How to Fix a Culture of Emasculated Men - Scott Galloway - #1013

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Scott Galloway, welcome to the show.

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
It's always great to see you, man. Great to see you here in London.

**Chris Williamson** (0:04)
Better to see you in person. It's the first one that we've done all the time that we've hung out in person, and all the podcasts we've done, and those two things have never crossed over.

**Scott Galloway** (0:11)
We've never done a live podcast?

**Chris Williamson** (0:12)
We've never done an in-person podcast. We've hung out and we've recorded, but we've never done the same two things.

**Scott Galloway** (0:17)
Welcome to London, man.

**Chris Williamson** (0:18)
Thank you. You did an interview with BBC Global that was titled, Young Men Are Struggling, What Does This Mean for Young Women? This, men struggling, women most affected framing is wild to me.

**Scott Galloway** (0:35)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (0:36)
Does that irritate you in the same way as it does me, to have to do this weird sort of land acknowledgement to the challenges that women face, even as we're talking about the problems that men are facing?

**Scott Galloway** (0:49)
I think it's productive to think of it as a societal problem. Well, moving to solutions, I think the only way you get stuff done here or the most effective way to get stuff done, and the lesson is, I've sent the majority of my life struggling with this issue professionally, and that is, I think I'm good at being right, I'm not very good at being effective, and there's a difference. And if you really want to help young men, you want to get, think about starting a conversation that gets programs and a change in mentality and a focus on the investments needed to lift up young men. I think it's done more effectively through the context of lifting up all young people. So the basic line is, women aren't going to continue to thrive and the country isn't going to continue to prosper as long as young men are flailing. So this needs to be a collective effort.

**Chris Williamson** (1:42)
I do understand, and I get the difference between ideological purity or reality-based insight and effective communication, press release and stuff like that. I had this conversation with Richard Reeves as well. I'm just so sick of this land acknowledgement thing, where we have to prostrate ourselves and say, well, we know that women, it's only been recent, that they got equal access to education and employment, and we must not forget that maternity leave must improve.
And after we've done all of this work, we can say, and now we can talk about male mental health, and now we can talk about male suicide. Could you imagine if there was a video that was titled, Young women are struggling. What does this mean for young men? But that wouldn't happen, at no point. Does somebody do this disclaimer about the struggles of men in suicide in order to talk about female breast cancer? That doesn't happen.

**Scott Galloway** (2:42)
Oh, there's definitely, look, there's a bias, but it's understandable. For 99% of our time on this planet, there has been men of my generation had an advantage. And so the muscle memory, the reflex reaction, the gag reflex is understandable. So, but, I mean, the bias is real. I'll say at a conference that women are doing better in college, right? 60-40, they score better. Seven to 10 high school valedictorians are women. Prefrontal cortices of women are ahead of a man's until the age of 25 The gas on, gas off executive function that lends itself well to academia, which to a certain extent has been shaped around the attributes that more easily come to a woman, has resulted in, most graduate schools now are what we think of as professional schools, have a greater representation of women. So if I say at a conference that women have been showed a better bedside manner, better studies that make them better doctors, everyone politely collapse and nods their head. Even I think the people who may not agree with that feel pressure to nod their head. If I say that throughout history men have been more, needed to be more risk-aggressive either to fight wars or immediately pick up a spear and go hunt something to feed the tribe and therefore men have an easier time making the leap of faith to be entrepreneurs and they're more risk-aggressive and start crazier ideas. There's a very uncomfortable pause in the room. You can say women make better doctors, better lawyers, better consultants and people acknowledge. If you were to say though, men might on average have the skills to be better entrepreneurs at least initially. By the way, none of this means that we shouldn't have, we should be biased against men in applying to the medical school or we shouldn't be funding women as entrepreneurs. But you're allowed to acknowledge, well, the whole world should be run by women. Yes, wouldn't that go on? Well, okay, the patriarchy has worked for 3,000 years. Maybe there's something to men being leaders. Oh, no, no, no, no, you don't say that. By the way, I don't believe that. So there's still a lot of misandry.