Thanks for joining us for this new limited edition podcast we're calling Lost Boys. I'm Anthony Scaramucci and I've been really concerned about what's happening to young people, specifically young men today. I grew up in a bluecollar family with a very tough father.
He wasn't always easy, but still there were a lot of adult men in my life that served as real role models for me and a lot of men like me. We knew what men were supposed to be and supposed to do. But but I worry that today between the morass of social media, the confusion about pronoun usage and the whole change in the culture, it's a lot harder for young men to thrive.
Young men are just doing much worse than ever before. Last summer, I started talking to my good friend, Professor Scott Galloway about all this. Many of you know him as the professor, businessman, entrepreneur, and podcaster.
And it turns out he is very passionate about this issue. And the more we talked, the more we both felt, let's see if we can do something about it. So together, we're starting this podcast, Lost Boys, to talk about what the problem is and then figure out what we can do about it.
In our first couple of episodes, we're going to talk with the author and researcher Richard Reeves, who has probably done more to shine a light on this problem than anyone else. I'm sure you'll find this as interesting as I do. Here's part one of my conversation with Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves.
I'd like to introduce now my good friend, my dear friend Scott Galloway, uh, who will introduce Richard Reeves. But guys, thank you so much for joining me. I have a lot of questions.
U, I have a lot of moms that are going to tune into this podcast. Trust me, I've been all over the speaking circuit talking to moms about this very issue. So, take it away, Scott.
Yeah. So, thank first off Anthony, thanks. This is Anony's vision and I was an easy yes.
I think Anthony is having a for lack of a better term a moment as sort of a interesting kind of thought leader or commentator on the state of our state of U state of the US. So, I wanted to be supportive of anything that brought attention to the issue and the issue is pretty straightforward. Um, I would argue that no group has ascended faster globally than women and by the way that's a wonderful thing.
Uh the number of women elected to parliament has doubled in the last 30 years. More women seeking globally tertiary education than men. And no group has fallen further faster in America than young men.
And Richard will go into this in greater detail as he's my Yoda around this stuff. But effectively you have uh if you go into a morg and there's five young people who've died by suicide. Four of them are men.
Three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times likely to be incarcerated. And uh and I relate to this on a personal level because I was one of those men when I was younger. I didn't have a lot of economic or romantic prospects living with my mother and kind of lost.
But America sort of loved me and picked me up by the scruff of my neck and flung me forward in the form of uh the University of California uh assistance and welfare for my mother. Uh and I don't find that some of those same programs and some of those same opportunities or the way society operates uh had I been that kid today, I worry that outcomes would have been different. And so this is something that's a passion project and immediately found um the person to kind of I don't know serve again as my my sensei if you will or my Jedi master is Richard Reeves.
Uh Richard is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Uh born in Petersboro, United Kingdom, educated in geography at Watam College. Am I saying that correctly?
Yeah, you are. Amazing. Crazy, right?
Right. And has a PhD from the University of Warwick and has had several pretty high level um positions including joining the office of Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Kle. Uh he's also was at uh was it the Hoover Institute?
Where were they? Demos. Demos.
There you go. IPO. Yeah.
And has and not only that is not just a bureaucrat uh one of the things I respect most about uh Richard, he not only wrote kind of this landmark book or David Brooks described it as a landmark book um of Boys to Men, but he's an entrepreneur and that is he went out and started a foundation or a research think tank. What what do you call this a think tank? Think tank is probably the best term.
Yeah, I guess. Sounds wrong though, doesn't it? The American Institute for Boys and Men and immediately was able to raise a lot of capital.
People have a ton of respect for him, his research, his kind of thoughtful almost sort of nonpartisan approach to this and saw the need and just one just to do some name dropping. I believe you received a $10 million grant from the Melinda French Gates Foundation. Is that accurate?
Piv Pivotal Ventures. It was 20. Yeah.
Most of which I had to give away, which is great. There you go. Well, we can help.
Anyways, with that, uh, Richard Reeves. So, Anthony, do you want to kick us off with a couple questions for for Richard? I I I I I think so.
I want to I want to start out by making a statement. Richard, if you don't mind, and get get you to react to it. I I feel like uh things were more easily defined when we were growing up.
Scott and I are contemporaries, both born around 1964, and I feel like we had some definition to our lives. You know, there were certain things that boys did. There were certain things that girls did.
And again, I'm not trying to be overly parochial or uh and I I understand that we want to be accepting in our culture for varying lifestyles and so on and so forth, but uh you know, Scott said something to me that really penetrated a few months back. He said, you know, there's no advocacy for white males. Uh there's maybe 75 different affinity groups at NYU, but there's no white male affinity group.
And not necessarily saying that there should be, sir, but I guess I'd like to ask you first for the the statistic that Scott's giving, what happened in our sociology, what happened in our uh world, our culture that's led to this problem that we're all facing? Well, I I think the first thing to say is that I think Scott has been a a real leader in terms of elevating this as a cultural conversation. So, there's a danger now that that you just get some praise inflation between me and me and Scott now, but let's get that over with.
But, but he was really leading on this before I wrote the book. He's one of the I I want the praise inflation, Richard. I mean, you don't know me, but I I have a very fragile ego, so don't focus on Galloway.
just like find subtle subtle ways to praise me. I'm sorry. Continue, Richard.
Anthony, please. So, so far, Anthony, I have no reason to object to you. How about that?
All right. So, someone sort of said like he's a friend in the sense that he didn't mean me active ill will. Let's start with that, Anthony.
But I'm thrilled you're doing this. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's interesting the way um this this is both like a like a factual problem in the sense that like we've got all these facts some of which Scott referred to but like an education and wages and employment and that's my background right I'm a fact guy I'm a researcher policy guy but I think there's something behind that which is what you're both talking about which is this identity question so beneath the surface of facts there's this question about identity and I do think that there was a clearer script.
That's the way I like to think about this is that there was the old script was for women wife and mother. You're going to raise the kids, you got to and the old script for men was you going to be the economic provider, head of household, bread winner, right? That was the script my parents had.
And I had a great upbringing. I'm very lucky, etc. But there wasn't like a question that they had to ask us about how it how they're going to divide it.
We tore those scripts up. I think Anthony, I see how you both react to this. I think we tore them up and we said to women, "Your script is no longer housewife, mother.
It's anything you want it to be. It's CEO, it's leader, it's you go girl. It's amazing.
" And as Scott said, that's the arguably the biggest economic liberation in human history. Amazing. So the script that girls and young women get now is around autonomy, of independence, assertiveness.
It's all uplift. It's incredibly empowering. We tore up the old script for men, which was bread winner, head of household, etc.
And we didn't replace it with anything. We just tore up the old script. And so what that means is a lot of men now feel that they're basically improvising.
They basically don't have a script. Uh or if they do, it's a negative script. I really fear that one of the problems now is that the script around what men, you know, what men should be is is more defined negatively.
It's don't be toxic. Don't mansplate. So, there's a long list of don'ts now for men, most of which we would probably agree with.
But what about the dos? What's the to-do list for a 24 year old man now? Um, and we don't have a good answer to that question.
That's created a massive vacuum, I think, in our culture and our politics. But Scott, what what Richard is saying happened for what reason? through osmosis there was a black a backlash to mask ma mas m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m m masculinity or male toxic masculinity.
What what caused this to happen or did it just happen naturally or Well, and I'm I'm going to do like a rich little version of of Richard here and he can correct me where I got it wrong, where I got it right, but the right will claim that it was if you tell men that they're idiots and predators for four or five decades, they start to believe you. I I think that's part of it, but I would I would argue that it's much more nuanced and that the primary culprits, if there is a culprit, are much harder to solve and less political. Uh the on-ramps, the on-ramps into a middle class where, you know, for someone who wasn't cut out for college or education, a lot of those on-ramps have been taken away.
Simply put, we've outsourced a lot of our our manufacturing jobs. One-third of jobs used to require a college degree. Now it's twothirds.
What happened to wood shop, metal shop, auto shop? Um there is a bias now that we've leveled the playing field in education in my industry. Women have just blown by men.
You know, the the attributes to be a good student just come more easily to a woman than you know at NYU, we don't like to talk, we don't say this out loud. There are certain graduate schools in NYU where if we were admissions blind, they not only would be 70% women, they'd be 70% Asian women. And so there's just the natural attributes of a woman lend themselves better to education.
I also think economically we've passed a lot of legislation that has transferred money from young people to old people. People over the age of 70 or 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. People under the age of 40 or 24% less wealthy.
Will that affects men and women? Yes. But when men don't have money, quite frankly, they're just less attractive.
That is more of a hit to them than it is a hit to women. So, you have an education system that's biased against them. You have Richard can speak to the actual biological reasons, prefrontal cortex, um, societal, economic.
I think those are the primary culprits. I think it's a little bit, and Richard, I'm curious to get your opinion. I think it's a little bit lazy to say that it's people not respecting not respecting men.
I think that's part of it, but I think it's a more complicated. There's a bunch of dimensions here that are probably the bigger contributors to the fall of young men. I But I'm I'm open to push back here.
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com/lossboys. Yeah, I think I in some ways I think that the discourse around men and the toxic masculinity I what that's done is put fuel on the fire. There will there are all of these more structural longer term problems as you say Scott around education.
The labor market has really turned uh against particularly men with less skill. I mean the fact that men without a college degree are earning no more today than they were half a century ago. like stagnant male wages for that for most men.
That is a massive economic fact and therefore a cultural fact. But I do think that the fuel on the fire has been to say if men are struggling it's sort of their fault. One of my criticisms of more progressiveleaning people is that they can't accept that men have problems because they're still convinced that men are the problem.
And that's created a blindness to the reality of these problems of men or a tendency sometimes to say if men are struggling it must be their fault. You know so if men are committing suicide or having mental health problems that's because they won't get help. You know if men are dying of COVID it's because they wouldn't get the vaccine.
If men are not doing well in school it's because they can't be bothered to crack a book etc. And so there's this weird sort of blame thing that happens with men, but only men now, rather than saying, well, maybe the education system is not working very well for men. Maybe the workplace has changed.
And so I think I think you're right, Scott, that these are deeper challenges, but I also think you're right, Anthony, that it's it does make things worse if we actually then not only say men aren't having problems, but also point to them as the problems. like a really unfortunate set of circumstances. You know, the reason men are struggling is not because people are being mean to them, but that doesn't mean people being mean to them doesn't make things worse.
And I certainly think it makes them open to much more reactionary voices who can then credibly claim that mainstream institutions and people don't care about them because they're too busy pathizing them. And I do think if you want someone to really kind of feel threatened and alone, then threaten their identity. That we do know that.
and masculinity has become part of that problem. But but to Anthony, to your point around Missandry, you never hear the word. You hear misogyny all the time.
You never hear Missandry. You know, I went on Theo Vaughn and I was talking about struggling young men. And I get what I always get dozens if not hundreds of comments along the lines of, "Well, if if young men just got their act together.
" Now, imagine me saying that about the black community. Well, if black people just got their act together, what would be the response? Well, if women were just in touch with their emotions, I mean, it is open season on if you're at a conference and you say, "Well, women are better managers.
They're more thoughtful. They're more nuanced. They make better doctors.
They're more nurturing. Everyone just kind of claps politely and nods their head. " If I were to say men are more riska aggressive and on average make better entrepreneurs, what would the response be?
So it feels like we can't even have an open honest conversation because it's it's open season on one gender and the other from just even even if you're trying to have a a science-based conversation, it's it's a third rail. You can't say anything that might imply that women are, you know, might be contributing or the role women play that this might be part of the, you know, they might be part of not only the solution but also part of the problem. You can't even go there.
It's really interesting, Scott, if you look, there is some really interesting research where if you show people uh evidence on sex differences, if you say there are some on average differences between men and women, say on risk takingaking or conscientiousness or something, if you say and that makes women better, people are much more likely to accept that there are sex differences than if you say it the other way around. And so there's this real asymmetry here, which is that people are much more willing to accept sex differences when women come out better from them than they are the other way round. And that's just intellectually bankrupt.
And you understand why it's happened. But it also, you understand why if we literally have nothing positive to say about masculinity and men, then no wonder so many of them feel under siege. And it means that we don't get to tackle these serious problems that Scott and I are both so exercised by.
I want I want I want you both to react to this because this is something I see in my children which I'm trying to combat and maybe you could offer me some advice on how to do it. I I feel everything that you said is true and I feel that there is an undercurrent of this lack of advocacy for men. They can't advocate for themselves.
And the other thing is they can't express that they feel the way that you guys are suggesting. Meaning, you can't have a 15-year-old say, "Professor Galloway, you know, I I feel left out of the equation, or I feel I feel one way, but if I assert myself and say XYZ, I'm not heard, or I uh people come down on me like a ton of bricks. I I I I guess where where I'm getting to is a lot of these guys, my children included, they'll they'll find recluse in the internet.
They'll go on the internet. They fall prey to some conspiracy theories. Some of these guys think the moon landing didn't happen.
I've got to listen to all this sort of nonsense uh that goes on on the internet. And I feel like they're falling into a trap of despair without the tools necessary to stand up for themselves. Am I do I have that wrong?
And if I do, tell me what I have wrong. And if I have it right, is there a solution? Richard?
Yeah. So I think you have it right that the question of what am I supposed to do today as a man, right? How am I supposed to date?
What about money? What about sex? What about fitness?
All those questions like what's this? What's the script? What's the story?
How am I supposed to be today? That question is on the lips and the minds of almost all young men today. So the question is not is there a question?
It's who's providing answers. And you're right that if they're not getting answers in the classroom, from their fathers, from their scout groups, from their churches, from wherever, and they don't have that conversation, those role models, of course, they'll go and look online. And so the solution is to have this kind of conversation is for us to be having the conversation, to be having a good faith conversation about advocating for our boys and men.
I mean, Scott already mentioned the suicide statistics, but just to put a sharp point up, we lose 40,000 men a year to suicide now. And since 2010, almost all of the rise has been among young men. So the rise in suicide among men under the age of 30 has been 30% just since 2010.
We have a crisis of loss of male lives in this. And and if we and by the way, it's higher among white men. There are lots of other issues that go the other way.
But if we can't have that conversation honestly and openly and tackle it, someone else is going to have that conversation. The question is not are we having this conversation. The question is who's having it?
Scott, how how low have you gotten in your life, Scott? Oh, I you know, I' I've often said that my worst days are better than most people's best days, but I was I was never I'm pretty blessed, Anthony. I've had, you know, I've lost, like most people, I've lost people I've loved.
out of business, go out of business, you know, some some big business failures, personal failures, been divorced, but never got to the point where I think some of these young men get where they feel as if I mean the the saddest thing I saw I read was that with young men in suicide, a lot of it is depression, uh, drunkenness, addiction related, and that the most rattling information thing I read was that with men our age who kill themselves, I had a I read a psychiatrist said that it's a rational decision that this is an individual who does the math. It typically like the path to suicide for them or a very common path is they have a financial they have financial strain. They lose a business, they go broke, they're no longer a provider.
their wife who no longer sees them as a provider um is less attracted to them and divorces them. 70% of divorce filings are from women. And we all like to pretend that all women are Lisa Simpson or Marge and high character people.
I can prove statistically there's a lot of good women, some not so good women. There's a lot of good men, some not so good men. Um and then the man, so the man loses his wife, his primary relationship.
He oftenimes loses access to his kids. I'm going through this with a lot of my friends right now. They have teenage girls or kids and they get divorced and quite frankly the kids want nothing to do with them.
It's like dad shows up, he doesn't live here. He's not part of my ecosystem and all of a sudden the dad goes from having all this great kind of what I call garbage time hanging out with his kids and he's no longer in the same house. family court is sometimes biased against men and then he just has no no role, no purpose and he makes a conscious decision to check out and that to me was just the most like devastating that it's a quote unquote rational decision and and what Richard was saying about the conversation I think it's gotten remarkably more productive in large part because of some of Richard's work and research but American households, millions of them felt this and saw it happening for the last two decades and no one was talking about it.
And unfortunately that void into that void slipped some unproductive voices that said be proud of yourself. And the problem with these unproductive voices is it starts positive. Be fit.
Be actionoriented. Take control. Go up and approach a woman.
And then it comes off the rails. Then it's like now invest in crypto and that don't let that go to the club with her friends, you know, put your foot down. It turns into thinly veiled misogyny.
And so right away the dialogue got a really bad rap. And the moment, and I'm sure I imagine you experienced this, Richard, I know I did. When I just even started mildly advocating for men are talking about these problems, they're like, "Oh, you're one of those guys.
You're one of those misogynists. " and people just shut off. And the good news is I think the conversation has got a lot more productive because the people now driving this conversation are the afterburners are mothers who are like guys I am not political something I have I have three kids two boys one girl uh two girls one boy one's in the girls in PR one's in Carnegie Melon and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping so I think the the evolution of this conversation has gotten a lot better.
But be clear, that void got filled by some very unproductive voices that have kind of delayed a productive conversation. Yeah. I just want to add a data point to Scott's point about being needed.
Like feeling unneeded, not useful to the tribe or to the family is literally fatal. And so we both mentioned that there's a four times higher suicide rate among men of all ages than than women. But among divorced men and women, it's eight times higher because it shoots up for men, but not so for women for exactly the reasons that Scots talked about, which is you don't have these connections, you don't have these ties and these these tethers.
And and I I think the conversation's moved on a little bit as well, but it's taken a while. And the problem is that for too long people like Scott were breaking the ice around this was people said in order to advocate for men you have to somehow be go against women. We've actually our institutes published a piece on zero sum thinking in other words the idea that for one group to do better another group has to do worse.
And zero sum thinking is the enemy of a flourishing family a flourishing community. But it we have been trapped in zero sum around this which is that somehow to advocate for men care about men means to care less about women which is like saying to a parent you're only allowed to care about your son or your daughter. Like which one are you going to choose?
It's batshit crazy. But it is the way that the gender debate has played out on both sides because you now get reactionaries saying in order for men to do better we need women to go back. We need to go back to the 1950s, women back in the home.
And that's only true of the reaction reactionary fringes. But unless we get to this idea that we have to rise together, which is what moms want, Scott's right, then we'll continue to have this vacuum that other voices can fill. So, so Richard, do you think it's possible to insert this more broadly into the educational system, whether it's here in the United States or in the UK or more broadly the Western liberal democracies?
Is there something that we could insert in the curriculum that you could get buy in from teachers unions, women, progressives that provide some more awareness? Like, listen, I I I know when I was in elementary school, they told me not to smoke. Some of us listened and some of us did the very opposite.
But just the awareness of the health issue probably slowed people down. Yeah. Well, I think the tide is turning a little bit on this.
What some of the ideas that I've had is to actually give parents the choice to start their boys in school a year later or at least a few months later because they do mature a bit later on average. So just having that option would be good in public schools as well as private schools where a lot of them do it. Scott and I have both written talked a lot about the need for more apprenticeships.
Technical high schools are amazing for boys. Just a bit more applied, a bit more hands-on. Boys, boys when they're learning need to know the why and the who before they care about the what.
So they need to know why am I learning this and who are you anyway with the teacher in order to care about the what. girls are a little bit better at doing the work anyway, even if they don't see the why. So, technical schools, but the thing that I feel perhaps most strongly about of all is more male teachers.
And that should be something that should not be controversial. At least in theory, it isn't. So, in the 1980s, 33% of our teachers were men.
Now, it's 23% and falling. And there's a a way in which the teaching profession has become very gendered. My own son just started teaching fifth grade in Baltimore City and I asked some people for advice uh about you know a man in teaching and they said make sure that his door has a window which most schools do anyway but if you're a male teacher never teach in a classroom where there isn't a wind where there isn't a window in the door.
Did I say that wrong? Um like right window because there's a trust issue. It's which is understandable but it's gone so far now that we become suspicious of men having a role in the lives of boys unless it's their own sons and I think credit to Scott here he's been very outspoken on this but the decline in the share of men in like the scouts is not boy scouts anymore this might have passed you by but boy scouts of America no longer exists it is now scouting for America and co-ed big brothers big sisters has much longer waiting times for boys than girls because they don't have male volunteers.
The YMCA, the YMCA is now staffed by mostly female volunteers. And so there's this huge absence of men in the lives of boys. And one way the public policy can address that is through schools.
Like if we can't increase the share of male teachers with all kinds of scholarship programs and incentives, better pay, which would be good for everybody, then I don't I don't know what else we could do. And I'm seeing more people open to that argument. We do not want an all female teaching profession.
And so that's an example where you should be able to get more support. And Richard, um I I think it was your study that showed that if you try to reverse engineer to a single point of failure for when a boy kind of comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model. And I'm not sure, Richard, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but the data on when quoteunquote mom and dad get divorced, 92% of the time it ends up being a household headed by a single parent who's the mom.
The outcomes are reasonably similar for girls. Uh, but they're much worse for boys. And that the the fascinating summary or conclusion is that while boys are physically stronger, and I I'm pretty sure I got this from your study, they're mentally and emotionally much weaker.
And just educating, just parents who are going through divorce knowing you really got to keep an eye on the boy because because as much as we think, okay, they're bigger and they're stronger, they're actually weaker as humans. Richard, did I get that right? you.
Yeah, you did. Yeah. There's this really nice image in psychology where they compare orchids to dandelions.
The idea is that orchids are just a bit more fragile. They do well when you take care of them, but they die quickly if you don't. And dandelions are more resilient, right?
They can grow in the cracks in the sidewalk or whatever. And it turns out that boys are a bit more orchid and girls are a bit more dandelion. And so family breakdown, neighborhood poverty, poor schooling, all of those things affect boys much more than girls.
Boys are much more sensitive than girls are. Scott's exactly right. That idea that boys are more fragile than girls is one of those counterintuitive ideas that we need to consider if we want to help young men today.
In the next episode of Lost Boys, we'll continue the conversation with Richard Reeves and talk about why it's so difficult to even get people to talk about this problem. Can we help boys without hurting girls? The short answer is yes, of course.
Why aren't the problems of boys a bigger political issue? Why is it hard for some groups like Democrats to even talk about these problems? and we'll talk about a secret army of women who are demanding we do better by young men.
Thanks for joining me and Scott Galloway for this premiier episode of Lost Boys. I hope you'll join us as we continue this conversation. If you'd like more information, please go to our website www.
lossboys. men. That's www.
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Lost Boys is a production of Salt Media and Casablanca Strategy Group. Barbara Fida and Keith Suma are executive producers. Tanya Salotti is our researcher.
Holly Duncan Quinn and Stanley Goldberg are editors. Special thanks to Christina Cassessi and Mary Jan Reebus and Drw Burroughs.
