From financial literacy to modern masculinity, Prof G has a theory for everything.
In this new episode Steven sits down with world-leading marketing guru, Professor Scott Galloway.
Scott began his career as a Fixed Income Analyst at Morgan Stanley, and in 1992 he started his journey as a serial entrepreneur, founding the brand and marketing consultancy firm, ‘Prophet’, the e-commerce site, ‘RedEnvelope’, and digital intelligence firm, L2 Inc’. In 2017, he released his New York Times bestselling book, ‘The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google’. Scott is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and host of ‘The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway’.
In this conversation Scott and Steven discuss topics, such as:

The biggest problem facing men

Why we need to speak about men

Where we are going wrong with men

How young people are doing worse that their parents

Why levels of suicide is increasing

I could have come off the tracks

Why young men are struggling

Why kids don't have social skills

How marriage is now viewed as a luxury item

The future of AI and sex bots ruining relationships

Why a partner is the key to a happy life

The ways that rejection is the key to success

The benefits of quitting porn

The key to financial security

Why you shouldn’t follow your passion

The way to get rich by living below your means

Why you should assume you aren't smarter than anyone else

Patience as the key to getting rich

How to start investing and Scott’s success with investing

Why financial literacy is essential

What is the ultimate expression of masculinity

Why young men need role models

The most dangerous thing about Andrew Tate

What really impresses people

Why luxury items are about sex and god

What made Scott hyper focused

Why you should do an audit on your life

How the solutions to world problems are simple

Why we should give young people money

The ways that masculinity has been hijacked


You can purchase Scott’s most recent book, ‘Adrift: 100 Charts that Reveal Why America is on the Brink of Change’, here: https://bit.ly/3PCIEbc

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If you were to point to a single point of failure, it would be the f***.

1 of the most desired minds when it comes to business and life.

He is about the obsession of how to be better as individuals and as a society.

Society tells you, especially I think as a man, that your worth is highly correlated to your economic success.

But for the first time, a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents.

Men under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.

The average age of a first-time home buyer is 47 now.

You have to swipe right a thousand times to get a single coffee.

It's 1 in 7 men doesn't have a single friend.

We're going to have men having relationships with machines.

The most dangerous person in the world, a lonely, young, broke male.

And that can lead to very ugly places for the economy and society.

What is the impact this is having on women?

Women have become better educated and they're making more money.

It means that the quote-unquote pool of viable mates for women is going down every year.

And a lot of these men are finding role models online.

Yeah, this is a real issue that this is a group that's struggling.

On the far right, people like Trump, a criminal, Putin, a murderer.

On the far left, As far as I can tell, their vision of masculinity is to act more like a woman.

We need a new vision for modern masculinity.

And this is the 1 I'm working through and will definitely get me in the most trouble.

Scott, it's quite clear that there is a crisis in society in different areas.

I called a friend of mine who is called Simon Gunning before this conversation literally 10 minutes ago.

He heads up 1 of the largest mental health charities in the UK and they specifically focus on suicide.

And I said to him, can you tell me the latest stats on suicidality amongst men and purposeless and those kinds of things?

And he said to me, someone dies by suicide in the UK every 90 minutes, 76% of these are male.

It's the single biggest cause of death for men under 45, and it's the single biggest cause of death for 15 to 49 year olds.

And the category of 19 to 35 year olds is twice as likely to report being in a crisis personally than any other group.

And lastly, 16 to 24 year olds are currently the fastest growing group in history to exhibit suicidality.

What is going wrong in the way we've designed and the way that we're executing upon this vision of society?

I think even the way we frame the problem is incorrect.

And that is when we talk about, if you were to say that women are 3 times as likely as men to kill themselves.

I think we would talk about the problem through the lens of it being a societal issue and we would immediately move to what investments and change in behavior and education would address that problem.

When we say young men are killing themselves at 3 times the rate as young women, we use terms like accountability or say things, well, if they just opened up more about their emotions or they need to get their act together.

And that is we've decided when it comes to men, compassion is a 0 sum game.

And that if you feel bad for men, it immediately kind of outs you as someone who might be anti-women or who's gotten red pill.

Because The void, the statistics are just staggering.

4 times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.

And because nobody was talking openly and honestly about those very real issues, that void created opportunity for what I think are some unproductive voices to fill that void and start speaking to these men.

And naturally a lot of people now have a gag reflex when they hear people talking about the problems around men.

So the first is we need to frame the problem as This is a real issue that requires and deserves compassion and our sympathy.

Gay marriage didn't in any way diminish heteronormative marriage.

And so the first is to have a conversation that this is a group that's struggling and to stop using terms like accountability and somehow blaming them for their own problems here.

The 19 year old male should not pay for the sins of his father or grandfather.

Now, and my Yoda on this is Richard Reeves, but basically it comes down to kind of 3 things.

Our prefrontal cortex does not mature as fast as a woman's.

An 18 year old woman from an executive function standpoint is like a 20 year old male.

So, or put Another way, 2 seniors in high school applying to college, the woman is essentially competing against a 16-year-old.

And that is her prefrontal cortex had that executive function that he has, she had it at 16.

So we're seeing double the number of women graduating from US colleges as men.

Because it's 60-40 ratio when they start, and then the ratio only gets worse because more men drop out.

That still is an incredible on-ramp to influence an economic security, and these men aren't getting on that on-ramp.

There's also, I think the education system is just biased against men.

Boys are 5, excuse me, a boy is twice as likely on a risk adjusted basis or a behavior adjusted basis to be suspended for the exact same activity as a girl who's brought into the principal's office for the exact same infraction.

You're sitting in front of me as a guy, you're twice as likely to be suspended for cheating on your chemistry test as if you as a girl coming in.

A black boy is 5 times as likely to be suspended as a girl.

Now, part of that is that 90% of primary school teachers are women.

There are more female fighter pilots per capita than there are male kindergarten teachers.

Men are not going into early stage education.

And this is really important because you have an entire cohort of boys who grow up.

If you were to point to a single point of failure where all of this starts, if you said, where did this young man come off the tracks?

If you tried to identify 1 signal through all the noise, it would be the following.

When the boy no longer has a male role model.

And with incarceration, with male abandonment, and with a lack of teachers in primary school, you have an entire generation of young men who grow up having never had a male role model.

And so a lack of male role model is an education system that is biased against them.

And then I think economic policies, whether it's the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, the transfer of wealth from young to old people, and you think, well, the fact that someone over the age of 70 is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago, when someone under the age of 40 is 24 percent less wealthy, that affects men and women.

I think it's especially hard on men because I think men are still primarily evaluated in terms, through the lens of their economic vitality.

So they're biologically behind women, have an education system biased against them, and we have economic policies that have created a great deal of shame and rage.

And the last point I would just say is for the first time in Europe and America's history, a 30 year old is not doing as well as his or her parents were at

And that creates just tremendous shame and rage.

The average age of a first time home buyer is 47 now.

In 1980, the average age of a first time home buyer was 29.

Young people have been sequestered from whatever you call, loosely speaking the American dream or the UK dream.

So the odds are just, the forces in the face of young men have just become greater and greater, and it's manifesting in a lot of different ways.

Lower marriage rates, lower birth rates, and skyrocketing in suicide.

Should also add that suicide is way up among teen girls because of social media.

So different challenges at different ages.

You're committing a lot of your time to both talking about this, but writing about this subject matter.

Why does it matter so much to you personally?

Of all the things, because you're 1 of those individuals, and I spoke to your team and they kind of echoed this, that is very diverse in their ability to speak about subject matter.

You could talk about investing or money or business or happiness, but for some reason you've honed in, it seems, in part, to solve this challenge that young men specifically are facing.

I was in stalling shock because I'm that guy.

I'm that guy that as a kid, like lost, didn't have a male role model.

We were in what I affectionately call an upper lower middle-class household.

I just could have easily come off the tracks and almost did a few times.

And because government stepped in and because of things like Pell Grants, which are financial aid for kids in the lower, I think quartile of income earning houses because the University of California saw themselves as public servants, not as luxury brands.

And they let in 76% of applicants, and I got rejected the first time.

So I was 1 of the 24% that didn't get in and then I got in again.

But the big hand of government lifted me up and also I had men, a lot of strange men step in, a stockbroker, a baseball coach, a neighbor.

I had all these wonderful men kind of step in.

And between the warm embrace of government in America that you still have unremarkable people, men who stepped in, this is nothing but for me, I relate to these young men and I see an opportunity.

I just think the problem is so much greater than the emotion and the bandwidth and the resources being allocated to it.

And it's just simply, you know, kind of a nod to the institutions and the men that helped me.

So, and also be blunt, it's a commercial opportunity.

It's a chance to talk about something that's it's a white space.

If you think of it yourself as a thought leader, you wanna be fearless and you wanna move the needle on stuff.

So this for me was just, you know, slowly but surely, you just look at the data and it all leads to 1 place.

And that is young men have fallen further faster than any cohort in America and Europe and it needs to be addressed and talked about.

This idea that it all comes back to do you have a male role model in your life links?

Interestingly, to a lot of the data that says we're less likely to be married than ever before.

We're less likely even I was reading some stats around when our first kiss happens.

It's now on average into their early twenties.

Everything seems to be moving further and further and back.

So from that, I deduce that the chance that a young man would have a male role model in their life is probably deteriorating as well because there's less marriages.

There's seems to be the prospects of dating seem to have dropped as well.

So is there correlation between these 2 things in some respect?

Yeah, there's, what's strange is, so you don't have kids, right?

What's weird about raising kids now is that my mom was worried about me getting into too much trouble.

I think what's fairly common now among parents is we're worried our kids aren't gonna get into enough trouble.

And that is we see the power of unsupervised play.

We see the power of maybe sneaking into a movie and getting caught.

We see just that it's important that at some point, kids are gonna experiment with alcohol and drugs and kind of better they ease into it as opposed to never do anything and then end up at college their freshman year and just can't handle the onslaught of it.

So, I think that there's something about the concierge and bulldozer parenting that where we use so many sanitary wipes on a kid's life that they don't develop their own immunities.

of Harvard's incoming freshmen class are virgins.

And I worry that, I mean, this is gonna sound strange.

But we have had such dramatic falls in that and drunk driving accidents, which is great.

But what it signals quite frankly is that kids are so over-programmed and have such a lack of socialization now.

The number of high school teenagers that sees their friends every day has been cut in half, that we're slowly but surely sequestering from each other.

And when we do that, we become less mammalia.

We're mammals, we're literally, if you have dogs, dogs are happiest when they're lying on top of you.

The worst thing you can do to a dog is leave it alone all day.

And what we're doing to young people is we're kind of, they are leaving others and themselves alone all day.

We're separating from each other, we're becoming less social.

And there's a group of men who aren't received well at school, don't find a source of pride, auto shop, metal shop, wood shops gone away.

They go online to date, the majority of them get rejected.

If you're average attractiveness in online dating, you have to swipe right 200 times to get a single coffee.

If you set up 5 coffees, you'll get 1 will actually show up, 4 of the 5 will ghost you and decide later on they don't actually wanna meet up.

So a young man of average attractiveness in online dating has to swipe right a thousand times.

He gets validation that he has no worth to the other sex.

He starts engaging with people because he has less opportunities for random encounters where he has to develop those skills.

And slowly but surely he sequesters from society.

And at some point he just is not really savable.

He just never develops those skills, those skills around friendship or romantic relationships.

In the United States, 1 in 7 men doesn't have a single friend, 1 in 4, 1 in 4 can't name a best friend.

In addition, marriage has become now a luxury item.

If you're in the upper quartile of income-hurning households, there's a 3 in 4 chance you're gonna get married.

If you're in the lower quartile, the lowest quartile, there's a 3 and 4 chance you will never get married.

So we have a group of the most dangerous person in the world, we're producing millions of them, and that is a lonely, young, broke male.

And just bridging into AI, I think the biggest danger in AI, that people are worried about it becoming sentient, I don't buy any of that, or super weapons, I think that's a problem, but we've managed through those things, bioweapons, et cetera, before.

I think the biggest problem that AI presents is that big tech presents a series of low calorie, low risk entry points into what feels like a reasonable facsimile of a relationship.

I think I'm making friends online, but you're not really experiencing friendship.

I think I'm in a relationship with somebody.

You're gambling on Coinbase or Robinhood.

And rather than endure the rejection and try and develop the skills and make the effort, and it is an effort and involves rejection of going out into the physical world and revealing yourself as someone who would like to be friends with another man, express romantic interest, take those risks.

We're developing these digital analogs of life that create low entry, low risk relationships.

And you think, well, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is because it leads to depression.

Because the reason why romantic comedies are 2 hours and not 20 minutes is that life is about the victory of taking risks, enduring rejection, and having a small business that works.

About approaching someone and getting the interview.

Cold emailing someone and getting a coffee and quite frankly pursuing someone and developing the skills and deciding to put on a clean shirt and maybe shower more often and maybe hit the gym every once in a while and maybe text when you're not sure how this person feels about you and figure out a way to interact with someone around the nuance and develop the skills around human sexuality such that you can develop a relationship.

And fewer and fewer men are engaging in those risks and that victory.

And I think that AI in combination with sex bots is gonna create an industry where men start having relationships with algorithms and dolls.

Supposedly the sex bot industry is gonna be bigger than the domestic box office receipts of all movie theaters in the US within 5 to 6 years.

So we're gonna have men having relationships with machines and dolls as opposed to other humans.

And I think it's just, it creates a level of depression.

I think her should be required watching for every teen male.

And I think every teenager in high school should have a course as part of health on mating dynamics, where they teach, especially young men, that approaching a woman and expressing romantic interests while making her feel safe is a skill and there's nothing wrong with that.

And that the end game, a relationship, a partner, a romantic partner is 1 of the keys to a happy life.

And we are sequestering, for a variety of reasons, men from the opportunities to have those relationships.

But what we're seeing with women is 2 in 3 under the age of 30 have a boyfriend Only 1 in 3 men have a girlfriend because women are dating older.

They want more economically and emotionally viable men

It's almost it's almost impossible for me to see how that doesn't become a huge part of male dating.

You know, I was speaking to Mustafa Salomon, who was the 1 of the co-founders of...

1 of the co-founders of DeepMind, which sold to Google.

And in his new book, The Coming Wave, he talks about how all of these breakthroughs in technology, 1 of which is AI, 1 of which is robotics, is going to sort of intersect with the ability to have literally someone in your house who can not only clean your house and do the dishes and make your lunch, but also can love you in whatever artificial form that love comes.

They can agree with everything you say, they can encourage you, and they can have sex with

I'm sure this might be clipped by somebody, there is a certain cohort of men who would rather choose that than nothing.

And when they're faced increasingly with that choice, it feels really inevitable to me to see how they would choose, some of them would choose a sex bot or something to that effect to fill that void.

We all make that type of decision in different increments.

A lot of times it's easier to say, I'm just gonna stay home and watch Netflix and take an edible and order in and maybe watch porn instead of go out and engage in the expense, the emotional trauma, the effort, the skills I have to provide to try and establish something resembling a real world relationship.

And I think teaching young people rejection and My son didn't make the football team last week and he's 13 years old and it was a big deal.

He thought this was the way he integrated into the UK.

He loves football, tried out, trouts are going really well, came home, threw his bag down, tears, didn't make the football team.

And of course his mother's totally freaked out.

And I'm like, this is a awful day for all of us and it's a great day for him because this is what's gonna happen.

He's gonna wake up tomorrow and he's gonna realize he's fine.

And he's gonna develop a little bit of callous over that emotion.

And I think you're an entrepreneur and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.

I don't know your relationship status, but if you're an entrepreneur and you're single, you're used to enduring rejection.

Because the only thing you know that has happened in someone who's very successful professionally and personally is they have developed the skills to endure rejection.

You approach strange women in a strange place, most of the time it's gonna be awkward and sometimes it's gonna be humiliating because you're gonna get rejected.

You wanna start a business, you keep asking people for money, You keep asking employees to join you.

You keep asking for customers and clients.

And the only thing I can guarantee you is a shit ton of rejection.

The ability to endure that rejection is absolutely the key to success.

More so than talent, more so than I even, I wouldn't say hard work, I'd say grit is right up there.

But your ability to endure rejection is the, if you want to punch above your weight class economically or romantically, then get out a spoon and get ready to eat shit.

That is a prerequisite to that kind of success.

And technology is enabling people to say, well, why subject yourself to that risk?

You can engage in something that feels sort of similar without any risk at all.

And over the long term, it's just such a bad trade.

Porn is the largest unsupervised experiment on young men that we've ever had.

And it's largely unsupervised because there isn't a lot of academic research on it because most academics don't want to be known as the porn professor.

So there really is a lack of research around it.

And when I coach young men, the first thing I do, kind of my go-to is I get their phone, I look at screen time.

I'm like, okay, let's think of your, what do you have as a young person?

You have a lack of financial capital, but you have a lot of human capital and that's really important, time.

So we're gonna think about your time as money and we're gonna decide how we're gonna invest it.

Let's look at your current portfolio of investments.

And I asked them to unlock their phone and I say, I won't be judgmental.

In between Twitter, TikTok, porn, Coinbase, it's so easy to find a minimum of 10 and sometimes up to 50 hours a week.

See all The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett transcripts on Applepodcasts

Professor Scott Galloway: “This Is An Emergency!” The Number Of Men Having No Sex Increased 180%! (Why This Is Dangerous & How We Fix It)