meIt doesn’t take much to come up with a title for your book Notes on Being a Man. And on the surface, Scott Galloway could easily be lumped in with a dozen other Manosphere-friendly Alpha Brothers who promise to teach young people how to find their inner wolf. After all, he is a wealthy, fit, white, heterosexual, shaven-headed 61-year-old Californian who has made his name and fortune as a successful investor and podcast host.
But in reality he is almost the exact opposite. Progressive, left-leaning, and incredibly sensitive. The man who advises readers on “how to solve the masculinity crisis, build mental strength and raise good sons” has been described as a “progressive Jordan Peterson” or a “Gordon Gekko with a social conscience.”
Galloway is also self-aware enough not to claim he has all the answers. “I don’t think it would be well received if I said, ‘This is how you become a man.’” He spoke from his home in London. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve had some success and mostly failed trying to be a man.”
He moved from Florida to England three years ago in part because he and his wife thought it would be a better place to raise their two sons, now 15 and 18. “The great culture, the interesting people and the proximity to the continent is amazing. The Premier League is fantastic, there’s no place like it.” Also: “If you’re talking about assault rifles or bodily autonomy, it’s not even discussed here.” But he still finds the weather difficult.
The studio where Galloway records his popular podcast is located in the basement. Prof G Pod (Business and Life Wisdom – he is actually a marketing professor at New York University); Raging Moderates (with liberal Fox News host Jessica Tarlov); And the most popular one is Pivot with tech journalist Kara Swisher. The two are good friends, comparing jet-set lifestyles and commenting on technology, politics and current events, easy banter peppered with Galloway’s deliberately corny jokes. “We can rib each other because that’s a form of equality and affection,” he says.
When Galloway first started talking about masculinity, he said people weren’t ready to listen. “It seemed like there was more misogyny here and more men criticizing women. The gag reflex was so strong.” That was about four years ago, but now everything has changed. When Notes On Being a Man was released in early November, it shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list of advice books, and Galloway has been in demand by the media ever since, offering his opinion on what’s wrong with men and what to do about it.
Galloway believes that young men actually is I’m in trouble. Drawing on research from authors such as Richard Reeves (author of 2022’s Of Boys and Men) and his NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt (whose recent book The Anxious Generation set off alarm bells on social media), he outlines the landscape of rising rates of everything from school boy suspensions to male unemployment, addiction, loneliness, and failure to attend college. “In the next five years, we will have two women graduating from college for every man, because men have higher dropout rates.”
Galloway suggests that Donald Trump may be back in the White House, especially because of the political left’s previous denial of the problem. “Let me tell you why we chose it. [him] “It’s because of fights with men.” He said the two groups most likely to swing toward Trump in 2024 are young men and women ages 45 to 64. “My argument is that it’s the mothers of young men.” While Trump embraced the manosphere, the Democratic Party defended the interests of just about every special interest group. except Young people, he insists.
In his books, Galloway’s solutions to men’s problems often boil down to a series of succinct codes and aphorisms. Some of them may feel like sound common sense, while others may feel a bit outdated. For example, one of his oft-repeated tenets is that “Man protects, provides, and procreates.” The same can easily be said about women. Galloway also tends to see the “protection” element in the context of men using their physical strength for good. “Real men don’t start fights in bars, they break them up.” – People need protection even though there is a lot of time fromEspecially women, other men.
And the ‘provision’ element he speaks of is mainly used in economic terms. “I tell my sons: If you’re with a woman, you have to pay for everything. And if you can’t, don’t go out. A woman won’t have sex with a man who shares her money.” According to another of his maxims, signaling resources are one of the three things women find most attractive, along with kindness and intelligence. He acknowledges that his sons have told him this is a boomer view of modern dating, but says, “I try to go where the data leads.” “Studies show that society and men themselves are really harsh on men who cannot survive economically.”
And if men can’t survive economically, he argues, that’s where the problems begin. “They won’t have the opportunity to mate. And when men don’t have romantic relationships, they tend to get off track.” He cites statistics showing that women are much better off without men than vice versa. “Men have a hard time maintaining friendships without a romantic partner. They tend to redistribute that energy into conspiracy theories, extreme online access, and pornography, and they never develop the skills to build romantic relationships.” Galloway has been vocal about the role the tech industry and social media play in exacerbating these problems by giving men an easy hit of dopamine and giving them fewer reasons to leave the bedroom. As he puts it, “I worry that we are literally evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial male.”
Galloway’s analysis may be somewhat Darwinian and reductive. It is imbued with nostalgia for a bygone patriarchal order: “Men are this, women are this,” as if there were a single set of solutions to these problems. As Galloway readily admits, nuances of race or sexual orientation are rarely addressed: “What do people say is the code of masculinity for gay men? The honest answer is, I have no idea. I won’t touch that at all.”
But isn’t that also… Jordan Peterson? Peterson proposed his own treatment for the “masculinity crisis” in his 2018 best-selling book 12 Rules for Life, which received as much ridicule as praise. The first rule was “Stand up with your shoulders back.” Since then, we’ve been exposed to a lot of masculine self-help books that fit this mold. Galloway has incredible respect for Peterson, especially for bringing this topic up before it was trendy. “Where we differ is that Jordan is basically using his amazing communication skills and knowledge of psychology to reverse-engineer these incredibly conservative views and sometimes take away women’s rights. It’s basically going back to the idea that ‘women are happiest when they’re supporting men’. I don’t think that’s accurate.”
Galloway is at pains to point out that she does not blame women for men’s problems. “I don’t think the answer is to disadvantage women economically in any way,” he says. “I’m not saying here that we need to lower the standards for women so that we don’t have a bunch of angry men by repackaging violence. I think we need to raise the standards for men. And I think we as a society need to implement more programs to raise the standards of all young people.”
Considering all this, one wonders why he decided to focus only on men. For example, in a TED Talk last year, in addition to his book, Galloway argued persuasively that the real problems we face are: every In particular, major problems in American society are the transfer of wealth and power from young to old, and the commercialization of politics, health care, and higher education. He says, “This is a fight between liberalism and illiberalism, not between men and women. One gender has played a big role in convincing itself that it’s the other gender’s fault. I don’t think that’s productive.”
While Peterson and his ilk try to trace men’s problems to the erosion of conservative values, Galloway does his own reverse engineering. That is, returning to a place of economic, romantic, and especially familial security. He says that if there is a moment “when a boy goes off track and runs into problems later in life,” it is when he “loses his male role model through death, divorce or abandonment.” The paper is more personal than his data-driven approach suggests.
Galloway’s father and mother immigrated from Scotland and England, respectively, and settled in California in the 1960s, but their American dream did not last. When Galloway was nine, his father moved out and lived with another woman, leaving his poor mother to raise him alone. In that case, it is not necessarily a role model, his Galloway’s grandfather, his father, was much worse, an angry alcoholic. “When my dad was very young, he would come home and wake me up and hit me.” Galloway admits it’s a low bar, but at least his father has improved.
Their relationship taught him a lot, he says. One of his biggest breakthroughs was when he realized that he had been keeping a score card of his relationships, starting with his father. For example, “Why am I such a good son when he wasn’t such a good father?” He said he became much happier after putting the scorecard aside and focusing solely on his life as a son. that He wanted to be a husband, a partner, a friend and a colleague on his own terms. He says it has made him happier and his relationships have improved. His father passed away earlier this year. “My father mellowed as he got older, and we had a great relationship for the last 20 or 30 years of his life.”
When Galloway tells his origin story, he doesn’t portray himself as an exceptional talent. He was an academically and physically unremarkable man, and he seemed to be better at picking up weed than picking up women. He attributes his success largely to luck and structural advantages. A good school education, no racial or gender discrimination, a loving mother, and going to a good college (University of California, Los Angeles) in a prosperous country. “Actually, I was born on third base.” But because he grew up relatively poor, financial security was always his motivation. “I asked questions like, ‘How do you win against capitalism?’ Approach.”
He also made great strides as an entrepreneur at the start of the dot-com boom, founding successful (and some failed) companies in emerging fields such as e-commerce and digital market research. In 2017, he sold his business intelligence company L2 for $155 million (he estimates his net worth to be around $150 million (£117 million)).
Galloway now splits his time equally between writing, investing, and media activities, including his podcasting network. He’s happy in London but plans to return to the United States next year to “make America America again.” As he prepares for the 2026 and 2028 elections, he wants to help build an informal, Democratic-friendly podcast network and is already working with several Democratic candidates. “People hear celebrities talking about how they’re leaving America. I actually think when things are bad in our country, it’s time to go home.”
Whether or not the crisis among men has led to the current regime, the men currently in power are certainly not the masculine exemplars Galloway had in mind. “I would argue that what people like Trump and Elon Musk are doing couldn’t be worse. anti-masculine“He says, “They conflated, or tried to conflate, masculinity with roughness and brutality. And not only is that wrong, it’s a terrible role model for young men.”
Who is Galloway’s role model? The first two people he suggested were Muhammad Ali and, more surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher. “I don’t know if it’s fair to call her masculine, but that kind of strength…” He is also a fan of Keanu Reeves, who is “really kind, generous with his time, and very humble, who rewards other actors in a way that is extraordinary.”
Is Galloway a good role model? He’s not sure. “People say, ‘Oh, your kids are so lucky to have you.’ It makes me self-conscious because there are so many weekends where I’m so caught up in my own shit that I don’t spend enough time or attention with my kids. I’m not present enough. So I have massive imposter syndrome about this.”
Through all of life’s lessons, Galloway has never been afraid to admit his errors and vulnerabilities. For example, when his father passed away earlier this year, he spoke movingly about it on his Pivot show and was brought to tears. He claims that crying is good for men. “For the last 3,000 years, we’ve been taught that if you show weakness, you cry. And the way you show weakness is that other men might take your shit, fuck your wife, and eat your kids. So men were taught not to express that weakness. And the good news is that we live in a modern society where people won’t kill you because you cry. It feels really good.”
He said he didn’t cry from the age of 29 to 44. Now, “I don’t have any of that. [holds] I came back crying. And it’s not an attempt to show my femininity, it’s just an attempt to slow down time.”
Despite a rigorous fitness regime, luxury experiences and cutting-edge health care (including regular testosterone injections), and embracing a degree of hedonism (he happily declares that he likes cannabis edibles), Galloway is starting to feel his age.
“When you’re in your late 50s, the years turn into seasons, and the seasons turn into months, and the months turn into weeks, and it’s like, ‘Bloody A, the end is coming for us.’ One of the tricks I’ve found to slow down is to stop and feel and touch when I see something that inspires me and moves me. I took a walk through Regent’s Park yesterday, and there was a rose garden I’d never seen before. I don’t like roses, but I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I thought, ‘This is really cool.’ So I stopped and thought, ‘Why do I find this interesting?’ Who does this? “Why are you doing that?”
These days, he says, “I get emotional every day, whether I’m watching Modern Family or reading something touching or listening to a friend talk about their struggles with their child. And I’ve found that generally it lets you know how you’re feeling, makes you feel closer to people, and most people are really receptive to it.” Especially other men. He doesn’t want his shit taken away and says, “Jesus, can I have some of that?”
Perhaps this openness to emotions is what really sets Galloway apart from his testosterone-fueled peers. You can model the lifestyle of an alpha male and come up with rules and sayings, but it still takes balls to admit that it’s okay for men to cry.
Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway (Simon & Schuster Ltd, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.