Logan Ury & Scott Galloway: Why Young Men Are Falling Behind

Logan Ury 0:00 This is a critical conversation around truly the future of humanity.

Scott Galloway 0:04 But we don't like to talk about this.

Steven Bartlett 0:06 This report is absolutely shocking. This is a crisis and young men are struggling, so I sat down with two leading voices on societal issues to discuss the rise of millions of lonely, addicted men. And the most important question is, how do we fix this? So let's start with this graph. It shows that young women are now out- out-earning young men.

Logan Ury 0:23 It is true. We have given women so many tools to achieve, but now boys are being left behind.

Steven Bartlett 0:29 And that the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education or employment has increased by a staggering 40%.

Logan Ury 0:35 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 0:35 And the data I've seen is that when the woman in the relationship starts making more money, they become twice as likely to get divorced.

Logan Ury 0:41 Because traditionally women seek partners who have more economic or social status than they do, and emotional intelligence is the new currency in dating. But these guys were raised not to be emotionally intelligent-

Scott Galloway 0:53 Yeah.

Logan Ury 0:53 ... but to be a provider.

Scott Galloway 0:55 That a lack of male involvement in kids' lives is a big factor leading to this. And once they lose a male role model, they become much more likely to engage in criminal activity.

Logan Ury 1:02 And so we are just creating a lot of these angry young single men who are saying, "Well, this is rigged against me."

Steven Bartlett 1:08 We actually emboss an audience to write in, and this guy, Jeffrey, wrote in and said, "My entire life, I have never felt like I was good enough, like I could never earn my place in society."

Scott Galloway 1:17 It's devastating. That's something that's controversial, I'm getting pushback on. I think the secret weapon for men that they don't leverage is to... (instrumental music plays)

Steven Bartlett 1:24 So we wanna hear a woman's perspective on it.

Logan Ury 1:26 Honestly, what I would do is... (instrumental music plays)

Steven Bartlett 1:31 This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is, if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

Steven Bartlett 2:03 Lost Boys. In March 2025, The Center of Social Justice released this report which has sh- sent a couple of shock waves across the UK, especially across the media. And just to give you a little bit of a sort of preface and some context on what this report says, at the start of the report, Andy Cook, who's the CEO of the report, says, "We listened to those working on the front line, the teachers, the youth workers, the charities, and the parents who s- day in, day out see the struggles of young people, and in recent years, they've been telling us the same thing. Something is going on with our boys." And because of this, they wrote this report called The Lost Boys which looks at all of the- the different facets of why young men are struggling. And in this report they say, "Boys are struggling in education, they're more likely to take their own lives, they're finding it more difficult to find stable work, and far too often they're caught in crime. The numbers don't lie. Something has shifted and we cannot ignore it any longer. It's not just about Andrew Tate or online influencers. These are symptoms, not the cause. The deeper truth is that too many boys are growing up without the guidance, discipline, and purpose they need to survive." And there's some frankly horrific graphs which actually sent the CEO of my company, a lady called Georgie, um, into quite an emotional state. She- she texted me and told me she was crying look at- looking at some of these graphs which we'll talk about today. But this is a subject that I know both of you know very, very well, so I'm keen to get into exactly why this is happening and what we can do about it. But to preface this discussion to understand where you both come from and the perspective you have, Logan, who are you?

Logan Ury 3:37 Yes.

Steven Bartlett 3:37 And what do you do?

Logan Ury 3:38 I'm a behavioral scientist turned dating coach. So that means that I take all of the lessons from the field of behavioral science, how we make decisions, and then I apply them to the field of relationship science, which is how love works. And so, I'm really passionate about this topic, because for a long time I've found that wherever I go, people say, "Oh, I know all these great single women. Do you know any great single guys?" And I just thought, "Oh, okay, maybe that's always been happening." But when I actually dug into the data, I saw that we are truly in a dating crisis right now and there is a huge mating gap between the type of men that women are looking for and the type of men that are available. This is a critical conversation around truly the future of humanity, because marriage rates are down. That means birth rates are down. And so this conversation is extremely important.

Steven Bartlett 4:28 And what sort of reference points do you draw upon? Because you've got some sort of unique access to data, right?

Logan Ury 4:33 Right. So I work at Hinge for the last five years, and so I have access to tons of data there around how daters are dating now, how daters are dating differently, what sets successful daters apart, and then I also have conducted my own research for this conversation, so I sent out a survey to thousands of my newsletter subscribers and people were very excited to talk about this, and I've conducted a lot of new research that I'll be sharing for the first time on this topic.

Scott Galloway 4:57 Um, so I make my living looking at data and trying to come up with insights. I spent most of my career looking at data to try and make, add shareholder value and then I have the luxury now of focusing on things I'm really interested in, and I just started s- stumbled upon data about that reflects that the cohort that has ascended fastest globally is women. And this is a wonderful thing and a huge collective victory, and the group that has fallen furthest fastest is men in Western markets. And the data was just so overwhelming, and also, I was close to being one of these men. I didn't have a lot of economic or romantic, um, prospects when I was a young man, but there were programs and an environment where I could be successful. And I worry that some of the temptations of technology, the economic trends, uh, had they been where they are now then, I could have very easily ended up a statistic. So I just sort of relate to these problems.

Steven Bartlett 5:57 I- I'm keen to understand from your perspectives what you think, like, the first domino

Steven Bartlett 6:02 that falls in a young man's life or a young boy's life that causes the outcomes we're talking about today. Like, what is, where is the first place to start?

Scott Galloway 6:09 So, the research I've looked at and Richard Reeves from the A- American Institute on Boys and Men, it's some good research here. The, the point of failure, if you reverse engineered issues too, is when a boy loses a male role model. And that is, in the US, we have the second most single family, uh, parent homes behind Sweden. And what's interesting is that in single parent homes, girls actually have similar outcomes, similar rates of high school attendance, income, rates of self-harm. Boys, once they lose a male role model, become much more likely to be incarcerated, engage in criminal activity, harm themselves. It ends up that while being physically stronger, boys are emotionally and mentally much weaker. So, the loss of a male role model is, I would argue, kind of the first point of failure that predicts that a kid, a boy is gonna struggle. And that has impacts on family court, economic policy, and just general in our s- general zeitgeist in our society, where men need to step up. If we want better men, we need to be better men.

Logan Ury 7:13 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 7:13 We need to step into that void.

Logan Ury 7:14 Another one that Richard Reeves talks about is that there's not enough men in the education system.

Scott Galloway 7:19 100%.

Logan Ury 7:19 So, I believe when Tim Walz was a teacher, one out of three teachers in his school was a man, but now it's like 24%.

Scott Galloway 7:24 Yeah.

Logan Ury 7:25 And so where do kids spend most of their time? In school. And who's teaching them? Mostly not men.

Scott Galloway 7:32 And it's, and you think, "Well, w- women can be fantastic teachers." And it's true.

Logan Ury 7:35 Right.

Scott Galloway 7:35 But after school programs, not as many coaches.

Logan Ury 7:38 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 7:38 They typ- typically are ma- male. Not as much compensation, so they don't get rewarded for being coaches.

Logan Ury 7:43 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 7:44 And if you just think about it logically, who does a teacher champion? A teacher champions someone that reminds them of themselves when they were a kid. So, a- and also just look at the, there's incredible bias, I would argue, against males in school. A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior-adjusted basis, twice as likely to be suspended for the exact same infraction as a girl.

Logan Ury 8:04 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 8:04 Five times as likely if it's a Black boy. And so, and once you're suspended twice, it probably means you're not going to college. In addition, look at the behaviors we promote in school. Sit still, be a pleaser, be organized, raise your hand. You basically just described a girl. And so, and also, quite frankly, a lot of the jobs that require tertiary education attainment, there's more women now in law school and medical school.

Logan Ury 8:28 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 8:28 And quite frankly, good for them. They're just better at that. They're better students. They deserve to make more money. They deserve it. But the reality is, it has huge ramifications when we no longer have wood, auto, or metal shop. They've gone away.

Logan Ury 8:39 Right.

Scott Galloway 8:40 So, those used to be a pass-

Logan Ury 8:41 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 8:41 ... to do some middle class jobs. They've been replaced by computer science. And so what are the paths for-

Logan Ury 8:47 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 8:47 ... the two thirds of males that aren't gonna end up with a traditional liberal arts college degree?

Logan Ury 8:52 Right. And just to add a few more stats to that. So, we know that 70% of valedictorians in the US are female, and women are much more likely to be in the top 10% of their class. But then on the SAT, men and women, or young men and women earn the same scores.

Scott Galloway 9:06 Hmm.

Logan Ury 9:06 So, there's definitely something happening in schools that is prioritizing the female experience or that women are better at that. We definitely wanna celebrate the success of women. I think the changes that have happened over the last 50 years are incredible, and I feel like I'm a beneficiary of that, and so is my daughter. If you look at all of the books that my daughter was given when she was born, they're about great women in history, "You Can Be Anything", "Dream Big, Little One". And so I feel like we have given women so many tools to achieve, and in many ways those have been manifested, but now boys are being left behind. And so this isn't a zero sum game. I was nervous about coming on here because I thought people would say, "She's a male apologist. She doesn't see how much women are still struggling." I think everyone is struggling. I think life is hard.

Scott Galloway 9:51 Yeah.

Logan Ury 9:51 But what's happening right now is we need to have empathy for young men, and we need to bring them up because this isn't just a problem about young men. And patriarchy doesn't just hurt women. A lot of people think about the patriarchy as something that prizes men and hurts women. But when there's a very narrow definition of men, everyone is hurt by that. And that's all the research that I've done is over and over seeing women feel like they are not enough good men to date. And men feel like they're being held to a ridiculous standard of holding both sides of the coin, being feminine and masculine.

Steven Bartlett 10:27 It turns out, as you were speaking, I was looking at the stats around fatherless homes, and it turns out that there has been a significant increase in the amount of young boys being raised without a father present. About 25% live without a biological, step, or adoptive father, according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. And the US has the world's highest rate of children living in a single parent household, and 92% of the time, that's with the mother alone. And in 1968, only 11% of children lived without, lived with only their mother, compared to 21% in 2020. So, that's doubled in the last 50 odd years, which is pretty s- pretty staggering. And then obviously the consequence of that, as Scott described, is that individuals from f- father absent homes were 300% more likely to carry drugs, to carry guns, to deal drugs, um, and all of, and there's this huge plethora of mental health consequences if you don't have a father in the home. I mean, what do we do about that? And like where are the fathers?

Scott Galloway 11:24 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 11:25 Where are the role m- where are they going?

Scott Galloway 11:27 Well, it's, it's complicated. There's, there's male abandonment. There's just no getting around it. But also going back to family courts, sometimes the courts and the finan- you know, our economy make it difficult for a man to stay involved in the kids' lives. And also, um, you know, family court's getting better at saying, "All right, the kids..." Uh, I mean, just a, a, a personal anecdote. I, uh, have a friend who recently has gone through divorce, two daughters, very much wants to be involved in their lives. They're 13 and 15 year old girls, and quite frankly dad's there on the weekends and they got their own thing going on.

Logan Ury 12:03 Hmm.

Scott Galloway 12:03 And they don't necessarily make dad a priority. And dad's not around for what I call the garbage time, and that is the, what, what I found with my boys is the moments of serendipity and connection happen randomly. When you're taking them to school, when you're out in the back-... you know, jumping around or playing, whatever it is, i- i- these garbage moments. And when you're not in the household, for whatever reason, there's just, there isn't that much garbage time. And I think slowly but surely, they lose, sometimes, connection with their kid. There's also, there's something weird going on, and I'm curious, Logan, if you've got data on this. But you have a one-year-old daughter, right? You're gonna be amazed. When my unfortunate boy had a Halloween party, and the boys are, like, cute, but they're dopes. They're boys. There are some 14-year-old girls who look like they could be the junior senator from Pennsylvania.

Logan Ury 12:54 (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 12:55 (laughs)

Scott Galloway 12:55 They're five foot 10-

Logan Ury 12:56 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 12:56 ... they're articulate. "Hello, Mr. Galloway. How are you? What a lovely home." And the boys were like, "Uh, no." And l- and biologically, girls mature faster.

Logan Ury 13:05 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 13:05 Their prefrontal cortex is 18 months ahead of a boy's. An 18-year-old girl or woman is competing against a 16 and a half year old when she's competing against an 18-year-old. And they're even finding that it's getting worse, that women or girls are starting to menstruate earlier, and boys' testicles are descending later. So, the gap in maturity, biological gap, they think might even be growing, and they don't know if it's pesticides? But when I meet my, uh, eighth graders' colleagues, there's a huge difference between-

Logan Ury 13:38 Colleagues. (laughs) Yeah.

Scott Galloway 13:38 Yeah, between the s-

Steven Bartlett 13:39 (laughs)

Scott Galloway 13:39 ... between the boys and the girls.

Logan Ury 13:41 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 13:41 And Richard's, one of Richard's suggestions is that we red shirt boys, that we hold them a year back. The boys start kindergarten at six, whereas girls start at five.

Logan Ury 13:51 So, the research in the UK shows that 70% of girls are ready to start school at age five, but many fewer boys are capable of starting at that age, in terms of readiness. And so, if you were to hold boys back, then they might be on more equal playing field for those critical moments of four to five, of 13 to 14, where the brains really develop at a different stage.

Steven Bartlett 14:14 I w- I wanna talk about that sort of early education experience and how it can be adapted, but also-

Logan Ury 14:18 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:18 ... just like if the environment of the classroom is right for boys. As we were talking about the point about fathers' listlessness as well, I found this graph, which is also pretty shocking, and it, it goes into what y- something you said, Scott. It basically shows

Steven Bartlett 14:29 that the absence of a father on a boy-

Logan Ury 14:33 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 14:33 ... causes depressive symptoms. But the absence of a father on a young girl doesn't cause the same depressive symptoms.

Scott Galloway 14:40 Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 14:40 Which means that the absence of a father for a boy r- drastically increases their chance of being depressed, whereas if for a girl, it doesn't.

Logan Ury 14:48 There's a lot of other-

Steven Bartlett 14:49 Which is...

Logan Ury 14:49 ... graphs that look like that, in terms of women and young girls are just actually a lot more resilient in childhood. So, if you are in foster care as a young woman, you have less negative outcomes than young men. And so there's this theory in parenting of, is your child an orchid or a dandelion? And so the orchid really needs very particular situations to grow, they need a certain amount of light, they need to be watered in a particular way, and they'll thrive in some situations, and they will not thrive in others. Whereas a dandelion can really survive in many situations. And so women, young girls tend to be more dandelions in childhood. And so that's why when you have a boy and a girl both in negative situations, the boy is more negatively impacted.

Scott Galloway 15:31 Boys are just weaker. There's a crazy stat I read that two, uh, 15-year-olds, a boy and a girl, both sexually molested. And to be clear, they're equally heinous crimes. But the boy who's sexually molested is six to 10 times more likely to kill himself later in life. It ends up that boys are just less resilient.

Logan Ury 15:51 Do you think there's somehow more of a stigma there? Like, I wonder why that's so dramatic.

Scott Galloway 15:55 Shame, they can't talk about it.

Logan Ury 15:57 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 15:57 Get uncomfortable.

Logan Ury 15:58 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 15:58 Feel there's ............................ There's a lack... I mean, I think and just until a few years ago, the social incentives were to never speak about it.

Logan Ury 16:06 Right.

Scott Galloway 16:06 I was on Lewis Howes' podcast, and he just openly said, "I was sexually abused as a child." And it was so shocking for me-

Logan Ury 16:13 Wow.

Scott Galloway 16:13 ... to hear this big, handsome guy.

Logan Ury 16:15 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 16:16 I don't think he would've said it 10 or 20 years ago.

Logan Ury 16:17 I-

Scott Galloway 16:17 I think people would've assumed that it was his fault-

Logan Ury 16:20 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 16:20 ... or made him less of a man. So, I, I think a lot of that has hopefully gotten better.

Logan Ury 16:25 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 16:26 But it... We just have to acknowledge boys, mentally and emotionally, are weaker than girls.

Steven Bartlett 16:34 Lewis Howes didn't admit that until a couple of years ago.

Scott Galloway 16:37 Is that right?

Steven Bartlett 16:38 So, he's lived with that his whole life, and-

Logan Ury 16:39 Wow.

Steven Bartlett 16:40 ... it wasn't until he was,

Steven Bartlett 16:41 I think, having dysfunction in his relationships and a few other things had happened that he decided he wanted to say it publicly for the first time. Which, again, feeds into your point. We actually, um, asked some of our audience to write in, and one of the people that wrote in was a teacher in a primary/preschool. And she said to me, she was an anonymous teacher in Germany, and she says, "Every year, it seems like more and more children, always boys, have this new energy to destroy the classroom dynamics. These boys almost always have two things in common, a lack of boundaries at home and unsupervised, unlimited access to all kinds of content on the internet, e.g. porn. Their perception of what is okay and what is right becomes completely distorted. I have tried so many things, and every year, it's becoming an even bigger challenge." (sighs) Young boys in school. So, one proposal is to delay education for boys-

Scott Galloway 17:34 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 17:34 ... put them in education later. Is the classroom itself a problem? Like, the sitting in school, listening to someone speak at you? Someone proposed to me on this podcast before that boys need more sort of practical play, and the classroom isn't designed for that. I wasn't sure if that was...

Scott Galloway 17:49 Well, in, in single-sex boys school, they end up with double the amount of recess time. And that is, they've, they have... I, I equate boys to dogs. A happy dog is a tired dog, and if it's not tired, if it ha- doesn't get to run, it's gonna cause trouble. And I feel the same way about boys. So, in these schools where they decide what's best for the boys, there's usually more exercise and more free play, and more roughhousing, co-ed schools. And I... You're also seeing, I think with boys... I mean, there's just... We d-... by even acknowledging that men play a critical royal- role in boys' lives a few years ago, that was seen as sexist.

Steven Bartlett 18:28 (laughs) .

Scott Galloway 18:29 What, you mean, what, you're saying Moms can't do this? And I can just tell you, there are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in. I don't know if it's the depth of my voice, my physical size, the way they relate to me, the fact that I'm not... You need Dad, (laughs) or that's what I have found, especially with boys. They need, almost like that- that- that, not physical intimidation, but it's almost like they begin tuning out their mom over time. I mean, they're incredibly close to their mother, they look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom. But they will constantly test the boundaries, constantly. And I think a lotta- a lotta single mothers, quite frankly, with boys, just can't keep a lid on that kid. They can't control the kid. So, and I think you're finding at schools, when there's no male kind of, I don't know, involvement, or that- that, I don't know, what I'll call physical presence, and then you add on this Dopa, uh, machine, that they get used to squeezing a Dopa bag a hundred times a day as they need it, and then you take the Dopa bag away, they're just more prone to emotional outbursts. I'm curious if you've done any research around why that- is that emotional outburst more common among boys than girls?

Steven Bartlett 19:48 I haven't done that research, but I am imagining that there's moms out there that are raising boys on their own, and they might be like, "Yes, it is hard, but what do I do?"

Scott Galloway 19:56 Right.

Steven Bartlett 19:56 And so, for that boy, who isn't taught by a lot of guys in school and isn't in the Boy Scouts, which doesn't exist anymore, or doesn't have big brothers, big sisters, like, what does that mom do?

Scott Galloway 20:08 So with that- uh, you talk- brought up Boy Scouts. In America, there's- there's Scouts for America-

Steven Bartlett 20:12 Right.

Scott Galloway 20:12 ... and it can be boys and girls.

Steven Bartlett 20:14 Right.

Scott Galloway 20:14 But Girl Scouts have their own single sex-

Steven Bartlett 20:16 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 20:16 ... but Boy Scouts aren't allowed to have their own-

Steven Bartlett 20:17 Right.

Scott Galloway 20:17 ... single sex. So, the questions are, I- you know, what do you do? And I think that we need a societal zeitgeist that says immediately, if there's no longer a male involved, we have to get other men involved-

Steven Bartlett 20:29 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 20:29 ... and acknowledge that that's not being sexist, that that's, you know, that that's important, that you get men involved. And I think, so- so I came from a single parent household, raised in- by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. Light of my life. As soon as my dad was gone, and then he had to move away for work, she got other men involved in my life. And I had wonderful men involved in my life. I had a ............................ Neighbor down the hall came in with his girlfriend and said, "Do you wanna go horser- horseback riding? You take me horseback riding." I don't know if men would be comfortable doing that, uh, in today's age. So, getting men involved in their lives. After school programs. Boy Scouts. I had a lot of wonderful men. I used to go camping with, you know, it, and there were men everywhere involved in my life. And I- I worry that a lot of those institutions-

Steven Bartlett 21:16 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 21:17 ... and also, there's a reticence and a hesitance for men to get involved in a boy's life that isn't theirs, for fear they're gonna be perceived as something's wrong with them.

Steven Bartlett 21:27 I was thinking that. So if we have less men in the home raising the children, and then we go to school and if- if the stat says that 72% of teachers in middle school are women as well, there's no men at school either, it's no wonder that boys are struggling so severely at such a young, early- early age, for so many reasons, because one would assume that they're being socialized in the same way as girls. I'm seeing, I've got m- a- a mother at home, don't have a father, I've got women at school, don't have male teachers. I mean, that's a controversial thing to say. I'm sure it used to be, but I think people are waking up a little bit now.

Scott Galloway 22:03 We need more male teachers. There's more f- there's more female fighter pilots per capita than male kindergarten teachers. There's just- there's an absence, there are some boys, not some, there are millions of boys in America whose first male role model is a prison guard.

Steven Bartlett 22:17 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 22:17 There are just no men in their lives. After school programs being canceled. No women, very- very few men K through 12. Dad's not around. There are- there are communi- there are literally communities, you read articles about it, where it's like, "Where are the men?"

Steven Bartlett 22:33 Yeah, that- that's what I'm trying to figure out. Where are they? Between-

Scott Galloway 22:36 Online. (laughs)

Steven Bartlett 22:37 Doesn't look like they're in work.

Scott Galloway 22:40 The- the-

Steven Bartlett 22:40 They're not in college.

Scott Galloway 22:42 The reality is, there just aren't, for a lot of reasons, a host of reasons, male- a lack of male involvement in kids' lives is a big, big factor leading to this. There are other factors, there's socioeconomic factors, there's biological factors, there's a lack of vocational training, there's outsourcing of many of the jobs that made a- a man's path to middle class viable. When you wanna talk about the UK, a big problem is the lack of growth.

Steven Bartlett 23:08 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 23:08 There's just not, there's not a lot of income opportunities for a young man who's not exceptional. And what we've seen in the US is essentially, if you look at our economic policies and college, it's never been better to be remarkable. Like, if you're in the top 10% of your high school class, you're gonna make more money than the top 10% did, 10, 20, 30... If you end up at Google, you're- you're gonna make... A kid at Google who's amazing, computer science degree, can make millions of dollars by the time they're 30. But I can prove to every one of us, mathematically, that 99% of our children are not in the top 1%. And our economic policies have basically said that school and college is meant to identify a superclass of one percenters that we're gonna try and turn into billionaires-

Steven Bartlett 23:51 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 23:52 ... instead of figuring out the infrastructure and the programs to ensure the bottom 90 have a shot at being in the top 10. And one of the stats is just around, uh, college acceptance. When I applied to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 76%. Now it's 9%. I was unremarkable, for whatever reason. Prefrontal cortex, single mother, whatever you wanna call it. But back then, they had the mission and the charge to let in unremarkable kids.

Steven Bartlett 24:16 (laughs) .

Scott Galloway 24:16 And that's no longer the case, because America's superpowers are optimism, and we all believe our kid's in that top 1%. And the reality is, they're not. Or people think...... "I like an economy where you can make a billion dollars 'cause that's gonna be me one day."

Steven Bartlett 24:32 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 24:33 So, they have ignored the fact that we are crowding more and more prosperity and opportunity into the remarkable. And I, for me, it comes down to what is, what do we want in America and the UK? Do we want a superclass of billionaires or do we want a society and an operating system that gives unremarkable people a shot at being in the top 10%? Uh, it's become winner take all, and we have purposely created a set of economic and educational policies that crowd a massive amount of prosperity into the top 1%, and we have opted for it because we believe we have a shot at being in that top 1%.

Logan Ury 25:09 I love that because I think that the winner takes all applies to a lot of different things. So I bet the top 10% of Americans now are healthier than they've ever been-

Scott Galloway 25:17 100%.

Logan Ury 25:17 ... while the rest of the country has never been healthy.

Scott Galloway 25:18 Best healthcare in the world if you're in the top 10%.

Logan Ury 25:20 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 25:21 Yeah.

Logan Ury 25:21 Or in marriages, the top marriages today are the best marriages of all time, yet we have declining marriage rates. So we're nearing the lowest rate of marriage that we've ever had in American history. So most people are, or fewer people are getting married, but if you're, you know, two college graduates who get married in your 30s, you might have an even stronger bond than people in the past. But that is a small group at the top.

Scott Galloway 25:45 To you, marriage has become a luxury item.

Logan Ury 25:47 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 25:47 If you're in the top quintile of income-

Logan Ury 25:48 Right.

Scott Galloway 25:48 ... earning households, you're, you're, 75% get married. If you're in the bottom quintile, only 20 f- If you're in the lower quintile of income-earning men, only one in four chance of getting married.

Logan Ury 26:01 And this has huge impact on our society because we know that married people are healthier, they're wealthier, they live longer. When couples are married, they actually have lower rates of child poverty. And so this has huge implications for our society if we're having fewer marriages, especially when you think about having fewer babies.

Steven Bartlett 26:19 I, um, I wanna get into dating and, and marriage and love and all those things. I, one of the things that really shocked me as I was preparing for this conversation was this graph.

Logan Ury 26:27 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 26:27 Because this isn't the narrative that we hear. Can you both see this one?

Scott Galloway 26:30 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 26:31 This is the reverse gender gap.

Logan Ury 26:33 Oh, yeah.

Steven Bartlett 26:33 Gender pay gap graph.

Logan Ury 26:34 Right.

Steven Bartlett 26:35 And it shows that young women are now-

Logan Ury 26:36 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 26:36 ... outearning young men. That's not what I heard in terms of, like, if I log onto social media, we've been trying to fight the gender pay gap. But to see that young men are now falling behind, both in education, both in unemployment. Young men face higher unemployment nearly twice the rate of women. Looking at the early d- developmental stats, this graph was horrifying.

Logan Ury 26:56 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 26:56 I, like, actually couldn't believe that was true, that young, young boys are struggling so much in education. But then to see also that it's reflected in...

Logan Ury 27:03 So that graph shows that boys age 16 to 24 are making 10% less in full-time employment than women. And so it is true that we're seeing a reverse income graph, but what we do need to talk about is even when women make more in their 20s, that changes around age 30 be-

Scott Galloway 27:20 When they have kids.

Steven Bartlett 27:22 When they have kids, right?

Scott Galloway 27:22 Yeah.

Logan Ury 27:22 Mm-hmm.

Steven Bartlett 27:23 It's like this meteorite hits-

Scott Galloway 27:24 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 27:24 ... and there's this huge burden placed on women. And I think that's a big part of the conversation that we'll talk about when we talk about dating, is women still feel like they have to have, you know, do all the household chores and raise the kids, but suddenly they have to earn a full-time income too.

Scott Galloway 27:39 100%.

Logan Ury 27:39 And so, so many of the gender roles are changing. And so yes, that graph is true. We have seen since 2020 that there's a shift, but I don't wanna just say, "Oh, women are making more in perpetuity," because as soon as there's kids involved, they pay the price.

Steven Bartlett 27:53 Jeneen, you said that women feel the need to then also earn a career and all those things. Where did that come from?

Logan Ury 28:00 Well, there's this idea of hypergamy. So traditionally, women seek partners who have more economic or social status than they do. And for most of human history, this worked-

Steven Bartlett 28:10 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 28:10 ... because men had the resources. And so there was sort of this arrangement where women could often marry someone who was more educated or earned more. But over the last 50 years, that's really changed. And so what I'm seeing in my work, working one-on-one with women, is that when they say that there aren't enough good guys to go around, that's actually true. So we now have this huge mating gap where we have these high-performing, high-earning women that have done the work and gone to therapy and work out and they're ready for their great partner, but they're not able to find enough guys who are available. And if this is a problem now with the women I work with in their 30s, we are gonna be facing a much more severe crisis 10, 15 years from now. So currently, 60% of college enrollment is women, but soon it's gonna be for every two women that graduate, it'll be one man.

Steven Bartlett 29:01 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 29:02 So that means half of those women will not have a guy who graduated from college. And so this is a crisis because these women are saying, "Okay, if you cannot be the provider, then you need to be offering more." Emotional intelligence is the new currency in dating. But these guys were raised not to be emotionally intelligent-

Scott Galloway 29:23 Yeah.

Logan Ury 29:23 ... not to give emotional support, but to be a provider. And so they've been chasing this lion, "I'm gonna hunt for this lion of being a provider," but suddenly they're told, "You need to hunt for a tiger, which is emotional intelligence." They don't have the skills to do that. And so women have raised the bar in terms of what they need from men while men are continuously falling behind.

Scott Galloway 29:44 100%. Yeah, there's, there's a lot there. There's some nuance around the pay thing. So the data I've seen is that women under the age of 30 in urban areas-

Logan Ury 29:51 Mm.

Scott Galloway 29:51 ... are now making more money. But to your point, the moment they have kids, where corporate America has really failed is it hasn't figured

Scott Galloway 29:58 out a way to maintain a woman's professional trajectory once she decides to deploy her ovaries and have kids. And there's some data saying, okay, two-thirds of divorce can be reverse engineered to the man starting to make less money. If, i- when the woman in the relationship starts making more money, they become twice as likely to get divorced, three times as likely to use ED drugs 'cause the guy loses his sense of purpose and self-esteem. What gets lost in that data is the reality is, if a woman is stepping up and stepping into the economic void and being more economically...... uh, being a greater economic contributor, then logically it would make sense that men need to step up logistically. And I think what a lot of women are saying is like, "Okay. I'm not getting anything." (laughs) "I'm not..." You're no longer a provider and by the way, you haven't filled that void. You haven't made up the delta.

Logan Ury 30:45 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 30:46 So, there's some, there's some nuance around it. What, what also I think is important to say is that if women are better students and g- showing the discipline and the skills to go to college in an information economy and making more money, then okay. Good on them. Just as, for whatever reason, men made more money. Maybe it wasn't fair, but y- you know, we, i- it's not a crime against humanity if women have the skills to make more money. What happens though is the second-order effects that you're talking about, and that is, and we don't like to talk about this, 75% of women say that economic viability is hugely important in a mate. Only 25% of men. For men it's not a criteria. For women it is, and it... Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast, he has this great stat, or he calls it the high heels effect, and that is 50% of women say they won't date a man shorter than them. I'm curious what you think-

Logan Ury 31:35 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 31:35 ... but I think it's more like 80%. I think it's an embarrassing thing to say because just instinctively, women feel like they'll be vul- vulnerable during gestation and they want someone they think physically could protect them. I just think it's hardwired into them even if they don't know it. Women, metaphorically, are getting taller every year, and women made horizontally and up-

Logan Ury 31:52 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 31:53 ... and men horizontally and down.

Logan Ury 31:54 Right.

Scott Galloway 31:55 And when the pool of horizontal and up keeps shrinking, they just have... So this notion, a ton of great women, where are the men? Or there's no men. There's a lot of men, just not men they'd wanna date.

Logan Ury 32:07 Right.

Scott Galloway 32:08 And then you speed ball it with the guys who are in the top 10% can engage in Porsche polygamy. They can get a date every goddamn night, which does not encourage long-term or very good behavior. So the guys they all want are not incented to enter into long-term relationships, and the bottom half of men are literally shut out of the mating market. And we always kind of, we always kind of, and this goes to your bailiwick, kind of portray men as the predators and the idiots and the, if they just got their act together. There's something strange going on and that is online dating, when a woman, a woman can go out with a guy, a high-status male, and I'll put forward this thesis and I want you to respond to it, she can have sex with him which gives h- her the impression that's her weight class for a relationship, but he's not interested in a relationship. And then she basically decides the bottom 90 are no longer in her weight class. And you can't tell a woman to lower her expectations-

Logan Ury 33:07 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 33:07 ... but the reality is, uh, and what the data I've seen on dating apps is that all of the women want the same few guys, and they shut out the rest.

Logan Ury 33:17 Yeah. Okay, so there's a few things I'll respond to there. So one, going back to the income graph, I wanna just call out that, yes, right now in a few urban markets, women are making more than men. So, women in DC and New York under 30 are making more than men on average, but in most situations, men are still making more than women. But we're talking about a projection. Going back to the dating research. So yes, it's exactly as you described. What we have right now is there's fewer and fewer men that are hypergamous mates for women. So if there's a much smaller pool of guys, then what you have is you have a bunch of women competing for the same men, and then a bunch of guys get ignored. But what I also see is that those top guys are having a hard time deciding. So I feel like in my coaching practice as a dating coach, I'm working with a lot of women who say, "What do I do? I've changed my profile the way you said I should. I took your class, but I still feel like there's just not enough great guys." And then I work with these CEO men who are having such a hard time choosing. And so I think we really have this exacerbated problem where so many women are competing for the same men and then a bunch of guys are getting ignored. And then what ends up happening is where do those guys go? And they go online.

Logan Ury 34:32 That's what you see.

Scott Galloway 34:33 They go to porn.

Logan Ury 34:33 They go to porn or they go to Reddit. I mean, I love Reddit but, they're really going to some of these red-pilled communities.

Scott Galloway 34:39 Yeah.

Logan Ury 34:39 And so what you're seeing now is just men really opting out of society. So when you go back to that stat, one in seven young men in the UK is NEET, not in employment, education or training, they have just opted out. And as Scott says, there's nothing scarier than a single man, a young single man. And so we are just creating a lot of these angry young single men who are saying, "Well, this is rigged against me." And so that's why I am worried about the rise of people like Andrew Tate. And if we wonder where are the dads, where are the men, well, men are finding these father figures but they're finding them online and they're not the father figures that I would choose for the majority of men. And so I'm really worried about this because I feel like women are saying, "Guys, you need to step up because I can provide and I don't need that from you," and guys are not prepared to rise to the occasion.

Steven Bartlett 35:31 What, what are women looking for? He, Scott talked about height.

Logan Ury 35:34 Yeah. So I would say, you know, I work at Hinge but I do think that apps have perpetuated this issue around height because if you can set your height filter to something then you might set it higher and then it's as if you have, the dating app is a club and you're literally having bouncers that prevent a bunch of guys from even getting into the club. So, many women in the US set their height filters at six feet, but only 14% of men in the US are six feet or taller. So w- what happens to the other 86% of men? And women are saying, "Where's my guy?" It's like, well you, he's not even showing up on your app. And so a huge thing that I push women to do is to change their height filters and just say there is nothing that proves that you're gonna have a successful long-term relationship if the guy is higher. I'm married to a short king. I love it. I feel like I really found this gem, and I think that so many women are ma- missing out on great potential partners because of things like height.

Steven Bartlett 36:31 Scott's point as well about they will date one of the men in the top 10%.

Logan Ury 36:35 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 36:36 ... sleep with him, potentially. And then that kind of adjusts their standards and they expect all other men to meet that standard. But there isn't just, there isn't enough men to meet that standard, is there?

Logan Ury 36:44 I haven't specifically heard that. I mean, there is a lot of evidence around assortative mating, that people sort of have an internal sense of how attractive they are and that they end up with someone similar to that. But assortative mating is different than hypergamy, which is really this idea, as Scott said, that women tend to date horizontally and up and men date horizontally and down. So, if you have two-thirds of women who are college grads and one-third of college grads who are men, and some of them are gonna date women without college degrees, you truly do have this dating crisis where there's just not enough men to meet this hypergamous mating.

Scott Galloway 37:19 Again, you can't tell women to lower their expectations, but this is the reality. When you ask a man, "If you could have a woman who had 80% of everything you wanted," 75% say, "Yeah, I'm on board."

Logan Ury 37:30 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 37:31 When you say to a woman, "A man has 80% of what you want," 75% say, "That's, that's not enough." But if you-

Logan Ury 37:38 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 37:38 But, but, but even look at the media.

Logan Ury 37:39 Right, right, right.

Scott Galloway 37:40 What does the media tell a woman to do? "He's out."

Steven Bartlett 37:43 (laughs)

Scott Galloway 37:43 What, he didn't open your door? He's not nice to his parent? You... Walk, walk right out on that man. Like, it's literally... Every piece of media is, "You don't need him. You're a strong, independent woman. Pull the rip cord. You're out." And i- i- i- it is (laughs) ... The, the, the basic kind of communication around this is, "You are a strong, independent, powerful woman. That is wonderful. And quite frankly, you don't need the imperfect man." And, uh, i- i- they're just not, they're just not connecting. I read that on Tinder, a man of average attractiveness has to swipe right 200 times to get one coffee, and then four of those five coffees will ghost him.

Logan Ury 38:28 (gasps) .

Scott Galloway 38:28 They will, they will decide they don't wanna meet him or they won't show up. That means a guy of average attractiveness-

Logan Ury 38:35 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 38:35 ... has to swipe right 1,000 times to get one coffee. Now, what does that tell that guy? "Women don't value me. Women make me feel rejected." And then they go online and they meet, they see these misogynists telling them, "It's not your fault."

Logan Ury 38:49 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 38:50 And these men become much more prone to misogynistic content, much more prone to nationalistic content. I- i- blaming other people for the lack of economic opportunity. They start sequestering from society. I worry that we are literally evolving a new species of asexual, asocial male. And if a man, by the age of 30, hasn't either lived with someone or married someone, there's a one-in-three chance he's gonna have a substance abuse problem.

Logan Ury 39:15 Wow.

Scott Galloway 39:15 In addition, it goes so much deeper than that, because if they don't develop the skills... You know, the reason romantic comedies are two hours and not 15 minutes is this shit is hard.

Logan Ury 39:25 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 39:26 Like, finding an attractive, intelligent woman. Generally speaking, 75% of people who've been married longer than 30 years say, "In the beginning, one was much more interested than the other," and it was almost always the man. Women are, women are much choosier. The basic, the basis of evolution is seed trying to get everywhere, men, and women deploying a much finer filter to, to select the f- strongest, smartest, and fastest speed. So, men need an environment to demonstrate excellence. And you hear these women talk about it. "He was kind. He was good at work. I liked the way he smelled. He was funny." Where do men demonstrate excellence when they're not going to college?

Logan Ury 40:01 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 40:01 They're not going into an office because of remote work. Where do they have... They're not going to church. They're not going to temple. Where does a woman have the opportunity to fall in love other than these baseline metrics? And you were talking about women say, you've seen these TikToks, over $100,000, that's not unreasonable, and over 6 feet. That's 2.2% of the male population. So, where do they fall in love? Where can a man demonstrate excellence? It used to be go to temple, seven single women, seven single men, and they kind of paired off-

Logan Ury 40:35 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 40:36 ... and worked it out. And online dating, similar to online e-commerce, online rentals, it's created a winner take most, if not all, environment. And it's, i- it's basically been amazing for attractive guys, attractive wealthy guys, tall wealthy guys. It's been amazing for them. For all the other guys, it's been a disaster, and it's been, made it mildly shittier for every woman. I- it is, i- i- the digitization of mating, I believe, has been a disaster. It's been bad for women. It's been disastrous for men.

Logan Ury 41:10 I wanna talk about how the genders seem to be separating in a lot of important ways. We know from research around political affiliation that women are now, on average, 30% more liberal than men. So, they are definitely experiencing political polarization. Then, for the first time in history, more men are attending church than women.

Scott Galloway 41:28 Hmm. Interesting.

Logan Ury 41:28 And when I started this research, I really came at it from this point of, "Is it just me or are there not as many eligible guys?" But when I dug into this, I found that both genders really feel misunderstood. And so I asked men and women, "Who has more power in relationships?" So, equal amounts, men and women said, "Oh, we have the same amount of power." 42% of that. But then what was so interesting is that 46% of men said women have more power, and 46% of women said men have more power. So, there's this huge feeling of, oh, the other gender has all of this power. And when I spoke to people, I wanna tell you about three dating paradoxes that I saw. So, the first dating paradox for men is this idea that now that women are providers and do not need a man to take care of them financially, they really want guys to step up with emotional support. But here's the paradox. They were not raised and they don't know how to give that emotional support or emotional availability. So, we know women, even if they have the same number of friends as guys, the women are talking to their friends much more often. Women speak to their kids, even starting at a very young age, they use more emotional language with their daughters than their sons. So, constantly we have this feeling where we're asking men to do something when they don't have the skills. I was talking to my friend David, and he said women are in graduate school when it comes to emotional conversations and guys are in third grade.

Scott Galloway 42:51 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 42:52 The other part of the paradox is that women are asking men to be more emotionally open, but then they get shamed when they do that. So, we have this great quote from Brene Brown where she says, "We beg guys to open up. We beg them to let us in. And then when they do, we can't stomach it."And I heard that over and over in my research. There's this quote where a guy says, "A woman would rather see me die on the white horse than fall off of it." And so there's this sense that, "I have to be perfect. I have to be the masculine and the feminine, but I don't have the skills to do that." And women say that they want these guys to be emotional, but as soon as they show emotionality, it can freak those women out. So one guy that I spoke to for this said, "I went on a few dates with this woman. At some point, I told her that my mom had had a suicide attempt. And the next day, she texted me and said, 'I'm sorry I can't see you. I cannot process your emotional trauma for you.'" And so guys are getting a lot of mixed messages. "We want you to be feminine. We want you to support us. But when you do, it freaks us out, and so we don't want that." And digging into the research, and I wanna look into this more, I think it's that a lot of women want emotional support. They want you to support them in their emotional journeys, but they're not as ready to have you open up in your emotional journey.

Scott Galloway 44:08 Can I put forward a thesis? And I want you to respond to it-

Logan Ury 44:10 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 44:10 ... because I haven't done the research.

Scott Galloway 44:14 In marketing, we call it consumer dissonance, what people say they want-

Logan Ury 44:17 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 44:17 ... and then what they actually buy. And what women say they want is an emotionally in touch man, and what they want is a masculine man. And that they will articulate what they want in a man, it includes being more emotionally available, and then they wanna have sex with a traditional masculine man. And what I hear from a lot of women, this is anecdotal evidence, and it's pulse marketing and you tell me what the data says, but there's just so many single women in my age group, and there's lit- it feels like there's literally no men in my age group. As bad as it is for w- people in their 20s and 30s-

Logan Ury 44:50 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 44:50 ... try being a woman in your 50s trying to date, right? And they tell me the same thing. These are liberal, progressive, educated women, they say, "By the way, I like a manly man."

Logan Ury 45:00 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 45:00 And they say it under their breath. So there's what supposedly is stated around, "I need more emotional availability, someone who's in touch with their feelings," but what the research shows is they want a guy with facial hair, who's the str- who's still... Women are still very attracted to-

Logan Ury 45:17 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 45:17 ... traditional masculine attributes.

Logan Ury 45:20 Yeah. I mean, I think we're just in such a hard moment, because you have women who are saying, "I don't wanna date a guy who earns less than me," and you might think, "Okay, well, the data hasn't caught up with the dating." If more women-

Scott Galloway 45:33 Yeah.

Logan Ury 45:33 ... are in higher education and more women are earning more, then maybe you're going to be the one who earns more in your relationship. But what they feel like is projecting out, "I'm gonna end up doing most of the housework, most of the childcare."

Scott Galloway 45:45 Yeah.

Logan Ury 45:45 "I might as well get a guy that can contribute financially." So they don't wanna change their expectations around that. And so I think we truly are in a moment where women are being asked to do more masculine things, and men are being asked to do more feminine things, and I think a lot of that is progress, but it also seems to be creating a lot of confusion in the dating world.

Scott Galloway 46:06 Yeah, it's sort of... I was just thinking, I coach a lot of young men, and occasionally women ask me for dating advice. And you coach, it sounds like, a lot of both. And what I, first thing I say to men is I ask them, like, "Would you wanna have sex with you?"

Steven Bartlett 46:19 (laughs)

Scott Galloway 46:20 "Right? Are you in shape? What do you look like naked? Are you, do you have a plan? You don't have to be rich now, but do you have a plan? Right? Uh, have you, do you f- have you found means of being confident? Can you demonstrate kindness and excellence across anything?" And the only advice I give women is second coffee. And that is, maybe it wasn't great. I mean, if you don't like the guy and you're just like turned off, fine. But if it was just okay, maybe give it a second coffee.

Logan Ury 46:47 I have a chapter in my book called Make the Second Date the Default.

Scott Galloway 46:50 Yeah.

Logan Ury 46:50 And it's really because I feel like I won the lottery with my husband, but he is somebody that takes longer to open up and he's this slow burn. We met in college, we met again seven years later, then we were friends for a year. And I feel like he's this incredible partner, husband, father. But I don't know that if we'd met just randomly on the first date that I would've gone on a second date.

Scott Galloway 47:09 Yeah.

Logan Ury 47:09 And so I think people really do need to train themselves to look for these slow burns.

Steven Bartlett 47:13 Logan, Scott said something there about what he thinks women want, which is these-

Logan Ury 47:17 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 47:17 ... sort of traditional masculine features. Is this what you see in the data?

Logan Ury 47:21 What's hard is, I think Scott's right about what people say they want versus, like, so stated versus revealed preferences. So according to the research that I did, women are saying the number one thing that they're looking for is kindness and compassion. That's also what men are saying that they're looking for. So in many ways, this is great. People are looking for the same things. But I just feel like there's these huge disconnects now where people don't feel like they can get what they want.

Steven Bartlett 47:45 M- men are saying they want kindness and compassion?

Logan Ury 47:47 That was, I made them say, "What are all the things that you care about?" And then, "What is the number one thing that you care about?" And kindness and compassion was first for both of them.

Scott Galloway 47:56 The stuff I've seen, or the stuff I've read, is that for women, and I've talked to men about this, number one-

Logan Ury 48:03 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 48:03 ... is they have to signal resources. And we don't like to say it out loud. And by the way, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a Range Rover and a Panerai now, but you have a plan.

Logan Ury 48:12 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 48:12 Right? You, you have your shit together. You go home at midnight when everyone's partying because you have to be up for work. You work out, which shows a level of discipline and that you can commit to something. You're in school. You've got a good job. This person is gonna have resources. And I don't think that's changed a whole lot. I think it, it, a man's ability to, to signal future resources has gone down. I'm not sure it's become any less of a criteria. Number two is intellect.

Logan Ury 48:38 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 48:38 And it's very instinctual, because if you make good decisions for the tribe, your kids are more likely to survive.

Logan Ury 48:44 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 48:44 Someone who's smart is more likely to take care of your offspring than someone who's stupid. What's interesting, I, and I love this, is the fastest way to communicate intellect is humor.

Steven Bartlett 48:55 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 48:55 And I joke, I joke, and this is bad, but I say, this is my impression of a woman. "I'm laughing, I'm laughing, I'm naked."

Logan Ury 49:00 (laughs)

Scott Galloway 49:01 And that is, I've always thought if a guy can make a woman laugh-

Logan Ury 49:04 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 49:04 ... she will, she will date him. And then the third thing, and this is where guys screw up, this is what I tell a guy's secret weapon is, it's kindness. Women want...... to see that you are a good person, you, you treat service staff well, you're good to your parents, you have manners, you treat people well even with no reciprocal expectation. Because they know that a kind person, if and when she's vulnerable and needs help and maybe isn't as, bringing as much to the table for certain periods of time, that, that this is a kind man. And, you know, sure, you wanna do your best to signal resources and have a plan. Sure. Maybe you're smart, maybe you aren't. There's not a lot you can do there. But the secret weapon, I think, for men that they don't leverage, and I do think it's a practice, is to demonstrate kindness. And we don't talk about that enough as men. It's like, well, okay ... And, and it's little things. Have good manners.

Logan Ury 49:59 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 50:00 Be thoughtful. Follow up with people. And I, I think that ... Anyways, those are the three things that I have read women want, uh, in men.

Logan Ury 50:10 Okay, there's so much there. So one-

Scott Galloway 50:12 (laughs)

Logan Ury 50:12 One is I do think we need a new definition for modern masculinity or mature masculinity or evolved masculinity. And I think that that's why this moment feels so painful, is that we don't have it. Because I agree with you. I don't think women are saying, "I want a feminine man."

Scott Galloway 50:27 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 50:27 I think they want a modern masculine man. And so that means somebody who is decisive and can provide, but also somebody who's able to communicate with them emotionally. And so one of the suggestions that I came here today to talk about is this idea of men's groups. So about a year ago, my friend David Klavins, who happens to be a world-class magician, came to my husband and said, "I'm gonna form this men's group." And so it's about six or seven men, and they meet together monthly, and they have served, uh, they, they have formed this council of peers. So every month that they get together, every guy sits down with Post-It notes and says the two issues that are most pressing for him. So first of all, I think that that's a great way of doing it, because it's actually that time to say, "What am I struggling with?" I think many people in their lives, maybe especially men, don't sit there in saying, "What's top of mind for me?" So guys get the quiet time to do that. Then they go around in a circle, and whoever has the most pressing issue, they get to take their time. And some men might say, "You know, these are top of mind for me, but it's not a priority. I'll give the time to someone else." And each month, they talk about what's going on for them. They hold each other accountable. So month three, they might say, "Hey, David, you've been talking about that for the last three months. Are you gonna actually do anything about it?" And I love that these men have a masculine space to actually go through what's going on for them, because maybe they have wives and girlfriends they can go to. Maybe they don't. But I think it's a different type of advice that you get from a council of trusted peers. And I really do think that men's groups could change a lot of these issues, because I can sit here and say, "Everybody should be in therapy." Guess what? Therapy's really expensive, and many insurance companies will not provide it or there's a huge waiting list. And so if we just sit around for all these guys to go to therapy, that's not gonna happen. But men's groups are a way that men can lead each other. They can provide this tribe of peers, and I have just seen so many changes in this group. So David told me his story where he had a lot of anger about his mom's debilitating illness, and he wasn't really experiencing it and it was coming out as anger at his mom, but he wasn't conscious of that. But by getting the anger out in a safe place with men, the only place where he felt like he could truly be angry, he was able to get over it and to actually treat his mom with a lot more empathy. Or my husband has gone to the group and talked about ego stuff at work or how hard the transition to becoming a parent has been, and I feel like the men in this group have grown so much over the 12 months that it's been happening, that I just paid for my brother-in-law to be in a men's group. And I want there to be tons of men's groups, because I really feel like this isn't an issue that a therapist or a mom or I can really solve. I think men need to be solving this problem within themselves.

Scott Galloway 53:13 What you said is really powerful, because if you walk down the hallway at Stern, there's Golden Seeds, venture cap- women in venture capital, Black Women's Consulting Club. There, uh, there are women's support gr-... There's nothing for men. And these groups are really wonderful. Uh, ManTalks is one that I've been looking at, where they've said, "Let's get together and just be supportive of each other." Uh, and it, and it's, and it's a fairly new phenomenon.

Logan Ury 53:39 Yeah. I think people are afraid of men gathering because traditionally, bad things have happened in that space.

Scott Galloway 53:44 Gangs. (laughs)

Logan Ury 53:44 (laughs) Right. There, uh, I mean, gangs. I'm just thinking of, like, many situations-

Scott Galloway 53:48 That's funny.

Logan Ury 53:48 ... in which, like, if, once there's a tiki torch, I want there to be some women there, right? Like, so there's a reason why people have been fearful of this. Or it's like, when the whole world was a men's group, a men's club, you didn't need to have men's clubs.

Scott Galloway 54:00 Yeah.

Logan Ury 54:00 But I think in this moment, this is a really powerful, organic, grassroots way for men to change. So I imagine that you have group chats with men that are your peers that you go to for advice. And I feel like there's men out there that don't have that. And we are meant to make decisions by getting advice from other people.

Scott Galloway 54:20 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 54:20 I personally have a board of directors that, in my life, when I'm gonna make a big decision, I meet with them. So when I took my last job, when I decided to move, all of these different things, I meet with my board of directors and I say, "What am I not seeing? What are my blind spots?" And they've given me a lot of good and hard advice. And I think we all need to be building our own board of directors, and for men, that might be this men's group.

Steven Bartlett 54:45 (paper rustles) Do you mind if I pause

Steven Bartlett 54:46 this conversation for a moment? I wanna talk about our show sponsor today, which is Shopify. I've always believed that the biggest cost in business isn't failure, it's the time you waste trying to make decisions, time spent hesitating, overthinking, or waiting for the right moment. (paper rustles) When I started my first company at 20 years old, I had no experience and no money. (paper rustles) What I did have was an idea and the willingness to move fast, and that made all the difference. If you've been thinking about starting your own business, Shopify makes this entire process so much easier. With thousands of customizable templates, you don't need coding or design skills. You just need a willingness to start. Shopify connects all your sales channels, from your website to social media, and it handles the backend payments, shipping, and taxes too, so that you can stay focused on moving forward and growing your business. If you're ready to start, visit shopify.com/bartlett and sign up for a one pound per month trial period. That's shopify.com/bartlett. (paper rustles)

Steven Bartlett 55:40 It is hard as a, as a young man to, um, share how you feel with other young men. Even if they are like your best friends, it's so much easier just to roast each other.

Logan Ury 55:47 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 55:47 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 55:48 Like, my, my group chat with my guys-

Logan Ury 55:50 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 55:50 ... is probably a little bit more advanced in, in terms of emotional-

Logan Ury 55:53 Yeah.

Steven Bartlett 55:53 ... um, openness, but most of it's just like a war zone. We're like criticizing each other, attacking each other, but that's kind of our way of showing love. And then you'll have once every two weeks, someone will be going through something. So like one of my friends now, he, they've just found out that there's a s- complication with the pregnancy.

Logan Ury 56:09 Mm.

Steven Bartlett 56:09 And the tone shifts and we all become supportive, but my girlfriend tells me how rare that is, that we have this space where we all, we'll talk about our emotions and how we're feeling and we'll swift, sw- switch from like trying to kill each other in the most like funny way to being really, really emotionally supportive. A lot of men don't have that.

Logan Ury 56:25 Well, it's so funny that you said that because my husband's really funny and so are some of the other guys in the group, and they actually had to talk about how they needed to be less funny because the f- the humor was becoming a distraction. And somebody brought up, you know, in their own male way, like, "I think that sometimes we're about to go deep and then someone makes a joke, and even though that joke was really good, we don't go back to where we were and we don't go as deep." So they actually work on being less funny in that group. But look at the work that you do. You sit for hours a week and you learn and you ask people questions and you're working on yourself. I'm not surprised that you have a group of peers that you can go to for that. But I would wager that the average man doesn't have that.

Steven Bartlett 57:01 Yeah.

Logan Ury 57:01 And I feel like there are gonna be so many women who are listening and watching this and they're like, "I want that for my husband."

Steven Bartlett 57:08 What is the evolutionary basis for this? This is what I was thinking the whole time. I was like, "Did we lose the man's group at some point in our past? And, uh, is that why we're adding it back into our lives?" Like, what was, what used to do this job before?

Logan Ury 57:18 So what I've heard, and I think evolutionary biology, you always have to take certain things with a grain of salt-

Steven Bartlett 57:24 Mm.

Logan Ury 57:24 ... 'cause people can kind of explain away anything with it.

Steven Bartlett 57:26 Mm.

Logan Ury 57:27 But it's that a lot of times men were sitting next to each other and they were having these conversations on the savanna, and that's often why like guys prefer to do activities side by side and not facing each other. And so you had men who were in conversation with their peers or, you know, in-

Scott Galloway 57:44 And outside.

Logan Ury 57:45 And outside. (laughs) Yeah.

Scott Galloway 57:46 Fishing. "Hey, heard you're getting divorced."

Steven Bartlett 57:49 Yeah. (laughs)

Logan Ury 57:49 Right. Right. Or it's like, you know, why it's so good to have conversations in the car.

Steven Bartlett 57:53 True.

Logan Ury 57:53 I feel like you had a lot of men that were in groups at church. You had men who were in the Elks Club. You had veterans that were meeting. We actually feel like this is a time where much fewer men are getting together, and this is all of the amazing research that's happening now around loneliness, is that the average young guy is spending many fewer hours a week with their peers-

Scott Galloway 58:13 Mm.

Logan Ury 58:13 ... face-to-face. So even though a guy might be catching up with his friend playing video games, I just don't think that that's the same thing. And so I feel like we need this in-person time with our friends to develop these relationships, and instead we have people on TikTok, people on Twitch watching other people live their lives.

Scott Galloway 58:32 You brought up two interesting things. One is your, your, your friend group. I have a similar group, same eight guys, eight guys I lived with my freshman year at UCLA. For 30 or 40 years, we've been kind of constant contact, email now and WhatsApp. When your friend had something bad happen to him, I think for a long time men have weighed in and s- showed empathy for each other. What none of my male friends have ever done, their friend group would say, is I w- I have never heard one of my male friends go, "I'm depressed. I'm, I'm just super fucking lonely and depressed." You just don't hear that from men. "I'm struggling with anger. I'm, I ha- I'm, all of a sudden I have erectile dysfunction." You would just, I've never heard one of my male friend when their mom dies or they get divorced, we weigh in with a lot of empathy, but you never hear them really open up because men are worried that if we display weakness, another man might kill us and take our shit from us, or that women aren't gonna wanna have sex with us. So there's still, I think, a huge inability for men to proactively talk about how they're really feeling. And then you talked about a board of directors. A great board of directors for a man in his 20s unfortunately, not unfortunately, is a girlfriend.

Logan Ury 59:46 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 59:47 And I'll just use personal experience. I had a great girlfriend when I was 24 and she basically said to me, "If you don't stop getting high every night, I'm gonna stop having sex with you." That was very motivating for me.

Logan Ury 59:59 Yeah. (laughs)

Scott Galloway 59:59 I really liked being with a partner. Without the guardrails of a romantic relationship, I think men are just, I don't wanna say lost, but women create more social connections outside of a romantic relationship, and sometimes that absence of a romantic relationship, they pour that energy into friendships and their professional life, whereas men start pouring it into video games-

Logan Ury 1:00:22 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:00:23 ... and Reddit and porn. So the fact that only one in three men in America under the age of 30 has a girlfriend and two in three women has a boyfriend, you think, "Well, that's mathematically impossible." It's not 'cause women are dating-

Logan Ury 1:00:34 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:00:34 ... older 'cause they want more economically and emotionally viable men. If I hadn't been in relationships that were great guardrails for me in terms of my own behavior, my own ambition, uh, it, n- I, men need... Without the prospect or the existence of a romantic relationship, men have worse outcomes than women who don't have. And d- i- it, it, is what I'm d- do you agree with what I'm saying? Does the research bear that out?

Logan Ury 1:01:02 You know, it's interesting 'cause part of me where my head goes is like, "Are you asking women to do the emotional labor of raising men?" And when you phrase it-

Scott Galloway 1:01:09 Mm.

Logan Ury 1:01:09 ... like that, it sounds really negative.

Scott Galloway 1:01:11 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:01:11 But from anecdotal experience from my own life, you know, I've been with my husband for 10 years. I think we both really shaped each other. But like even yesterday, he texted me and he's like, "I'm gonna get an Uber instead of renting a car at the airport. You've taught me how to be such a savvy traveler." Like, that's a small example, but it's like you really do influence each other.

Scott Galloway 1:01:27 Mm-hmm.

Logan Ury 1:01:28 And I think that, I think sometimes about my single friends and how they go to bed at night and they don't have a person next to them to give them advice and to listen to them talk about their day.

Scott Galloway 1:01:39 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:01:39 And I think that when we're in long-term relationships, there's an element of raising each other and building memories together and making each other better and having that investment.

Scott Galloway 1:01:48 One plus one equals three.

Logan Ury 1:01:49 Right. And that's why I just, all these women that come to me and all these men that are looking for love, that want relationships, and something is happening right now where the gap just seems to be widening and these relationships aren't happening.And this is even true in teenage relationships. So, it used to be that for baby boomers and Gen X, three-quarters of men had had a relationship in their teen years. And now, it's under 50%. And so if you start building your relational skills at an early age, then you get better and better at dating over time. But if, as you said, by the time you're 30 you haven't been in a relationship, that's seen as a red flag to a lot of people. And so I think we have a problem now, but I'm really projecting that we're gonna have a much greater problem in the future.

Scott Galloway 1:02:32 I think a real enemy of relationships and mating for people in their 20s that we haven't talked a lot about, I had Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford on my pod talking about addiction and something we're just starting to come to grips with, and as I read more about it, I think porn is really-

Logan Ury 1:02:50 Let's talk about porn.

Scott Galloway 1:02:52 Well, personal experience. I used to go on camp- ... The only reason I graduated from UCLA, I graduated with a 2.27 GPA. If I had graduated with a 1.97, I wouldn't have graduated.

Logan Ury 1:03:03 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:03:04 Not an en- Not the only motivator, but a real motivator for me was the prospect of meeting someone. I, I could go onto campus and there might be a chance I'd meet friends, be social, and possibly meet a potential romantic partner. It was very motivating. And if I'd had porn on this-

Logan Ury 1:03:21 Right. (laughs)

Scott Galloway 1:03:22 ... and on my screen always available, I'm not sure I would've gone on campus and ... I, I just would've spent a lot more time at home. And unfortunately, the deepest-pocketed, most talented companies in the world are trying to convince young people that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm. And what I say to young men I coach is that, "I'm not gonna tell you not to consume porn, but try to modulate it," because I think that fire of wanting to meet someone and wanting to demonstrate excellence, and being ... having perseverance and enduring rejection and getting your shit together and dressing well and smelling nice and showering, for godssakes. That mojo, that desire is incredibly important for society. And we're taking young men's mojo away with frictionless, open-access, on-demand porn.

Logan Ury 1:04:14 Have you seen these NoFap communities?

Scott Galloway 1:04:17 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:04:17 Have you seen this?

Steven Bartlett 1:04:18 Yes.

Logan Ury 1:04:19 Okay. So I was listening to this episode of Modern William with Chris Williamson and he was interviewing Hamza, who was self-identifying as a former red-pilled person. And he was talking about how much it changed his life to try to enter the NoFap community.

Steven Bartlett 1:04:31 Which means?

Logan Ury 1:04:33 No masturbation. And so I do think that porn is a huge problem. My first job out of college was running the Porn Pod for Google. So what this meant was that we would sell ads for the porn advertisers. This team does not exist anymore. This was a long time ago. Um, my parents were like, "I sent you to Harvard, and now you're selling ads for pornography." But when I look back, I'm like, "What was I perpetuating?" Because I feel like there's just so many problems with what technology is doing in terms of replacing human connection. So let's just project out. ChatGPT is already amazing. I'm currently in my Google feed getting ads for Replika, and the ads say, "Get your perfect AI boyfriend, always there for you."

Steven Bartlett 1:05:18 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:05:18 So you think about the fact that real-life relationships are messy. I tell my husband on a weekly basis, "Please throw your contact lens in the garbage." And every week we have a disagreement about that. Well, guess what? Your online girlfriend, she doesn't nag you. She doesn't tell you to pick up your socks. She only tells you how great you are.

Steven Bartlett 1:05:38 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:05:38 And always tells you, you know, that you're doing the right thing and, "How was your day?" Then you insert sex robots. Okay, so you have your emotional needs met. You have your sexual needs met. Maybe you're watching porn while engaging with your sex robots. Why would you wanna go through the very challenging potential rejection of real-life relationships? And I feel like if all these things come to pass, which it seems very likely that they will, we are truly in a crisis moment when it comes to birth rate and future generations.

Scott Galloway 1:06:09 And it impacts them ... It'll impact the economy because the skills you have to develop to be successful in the mating market are life skills.

Logan Ury 1:06:19 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:06:20 You have to be able to endure rejection. You have to have a sense of humor. You have to be able to read the room. Show me a guy who's good in a bar, I'll show you a guy who'll probably be good in a boardroom. And the skills you have to develop as a young man if you want a romantic and a sexual relationship pay dividends the rest of your life. And if you don't develop those skills, I think it impacts your life across a bunch of dimensions.

Logan Ury 1:06:40 This is something I'm worried about for Gen Z in general. So I did a ton of research with post-pandemic Gen Z daters, men and women in the UK and United States, and such a big theme that came out of it was that they don't have rejection resilience.

Scott Galloway 1:06:53 Yeah.

Logan Ury 1:06:53 And I think that we hear this in many aspects of life. So, someone that I'm close to, he's the former dean of Brown, he's a professor there. And he was talking about how it used to be that his office hours were empty and that's when he could do his reading or play solitaire. But now students come basically saying, "Tell me exactly what's gonna be on the test. Tell me exactly what to write in my paper," because they are not willing to fail. I have friends who are managers at Google and they give somebody feedback in a Google Doc and the person is crying because they take that as extreme rejection. And so if you don't have the resilience built up-

Scott Galloway 1:07:24 Hundred percent.

Logan Ury 1:07:25 ... to fail, then you are not going to take risks. And everything in life worth having is worth taking a risk for. And so, I feel that I have my dream job. Nobody messaged me on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, Logan, do you want to study dating and relationships?" No. I invented this job and now I get to have it. And same thing is true with relationships. It's not about waiting for the perfect person to show up. It's about becoming a great person who somebody else chooses and going after what you want.

Steven Bartlett 1:07:51 I wanna talk about all of this and specifically offer some solution to the young, to the parents, to the boys, to the teens, to the men that are listening. We had a, a young man actually write in on this subject.And he said, "I've suffered with crippling loneliness, and so I've spent over $1,000 hiring women online just to talk to me and to keep me company. On top of that, I've spent several thousand dollars more engaging in other business with them. After doing this for nearly a year now, I still feel incredibly unfulfilled." And on the subject of porn, 30% of internet traffic is now related to porn, with about 80% of that porn traffic coming from men and 20% coming from women. I actually had a conversation on this podcast before about porn, and funnily enough, the top comment was, "By the way, us women, what, get porn addicted too." Because, it was a bit of a blind spot to me, but, uh, I think that's something that's worth acknowledging. Uh, and the stats are staggering in terms of how high a po- porn consumption correlates to higher probabilities of depression. What do you do about it? Like, on an individual level, I get it, try not to watch porn? But, I mean, that doesn't seem like incredibly great advice because if you're lonely, you're not getting laid, no one wants to date you for all the reasons we talked about today. Restraint seems to be a pretty shitty (sighs) solution.

Logan Ury 1:09:07 Let's give this one to Scott. (laughs)

Scott Galloway 1:09:09 Okay, so I coach young men. I take two to three on at any time. And I don't know if this is the right way, but it's my way. I'm like, "You gotta lean into your advantage. When you're our age, you have more... You have capital, you have more money than time. They have capital, they have a lot of time." And I ask them to unlock their screen, and I say to them, "I gamble with options. I gamble. At my age, I still gamble. I, I preach about low-cost index funds and I buy call options. That makes no fucking sense. It's gambling, but I know it. I watch porn. I try and modulate my use so I can put the majority of my sexual energy into my partner, but I watch porn." 'Cause I want them to not feel like I'm gonna judge them.

Logan Ury 1:09:47 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:09:47 And they unlock their phone. And I say, "We're gonna find 8 to 12 hours a week of time, of capital, and we're gonna reinvest that capital in higher ROI investments." It is so easy to find 8 to 12 hours. I can sometimes find 7 hours or 15 hours just in TikTok.

Logan Ury 1:10:03 You look at screen time?

Scott Galloway 1:10:04 I look at screen time.

Logan Ury 1:10:06 Okay.

Scott Galloway 1:10:06 And I say, "All right, come with, through with me-

Logan Ury 1:10:08 Yeah.

Scott Galloway 1:10:08 ... we're gonna find 8 to 12 hours, and then we're gonna reinvest that capital into three investments. One, we're gonna start working out and getting fit. You're gonna work out three times a week with weights. You should be able... The, the human male form is spectacular. You should be able to walk into any room under the age of 30 if you're a man, and know that if shit got real, you could kill and eat everybody or outrun them. I need you to be strong. You're gonna be more mentally healthy, you're gonna be kinder. Look at the people who break up fights at bars, they're big strong men. Look at the people who defend their country. It- you... You wanna be strong as a man, it feels fucking amazing. Testosterone, your, your bone structure, your muscle mass, it's amazing. Lean into that. We're gonna get strong. Two, you gotta start making some money." And the kids I... You know, to be honest, the kids I'm coaching are really struggling. These are kids at home at the age of 23 with their mom, not getting along with their mom. Nothing going on. If you have a phone, you can make money. I don't care if it's Lyft, Task Rocket, 'cause you get a taste for the flesh. And the f- the way to start making a lot of money is to start making a little bit m- of money. 'Cause you start to figure out the economy, "How could I make more money? Maybe at some point, could I buy a car and hire a driver to be an Uber..." You know, what, what is the way... You know, could I get a certification in, in plumb-" And you start figuring out, and you start getting... Your greed glands get going, "Oh my God, it's costing that money. I can go out, I can go to a concert." It gets those greed glands going. And then the third thing we're gonna do is we're gonna put ourselves in the company of strangers and the agency of something bigger than ourselves twice a week. Church group, softball league, nonprofit, uh, char- whatever it is. And then 3A, and this is... I've just started doing this. (laughs) I've only done it two times. And it's an exercise and I say, and it goes to your... I think no is the way to success.

Logan Ury 1:12:00 Mm-hmm.

Scott Galloway 1:12:01 Show me someone who's successful, I'm gonna show you a shit ton of nos. I've been reji- I ran for sophomore, junior, senior class president, lost all three times, decided to run for senior class president, lost. I applied to 38 jobs, I got one offer, nine schools, rejected by seven. I mean, I just... My whole life has been about no, and that's why I'm successful is I was always able to endure it. So I say to them, "This is what I want you to do. I need you to go up to a stranger at wherever we're doing, church group, rider club, riders club, (coughs) whatever it might be, online educa- not online, excuse me, education, continuing education, and you're gonna ask them out for coffee, it's a friend. Hey, what are you doing? Do you wanna watch the game? Do you wanna watch the Liverpool game this weekend? Let's go to a bar. If it's a woman you might be attracted to, hey, try and get a rap going, would you like to have coffee? And here's the goal. The goal is no, and we're gonna celebrate no, 'cause you're gonna call me and I'm gonna say, did you ask someone out for coffee or to a bar? And most likely they'll have said no, they'll be polite, they'll come up with an