therapy can help you overcome some of the obstacles that make you (men) lonely
“I’m overexposed at this point,” Scott Galloway tells me over Zoom as he paces around his hotel room in San Francisco. And it’s true that the NYU professor, investor, and podcaster is seemingly everywhere these days. Galloway is on tour promoting his book, warning anyone who will listen that the young men of America are in deep trouble, falling behind their female peers every which way, and becoming increasingly undateable in the process.
His latest book, Notes on Being a Man, is part of Galloway’s solution to the problem. “The book is for young men who I think need a code,” he said. “I think men aren’t attaching to church. They’re not going into work. They seem to be attaching less to romantic relationships.”
Part memoir and part self-help book, Notes on Being a Man just landed in the top spot on the New York Times “Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous” bestseller list. It’s full of good, time-honored advice for the basement-dwelling, porn-addled young men of 2025: Get out of the house, get an education, get a job, work hard, work out, ask a girl out, and create “surplus value.”
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The advice in the book is blunt, while the autobiographical passages are a reminder of the old adage that one learns more from failure than success. Galloway also leans into his reputation as a prickly sort. “Outside of work, I barely remember my 20s and 30s,” he writes. “Work cost me my hair, probably, my first marriage, and arguably my sanity. But for me, it was worth it.”
I spoke to Galloway about his book, his life, his advice for young men, and why he’s so worried about them. Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Will Rahn: So, who did you write this for?
Scott Galloway: I wrote it for young men. I would say that my target audience, or my fans, are young men. My biggest supporters are single mothers who are sometimes struggling with their boys.
I tried to write it as if my sons were going to read it in 20 years and better understand the world that they grew up in, and better understand me. And I try to refuse the temptation to do land acknowledgments or be worried about being shamed. I try to just write exactly what I feel and where the data takes me, regardless of who at that moment might find it distasteful. I try to write as if I’m dancing while no one’s watching.
WR: Your book had me thinking. I’m 38, so perhaps I’ve aged out of your target demographic. But you write very well, and sometimes movingly, about family, about missing your wife and kids when you’re on the road. And there were moments where I found the advice a bit hard-hearted, like when you say there’s no real balance in life, only trade-offs. I was in my office reading that, and I thought, there’s no place I’d rather be right now than with my wife and kid.
SG: You don’t realize just how young you are. I think 38 is really young. At 38, you think you’ve figured it out, and you probably made some decisions that have put you on a certain trajectory. But 38 is crazy. Chances are that in 10 or 15 years, you’re gonna look back and think, I would have never thought I’d be here doing this 15 years ago. There’s definitely going to be some off-ramps you weren’t expecting to take, or some on-ramps.
WR: At 38, you were getting divorced?
SG: No, I’d already been divorced. I was living in New York and struggling professionally. I had had some wins, but had been punched in the gut by the dot-com implosion. I was trying to be an activist investor, and was primarily just leaving my house for food and sex.
I was trying to kind of optimize for my arrested adolescence. I wasn’t flailing professionally, but I was definitely struggling, wandering. I could always support myself, but I hadn’t had any kids yet. I wasn’t in a relationship, I was living alone in New York, and I remember thinking, I’m fine being an island.
I remember saying to my ex-wife, “You can have our friends.” I just like the idea of detaching and being totally selfish. And I moved to New York, had a loft. I had signal wealth. I did have real wealth. I could definitely lean into the isolation of an introvert and being totally selfish all the time. But I remember at some point thinking, I’m going to be dead by the time I’m 55. If I don’t have any guardrails or any relationships—with the amount of alcohol I’m drinking, the lack of connection, the lack of guardrails—I’ll be dead at 55 or 60. So it was almost like a conscious decision that I needed to reengage friendships and find a romantic partner.
I tried to write the book as if my sons were going to read it in 20 years and better understand the world that they grew up in, and better understand me. And I try to refuse the temptation to do land acknowledgments or be worried about being shamed.
But at 38 I was in a much different place than you. And if you’re struggling with the balance between family and being there for your kid and your partner, and then the requisite sacrifices to be really successful in our society, and trying to calibrate the trade-off—and it’s not entirely clear, and sometimes stressful, and sometimes can even inject stress into the relationship—that’s exactly where you should be. That’s just part of living in a capitalist society. Where do you live?
WR: Manhattan.
SG: So unless you were smart enough to be born rich, there’s just going to be enormous economic pressures. I had to leave New York in 2011 after I’d had my second kid, because we just couldn’t afford to live there. We were making really good money. My wife was at Goldman Sachs. I was starting to get some traction. But the schools wanted to charge our kids $58,000 a year to play with blocks. A three-bedroom apartment was 12 grand a month. I was making more money than I ever would have dreamed when I was a kid. And I had to think about our credit card bills at the end of the month. And I thought, I don’t like this.
WR: You made a conscious decision to find more friends and find a partner in your late 30s. But then there’s this accidental thing that happened, which is your girlfriend—now wife—got pregnant with your first son.
SG: Yeah, I didn’t want to have kids. I didn’t want to get married. I got married because she said, “I want to have kids.” I said, “Well, I don’t really want to have kids, but I would do it, but I’m definitely not getting married.” And she called my bluff and said, “We can have kids and not be married.” So we had kids before we got married. But I had no desire to have children, and it just kind of changed everything, both good and bad.
I remember when my first kid had the poor judgment to come marching out of my girlfriend during the great financial recession. I had lost everything again. I’ve been wealthy three times because I’ve lost it twice. And that was a moment when I lost it all again.
I know you’re supposed to hear angels singing and bright lights when the kid comes into the world. And I remember I was so obnoxious and anxious. I had to sit down. I just felt this weird sensation I’d never felt before, a mix of shame and kind of insecurity. It’s like, I have fucked up again, lost everything, but now it’s not only bad for me. My first sensation was one of a little bit of failure—that it’s no longer that, when I make these professional mistakes, I’m only letting myself down; I’m now letting a family down. And I struggle a little bit with depression, so I think I have a tendency to see stuff through dark-colored glasses. But when my son was born, the first sensations were not positive.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that they are my purpose. I never really had a purpose until I had kids. Now I’m like, okay, my purpose is to raise loving, patriotic men. And everything stems from there, whether it’s my ambition around economics or being good to their mom, or spending time with them, or trying to model good behavior.
I’m kind of shocked that you want to spend more time with a 1-year-old. I found babies awful.
WR: I think mine is funny. He’s like a wiggling little sea turtle.
SG: Well, I can’t tell you what a treat you’re in for. Because when they turn 3, they get hilarious and interesting. And the way they see the world, the way they perceive stuff, and how they get into you as a dad. I feel bad for you for the next couple years, because I thought 0 to 3 was awful. But 3 to 13? That’s the golden decade.
WR: And then they rebel, as we all did.
SG: And then they get these horrible things called opinions. I feel like every young man in the world seeks me out for my opinions. The only people who don’t care what I think are my own boys.
WR: On the topic of young men, have you seen this Rod Dreher essay about how so many of the Gen Z men in D.C. are Nick Fuentes addicts and antisemites now?
SG: I thought David Frum kind of summarized it perfectly: If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will. And young men are more risk-aggressive, more prone to extremist views. There’s just a cycle through history: The most unstable, violent nations all have one thing in common, and that is a disproportionate number of young men who lack economic or romantic possibilities or opportunities. When women don’t have as much romantic opportunity or economic opportunity, they sometimes channel that energy back into their friends or into productive things such as professional progress. But men not having romantic and economic opportunities is the tool that fascists have leveraged for a long time.
The problem now is, where does a man demonstrate excellence if he is not going to church, not going to college, not working, or working remotely?
I think Trump is president because of failing young men. If you look at the three groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red, 2020 to 2024, you start with Latinos and people under the age of 30. And the reality is, for the first time in our nation’s history, a 30-year-old isn’t doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. They’re 24 percent less wealthy than people under the age of 40 were 40 years ago. Meanwhile, my generation is 72 percent wealthier than we were 40 years ago. The majority of our economic policies are nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from the young to the old. So they’re fed up, and all they know is they’re not doing well, so they just want change.
And then the third group, and the most interesting one, that pivoted hardest from blue to red, was 45- to 64-year-old women. And my thesis is that they’re mothers. A lot of women in the United States will vote for whoever they perceive is best for their husbands and their sons. And when your son is in the basement playing video games and vaping, you don’t give a shit about the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. You just want change.
Struggling young men are always the fire that moves. People will come along, tell them their economic problems are the fault of immigrants, or that women’s ascent is responsible for their descent. Radical jihad has always leveraged failing young men, right? Fight for us and die, there’s 12 virgins waiting for you. ISIS took sex slaves and gave them to their soldiers as part of their military strategy.
The natural state of being is an unchecked economic system where you don’t redistribute capital. A small number of men are really talented, really fortunate, inherit wealth, and they get to engage in Porsche polygamy and have a disproportionate number of mating partners. And the bottom 90 percent of men have fewer and fewer. That rage or dissatisfaction can be channeled into unproductive means.
The greatest innovation in history wasn’t the iPhone or vaccines; it was the American middle class, and it wasn’t an accident. Seven million men returned from war in uniform. They were fit. We put a bunch of money in their pockets to make them economically viable, which made them more attractive to women. This led to huge household formation, a baby boom, productive, loving households. Then they brought non-whites and women into this prosperity through great social progress, great legislation. We decided to transfer opportunity and money back from the most fortunate into the American middle class, but that is not the natural state of being.
If you don’t figure out policies that create forward-leaning investments in technology and education and give young people a fighting chance, you’re just going to have an unstable society. You’re going to return to the natural order of a small number of people having all of the opportunities, which just creates instability. In some ways, I think we’re returning to what has typically been the natural order of economies for the last several thousand years.
WR: We’re talking about the romantic frustration of young men and then also the economic frustration. And, of course, these two things are linked. But if you look at incel forums online, there’s this very prevalent feeling that women have unrealistic beauty expectations for men, when in reality women are very forgiving.
SG: If you talk to people who have been married longer than 30 years, 70 or 80 percent of them say one was much more interested in the other. In the beginning, it was usually the man who was more interested. Men have this instinct to spread their seed to the four corners of the earth. Women have an instinct to put up a finer filter with the screen, to pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed. And the way men get through that screen is by demonstrating excellence.
If you’re in a room of 100 men and 100 women, and there’s alcohol, almost all the men would sleep with most of the women, and most of the women would sleep with none of the men. But over time, what you find is a man can demonstrate excellence. I like the way he treated his parents. He was funny. I started to like the way he smelled. I was so impressed with him.
The problem now is, where does a man demonstrate excellence if he is not going to church, not going to college, not working, or working remotely? Where does a man have an opportunity to develop those skills and demonstrate excellence to get through that much finer filter? And then, the whole world gets digitized. The digitization of any market results in a winner-take-most consolidation. And that’s happening in dating or mating.
I wouldn’t argue it isn’t aesthetics. The research shows that essentially it’s very kind of two-dimensional for men: their height and their perceived wealth, their ability to signal resources. That doesn’t mean they have to have a panorama Range Rover in their profile photo, but a guy who went to MIT and just accepted a job at KKR, that guy does well online.
WR: You talk about demonstrating excellence. A lot of the single women I know might say that demonstrating mediocrity is enough: You need to have a job. You need to be working. You need to be trying. You need to be putting some effort into your life. Then you can find a romantic partner just as a regular guy.
SG: One hundred percent. One stat, the craziest stat I’ve seen, says that 45 percent of men 18 to 24 have never asked a woman out in person. So if you can develop the confidence and skill to approach a woman and express romantic interest while making her feel safe, and then develop some calluses, some resilience, so you’re willing to do it again, you’re immediately in the top half of men. Some people say women have raised their expectations so much. There’s some truth to that. Some women say they’re only looking for six-foot, six figures. If you take out married men and obese men, it’s like 3 percent of the population.
I think Trump is president because of failing young men.
But I do think there’s something to the fact that women are not saying they can’t find a man. They just don’t want to find a man they can mate with. Because I think what happens to a lot of these men is they’re not out, they’re not working, they’re not in school. Men need guardrails and exposure to other mammals to develop skills, and then by the time they’re 25 or 30 and still living at home and haven’t had that kind of skills or training—I don’t want to say they become undateable, but they become resentful, and they start making excuses.
I worry that you’re going to start seeing fewer and fewer young men just out anywhere, because I believe that synthetic porn is going to get so lifelike that after a few bad experiences, men are basically going to sequester from the rest of society—to instead have just decided to have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm. And without that training through their 20s, they kind of wake up and they truly are unviable.
My prediction is that you’re going to go into public events, you’re just going to see just very few young men. Because men’s sexual desire hasn’t gone down. It’s their willingness to endure rejection from other organic mammals. They’ll just go for the Diet Coke version, rather than put in the effort and take the risk, incur the expense and the effort of trying to be a viable mate. So it’s almost as if our economy has been attached and is incentivized to plan or evolve a new species of asocial, asexual males. Unfortunately, unwittingly, our economy has become a big bet on our extinction.
WR: You mean that between both AI and all of the addictive things that are kind of destroying young men—sports betting, pornography, just all of the various distractions and factors that lead to them becoming unmarriageable. And then the species dies out. That’s what you’re talking about?
SG: The highest-margin products in history, the ones that create the most shareholder value, are essentially businesses that tap into a flaw in our instincts. Here’s a gambling app for your immature prefrontal cortex. Here’s a casino in your pocket, here’s constant dopamine, here’s a video game, and here’s lifelike porn.
WR: What’s this revolution in pornography, exactly?
SG: Synthetic relationships. Essentially, 24-7 porn. Supposedly 25 percent of Google searches now are porn-related. So the Playboy in my dad’s garage was not a reasonable facsimile for sex for me. So I finally mustered the courage to try and approach women in real life, and to develop the skills to do so. But as that experience becomes more and more lifelike and more and more tailored specifically to your own sexual fetishes, the mojo to take the risk to leave your house and actually approach a stranger goes down. And I think with synthetic porn, they’re basically lifelike characters that have a conversation with you, know how to tease.
WR: A Sasha Grey in your pocket.
SG: At all times. OnlyFans right now is the highest revenue per employee of any company in the world. It’s for sale. I think that’s because the owners have figured out that AI is about to become OnlyFans at 2 percent of the price. So you’re going to see the same sort of extraordinary offering that a lot of young, lonely men feel with OnlyFans at 98 percent less expensive, which means it will scale.
I think synthetic porn is one of the greatest existential threats to our society right now. I think when you can design what you think is the perfect woman, aesthetically, for you, and it’s frictionless—she always thinks you’re funny, she’s always encouraging, she never says no, and she’s willing to undress and perform sex acts for you—I just wonder if more and more men are again going to become sequestered from society.
We’ve attached our economy to this polarization of our society, and I just think these men aren’t going to develop the skills and or be able to have the guardrails. You need women to say, “No, stop smoking pot.” In my 20s, my girlfriend said if I didn’t stop smoking pot, she was no longer going to be my girlfriend. That was very motivating to me. My AI girlfriend is never going to say that to me.
WR: But your AI girlfriend is also not going to be able to do real-life things. I don’t fully understand the attraction to it, and maybe that’s an age issue or something like that, but it seems like pretending you’re dating an app is the loneliest existence imaginable. That’s somehow more lonely than just being alone.
SG: And you’re a mature, thoughtful person who’s engaged in a healthy relationship and found reward from it. But—and I agree with you—a lot of these men, I believe, will wake up and realize that the loneliness and emptiness of these experiences far outweighs the risk of what lies beyond that room for them. The problem is, do they discover that when they’re 30 or 40 and they haven’t developed the skills or the economic viability to be attractive to a potential mate? And what’s happening is, as porn gets better and better, it also gets harder and harder to meet somebody and more expensive. It gets expensive to go out.
I get a lot of pushback on this, and I’m accused of being a misogynist, that I’m saying it’s women’s fault. But I do think online media, and media in general, is telling women, once you spot not even a red flag but a magenta flag, get out. It’s like, “Oh, he didn’t open your door. He is out.” Or, you know, he doesn’t have a good relationship with his parents. That’s a red flag. Or even if he just likes rock music. You’re a queen. You’re a strong, independent woman.
And so I think that if you look at surveys, when you ask men if a woman had 80 percent of everything you want, three-quarters of them say, “Yeah, that’d be great.” When you say to a woman, there’s a man with 80 percent of everything you want, three-quarters say that it’s not enough.
We always have a tendency to pathologize men and put all of every crisis on the shoulders of young men. And I think that they may even be, quote, unquote, more responsible for it. But there is a certain expectation. You’ve seen these TikToks, where women say they ask women, what is the minimum standard you would even consider dating a man. And they say he’s got to be at least six feet, at least six figures.
Again, that’s 3 percent of the population. And a lot of women will overcome those initial benchmarks or bars when they just like his hands. But what are the venues where men get to demonstrate that excellence now? Now it’s all just kind of a snap judgment. So there is what you would call a mating crisis.
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therapy can help you overcome some of the obstacles that make you (men) lonely
“I’m overexposed at this point,” Scott Galloway tells me over Zoom as he paces...