What does a liberal solution to the masculinity crisis look like? As men fall behind in the American educational system and the economy, they’re looking for meaning — but often find it in the wrong places.
My guest today is Scott Galloway, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business. Galloway is an unlikely masculinity guru. He’s a liberal academic, a business founder and a married father.
He had a lot to say about the social and economic reasons young men seem to be struggling, but he’s still optimistic about the future.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Scott Galloway, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
I think at this point, probably most people listening or watching are familiar with some of the basic information on the condition of young men in America. And so I want to, not dive into that data, but start at a more personal level.
You are a teacher, you’re a father, you’re a podcaster. In your personal life, how did you first get the sense that young men in America were in a kind of trouble?
Scott Galloway: Well, it was a specific moment that lit the candle, if you will.
It was during Covid, and a young man named Alex Kearns was trading options on Robinhood. He got what ultimately ended up being an errant message saying that he owed them thousands of dollars. And he spent most of the night sending panicked emails to an unresponsive Robinhood, which wants to scale, so there are no humans.
Then in the morning, he decided that he didn’t want to leave his family with that burden, and he took his own life.
And you see this kid, Ross — do you have kids?
Douthat: I have a number of kids, yes.
Galloway: Occasionally, you see something, and you see a picture of a kid, and you’re like: That’s my boy.
Douthat: Yeah. And you have two sons, right?
Galloway: Yeah, I have two sons. And that happened to me — this is the power of media. It just reached into my soul and grabbed me.
And I started doing some research on it, and I found a lot of data about the challenges facing young men — in this instance, the unrelenting foe of Big Tech, which every day is trying to figure out a million times a second a way to get you on a screen one more second, and the young, immature prefrontal cortices of men are especially vulnerable.
And Big Tech, which is 40 percent of our S&P right now, essentially has one job, and that’s to separate or sequester young men from their relationships, which is key to a mammal’s health.
I worry that we’re evolving a new species of asocial, asexual males.
It is receiving a lot of attention now, which is really rewarding, but it wasn’t four years ago. When I went to the Democratic convention in Chicago just a couple years ago, I saw a parade of special interest groups articulating all the very real issues different special interest groups still face. I didn’t hear one word about the cohort that has fallen further faster than any cohort in American history, and that’s young men.
That was kind of the moment when I started going down this rabbit hole, if you will.
Douthat: Take us back in time in your own life. Your book about this subject is partially analysis and prescription, but a lot of it is personal story and memoir.
So you’re 61, right?
Galloway: Yeah. Can you believe that, Ross?
Douthat: An exceptionally well-preserved 61, I must say.
Galloway: Oh, God.
Douthat: You came of age about 15 years before I did, so in the 1970s and ’80s. What do you think was different in the male experience then?
Galloway: That’s a generous question. I relate a lot to these struggling young men, because I think I could have very easily, with a few wrong turns or bad decisions or lack of infrastructure, really come off the tracks. My father was not involved in my life. I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died as a secretary.
I feel like America, back then, loved the unremarkable. I got assisted lunch. I always say I’m a product of Big Government. And by the way, this is not a humble brag — I’m a remarkably talented person. I may be even a 1-percenter, but that puts me in a room with 75 million other people.
My life, my wealth, my opportunities are well above the 75-millionth most blessed person, and I reverse-engineer those things to several factors that aren’t my fault.
The first factor was the irrational passion for my well-being from my mother. But maybe more than that is I was smart enough to be born in America, and especially California, in the ’60s as a white heterosexual male. I got assisted lunch. I applied to U.C.L.A., Ross, when it had a 74 percent admissions rate, and I was one of the 26 percent that didn’t get in. And I was installing shelving for what seemed like a lot of money at the time — $18 an hour.
And I came home one day, and I just broke down. I said to my mom — I was living with my mom: This is my life?
Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational work, but I wanted to be a doctor at the time. At that moment, I had aspirations to be a pediatrician.
She said: Well, is there something we can do? And I found out there’s something called an appeal process, and I wrote an appeal, and the truth has a nice ring to it. I said: I want to be a doctor, and I’m installing shelving right now.
And I remember the call. Someone from the admissions office at U.C.L.A. called me and said: You’re not qualified, but you’re a native son of California, and we’re going to give you a shot.
I got through U.C.L.A., showing up with a 1984 Honda Accord and $60, and $4,500 in student loans. My tuition was $1,200 a year.
And then I graduated. I rewarded the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regents of U.C. with a 2.27 GPA — which for your listeners, Ross, is not very good.
Douthat: It’s above a 2.0.
Galloway: It’s above a 2.0. Yeah.
Douthat: It’s better than a 2.0.
Galloway: It’s enough to graduate. They did give me the same diploma everyone else got. And this is the crazy part: Berkeley, arguably the finest public institution in America, let me in to graduate school.
Like a lot of men, I think I just didn’t get my act together until I was about 25, 26, and it kind of inspired an upward spiral of prosperity. I worry now that what we’re trying to do in America is identify a superclass of freakishly remarkable young kids who play lacrosse and find time to build wells or have platforms helping the mental health of kids all over the world — or are the children of rich kids and turn them into billionaires.
And I think America has lost its script. I think the whole point of America is to give unremarkable kids a shot at being remarkable or doing something important. I feel like I had that infrastructure, and I worry that in today’s world, a lot of that infrastructure has been crammed into the kids who had already demonstrated they’re remarkable at the age of 18.
Douthat: There are a couple places I’d like to go with that.
One point is the idea of slow development and grace. To me, when you tell that story, I don’t think you’re unremarkable, but it does sound like you were a kid who needed time and space and opportunity that wasn’t there at age 16 or 18, and ended up being there.
Talk about that for a minute. Is the big difference the space that society allows between the ages of 15 and 30 for people to screw up or find themselves? Is that a big change that has disadvantaged men?
Galloway: I would argue the primary education system is biased against boys.
Boys are twice as likely to be suspended. And once a boy is suspended twice, he’s probably not going to college.
Think about the way we approach what we ask of students in school. Sit still, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described the activities that come more easily to a girl. Even push a pencil around, ask questions. Our prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl’s.
Then you have a kid who, quite frankly, may not be ready for college, and a lot of the traditional on-ramps to a middle class life have been closed. We all knew that kid in high school who wasn’t going to go to college, but he could fix your mom’s car. And there was wood shop, auto shop, metal shop — those have gone away. They’ve been replaced with computer science and Mandarin courses.
And we’ve all decided as parents that if our kid can make 80 grand a year at the age of 19 installing energy efficient HVAC heaters, that somehow you’ve failed if they don’t end up at M.I.T. So we have this one path of success that has been driven into families, and there’s a certain amount of shame.
Then you have my industry, which has embraced this [expletive] rejectionist LVMH strategy of artificially constraining supply — such that we can brag that we turn away 90 percent of our applicants.
Douthat: Your industry being higher ed?
Galloway: Yeah, it’s morally corrupt. Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment, and lets in just more than 1,100 kids a year. They could let in 11,000. It’s in the middle of nowhere. They have the infrastructure, they have the money, and by the way, there would not be any degradation in the quality of those freshmen.
But once people have a degree or a housing permit or a house — and this is the virus that infects America — they pull up the gates behind them because it makes their degree and their house worth more.
How many times have you heard someone, Ross, say: I would never get into the college I went to if I applied now?
Douthat: I hear that occasionally as a parent of younger teenagers. [Laughs.]
Galloway: What that means is your daughter is not getting in, and we have to flip the script. But maybe he or she does go to college for one or two years, borrows a lot of money, decides it’s not for them, drops out, and what is one of the few forms of debt that is not automatically dischargeable in bankruptcy? Student debt. They drop out, and this debt haunts them the rest of their lives.
In addition, the transfer of wealth could reasonably be called a transfer from the poor and the middle class to the rich, but more than anything, the transfer has really been from the young to the old.
Who owns homes and stocks? People our age. Who rents and makes their money from current income and wages? Young people.
Douthat: Right. But those are things — student loans, cost of housing and so on — that affect men and women both, right?
Galloway: One hundred percent.
Douthat: Both men and women are going into debt. Both men and women are struggling to buy homes.
But on the question of men, in particular, you mentioned earlier going to the Democratic convention and hearing people talking about all kinds of identity groups and their struggles, but not talking about men. I think it’s very clear from the perspective of people at the Democratic convention why they’re thinking that way.
They listen to your story where you say: I was lucky to be born a white heterosexual man in 1960s America — and they say: Damn right. White heterosexual men had all kinds of unfair advantages. They were propped up in various ways by what gets called patriarchy.
Galloway: Yep.
Douthat: Those advantages have gone away, and now men are struggling. But didn’t everyone else have to struggle for hundreds and hundreds of years? Why can’t men deal with it?
I’m curious how much of what you experienced, the advantages you feel like you experienced growing up, are connected to unfair advantages, sexism and so on, and what isn’t.
What is the thing you can pull out of the ’60s and ’70s and say: This is still something we can have in a more egalitarian America?
Galloway: That is 100 percent fair. It’s very easy, as a younger man, to credit your grit and your character for your success and blame the market for your failures.
I didn’t really recognize it until I was in my 40s. I raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my startups in the ’90s, and it didn’t dawn on me that there weren’t any gay people or nonwhites or women raising money from venture capitalists.
The question is: Should a 19-year-old male being raised by a single mother pay the penalty for my privilege? Because things have changed dramatically. The advantages I had are no longer nearly as distinct, and maybe there’s even some disadvantage to being a young male.
I want to touch on what you said: that the economic challenges facing young people impact men and women. One hundred percent true.
But this is the bottom line, and I don’t think we like to admit this: Beyoncé could work at Kentucky Fried Chicken and marry Jay-Z. The opposite is not true.
Young women are disproportionately and unfairly evaluated on their aesthetics. Young men are disproportionately and unfairly evaluated on their economic viability.
Young men get much, if not most, of their identity from their professional or economic success or lack thereof. So while I agree with you, and I think the solutions should be gender neutral, focused on lifting up all young people, it has disproportionately, negatively impacted young men.
Douthat: But then maybe they can’t be gender neutral.
I think part of why you’re an interesting figure is that you make a lot of arguments that are right now seen as conservative and conservative coded. A lot of things that you say about the struggles of men are things that you hear from conservative writers, conservative thinkers and the manosphere in their crudest form.
As I watch you, I feel like you have these views, and you’re trying to stay liberal. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s what I see in Scott Galloway. But it seems like what you’re describing is a landscape where there’s some set of advantages that men used to have that you can just say were unfair, and it’s good that they’re gone.
At the same time, when you say: Look, men need more time to develop. Male teenagers are just the weaker sex in educational settings compared to women — it does seem like there’s certain things that your theory needs to favor that would be pro-male in a particular way, and in a way that would, by their critics on the left, get called the return of patriarchy or something like that.
What do you think about that?
Galloway: It’s a really fair point. And to be fair, the far right saw the problem first. They realized that something was wrong in Mudville with young men, and they saw them first.
The problem was that their answer was to take women and nonwhites back to the ’50s. And some of the initial voices that filled the void were really negative voices, cosplaying empathy, but what they really were was just thinly veiled misogyny and a form of masculinity that was coarsening our discourse.
I always feel my land acknowledgment is the following: Women don’t have an obligation to service men romantically, sexually. This is not women’s fault.
One of the greatest victories in America and society, generally, is that women are thriving. Men should take pride in that and be the afterburners for our sisters’ and our mothers’ and our daughters’ success.
The far left’s answer to this problem, quite frankly, is: You don’t have problems. You are the problem. You’ve had a 3,000-year head start. Deal with it. Now deal with the [expletive] we’ve been dealing with forever.
And quite frankly, what’s the solution for young men from the left? Act more like a woman — and I don’t think that’s helpful, either.
I think there has to be something in the middle, and I think it’s very progressive to talk about empathy and lifting up groups.
Douthat: But in your story, in education, it sounds like you do need something that is effectively a different track for men, and maybe in the way we talk about this a lot with women, in terms of how you make the workplace compatible with pregnancy and motherhood.
Galloway: Yeah, protections. Sure.
Douthat: It seems like you’re saying, in the same way, that we need to think about how to make the modern educational system compatible with boys whose brains develop more slowly, and the need for men to have, what? An extra five years, in effect? Is that the argument?
Galloway: Let’s go to solutions. I believe we should redshirt kindergartners. I think boys should start kindergarten at 6. They’re 18 months behind. OK, let’s true up their cognitive abilities. Start boys at 6, girls start at 5.
Let’s raise wages for teachers and do a better job of recruiting men into primary schools. Simple stuff — like pay for after-school sports coaching, which is disproportionately men — compensate them for those extra hours.
I think mandatory national service would be hugely beneficial for patriotism, for America and for young men and women. A lot of young men, quite frankly, just lack purpose.
Douthat: Stay on that idea for a second. So the idea is you’re taking, let’s say, somewhere in the 18- to 22-year-old zone, whether it’s a guy who isn’t ready to go to college or a guy who’s graduating college or hasn’t finished and doesn’t have purpose, and you’re saying: OK, you need this extra two years of development, and you need something to do in that time?
Galloway: Anything from being in the military to being smoke jumpers to elder care to donating time at a no-kill animal shelter. I think America needs a lot of talented young people who understand technology to get out there and spend time with other Americans.
Douthat: You just gave a nice gender-neutral–sounding description. But if it’s the men you’re worried about, it’s the smoke jumpers you need, right?
Galloway: OK, nurses, senior care ——
Douthat: Like, the problem you’re trying to solve is more likely to be solved by the smoke jumpers than the no-kill animal shelter. Is that fair?
Galloway: OK, what I’m trying to do ——
Douthat: I’m not trying to make you ——
Galloway: I understand. But I’m trying to come up with a series of solutions that are more politically palatable and that have a chance of being enacted. I also want to recognize that a lot of the things I talk about are challenges for young women as well as young men.
But I think there’s a series of programs to lift up young people that would disproportionately help young men. Because a lot of the benefits have been taken away and have been especially detrimental to young men.
Douthat: Why don’t you like the term “toxic masculinity?”
Galloway: I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think there’s coarseness and cruelty and criminal behavior, but I think masculinity is strength, service, stoicism, demonstrating strengths and skills — such that you can establish resources and strengths, such that you can then protect others. I think it’s optimizing for service, not for attention.
Unfortunately, a lot of criminal, violent, psychopathic behavior has been conflated with masculinity. I don’t think there’s any such thing, just as I don’t think there’s any such thing as toxic femininity.
Douthat: I don’t like how the phrase “toxic masculinity” gets used, but I think it can be a useful phrase because of what it implies.
It implies that there are vices that maybe are not exclusive to men but are disproportionately male — men are more violent than women and so on. But there are also virtues that are, again, not unique to men but are associated with masculinity in certain ways.
I think you were just describing some of them. In the book you have the three Ps. To me, it’s your description of virtuous masculinity. So tell me what the three Ps are.
Galloway: So, provider. I think a decent goal for a young man starting his career is, in a capitalist society, to just acknowledge the way the world is and that if you want an absence of anxiety, if you want health care, if you want to be attractive to a mate, you’re going to need to have a plan to make yourself economically viable.
That might be getting a trades license, getting a Bachelor of Arts, working real hard — whatever it might be, you’re going to need a plan to be economically viable. And by the way, that plan will change, but you have a responsibility to develop some sense of a plan for economic viability in a capitalist society.
Once you develop a series of strengths — it can be character, it can be kindness, it can be economic power — the next move is to protection. It’s a tragedy to me that women don’t feel safe on the New York City subway. Women shouldn’t cross the street when they see a group of young men. They should cross the street to be around young men.
Your job is to protect. Who breaks up fights at bars? Big, strong men. Who starts fights? Insecure people who don’t like themselves. So I think strength immediately moves to protection.
And the third thing — and I get more pushback on this — is procreation.
Douthat: Not on this show you won’t, Scott. Don’t worry.
Galloway: Well, I think we need to stop demonizing and start celebrating young men’s horniness. It makes them better men. It makes them want to shower. It makes them want to have an economic plan. It makes them want to have girlfriends so they can figure out a way to behave around other women. It makes you kinder.
My first girlfriend told me that if I didn’t stop smoking pot every night, she was going to stop having sex with me. And guess what? I stopped smoking pot.
A movement I hate, Ross? I hate the Incel movement. I think it is such [expletive], this notion that women have such high standards that they can never be successful. Well, welcome to the workweek, boss. For 99 percent of history, 99 percent of men have been involuntarily celibate for 99 percent of the time.
There are few men who wouldn’t rather be doing something else more right now than having sex, and it’s a motivator for us to be better men. No man has the right to reproduce. You’ve got to work for it.
I hate this movement where men throw up a B.S. excuse, and they abdicate, and they stop putting in the time and the effort and the energy to be better men who are more attractive to women — who understandably are raising their standards because they’re now no longer economically indentured to men. And they’re excelling, so they have the right to have higher standards.
Douthat: The Incel movement and everything associated with it is pretty much, by definition, a movement for men who feel like they’re not succeeding, generally. For men who are succeeding, who are attractive in the dating pool, if you’re telling them: Go out, have sex, be horny — and whatever else, how do you get that to be connected to protection and providing, rather than just being a different P — predatory?
And to be clear, I don’t mean rape and sexual assault predation ——
Galloway: Right. Being a player that’s not failing.
Douthat: Exactly. Just treating women badly in a dating market that benefits you because all these other men are failing.
Galloway: What I would say is that, one, you’re talking about a minority of people.
Douthat: Not all men, as they say.
Galloway: Men not doing well and struggling with their career or their romantic possibilities — I think that applies to 95 percent of men at some point in their life. I know it applied to me for a large portion of my life. I don’t know about you, but there were definitely moments in my life when I was insecure about my professional and romantic success and opportunities.
Douthat: Never true for me, Scott. Never.
Galloway: No? [Laughs.]
Douthat: Not even once [Laughs.]
Galloway: Not you, Ross?
Douthat: Never!
Galloway: What I would suggest is that we need more third places. Men aren’t going into work. People aren’t going to church or to temple or to mosque. There are no venues anymore for young people to fall in love with what I’ll call non-curb appeal, non-Brad Pitt, remarkable men.
If you talk to couples who have been together longer than 30 years, 80 percent of them will say one was much more interested in the other in the beginning, and it was usually the man who was much more interested. But this is what happened: I saw the way he treated his parents at church. He was funny. I liked his friends. He was great at his job.
The problem around mating and connection and falling in love is that there are very few romances that mimic a romantic comedy, where they bump into each other in a bookstore and there’s this wild gaze into each other’s eyes. It usually doesn’t pan out that way.
Douthat: Listen, I spent hours — weeks — hanging out in bookstores waiting for that to happen.
Galloway: Hoping to find Julia Roberts?
Douthat: I was in the fantasy and science fiction section, so maybe I had chosen poorly. But yes, I agree.
Is the argument then that, basically, if you have this potentially predatory male elite who is doing well, one of the best ways to fix that problem is to elevate the rest of the male population so they feel more pressure to be good guys?
Galloway: I think you’re talking about a small slice of the dating market, because the incentive system is the following. There’s research on what attracts a woman to a man as a mate or sexually.
The No. 1 thing — we don’t like to talk about this — is signaling resources. Women naturally feel they might be vulnerable during gestation. They want a protector, and in a capitalist society, strength oftentimes is conflated with resources.
The good news is you don’t have to show up with a Range Rover and a Panerai, which is a good rap, but the key word in that is to “signal” resources. So are you the guy who has a plan, who leaves the bar at 11 because you have work the next day, is organized, is thoughtful, disciplined, is trying to better himself? That is very attractive to women.
No. 2 is intelligence — and again, all of this is anthropological. The person who makes better decisions for his family, that family is more likely to survive. And the fastest way, by the way, to communicate intelligence is humor.
You can’t tell someone to be funny, but what I tell men is: Laugh. Laugh out loud. A great sense of humor is being funny, but that’s hard. It’s also just laughing out loud and laughing at yourself and not being easily offended.
And the secret weapon that women are most attracted to in a relationship is kindness. They want someone they know that, if they’re vulnerable, is going to be good to them. And I think it can be learned. I think a kindness practice can make you kinder.
Douthat: Whose job is it to teach them? Who is teaching young men the three Ps that you describe?
Galloway: So what’s the infrastructure for healthy masculinity, productive masculinity and loving, secure households and good men?
Douthat: Yeah. Where does it come from, especially in a society where there’s lots of divorce, lots of men are raised without fathers?
Where does it come from for someone who’s in the position you were in? Divorced, your father’s not in the picture. How do you transmit?
Galloway: Well, you said it. It comes from you and me, Ross.
Douthat: I was afraid of that.
Galloway: If you look at the bricks and mortar of what builds good men or not, it can be reverse-engineered to a single point of failure.
You know how in air disasters, they try to reverse everything to what was the single point of failure? The single point of failure for when a boy comes off the tracks is when he loses a male role model through death, divorce or abandonment.
The moment a boy loses a male role model, at that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college.
What’s interesting is that girls in single-parent homes aren’t nearly as affected. They have similar rates of high school graduation, similar rates of self-harm. Now they’re more promiscuous because they’re looking for male attention in the wrong places. But generally speaking, they have the same rates of success as dual-parent homes.
It ends up that while boys are physically stronger, they’re emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls. Five years ago, even acknowledging that boys need men was triggering for the far left. It was: What — women can’t raise boys?
I was raised by a single immigrant mother a lot of my life, but she immediately got men involved.
Douthat: Who were those men? Who were the most important men in your life growing up?
Galloway: I still stay in contact with some of my mom’s boyfriends. There was a guy across the hall who noticed that I was being raised by a single mother, and he used to come over with his girlfriend and say: We’re going horseback riding. Do you want to come with us?
I joined the Boy Scouts. Larry Nobler, a chemistry teacher, used to invite me over to wash his cars with his boys. Immediately, there were men involved.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s because of Michael Jackson or the Catholic Church, but there are a lot of men in their 30s who are wonderful young men who have paternal and fraternal love to give and are reticent to express interest in mentoring a teen boy for fear they’ll be suspected of something. So they’re reticent to get involved.
Douthat: There is also a dynamic for boys with single mothers — and it sounds like you were fortunate — where the boyfriends do not always treat those boys well. There are dangers to boys from nonparental male mentors that aren’t just about sexual abuse.
Galloway: Well, the likely sexual abuser is a stepparent. But while those examples get a lot of outsize attention, as they should, there are a lot of good stepdads. It just comes down to — beyond the economic policies, primary education fixes, vocational programming, national service — the No. 1 solve for this problem is that if we want better men, we have to be better men.
I think the outer ring of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child who isn’t yours.
Douthat: One more question on politics and your own relationship to liberalism and progressivism.
I’m a conservative. If you tell me that we need to teach young men that they should be providers, protectors and that they should procreate, I’m all in.
But I know lots of people, lots of parents — who don’t consider themselves part of the far left, who consider themselves sort of normal, liberal, progressive people — who I think would be kind of allergic to a formulation that says: Oh, there’s something distinctive about protection that we want to teach our sons that’s maybe different from what we teach our daughters.
Imagine someone who isn’t on the far left, but they’re a Kamala Harris voter, and they’re like: Really? Isn’t that just bringing back patriarchy, Scott?
Galloway: I think it’s a fair criticism. I think one of the things I got wrong in the book was that I reverse-engineered my success to having money and finding a mate. The reality is that isn’t the whole shooting match.
The moment you write the book, you’re satisfied for two minutes, and then you start thinking about everything you got wrong, and social media is really good at helping you identify those things.
I think if I were to add in some additional dimensions, it would be, one, service. Two, I love the notion, from Richard Reeves, that the test of becoming a man isn’t a religious ceremony or a birthday, it’s surplus value.
At what point do you create more economic value or tax revenue than you absorb? Are you the dude who more people complain to than about? Do you love more people than love you? Do you protect more people than protect you? The idea is getting to surplus value, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs or be a baller and have a lot of money or date a lot or have a lot of sex.
I think if I did it again, I would have focused more on service and surplus value.
Douthat: But you’re still trying to pull progressives toward a slightly less gender-interchangeable view of the sexes.
Galloway: I think 95 percent ——
Douthat: I think that’s what you’re trying to do ——
Galloway: Look, OK ——
Douthat: No matter what hostile reactions you got.
Galloway: You’re a dad. Put a bunch of 8-year-old boys and 8-year-old girls in a room, put dolls and cars and Hot Wheels in a room, and see what happens.
You’re talking about politics. I’ve advised a lot of Democratic candidates running for president. They all claim they’re not running for president, but they want my views.
I think there needs to be an era of renewal — a renewal of alliances between America and Europe, a renewal of alliances between moderate Republicans and Democrats. But the greatest alliance in history that is in most desperate need of renewal is the alliance between men and women. And I have seven and a half billion points of data to show it’s the greatest alliance in history.
Douthat: It has carried us a long way so far. Yeah.
Galloway: The genders have each done a great job of blaming the other for their own problems. It is time to realize empathy is not a zero-sum game.
Civil rights did not hurt white people. Gay marriage didn’t hurt heteronormative marriage. Women and our society aren’t going to continue to flourish if men are flailing.
Let’s celebrate young men the way we have finally and deservedly started celebrating young women.
Douthat: OK, let’s now ask a pessimistic economic question.
I look at the data for job creation. The American economy is creating jobs in health care sectors, in service sectors. It’s creating jobs disproportionately held by — and of interest to — women.
It does seem like there is something anti-male about the trajectory of the economy, and you either need the economy to be different, or you need lots and lots of men who are willing to become nurses.
I’m just curious what you think about that as where we’re going. Whatever we do with mentorship or anything else, we’re going to a world where the future of work is currently female coded. What do you do about that?
Galloway: That’s true, and some of that is if women make better lawyers and doctors, then they deserve the economic accouterments of that.
Douthat: But if there are tremendous opportunities in nursing, and men, for that trucks-and-dolls reason you just described, aren’t enthusiastic about nursing, what do we do about it?
Galloway: I think just as we’ve been successful at somewhat de-gendering leadership roles in companies and recognizing that women bring great attributes and leadership skills — we’ve seen the number of female C-level executives increase dramatically over the last 20 years — we need to de-gender some of the health care.
I don’t know if that’s a marketing campaign or what it is. But it’s ridiculous that, in any way, it’s less masculine to be a nurse.
I’m less sanguine, as you are, or less pessimistic, because I think all of the capital expenditures spending, mostly tied to A.I., is going to create a boom in vocational jobs and trades jobs, which disproportionately benefit young men.
Douthat: That was my follow-up question. What does A.I. mean for the economic picture for men?
Say more about that. Is the A.I. era good for young men?
Galloway: So I’m an A.I. optimist. I think all the catastrophizing about the job apocalypse is basically fund-raising and techno-narcissism. The idea: I’ve built something so incredible it’s going to destroy the economy, so invest in this round, and get rich while the world crumbles — it’s total [expletive].
I think, like every technical innovation in history, it’s going to have short-term job destruction, just as automation did destroy some jobs on the factory floor. But we didn’t anticipate heated seats and car stereos, and now there are more people working in the automotive industry than pre-automation.
I think A.I. is going to create more jobs than it destroys. A record number of new business permits were issued. I believe it’s going to create more jobs than it destroys.
Douthat: But the kind of jobs — you talked about trades. Again, in a world where men do not yet all want to be nurses, is there something that this new economy offers them that wasn’t being offered five years ago or 10 years ago?
Galloway: We’re going to have tens of thousands of open jobs just for the anticipated nuclear power plants we need to build. We’re going to need pipe fitters. We’re going to spend more money building data centers next year than building office buildings, and we’re going to need tradespeople there.
I would say the biggest opportunity for a young man or woman right now is to go find a small business in trades, whether it’s hanging curtains or installing soapstone marble. If you’re good at carpet cleaning, find the local business in your area, and there’s a very good chance it’s being run by a baby boomer whose kids don’t want to take over.
There’s going to be enormous opportunity in small businesses and trades jobs for all young people, but those businesses do disproportionately attract young men. So I’m actually quite optimistic.
Douthat: But there’s a tension. Clearly, A.I. also feeds into everything that you started out in this conversation describing — the way that tech is addictive, immersive, keeps you in your room. It feeds you slop. You scroll all the time.
It sounds like, in your telling, A.I. is giving opportunities, but you still need a world where the young men can actually take them and not just be further captivated by their gambling app and streaming video and porn — bespoke pornography — or whatever else A.I. generates.
Galloway: There are competing forces. If you’re motivated, can get out of the house, have the discipline to develop a skill, I think the future actually looks pretty bright.
Douthat: Let’s end with your own sons. You can tell me anything, but I’d like to know, one, how you think they’re doing. One is in high school, and one is going off to college. And two, what are you most worried about for them, in particular?
Galloway: I come from a position of privilege because a lot of the things we talk about are largely assuaged or abated with money. That’s the reality.
Douthat: Sure. I come from a position of privilege, too, and I have a lot of kids — sons and daughters — and every family has temptations and issues and inherited things. I just want to know, in the Galloway family, what do you worry about?
Galloway: Oh, hands down, the phone. The biggest source of tension and anxiety. I wrote a book on Big Tech. I’m considered someone who understands more than your average bear about technology. The phone is the biggest source of anxiety in our household.
My youngest son will sneak ——
Douthat: How old is he?
Galloway: He’s 15.
Douthat: When did he get a phone?
Galloway: Way too early. Way too early. I screwed up. And during Covid, he developed a vice addiction. And sometimes — I won’t say which son, but one of them — would fake stomach problems to go in the bathroom to be on TikTok and lock the door. I jokingly say I would bang on the door and say: Start masturbating, and get out of there.
Look, the biggest challenge facing my kids is addiction from godlike technology that’s tested a billion times a day, that has connected shareholder value to sequestering you from the key relationships in your life.
The most encouraging thing, or one of the most encouraging things, just happened to me: I just took my kid to orientation at U.V.A. I dropped him off at his dorm. He hugged me, shoved me out of the door, and I realized that I had achieved what I’m supposed to achieve — and that is that I am now obsolete.
Douthat: For now. [Laughs.]
Galloway: For now. We’ll see.
Douthat: For six months.
Galloway: Until the tuition for next semester rolls in.
Douthat: Or until, you know, I feel like there have been moments when my dad has felt successfully obsolete in my own life, and then there have been moments when, even as an adult, he’s become incredibly important once again. So I imagine that you and I will both go through that.
Galloway: I hope so.
Douthat: I think that’s a good place to close. I hope your son has a fantastic time, and thanks for joining me, Scott.
Galloway: Thank you, Ross, and congrats on your success.
Douthat: It’s the P’s Scott.
Galloway: There you go.
Douthat: Take care.
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