like I think some of the most rewarding types of love is to give fraternal and paternal love. My purpose, my thing in life is to try and prepare my men for others, prepare my boys for others. That's my job. It gives me purpose.

I think there's so many men out there that could offer so much fraternal and fraternal love to a young man or a boy and they don't do it either because they're too lazy or they're not stepping up or they w they're worried that people will suspect them of something. And there's so much need. And this is what you do. You find a single mother in your workplace and say, Go into a game, does your son want to join me or join me and my boys?

Does your son want to hang out, washing your car, going to a game, whatever it is? That is the e in my opinion, that is the easiest solve that doesn't involve the government right now. But the bottom line is. Men of our age aren't stepping up and I couch it in masculinity. You take care of yourself. That's the first circle. You affix your own oxygen mask. You can't ca t can't take care of other people.

unless you're economically and emotionally somewhat viable. You take care of your family, take your extended family, take care of your community. But the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. And not enough men are doing it, even really successful men. They're not stepping up. They're not helping young men.

and the easiest thing to do, the most and it's so rewarding. I can't tell you, it makes me feel and I don't do enough of it, but I do mentor young men. It's just so easy to add value. They make such stupid fucking decisions. My job with my sons is to be the prefrontal cortex. No, you have to wear shoes to school. I I I know this is right. Wear shoes to school. So anyways the call out. Y if we want better men, we have to be better men.

I don't think you can really hit the pinnacle of what it means to be successful in masculinity unless you're involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. We have the most single parent homes of any nation in the world. We used to be number two to Sweden. We'd pass them two years ago. But that's what I would call, I constantly talk about government fixes because I'm a lefty. They're the easiest societal fix is quite frankly is just male mentorship.

The original script for Mr. Mom that he wrote a play, Wait Till Your Mother Gets Home, that became Mr. Mom. He's like big buff guys, white.

Different men for different sources of mentorship. It will become clear what I'm saying here in a moment. My academic advisor, my PhD advisor was an incredible woman. So I was mentored by women too, but that's characteristic of academic.

you know, and we've worked out our our stuff. But at that time it was, you know, it was skateboarding, it was lifting weights, it was uh I want to become a firefighter, actually w took fire science courses and and did that. And then eventually tripped and fell into science and mentored m uh menteed myself To a wonderful professor at Santa Barbara, and then the the story unfolds.

And my mom was smart enough to get men involved in my life really quickly. And it was hu it was everything for me. Everything. I got a my mom's boyfriend gave me two hundred bucks and said I I started asking about stocks. And he said if you haven't spent this or bought stocks by the time I'm here next weekend

I'm um taking it back. So I went to Westwood and Wilshire Boulevard and walked into Dean Witter and this guy with a big jufro came walking out, Cy Fer Sarrow and said, Hi, I'm I'm Cy Sarrow. And every day I would call I didn't have a lot of friends at 13, him from the Emerson Junior High Payphone, 20 cents, and he'd give me a lessons on the market. I bought twelve shares of Columbia Pictures and be like,

Close encounters of third kind is a hit, that's why the saga's up. Casey's shadow is a bomb. When there's more buyers for the stock and fewer sellers, The stock goes up. And he taught me about markets. I've been investing in stocks since I was thirteen. I've made a lot of money selling my companies. I've made a shit ton of money investing in stocks. And just this guy, and by the way, he came to one of my live podcasts about two years ago. He's now eighty-two.

Just this guy's interest in me, like just meant the world. And also, and this is a weird story, but he recently just passed away, you know how in media there's that second family people talk about. The dude who has a family and you find out he has a second family. My mom and I were the second family. My mom's boyfriend and my kind of male role model had a family.

And not only that, I see it with my boys. Their mom's voice literally becomes white noise to them. They like stop hearing it. And they they take her seriously, or literally but not seriously. And uh and but even even just saying that boys needed men five years ago, this dialogue has come so far was triggering to some people. What women can't raise good men? No, my mom raised me a lot of my life.

But if I had not had a bunch of men who just naturally stepped in, there was a guy across the hall who noticed that it was just me and my mom. He would come over his girlfriend to me every other week and say, Do you want to come horseback riding with us? Right?'Cause he knew I was being raised by my mom. It was n a natural instinct for him to come over and take me out. And I worry that we've lost that, that we don't have enough male mentors.

Uh but that alone was important to me. But I'm gonna think a lot about many of the things you've said. You've talked about having a code, this you know, this uh the notion of of of really being a a provider and a protector, having building a financial, you know, foundation for oneself. Uh

you know, putting uh service over uh attention to self and uh and just so many things of value. This is one that um I know many people are gonna come back to over and over again. And uh I'm just grateful for you doing what you do. You defy all the stereotypes of the of the groups that people assign you to, which those are my favorite kind of people. So

encourage people to say outrageous things. And sometimes they're not very informed. And I'm guilty of this sometimes. I've fallen to this Dunning Kruger where I think I know something about something'cause I know a decent amount about marketing or business. And I think in our leaders we need to make intelligence

And honesty and science cool again and you're doing that. And I worry sometimes a lot of our most senior elected f officials on the health side are not making intelligence or science cool again.

And there's gotta be people like you out there that young men aspire to be more like that say, No, training, domain expertise being measured and science matter. Like that you're making that cool again.

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