Male Roles, Obligations and Options for Building a Fulfilling Life | Scott Galloway

Summary

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Huberman Lab Podcast Summary

Episode: Male Roles, Obligations and Options for Building a Fulfilling Life | Scott Galloway

Date: April 27, 2026
Host: Dr. Andrew Huberman
Guest: Scott Galloway, NYU Stern Professor, author, and commentator on life design, business, and culture.

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Episode Overview

In this dynamic and deeply reflective episode, Dr. Andrew Huberman hosts Scott Galloway to dissect the contemporary male experience. They discuss the evolving and often confusing landscape for men—young and old—in work, relationships, health, and society at large. The conversation oscillates between timeless principles and present-day pressures, with Galloway sharing candid insights on masculinity, mentorship, societal expectations, Big Tech, inter-gender alliances, and practical daily actions for self-improvement. The dialogue is frank and sometimes combative, but always solution-oriented and data-driven.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Challenge of Giving Relevant Advice Across Generations

• Humility & Data: Both speakers acknowledge generational disconnect, striving for humility by admitting their blind spots and turning to data and honest dialogue across age groups.
  • “You can't fully relate to a 16 if you're not 16 years old...I try to counter my biases or my uninformed theses with data.” —Scott Galloway [04:58]
• Parental Observation: Galloway references learning from his own sons and their peers to stay grounded.

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2. The Macronutrients of a Fulfilling Life for Men

Scott Galloway’s “4 Ps” Framework

• Provider:
  • Economic relevance is foundational to self-esteem and society’s evaluation of men.
  • “Try and have a plan to be economically relevant in a capitalist society. Whether we like to admit it or not, a male...is going to be disproportionately evaluated based on your economic viability.” —Scott Galloway [06:42]
• Protector:
  • Protection is the “ends,” not just the means. Feeling that your family is safe and supported is at masculinity’s core.
  • "The whole reason you make money...the ends is such that you can protect others." [06:42]
• Procreator:
  • Young men’s sexual and relational desires are not a pathology but a motivator for self-betterment if channeled purposefully.
  • "We need to stop demonizing young men's desire for relationships and sexual desires...if channeled correctly, makes you want to be a better man." [06:42]
• Service (Surplus Value):
  • True adulthood means creating “surplus value”—giving more than you take.
  • “At some point, can you honestly look in the mirror and say, I had surplus value? I create more tax revenue and jobs than I absorb.” [06:42]
  • Cites Richard Reeves’ influence for this model.

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3. Actionable Strategies for Young Men

• Three Tactical Pillars ([17:53]):

  1. Strength & Physical Fitness:
     • “The best antidepressant is moving weights, building some bulk or running far. Every man under 30 should aspire to be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real, they could kill and eat everybody or outrun them.”
  2. Meaningful Work:
     • “Start making some money outside of your house… the great thing about getting a taste for the flesh of money is you start learning how to make more money.”
  3. Community & Social Action:
     • “Put ourselves in a group setting where we’re trying to achieve something great in the agency of others…do something called ‘the approach’—initiating genuine connection and being willing to hear no is the goal.”

• Resilience Through Rejection:

  • Embrace rejection as a key to growth: “Everyone you admire...the only thing that got them there was the willingness and the endurance to anticipate no.” [00:00, and reprised at 17:53]

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4. Big Tech, Social Media, and Its Societal Impacts

• Addiction & Alienation:
  • Galloway and Huberman discuss how tech companies deliberately design platforms to maximize time-on-device, preying particularly on young men (“Bond villain with trillions of dollars is Big Tech.” – Galloway [17:53]).
  • “Big Tech is not your friend…if you do not figure out how to modulate big tech products...you are falling into a trap.” [17:53]
• Algorithmic Incentives:
  • Social media rewards divisiveness, antagonism, and content that causes outrage and polarization.
• Policy Solutions:
  • Antitrust action (breaking up monopolies), reclassifying algorithmically-elevated content (removing Section 230 protections), and stringent age-gating for minors.

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5. Public Role Models, Flaws, and Perfection

• Elon Musk Discussion:
  • Huberman and Galloway debate Musk as a protector role model; Galloway argues Musk’s online behavior undermines his social responsibility.
  • “You never punch down.” —Galloway [28:35]
• Broader Point:
  • Role models need not be perfect — take what’s inspiring, leave the rest, and maintain nuance in the age of public oversharing and online outrage.

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6. Men, Women, & the Need for Renewed Alliances

• Manosphere & Gender War:
  • Both speakers decry increasingly toxic gender discourse online, emphasizing that the greatest alliance in history is between men and women.
  • “The most important alliance that needs renewal is...the alliance between men and women. The integration of female and male energy—the ability to find someone you want to procreate with, to build something together—that is the most rewarding thing in life.” —Galloway [51:15]
• Societal Destabilization:
  • When men and women are pitted against each other, it erodes not just relationships and family, but social stability at large.

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7. Society’s Failing Young Men: Economics, Education, and Policy

• Transfer of Wealth:
  • Criticism of policies that funnel resources from young and middle-aged generations to the elderly at the expense of opportunity and mental health for youth (see Social Security critique [122:43]).
• Higher Education:
  • Elite universities hoard opportunities for the wealthy and freakishly exceptional, while the “unremarkable” are left behind, contradicting the American ideal.
  • “America loved the unremarkable when I was a kid. It’s fallen out of love with the unremarkable.” —Galloway [130:48]
• Vocational Training and Service:
  • Calls for expanded access to vocational programs, national service, and rethinking what “prestige” and success look like.

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8. The Importance of Male Mentorship

• Crisis Point:
  • Loss of male mentors through divorce or absence leads to markedly worse outcomes (e.g., higher incarceration).
  • “The ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. And not enough men are doing it.” [140:31]
• Action Item:
  • Men should actively seek opportunities to mentor boys, especially those lacking father figures—whether informally (coaches, teachers, neighbors) or through formal programs.

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9. Substances, Sex, and Navigating Modern Risks

• Alcohol & Social Connection:
  • Galloway encourages moderate, responsible drinking for its historically central role in social bonding.
  • “I worry that with 40% fewer pubs now post Covid in Britain and a lack of mating and a lack of connection… the risk to a 25 year old’s liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation.” [79:50]
• Pornography Addiction:
  • Expresses deep concern for the under-recognized epidemic of porn-induced apathy, especially among young men, which can undermine motivation for healthy relationships and self-improvement [100:15].
  • "I wonder and worry if porn is the most under researched addiction and the damage it's having on young men." —Galloway [103:18]
• Caution on Substances:
  • Huberman notes context is everything—a young man living poorly or socially isolated should avoid substances and focus on health and connection first.

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10. Testosterone, Masculinity, and Societal Narratives

• Testosterone Therapy:
  • Galloway shares his personal success with testosterone replacement, underlining the importance of strength, aggression, and vitality in balanced masculinity [109:53].
• Cultural Narratives:
  • The extremes of both political spectrums misunderstand or mishandle masculinity: either demonizing it (left) or promoting coarseness and subjugation (far right). A middle path—celebrating strength, service, and valor—is needed.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Risk and Growth:
  “The goal is no, because you're going to get no's...The only thing that got them there was the willingness and the endurance to anticipate no.” —Galloway [00:00, 17:53]

• On Service Over Attention:
  “Are you optimizing for attention or service?” —Galloway [06:42]

• On Renewing Men-Women Alliance:
  “The most important alliance needs renewal is...between men and women. Online it’s teaching men to blame women for their problems. No.” —Galloway [51:15]

• On Social Media’s Impact:
  “Big Tech is not your friend. If you do not figure out how to modulate big tech products...you are falling into a trap.” —Galloway [17:53]

• On Mentorship:
  “If we want better men, we have to be better men.” —Galloway [144:59]

• On Allies and Progress:
  “Women’s ascent saved our ass. Their ascent is in no way inversely correlated to men’s descent. Men have to stop that bullshit.” —Galloway [51:15]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------|------------| | Humility about Generational Advice | 03:48–06:18 | | Masculine “macronutrients”/4 Ps | 06:42–13:38 | | Actionable Mentoring Guidance | 17:53–26:35 | | Critique of Tech and Social Media | 26:35–43:35 | | On Public Figure Role Models | 28:35–41:41 | | Men & Women—Renewing the Alliance | 51:14–53:41 | | Big Tech Regulation/Policy Solutions | 69:05–73:49 | | Alcohol, Cannabis, and Social Behavior | 78:12–100:15 | | Pornography & Motivation | 100:15–104:40| | Masculinity, T-therapy, Political Framing|109:53–113:06| | Wealth transfer/Generational critique |122:43–132:02| | Higher Ed and American Exceptionalism |130:48–132:02| | The Power and Need for Male Mentorship |140:31–145:34|

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Memorable Moments

• Galloway candidly admitting to personal and professional imperfections and the need for grace [38:14]
• Discussion of the “sex recession” and the dangers of pathologizing healthy male sexuality [51:15]
• Audience question from a woman about “accountability” in men and Galloway’s and Huberman’s real-time reaction [53:41–57:47]
• The repeated theme: “If we want better men, we have to be better men.” [144:59]

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Summary Tone & Style

• Candid, earnest, data-driven, and at times blunt. Both speakers balance “tough love” with actionable steps and empathy, maintaining a tone designed to be both challenging and inspiring.

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For Listeners Seeking Action

Daily Steps for Young Men:

1. Regular physical training or consistent movement
2. Pursue work or side incomes outside the home
3. Seek out group-based activities and be willing to face/seek rejection
4. Limit/structure tech and phone use intentionally
5. Develop mentorship relationships—both as mentee and, in time, as mentor

Every Man Should Ask:

• Am I giving more than I take (surplus value)?
• Am I optimizing for service or attention?
• Do I have a code guiding my daily decisions?

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is a blueprint for building a fulfilling life as a man in 2026—rooted in timeless virtues but focused on today’s challenges. Galloway and Huberman bring practical wisdom, hard truths, and hope for a more connected, robust male experience—one built not on grievance or entitlement, but on agency, resilience, and renewed alliance between men, women, and society.

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Transcript

[A]

And this is the goal. The goal is no, because you're going to get no's and then I'm going to call you after you've made the approach. You're going to text me. I did an approach. Did you get a no? Yeah, I got a no. That's exactly the point. That's the goal. Because everyone you admire, everyone you think has killed it. The only thing I can guarantee you is there were a ton of no's in getting to one of the top 10 podcasts in the world, getting to a person as a partner who's higher character and hotter than you, getting to make more money than you would have ever guessed that person would have made. The only thing that got them there was the willingness and the endurance to anticipate no welcome to the Huberman Lab

[B]

Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Scott Galloway. Scott Galloway is a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and one of the world's leading public educators on intelligent life design, including finances, relationships, and as today's conversation also covers, on the socio political landscape. Today we mainly talk about masculinity and what men, young and old and everything in between are facing today in terms of their roles to take in work, in relationships and their health. And today we don't just review the data, you'll hear statistics. So Scott is very grounded in quantitative data, which is important, but he also shares several clear, actionable steps that you can take daily to ensure that you're making progress in work and relationships and finances. We also get into a bit of debate or more about things like alcohol, the benevolence or lack thereof of big tech and social media. And we talk a lot about the male female dynamics in terms of the consequences of single mom homes and divorce, but just generally male female dynamics. So while today's episode does include a lot of exploration of different topics that frankly I didn't anticipate, it's also very proactive. Scott delineates the things that you can do and frankly should do each day. These aren't just lists or hacks, but effective tools that come from knowledge, data, his deep thinking, and that reflect the landscape we are in now. I'm very grateful that Scott took the time for this conversation. You'll see that we agree on many things. We disagree on several. He's a very deep thinker, extremely smart, obviously he also cares about people. That comes through over and over again. And he's extremely generous today on your behalf with, indeed, tough love knowledge. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Scott Galloway. Scott Galloway, welcome.

[A]

Thanks, man. It's good to see you. Actually, I was nervous driving over here. I like you and respect you, and I was thinking, I was trying to figure out why I was nervous. I really want to. I want to do well today. And the last time I had this feeling was when I was going to do Rich Rolls podcast. I really like like you. I really like and respect Rich. And I remember thinking I had that same feeling. I wanted to do well. Anyways, good to be here.

[B]

Oh, man. Well, great to have you here. It's funny you say that because, you know, I was coming here and I was thinking, yeah, look up to Scott, like, I respect him. And we've had one conversation prior to this that ended up being quite extended conversation. And I told Rob right before coming in here, our producer, I'm super fired up to.

[A]

Thanks, man.

[B]

To learn from you and just sit down and chat with you. So I actually am gonna do something differently this podcast than any other podcast, which is the question I'm about to ask or the kind of thing I'm about to pose I normally would do off camera. Okay, I'm gonna do it on camera, which is coming in here today. It occurred to me that we as a. How old are you?

[A]

I'm gonna be 62 in November.

[B]

62. You look great, man.

[A]

Thanks, man.

[B]

You can share what you're doing if we get the time. Fitness wise, I'm 50 and the risk we run into, I realize, is that when I was 16, 20, 30, et cetera, yes, I wanted knowledge, maybe even wisdom from elders, but I also knew with certainty that they didn't understand a thing about what it was like to be that age at that time. So I realized that as much as we might think we know, we don't know what it's like to be 16, 25, 30, 40 year old men. And we'll also talk about women today, but probably mostly men in 2026. And so how do we reconcile that in a discussion like this? I just wanted to ask you, how do you think about that? Because so much of your content and what you're teaching out there is about timeless truths. But there's also a lot of things that are happening now. Not just pain points, but maybe opportunities that I don't know. How do you think about. Do we really know? How should we pass along information in a way that's truly useful to people? Because that's what obviously we both want this to be about.

[A]

Well, just what you said, you can't fully relate to a 16 if you're not 16 years old and know what they're going through. You guys are skateboarders. And when I was 16, I got home and it was either watch cartoons until my mom got home or it was take risks and go out and find friends and do things. And now there's so much temptation at home. Between big tech and having a casino in your pocket and Netflix in your pocket and porn in your pocket, it's just hard to relate to what they go through. I think the first thing is just acknowledging you don't know what you don't know and then turning to data because there are people who look at the data and I try to counter my biases or my uninformed theses with data. So I try to find good people, good research and inform it. Also, it helps. I have 15 and 18 year old sons. I ask them a lot, I observe them a lot, I hang out with them a lot. And you start to pick up on stuff. But I think the first is just being open to people pushing back and recognizing unfortunately, every once in a while in the comment, when someone points something out and going, if it really hurts and it's upsetting, it's usually because they're right and they found some soft tissue and they've pressed on it. And I try to be open to learning and just acknowledging when I got it wrong.

[B]

What do you think are the. Could be three, could be five, could be ten things that all males should strive to check the boxes on in order to have a good life, not just to be great in some particular role. But what are the macronutrients in your opinion of becoming a healthy, happy, fulfilled male?

[A]

I think every person, not just every man, needs a code. And that is you're gonna be faced with hundreds of decisions each day and you wanna make generally a higher proportion of good decisions than the peer group. Right. So what helps is a code. Some people get that code from religion, the military, There are really strong family connections. I actually got my first kind of code from my first job. I worked at Morgan Stanley and there was Just a certain level of professionalism. I got code from sports at ucla. But I wonder. There's so many lost men right now. I wonder if masculinity can be a code or some sort of aspirational form of masculinity where people born as males might have an easier time leaning in. And I should also say that I don't think masculinity or femininity are sequestered to people born as males or females. I'm drawn to men who are more feminine as friends. My close friends kind of take care of me and are more nurturing. But I think for young men, if they feel like they can lean into some positive masculine attributes, that it could serve as a code. So I loosely break it down into three very reductive qualities. And that is the first is to be a provider. I'm not talking about the way the world is, but the way the world should be. I think every young man should have a plan and have an assumption that at some point he will have to be the economic leader provider for his family. Sometimes that means getting out of the way of your partner who's better at that whole money thing. Sometimes it means providing more domestic or emotional support and labor if your partner is accelerating economically. When my partner had a kid, she was working at Goldman Sachs. She was making more money than me. I was a new academic at NYU. I was making $160,000 living in New York, which is may sound like a lot of money, but it wasn't and she was making substantially more. So I tried to pick up slack and provide more labor at home and take charge of our finances. But I think at the outset, trying to find a plan to be economically relevant in a capitalist society is really important because whether we like to admit it or not, a male, from a self esteem standpoint, from a sexual currency standpoint, from the esteem of the tribe or the society is going to be disproportionately evaluated based on your economic viability. So from an early age, try and have a plan. You may not have to stick to that plan. I'm not saying you got to go to Harvard and go to work at Goldman Sachs, but maybe you're going to go to trade school, learn how to install energy efficient H Vac, but you just need a plan to be moving towards something. The second is protector. If you think about the most masculine jobs, fireman, cop, military, the notion is you develop skills and strengths such that you can protect others and the most, if you will, manly, masculine, satisfied, I ever feel is a Night when I feel as if my family feels protected, the kids are asleep, my partner feels loved and supported. And I've been able to, hopefully, through partnership, through economic valuability, been able to provide a warm, comfortable life for them so they can focus on the things that are important to them. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of men that we should look up to, whether it's the president, I apologize for getting political, or the wealthiest man in the world who are naturally going to be seen as male role models, they seem to have skipped the protection part. That the whole shooting match, the whole reason you make money, that's the means, but the ends is such that you can protect others. I find that's the most rewarding thing in the world. And then finally, procreator. And that is, I think we need to stop demonizing young men's desire for relationships and sexual desires. I think a young man wanting to have sex can be a tremendous motivator to be a better man. It's like fire. It can be incredibly destructive. But if you put it in a steel casing with spark plugs, it can create tremendous progress. And the story I use is that I was at the Raleigh Hotel in Miami and I saw a very attractive woman. And it was the middle of the day and without the benefit of alcohol, I didn't have the confidence to approach her. But I promised myself I was going to approach her. And then I went out to get my car from the valet and was sitting in the car and I'm like, God, you're such a fucking wimp. So I ran back in, went up to her and said, hi, I'm Scott. Where are you from? Anyways, long story short, 18 months later, our son's middle name born was Raleigh. And I didn't look at her, Andrew, and think I'd really like lower rates on auto insurance. I looked at her and thought I'd really like to have sex with her. And I think young men's desire for relationships and sex, if channeled correctly, makes you want to be a better man. Have a kindness, practice, demonstrate excellence. Shower, for God's sakes, work out, have a plan. Have resilience. Have perseverance, demonstrate excellence. So in sum, provider protector, procreator, where I think I missed it in the book, and I'd love your response because I'm open to criticism. Here is one. That's what worked for me. And I think a lot of younger people, there's different forms of masculinity that don't necessarily involve being economically secure. Finding a mate also the component I've really missed is service. I think a great one question or proxy for masculinity in terms of what you do every day is are you optimizing for attention or service? And then the litmus test that Richard Reeves kind of gave me, who's sort of my Yoda on this stuff, is this notion of surplus value that some men are born males but never they die, never having become men. It's not about a religious ceremony and age or some sort of experience or ritual. It's about at some point, can you honestly look in the mirror and say, I had surplus value? I create more tax revenue and jobs than I absorb. Everyone absorbs tax revenue. If you're in America. I listen to more people complain than I complain. Right. I love more people than love me. And I didn't get that. I don't think I really became a man well into my 40s because I was always. I took a capitalist approach to relationships. I always wanted more. I wanted a girlfriend that was better to me than I was to her. I wanted a job where I was getting paid more maybe than I was contributing. And then what you realize as you get older is the whole shooting match is to create surplus value. Provide, be a better friend, be a better partner. There's no way my kids will ever be able to return as much as I've invested in them. I mean, we have these. You know, the Hallmark Channel and insurance commercials will tell me that I'll have these moments and I get those. But my kids are never up at 2am worried about me. They just aren't right. I'm spending a ton. I always say to them, you're adding negative value. Just be clear. You go to these amazing schools, all these talented people, negative value. Me and your mom, we are constantly investing in you. This would be impossible for you to pay us back. What I figured out is that's the whole shooting match is I'm finally Andrew, finally at a place of surplus value. I apologize for the word salary. Provider, protector, procreator. Are you optimizing for service, not attention? And do you? Can you really say that you add surplus value?

[B]

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[A]

I think it's really important. I mean you're talking a little bit about role models and references. And so first off, one myth I think we need to dispel is that success equals exploitation. There's a very unhealthy zeitgeist, especially from the far left, that anyone who's very successful is exploiting others. And I think we need to puncture that narrative and say you should strive to be successful and success might mean certain things for other people. I didn't grow up with money, so for me success for most of my life was trying to get economic security. I was anxiety plagued, my mom and I, economic anxiety. And it was like a ghost following us around telling us we weren't worthy. So my role models were always people who'd figured out economic success and people have to pick their own role models. I always thought masculinity was getting back in someone's face who wasn't Give me the respect I thought I deserved. I was that asshole that when someone cut me off in traffic, felt like I needed to speed up and cut them off. That if the Delta ticket counter representative wasn't kind to me or was busy, I would get back in their face. It's like, well, do you realize I'm a 1k member? And then, you know, a decent reference point is just men you admire and they're everywhere that perhaps don't can take blows. They realize someone might be having a bad day. But you said something that inspired a thought in that what I just outlined is pretty meta, you know, kind of themes that sometimes aren't that actionable. So I just want to bring it down one level. As we were talking about off mic, I try and mentor two or three young men at any given time. And these are young men that quite frankly need mentoring. They're struggling. Most of them might be still living at home. You know, they're not. These aren't people who went to Brown and are working at Goldman Sachs. And, and so some, just some more tactical things that I think serve as a reference point for how you succeed or how you make progress. The first thing I do, the first hack is I say unlock your phone and I'm going to look at it and there's a little bit of nervousness. So what I do to loosen them up or lubricate it as I say, okay, let me tell you two things. First is I gamble. I don't gamble on FanDuel. I gamble with options. I know it's stupid. I know I'm going to lose money over the long term. I'm a smart guy. I love markets. But that dopa hit I get is too seductive. So I sell calls and puts. I consume porn. That's sort of not. That's not a. That's an embarrassing thing to say at 61. But yeah, I still consume porn, but I tell them that and it lubricates or it makes them more comfortable. I open their phone. Everyone has an advantage. Most young men who are not excelling, if you will, by traditional Western capitalist standards, their advantage is capital, specifically their human capital. They have time. And within about five to seven minutes, I can find eight hours of time from TikTok, from X, from porn, from gambling sites, from YouTube. I'm like, we're going to find eight hours. You tell me we're going to reduce this eight hours and next week I'm going to check and we're going to reallocate that capital into three things. The first is we're going to get really fucking strong. I just think the best antidepressant is moving weights, building some bulk or running far. I've jokingly said every man under the age of 30 should aspire to be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real, they could kill and eat everybody or outrun them. There's different forms of fitness. You can be fast, you can be flexible, you can be strong. But there's no excuse. The male form is blessed with, you know, more bone density, double twitch muscle, all the things you talk about, this incredible substance that pours over called testosterone. You're going to look back when you're my age and think, why wasn't I just fast, sleek, a monster, just strong. So we're going to work out at least three times a week. The second thing is we got to make some money. And I want you to make money outside of your house. You know, I don't care if you're a Lyft driver. Task Rabbiter Panera's hiring people at 18 bucks an hour and only one out of ten that accept a job actually show up the first day. So if you really make the effort, you can make decent money. And the great thing about getting a taste for the flesh of money is you start learning how to make more money. If you want to make a lot of money, unless you're smart enough to be born to rich parents, start off by making a little bit of money and you'll start to figure out capitalism, right? And the final thing is at least three times a month we're going to put ourselves in a group sitting where we are trying to achieve something great in the agency of others. A non profit, a church group, a sports league, a riding club. And then the second phase of that is we're going to do something what I call as the approach. Hey man, do you want to go watch the jets game? Right? An expression of friendship. And then if you're really comfortable, an expression of romantic interest while making them feel safe. Would you like to grab a coffee sometime? And this is the goal. The goal is no, because you're going to get nos. And then I'm going to call you after you've made the approach. You're going to text me. I did an approach. Did you get a no? Yeah, I got a no. That's exactly the point. That's the goal. Because everyone you admire, everyone you think has killed it. The only thing I can guarantee you is there were a shit ton of no's in getting to one of the top 10 podcasts in the world. Getting to a person as a partner who's higher character and hotter than you, getting to make more money than you would have ever guessed that person would have made. The only thing that got them there was the willingness and the endurance to. To anticipate. No. And unfortunately, Big Tech is setting up an algorithm that convinces you that a frictionless life is a good life and that you never need to endure. No. And what you end up with is a lack of skills to persevere, to realize you're okay. And that's what I ask the kids the next day. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm bummed out. But you're okay. If a man under the age of 30 works out three times a week, works 30 hours a week outside of the house, and is volunteering, that immediately puts him in the top 8% of all young men. And I apologize for the word salad here, but something I hate is the incel movement. Involuntarily celibate, right? Throughout history, 99% of men have been involuntarily celibate for most of their lives. There's few things young men would rather be doing than having sex. Only 40% of men have reproduced throughout history, 80% of women. So no man has a birthright to reproduce. In the west, it's actually now 75%. So young men have more agency than they ever have. Now, if you do those things right, just those three things, work outside of the house, work out, have a kindness, practice, volunteer in the service of others, you're immediately going to put yourself in the top decile of young men. And if you're in the top decile of young men, I can guarantee you over time, you will become voluntarily ins celibate, which is awesome because you'll establish a relationship. And young men under the age of 30, a lot of the research shows, benefit more from a relationship than women. Yet only one in three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship, whereas two in three women are in a relationship. And you think, well, Scott, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older, because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. So I'll circle back to the more tactical recommendations. Get fit, start making some money, have a plan, and start doing things in the agency of others. I think the ultimate hack for depression, or if you're feeling bad about yourself, is to start helping others and to always keep in mind, and this is the hard part, that the antichrist of your progress as a young man the devil, the fucking enemy. The villain here, the Bond villain with trillions of dollars is Big Tech. They are trying to figure out with AI a million times a second how to convince you to spend one more second a day on your phone sequestered from your relationships because they're a shareholder value. 40% of the S&P is 10 companies whose sole mission is to monetize your time. And unfortunately they're not bad people. But what they're doing has resulted in, in a small group, a cohort of men. It's not small. Millions of men who are evolving into a new species of asocial, asexual males who wake up at the age of 30 thinking they've had a frictionless life living at home, obese, anxious and depressed, having never developed the skills that they need to do well professionally, personally. So Big Tech is not your friend. If you do not figure out how to modulate big tech products, whether it's Instagram or YouTube, you are falling into a trap of eventually being sequestered and not developing the skills to establish the most important thing in life. And that is relationships.

[B]

Two questions about Big Tech. And I'll just push back a little bit on the big tech thing. Not because I'm afraid of big Tech. I did grow up in Silicon Valley so I.

[A]

When you're at Stanford.

[B]

Yeah. Invariably have a different relationship to it. And I'm not name dropping. I happen to be close with some of the people that run these companies or in number, you know, two or number four slots or you know, in some cases who run the companies. One who I've never met, who I'll just raise first is who you referred to earlier. The richest man in the world is Elon Musk.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And I was frankly a little bit surprised that you called him out when discussing the importance of being a protector. I understand the political side. Well, let's just for the moment I will just set Trump aside. Very polarizing figure. Happy to go there if you want, but I know your stance on him. But the mention of Elon as a non protector surprised me because I think of Elon as somebody who seems to love his children very much. He's organized family differently than most, but he certainly has the capacity to take care of them. Who is committed to big projects. I mean a superhuman level of output in terms of just neuralink the field that I'm closest to. Right. Phenomenal progress. And that's just one of the SpaceX neural link, Tesla X, et cetera. So I'm just curious what motivated that that makes you. Because I don't see him as a non protector. I don't know that I see him as a protector of a particular kind in his personal life, but I don't have access to that. But in terms of his motivation to protect our species, I personally believe his desire to get to Mars is a genuine one, to have an option for humanity. So I see him as a protector. And I'll probably piss off a lot of people by saying this, but that doesn't mean I universally adopt everything he says and does. But I see him as kind of an awesome figure in our history who's like, let's get to Mars in case this Earth thing doesn't work out. And also let's get to Mars because it's awesome.

[A]

I think that's an entirely fair viewpoint and you're adding nuance to it. So let's talk about Elon Musk. If I had a red button that I could push and get rid of all of Big Tech or Elon Musk, somehow it could float away like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character and not die, but just not, not have happened, I wouldn't press the button. I think Big Tech and Elon Musk are net goods for the world. We're going to get to EVs, we're going to get to Mars faster because of Elon Musk. He inspired the EV race, which is good for the world. The problem is with the word net and as it relates to masculinity and as a role model for young men. He's probably one of the best role models in terms of being super aggressive, taking risks, ignoring the noise and just being laser like, focused, telling an amazing story, garnering capital. I mean, there's just no getting around it. The guy's just an inspiration. I think the whole shooting match is if you become the richest man in the world, I think you move to protection. I would argue that he's not a great role model and that he has not done a great job of convincing younger men that protection and taking care of others. I think the way he acquits himself online by punching down when he says something mean about somebody. And I know this and I'm fine because I have money and I'm not dependent upon any one person's opinion of me. But if he says something negative about you and calls you names, his 120 million followers come for you. And I think as a general rule, and this is true for everybody, but especially for men, you never punch down. You just don't anyone. I'm Openly, I make personal attacks on people. This is technically a personal attack on Elon Musk. To call someone not a good role model, that's a personal attack. But I never make personal attacks of anyone who isn't markedly more powerful than me. And I find that a lot of these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have no problem punching down. So again, it goes back to this. Is he a net good for the world? I acknowledge the point and I would even argue, yeah, he is, but that doesn't. He should also be held accountable for his blessings. I can't stand the fact that he shitposts America and the government. If you look at the most successful companies in the world, they're littered up and down the coast. We're on right now, whether it's Qualcomm In San Diego, SpaceX and Snap here, head north to Salesforce and Meta and Google. Keep going. You hit Amazon and Microsoft and then it stops once you get to the Canadian border. And then you have to go all the way up to Lululemon to find a multibillion dollar company, come back down to where you teach at UC San Diego and those great companies and it stops and you got to go to another 7,000km to get to Mercado Libre in Buenos Aires. There's something about America that creates unbelievable opportunity that creates the wealthiest men in the world. And I find that these tech brothers have a total lack of appreciation for the sacrifices in the system built in America and are the first to shitpost the government and complain about regulation and things getting in the way. I find that especially obnoxious. But let me acknowledge the point. I think on the whole, Elon Musk and Big Tech are a net good for the world. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable and ask, why would you do these things when you're so blessed?

[B]

So this gets to the heart of something that I think is extremely important, which is we're living in the age of everything pretty much being public about public figures. Not everything, but many more facets of their lives than ever before in history. In part because they share many more facets of their lives. It's not just that stuff gets unearthed. It's like they're talking about their company. They're also in the role of arguing with their ex on sometimes online, you know, you see that their kids sometimes will be apparent who they are. You know, it's interesting. My dad, first generation immigrant who came here, became a scientist and he's from Argentina and along these lines he Always said it was funny to him that when you would go to somebody's office in the United States, a professor or a businessman or something, the picture of his family was facing out. He said that was so weird. He said in Argentina, your picture of your wife and your kids and your. And your dog was facing in. That's yours. You don't share that with a person coming to your office. Like, who would do that? This oversharing thing, when you look back, is kind of a long standing theme in American business. And it shows up even more so, of course, online. So to me, this idea of, okay, Elon, for instance, but very different role model figure, someone that I consider a close friend. Jocko Willink, incredibly impressive. True warrior.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Great dad, great husband. I know his family. Amazing human being in so many ways. And he's kind of like the tough football coach that a lot of guys didn't have that younger guys. I think that's one of the reasons people gravitate towards him. You don't wonder whether or not he really can do what he says you ought to do because he does it every day and he posts it on his watch. So Jocko is a really good example of somebody that people admire. And I consider Jocko one example. So why not look at public figures, you and perhaps even me, for instance, and just look at these people as a buffet of options to adopt certain traits but not others. Be doing great things and assuming that the other things they're doing aren't truly atrocious. Right. I mean, criminal atrocious. I don't know that we're asking the people who are role models, leaders, business leaders. I don't think we're placing a reasonable expectation on them. I don't say this for any personal reasons. I've known I'm replete with flaws for a very long time. So I don't claim to not have them, never have. But then young guys might be thinking, well, I have to be perfect too. And if I'm not perfect and I don't have 150 million followers, I better have a fraternity of people to protect me. This is the kind of the underlying current that I think has driven the toxic end of the hate the word, the manosphere. I hate it because it's become too mishmashy. It's not even a continuum, it's just a mess. So what do you have to say and think about the expectation that the leaders of the world, the role models, not have these flaws at the same time telling guys, hey, like ask and get Told. No. I mean, you and I both know. I don't know if it's real world data or if it's statistical data, but I have many women friends in my life and I have a sister. If an attractive guy rolls up on a woman and says, hey, you want to get coffee sometimes?

[A]

It's romantic.

[B]

It's romantic. If a guy that's not attractive does that, it's creepy. It's creepy. So how do you tell a guy that isn't good looking to do that and then not be called a creep and not just be called a creep, but be called a creep on an app which isn't just designed to prevent sexual assault, but is also designed to share information about who to date and not to date? And guys get. I'm told by young guys, I'm not on dating apps, but that guys get blacklisted basically, not because of sexual assault, but because, you know, they get called out as, like, a bad kisser, he didn't smell so good or something. This is the stuff that used to be in private discussions among women. I know this because I have a sister. Right. Women talk. I listen through the wall. Right. What do they talk about? And now it's public. There's parallel construction here. I'm sure you're tracking it, but for everyone listening, it's like, this is a serious problem. I mean, can't we acknowledge that somebody like Elon. Let's just stay on that example. Is a phenom that probably has never existed in at least 100 years, has huge vision. Sure, he might have some, like, issues in his life that are none of my business, and yet he has a lot of good example to set for young men. I believe that. And it also gives permission to not be perfect without harming people.

[A]

So acknowledge the point. There's a lot there. But I still think if someone is constantly optimizing for attention to draw cheap capital to his firms and is very open and very critical of others and is probably the most dominant force in electing the next president, that we should pay very close attention to his activities, whether it's reported addiction to ketamine and sleeping with a loaded gun next to his bed and not living with any of his children, whether it's.

[B]

You think that should be public, fair game.

[A]

I think if he wants to put certain aspects of his life out there constantly for affirmation, that that type of scrutiny is probably fair game. I also acknowledge the point that people are human and you need to have some grace and say, well, unless you're perfect Try and learn from people, try and understand them and try and demonstrate some grace. The other thing going back to big Tech is that we have connected economic value to tearing down people. So you've had bestsellers? I've had bestsellers.

[B]

I said my book hasn't come out yet. I hope for it to be a bestseller.

[A]

You haven't. You have a book?

[B]

No, it comes out in September. It's been delayed for a while, but I appreciate the.

[A]

I feel like I've already read it.

[B]

No, well, I'm willing as well. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

[A]

Let me prepare because I think you're actually. I don't know you well, but I do know you. I get the sense that, like me, a lot of the criticism doesn't just bounce right off you, that you take this stuff to heart and sometimes it upsets you. I know it. Look, I'll say it upsets me, some of it does.

[B]

But it's not the criticism that people think upsets me that upsets me. But that's a different story.

[A]

Your book will be a bestseller. You could put out, I don't know, the script of the Sound of Music and it's gonna be a bestseller.

[B]

It'll be better than if I had done that, but not better than the Sound of Music.

[A]

There you go. And this is what TikTok and YouTube, the algorithms. Someone will immediately say, this is why Andrew Huberman's book is bullshit. Because if they put a well known figure's name in front of a best selling book and says bullshit and creates antagonism and comments, the algorithms pick up on that. Optimize it. It'll get millions of views, which is more Nissan ads and more shareholder value. So there is not only a healthy check on people's power, more scrutiny. The president should get a lot of scrutiny. The president deserves to have his business and personal life to a certain extent at least where it demonstrates character, looked into and examined. And I think a certain amount of power and healthy check on power is probably a healthy thing. Unfortunately, now there's economic incentive around tearing people down. Like, I don't know about you, I do have a real fear. I am highly imperfect professionally and personally. I've engaged in a lot of professional and personal behavior that I am not proud of. I've been divorced. I haven't been as kind to people that have worked for me as I should have been. And I'm worried it's all going to come crashing down. And a lot of times I feel like the stuff I'm Saying on podcasts like this, I'm trying to portray myself as being better than I actually am. I have huge imposter syndrome. And Big Tech has an economic incentive in trying to find as many guardians of gotcha pins as possible, because if you get to a certain point of fame or credibility, there's just too much money in trying to find the soft tissue on you. So there's a very unhealthy attribute in our society where we're all just waiting for bad news, and there's economic incentive to say, well, this person isn't perfect. Look what this person did. So I agree with you. We need to demonstrate a little bit more grace. Something I really hate about my party, I consider myself a proud progressive, is these purity tests, right, that. Oh, you know, I put out a picture of me and a bunch of buddies that I went to UCLA with. One's an aircraft carrier pilot, one's an ophthalmologist, like it was a picture of all of us. And I've said, you know, find impressive men and befriend them.

[B]

I think I saw that post. You were the one towering over the rest of them.

[A]

Yeah, I think I've shrunk.

[B]

Huh?

[A]

Isn't that weird?

[B]

You're a tall guy. No, I don't think you shrunk. I only know you now.

[A]

I was six' three in college. I'm six' one and a half now. That's nice. I'm at an age where I'm shrinking anyways, and I knew I was just waiting for it. Why? Privilege. What a douchebag. What? You know, just all the comments and all the sort of, you know, people. People coming after you, right? Or people who can't just say, oh, good for you. Well done. And that's just part of it. And that's a small price to pay for a certain level of success. But the algorithms immediately grab that and elevate it because there's money and antagonism, a thoughtful, nuanced conversation online, and a positive, reinforcing comment that that doesn't tickle the sensors. If you can create a fight online, if you say, MRNA vaccines alter your DNA, you're going to get a lot of comments. And the algorithms love that, and it'll elevate it. So, unfortunately, we have attached 40% of the market value of the S and P to incendiary content. That tears us apart. And the result is people now believe that Russian troops pouring over the border in Ukraine is their enemy. They believe that their neighbor with a Trump sign is their real enemy or someone who doesn't believe your ideology around gender politics is your enemy. And unfortunately, it's being I believe and I know this sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. These poorest platforms that have an economic incentive and antagonistic content are being fueled by bad actors, whether it's the GRU or the CCP who look at America and say, we can't beat them economically, we can't beat them kinetically, so let's get them to hate each other. And that is Americans now perceive other Americans as the biggest threat. So one it is healthy to look at powerful people that have huge influence, such as you, and to a lesser extent, me, and question their beliefs and write critical articles of them. It crushed me when the I can't remember the Atlantic or the New York or New Yorker came out with sort of a critical review of my book. It was really upsetting to me. And I think part of the thing that was so upsetting was, and we were talking about this off mic, it meant some of it was true. That's healthy. It's healthy when there's thoughtful criticism around your book. But when I have hundreds of comments accusing me of shit that never happened and then you look at it and it's dog mom, Wisconsin331 with three followers, that's a bot. And the fact that these platforms choose not to screen out those bots because they know more incendiary comments that create more comments and more Nissan ads, I think that is tearing at the fabric of America. But I just want to acknowledge the point. I think maturity is realizing people aren't perfect. Learn from them what you can. But I do think the wealthiest man in the world and the president should be held to a higher standard. I think they have extraordinary blessings. I think their decisions matter. And I think it's. I think the scrutiny they come under is warranted. And I will say this, I think the President, to a certain extent, Elon Musk, have created a lot of cloud cover for our imperfections.

[B]

As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still take it is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day. But I'm often asked, if you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1 because it has just been oh so critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1 and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drink ag1.comhuberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. Again, that's drink AG1 with the numeral1.comhuberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. I disagree vehemently with one point, which is that I'm more influential than you are. You're incredibly influential. In fact, an ex girlfriend's sister who went to NYU asked me if I knew who you were. I said, of course. And she said her words for our generation. Scott is like a father to us. And she happens to be in venture capital, so maybe there's a finance link there too. And I. But I pressed on that a little bit and just asked. And she said, yeah, you know, we look up to him, we listen to him, he's very paternal to us. So I thought you might appreciate that.

[A]

I do appreciate that.

[B]

Although I would've come to a woman as well.

[A]

I'd appreciate it more if she'd said older brother. I'm very conscious of my age now.

[B]

Really?

[A]

100%.

[B]

You're in your 60s, you're super fit, you got two healthy boys, you're in a happy relationship, you got huge reach. I imagine your bank accounts are fine and you're trying to. And you're actively engaged in service. In my eyes, you're doing great.

[A]

I appreciate that. But I'd rather be in this spot at 40. At 41, not 61. I'm very self conscious about my age. But I just want to go back to something I think that gets in the way of success and has been a huge unlock for me is. I mean, it's not. But your fear, your fear of criticism. If you're going to be successful, you're going to face criticism. Starting a business is subjecting yourself to public failure. I want to go back to something you said about approaching women and guys being afraid to be that guy. I think some of that is a little bit exaggerated in that most women, if you are respectful, the vast majority of women, if you are respectful and approach a woman at a bar, hi, how are you? And she's not interested, you're going to be fine. And you're both going to be fine. And just as I think there's two myths that are damaging to the mating market, which is really upsetting to me. One, that men think that all women are looking to, or a lot of women are looking to embarrass them and they might get canceled professionally. If you're respectful to a woman and approach her and make her feel safe, and then if she's not interested, politely exit, you're going to be fine and so is she. And I don't buy that you're taking your career in your hands. I think that's just bullshit and an excuse to be an incel. I just don't buy it. And two, what really has been an enormous unlock for me is I believe in my atheism. I believe at some point I'm gonna look into my kids eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. I was fucking their age. You got a bunch of young dudes in here who look like former Abercrombie and Fitch models. I remember they look like they're 25. They're probably 35. It was yesterday I was their age. Which means just in an instant, I'm gonna be again at that moment where I know I don't have much time left. And in 100 years, no one's going to give a shit what I said or thought or did or the mistakes I made. And embracing that and accepting that has given me so much courage, right, to start businesses, to make dumb investments that might be crazy to tell men in my life, finally that I love them or I'm impressed with them. When I was their age, I had this weird sense of masculinity that if I said, oh, dude, look how handsome this dude is, that it took away from my prestige somehow that I couldn't tell people they were impressive. I couldn't tell a woman, God, I'm just crazy about you. And I would give anything to spend more time with you. Because I was worried that she wouldn't return my affection and I would be just too hurt and I had to be cool and not need her. All this bullshit that Got in the way of me really having a good life. And what I realized is every failure I've had, people go, oh, his business went bankrupt. Okay. And then they go back to thinking about themselves. So everyone you're worried about really doesn't give a shit about you. And by the way, the dude that's not very good looking and is with a ridiculously, like, high character hot woman is one of two things as rich parents or two or two is willing to endure rejection. So I just don't buy, you know, that myth of the man risking his personal and professional reputation. I don't think that's true. On the other side, the myth I hate. I don't know if you've seen this on TikTok. A lot of women are saying, I don't date because the risks of being unalived, which I guess is the woke version of saying murdered.

[B]

I think it's. Cause on social media platforms, if you say murder or suicide.

[A]

Oh, it goes right down.

[B]

I don't know if it actually does, but it's this idea that. Yeah. That it's gonna be ranked down.

[A]

Here's the data. Okay. If 2,500 women a year are murdered by men, that's way too many. It's a huge problem. Sexual assault is a bigger problem. The majority of women who are murdered are murdered by someone they know. So the reality is a small number of women are murdered on dates with strangers. It just doesn't happen that often. And 40,000 men a year kill themselves. So if you go on a date with a man, the man is 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you. So what I would say to men is make the approach, take the risk, and as long as you're respectful, you're going to be fine, and so is she. And you are not taking your professional or personal reputation into your hands. And what I would say to women is if you go on a date with a guy that you met on an app, there's all sorts of digital breadcrumbs. And it's a lot. You are. And I can statistically prove this. The ride over an Uber, the Uber was a lot more dangerous than the date itself. And you are more likely to. To die of choking during dinner than to be hurt by that man. So what I hate is that there's all this inflammatory content being boosted on online media that's getting in the way of the most rewarding thing in life, and that is to find someone who you are physically attracted to, who you sync up with spiritually and you decide to build a life together. And not enough of that is happening. We're in a sex recession, right? And online is making it worse. The dating apps have an incentive in you finding a bigger, better deal. And the genders have done an amazing job of convincing each other it's the other's fault. And I think one of the big foci that need to be really pay more attention to is what I call renewal of alliances. I'd love to see a renewal of alliances between us and our great allies in Europe. Renewal of allies who are moderates. I know nothing about you. I just can't believe you're an extremist on the left or the right. I just don't.

[B]

Bullseye.

[A]

There needs to be a renewal of alliances between what I'll call moderate lefties like me and moderate conservatives that are everywhere. We're all Americans. But the most important alliance that needs renewal is the greatest alliance in history, hands down. And it's the alliance between men and women. The integration of female and male energy. The ability to find someone you want to procreate with, to build something together that is the most rewarding thing in life. And I can prove it's key to the species progress and existence. And men and women have been taught not to trust each other and to blame each other. I hate the fucking manosphere and I hate the, quite frankly, some of the reactionary notion on the left where it's misandry, cosplaying is social commentary. There's a lot of bullshit misandry online where you're assuming every young man is a predator and quite frankly that every billionaire is evil or that every white person is racist. But the alliance between men and women needs to be reformed. It's the greatest alliance in history. And online it's teaching men to blame women for their problems. No. Women's ascent saved our ass. Women in the factory in World War II is the reason we won the war in four years, not in seven. Women going into the workforce in the 70s and 80s in protections of their rights for fair pay is the reason we're not a second tier power to China right now. If women hadn't ascended, we'd be really squarely and duly fucked. Right? And their ascent is in no way inversely correlated or correlated to men's descent. Men have to stop that bullshit. An immigrant didn't take your job. He made it such that you could have lower rent a meal for a reasonable price and have someone take care of your mother when she's older and at the same time, if you're having romantic problems, it's not her fault. Women are ascending and naturally they have higher standards because they're no longer economically dependent upon men, which should be a motivator for men to level up, not to start blaming women. And all this shit is being totally inflamed and taken totally out of proportion by online because it creates more attention, it's interesting, it's novel, and it creates more Nissan ads. But I'm trying to figure out what is the economic incentive to try and figure out a way to get more men and women appreciating the other gender beyond just the basics, right? How do we renew that alliance?

[B]

I love that statement. I saw somewhere, of all places on X, you know, every once in a while you encounter something that really sticks with you. Every once in a while there's a gem that just falls through, really makes you think, and I don't know who this person was. Might have been an account with one follower. And it landed in front of me and it said, the way you destroy a society is to get the men and women to hate each other. And as a biologist, first and foremost, I thought, well, that makes perfect sense, right? If you want to eradicate a population of any species, you get the males and the females to start hitting each other, not just because they don't mate, but because you throw off the mating dynamics in a way that then can create infighting among the males. We see that too, infighting among the women. Although, I don't know, I think that there's a lot to explore around this sort of what the standard is that we're holding the opposite sex to. It's an interesting question. I can't say I've really evolved my thinking around this enough to maybe dive into it, but I know you thought about this. I think a lot of males hide behind this notion that they have to be everything. They have to be tall, they have to be rich, they have to be jacked, they have to be kind. They have to be, you know, hopefully everyone's kind. But you know what I mean, that they. They can't say the wrong thing even once, you know, so they're hiding behind that. And if they go out and look, they'll get plenty of evidence for that, right? No men, no protectors, no this. Actually, I did something I rarely do, which is I brought my phone into this because right before I came in here, a woman that I've known for 20 years wrote and asked me if I would ask you a question. No. And it's directly related to this. So I'm gonna do this. Of course I'm not gonna say who this person is. And she said, cause I mentioned that I'm speaking. Speaking to you today. And she said, please tell Scott that I'd personally like to thank him for his efforts encouraging men to embrace their duties as protectors, providers, and generally just being accountable because we have a serious shortage among hetero dudes. She lives in San Francisco, particularly in the Bay Area. And I said, will do. But can you tell me what you mean by accountable? Serious question. I want to make sure I'm specific. She said, when I say accountability, I'm referring to the fact that many times in romantic relationships, men seem to want to avoid feelings of shame and guilt to such a degree that they often respond to their partner's feelings towards them without empathy or accountability. I find that here in. Okay, San Francisco. There are many women in San Francisco. I don't think I outed her here. Or perhaps all major US Metros, chivalry is dead. Men are afraid to assert their desires because they don't want the obligation that it might entail. Interesting. They give up when something requires internal growth or leveling up. They shy away from acting protective of their partners in favor of egalitarian dynamics, which is flawed since men's clear since men clearly have more physical strength. Oh my God. This goes on and on. This is almost overwhelming me, but I think I'm, you know, can grapple with it. Oh, thank you. I swear I didn't plant this. She said, none of this has ever applied to you, in case you're serious. Thank you for that one, by the way. She says they're wimpy. They avoid relationships that require work and responsibility because they don't want to feel inadequate. They avoid difficult conversations and repair because they don't want to feel shame or guilt. They avoid asking for anything explicitly because they don't want to feel obligated or complimenting a woman or giving her flowers or romance. They're all scared to do it. It's so odd. Anyway, that's it.

[A]

That's all. Huh?

[B]

Okay, so I'm hearing that second part for the first time, the long part. And I have to say, if I were a 25 year old guy now I'd be like, whoa, right? That's a lot. Okay, there's something there. They want me to bring flowers, be romantic, be affectionate. Clearly there's a. There's a reference towards being sexually proactive there and yet assume responsibility, level up, be empathic. You know, I'm not trying to defend or attack this person who's I'm close to in my life, but that's a lot. That's a tall building right there to scale for a guy who's trying to figure out how to work out three times a week, get off porn. Anyway, I thought I'd share that and just get your reflections.

[A]

I think that first off, I think that we all have a set of insecurities around not living up. Mostly because again, I really do think Big Tech has had is while it's a net good, incredible economic growth, job growth, I connect with my buddies from college, I get to build a business and market it less expensively. I can break through voices that can bubble up just based on their talent. Teen suicide has skyrocketed since social went on mobile. It's not the only reason, but it's either number one or number two. According to my colleague Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge at San Diego State. I don't believe there's any reason that anyone under the age of 16 should be on social media where they encourage young girls are encouraged to sexualize themselves. But if they start having suicidal ideation, they are sent an email that says verbatim, here are some images on suicide we thought you might find interesting. But also it's created unreasonable expectations for a lot of young men and young women about what they need to look like. If they haven't made millions of dollars, if they aren't on a private jet going to Coachella, if they don't have a boyfriend with a six pack, if they, if they don't look just amazing all the time. I think it creates tremendous anxiety and unreasonable expectations. But I do, you know, so I would argue that who's. Okay, so who's at fault? We're at fault. And that is we keep hoping or waiting for the better angels of tech CEOs to show up. That's not going to happen. I've been working my whole life with CEOs. They're going to make incremental decisions to do whatever moves the stock price up. That's their job. That's capitalism. Their job is to take a set of resources, figure out an offering where they get more than they paid to garner those resources and create shareholder value. They will do anything to do that. That's their job. And then we're supposed to tax them such that we can build our roads, take care of our veterans and have a set of laws so they don't get out of control, so that they don't lie and say no, smoking's not addictive. And then our mothers, our sisters and our dads start dying. Right? We have regulation. We are net beneficiaries from fossil fuels and pesticides, but we still have an EPA and an fda. There's absolutely no regulation on Big Tech. There's more regulation in this mic than there is on Big Tech because they have weaponized Washington and money and Citizens United. There are more full time lobbyists living in Washington D.C. working for Amazon, one company, than there are sitting U.S. senators. So they have very effectively avoided all regulation to the point where they basically run unfettered, whether it's bots, whether it's harm to children, whether it's letting bad actors try and influence elections. And they, in my opinion, if your content can be reverse engineered to self harm among teens, if your podcast, if we could prove statistically that your podcast was resulting in self harm among teenage girls, this podcast would be shut down, you would be sued and you would eventually decide to go out of business.

[B]

Yeah, well, if we were harming people appropriately.

[A]

So I would argue Big Tech does that and more every day. And these cases that just came down, actually one in LA that found Google liable, do you realize that the New Mexico Attorney general, do you know what he did in his case? He created an account posing as a 12 year old girl and within minutes he was getting messages and solicitations from known sexual abusers. That was their first piece of evidence that if you create an account and you say you're a 12 year old girl, within hours they were getting overtures from known sexual predators. So the fact that this company can target you and know that I'm wearing Warby Parker's and start serving me ads by looking at the screen or know that I'm at Coachella listening to David Byrne and start serving me albums of David Byrne's greatest hits, then they can figure out that a 12 year old girl shouldn't be getting overtures from 55 year old men.

[B]

I'll bracket that sentence right. That very fair and very important statement that if there were some balance of optimization towards real protections, that that is important.

[A]

But they made I think $11 billion last year from people under the age of 18. But you asked who's to blame? We're to blame because we haven't elected people who are willing to hold these companies accountable and their sole mission is to get reelected. And in 97% of elections, whoever raises the most money gets reelected. And these companies are now the fastest growing expense line amongst Big Tech isn't AI as a percentage basis. It isn't rd, it isn't capex. It's lobbying. Because the greatest ROI in history is spending money on politicians. I give money to politicians because I'm getting more politically active and it doesn't surprise me that they're whores. The most disappointing thing is what cheap whores they are. If I get $50,000 to a senator, he'll have dinner with me when he's in New York or she. Because they have to. Because the system is set up such that whoever raises the most money gets elected. And Big Tech has figured that out. So until we have the judgment to elect people who are willing to stand up to Big Tech and actually implement safe and common sense regulation, I don't want them to go out of business. Let our thoroughbreds run. I actually believe the American model of less regulation versus more is one of the reasons we're much more successful than Europe, which hasn't grown in 20 years. But this has gotten to a point where we seem to have a total lack of regard for our children's well being and the fact that Americans hate each other and that we're kind of eating ourselves from the inside out. So again, we need an EPA and an FDA or some sort of equivalent for Big Tech, especially with AI. But I want to acknowledge the point. None of this could have happened without fossil fuels. There is a trade off here, right? Pesticides are important for our food safety, but there is an fda. We have decided to just let Big Tech run unfettered. And I think it's been gotten to the point where it's pretty damaging for society. I think we've robbed kids. My kids are in the kill zone, 15 and 18. I think they've been robbed of a lot of their youth. I understand this shit. And I have a son who has device addiction who will lie, take his phone, say he doesn't feel well, take his phone into the bathroom for 45 minutes and I have to bang on the door and jokingly scream, start masturbating. Because this kid is addicted to TikTok. What the British did to the Chinese in terms of getting them addicted to opium. I think that the Chinese, via porous platforms that are shareholder driven in the gru, are addicting our youth. And we're going to raise a generation of civic, nonprofit and military leaders who fucking hate America. We are teaching kids to hate each other, hate America, hate every special interest group, hate every ideology that doesn't fit their own. And there's no grace around what it means, and how fortunate are we to be American? And I think at the center of it is a total lack of regulation amongst these incredibly brilliant companies. The most technologically sophisticated, deepest pocketed companies in the world are trying to sequester our youth from us, and they're stealing youth. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half the last 20 years. Men between the ages of 20 and 30 are spending less time outdoors, Andrew, than prison inmates. We are robbing youth because we refuse to regulate these companies. So do I want these companies to go away? Do I think they're bad people? No. But we have a system that values wealth and shareholder value above all. And so tech CEOs and their boards will make a series of incremental decisions regardless of the damage to the public. And we have a set of elected leaders that don't do their job, and that is they're there to prevent a tragedy of the commons. And. And it's Democrats and Republicans. So it comes down to very boring shit. Unless we reform Citizens United, unless we de gerrymander the United States Congress, money is going to win and these companies have more money. But no, I would push back. I think these companies are starting to do a lot of damage to our youth. I'm worried my kids are going to grow up so used to getting dopa so easily and squeezing it so fast. And this is your field that we're flushing into society, a series of young people who are so ready for addiction because they're so used to getting an automatic dopa by just flipping out their phone really fast.

[B]

One thing that I don't think I've emphasized enough on this podcast, this, and certainly not this, but other episodes as well, is a kind of reframe around the dopamine in phones. I'm not trying to correct you here, but I think it might be helpful for this discussion and for people listening to. We need to move our minds away from the idea that the phone is providing these dopamine hits because it's not the behavior with social media, but phones generally is a lot more akin to true clinical grade obsessive compulsive disorder. Colleagues of mine that work on obsessive compulsive disorder, I just want to give a shout out to. The pioneer of this field was a woman I just adored, Judith Rapoport. She passed away recently. People can look up her obit. There's a really nice one in the Times identified the brain structures associated with this thing that we call ocd, right hand washing Scratching, hair pulling, you know, all the variations of it. What defines obsessive compulsive disorder is that the engagement in the behavior, the compulsion, doesn't relieve the obsession. So to call someone OCD because they need everything perfect, but then when it's perfect, they're like, okay, I can relax. That's not ocd. OCD is when you engage in a compulsive behavior over and over again, and all it does is serve to reinforce the obsession that, to me, more closely mimics what I see in terms of phone use than the idea that it's like, no way. This amazing thing on the phone that comes every once in a while, but after you've spent a day or so on social media or on YouTube, we are all engaging in a much more passive, slow, degradation kind of way that I'm sure impacts the dopamine pathway. In fact, OCD is directly tied to the dopamine pathway. So I'm not divorcing it from dopamine. But I think if we started to look at our relationship to the phone as more of an induced obsessive compulsive disorder than an addiction, I actually think that's one of the potential ways out. Not just because words matter and concepts matter, but because I think in order to get out of that loop, you have to see yourself from the outside, and you have to realize that you're being hijacked. I think right now there's just so much incentive for being on it, for being in the bathroom, you know, looking at the phone. Look, I'm not addicted to my phone, but I will tell you, there are days when I feel like I pick up that thing, even though I don't want to. And that's different than addiction. I know what addiction feels like. That's not addiction. That's happening just reflexively. People aren't even thinking about it. The lack of awareness is just not there. So forgive me for going on this tangent, but as you're saying everything today, I'm trying to think solutions. And I know Mark. I actually am friendly with Mark. So I think they care. I do think they care. I think they've created something so big that it's very hard to navigate and keep up with shareholders and all this stuff. But I would love to see the world's relationship to their phones and social media change so that it is more in our individual control, more benevolent.

[A]

But that's against our economic interests, and they'll fight that tooth and nail.

[B]

But I wonder if there is a way to incentivize that.

[A]

Well, let's talk about that.

[B]

So I'm trying to think of solutions.

[A]

So let's move to solutions. 1. Antitrust. I don't think Meta should have ever been allowed to buy Instagram. I think their ability, their scale of data suppresses any formidable competitor. Two thirds of all social media now goes to one company. And with a lack of competition, there's really no oxygen for a company that might say, we're not going to allow 18 year olds on here. Any content that's incendiary, anything that looks like it's been weaponized by bots or might be from a bad foreign actor, we're not going to allow it. I think there's a lot of parents and a lot of people that would like to be on that platform. The game's over, they've won. I don't think Google should have been allowed to buy YouTube. And people say, well, they're great companies. If YouTube was divested from Google, the next day YouTube would decide to start a basic search algorithm and Google would start another video platform and we'd have two competitors and there'd be lower rents on labor and on advertisers. Competition is an amazing thing. These companies are a set of distinct monopolies that extract rents from labor, from the consumer and from the well being of America. So antitrust Senator Klobuchar has done great work here. Basically she says, I'm overrun. She's like, I got a staff of 60 people. There are 200 lawyers hired by Meta and Facebook who are doing nothing but getting in the way of anything to do with antitrust and giving money to people who will delay and obfuscate anything around antitrust. 2. Removal of Section 230 for algorithmically elevated content. Their basic premise is we're not in the, we're not a media company, we're just a platform. We're just putting stuff on a board. Well, okay, but if you decide this content gets more, they elevate it. They make the decision to elevate it. And sometimes the content they elevate is not good for the mental health of America. It tears at the fabric of America. I think if you algorithmically elevate content, you should be subject to the same liability as say, News Corps. When News Corps and Fox told its on air anchors to repeat a lie that they knew was a lie, that Smartmatic voting machines had been weaponized by Hugo Chavez and they knew it was a lie and then Smartmatic sues them and says you caused us economic harm, they had to pay $750 million fine. What happened on Fox was a dumpster fire compared to the nuclear mushroom cloud of what happened on Facebook that day. But these nascent platforms, which in 1997 we were trying to give them running room, those protections are in place for tech platforms that are not in place for media companies. So if you algorithmically elevate content, you are now a media company. You should be subject to the same liability as every other media company. And then finally, three age gate this shit. The downside of Instagram and YouTube for 15 year olds is way greater than the upside. And people who say to me, Scott, this is about parenting, that's a tell for they don't have kids. This is where they get their homework. And my colleague at nyu, Adam Alter, who also has an appointment at the psychology department, said when you take kids off of screens, totally, it actually is more damaging to their mental health because they're ostracized from all social activity. And what's happened, the greatest uptick in school scores in recent history is when they do what my buddy Jonathan Haidt suggests do these schools do and they ban their phones. So I think there are common sense solutions that keep a lot of the good stuff these companies do while recognizing, well, maybe a 14 year old shouldn't be spending seven hours a day on TikTok or Instagram while his or her single mother is at work and can't police it. So I think there are common sense solutions in a meeting of the minds here. But everything I propose, they will spend tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to get in the way of and make sure it never happens again.

[B]

I really appreciate your answer. I like to think that they are listening, especially in the wake of these recent lawsuits where they had to pay out. Granted, a drop in the ocean compared to their total revenue, but those were very public cases and maybe I'm overly optimistic. I like to think that they care enough to pay attention. I mean, look, many of those guys, it's mostly guys running those companies now. YouTube used to be a woman, but now almost all of them are run by guys. They have kids. I can guarantee their kids don't spend a ton of time on their phones.

[A]

They send them to schools where they're not allowed to be on screens.

[B]

Right?

[A]

They're doing their job, we're not doing ours. I don't even kind of resent them. I think Mark Zuckerberg has been especially damaging. But they're doing their job. Capitalist society has to have for profit companies that within the bounds of law, make A lot of money. Look, you can't have a Navy, you can't have innovation, you can't have

[B]

Parks,

[A]

unless you have the tax revenue to support this shit. So we need our thoroughbreds to run. They're great companies, but there's basic common sense regulation that should be applied that they've managed to delay and obfuscate and ensure it never happens to them.

[B]

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives insights into your heart health, hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol. And it did. In a follow up test I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back where I want them, in range. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is so important for health and while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit functionhealth.comhuberman and use the code HUBERMAN for a $50 credit towards your membership. Glad you mentioned the Navy. Recently I was invited out to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and had the privilege of giving a talk to 4000 midshipmen which includes both young men and women. It was an amazing experience. I'll tell you this, a guy who's been, I guess on this podcast was the one that organized this. Coleman Ruiz has amazing life story. He's not particularly public facing, but amazing story of his own life. And okay, so you go there and all these young men and women are of course in their cadet fatigues and going about. They live two to a dorm room, they do PT physical activity every morning at 5am Lunch was the most incredible experience. You walk into a dining hall with thousands of men and women, tons of noise, a bell goes off, everyone's quiet, everyone sits down, a bell goes off, everyone starts eating. Fifteen minutes later, bell goes off, everyone stands up and walks out. Everyone has to play a sport competitively Everyone there is forbidden from using their phone. Most all of the day and night, one member of this dorm room might be studying while their roommate is sleeping. Every single question was about how to be a better human being, physically, mentally, emotionally. And this visit was right in the early days of the recent war with Iran. So they have a lot to worry about and they're very close to all these things. A young woman came up to me and told me that she's part of the, you know, the space program, the military space program. Amazing. Like, just a complete contrast to everything that we're talking about. I thought to myself, like, goodness, like these people, young people like this still exist. Yeah, all firm handshakes, all eye contact, and by the way, every color you could possibly imagine, every color you could possibly imagine, you know, every stature you could possibly imagine, every income, class. I would ask people, where are you from? You know, part of the meet and greet. The problem was they were like, you know, my problem is I actually want to know about what, where people are from, what their name is, what they're interested in. That can just take days, right? But it was incredible. And I thought to myself, okay, there's hope. Like, we came out of there, our team was like, yeah, like there's hope, okay. It's associated with the military. I'm sure people will scratch at that point. But thank God that these kids and this thing that we call the Navy exists because it was so inspiring. It made me level up as a 50 year old man who thinks these guys shit mostly together. Emphasis on mostly. I was like, whoa, hey, step it up now. Probably their only quote, unquote flaw was I did a poll, there were a lot of questions about nicotine. And I asked approximately what percentage of the room takes nicotine every day. I would say about 20 to 30% of the hands in the room went up. Nicotine is in major use in young people.

[A]

Are they using the, the oral nicotines?

[B]

Yeah, which by the way, don't cause cancer, but yes, it's very addictive. Raise blood pressure and, you know, I'm not encouraging people to do it, but this brings me around to a separate point. I just wanted to kind of paint that picture, but to a separate point. You and I have never had a public argument, nor are we going to now, about alcohol or about cannabis. But you and I share somewhat different views on alcohol. I've been very vocal and perhaps our most popular episode ever was the episode on alcohol. I didn't foresee that. And the deal is zero is better than any if we're strictly looking at health, two per week is probably fine. If you're gonna drink more, you should probably do a bunch of other things to reduce inflammation and offset it and get good sleep and et cetera, et cetera. I'm not telling people what to do. They should just know what they're doing. You've made the argument quite aptly that alcohol can be an important social lubricant for young and older people so that they can socialize and have a life. I worry that if young people now drink more, they're gonna end up drinking alone. They're gonna end up masturbating into porn more alone, they're gonna end up with more hangovers after all their alone behavior. I think what you've argued for is the notion of healthy fraternity, healthy dating and socializing. You've mentioned bars a couple times. Alcohol as something that can bring people together in a positive way. If you don't mind, if you could elaborate on that. And maybe I'll just toss out cannabis as another one, because cannabis has problems, and I'll acknowledge benefits of its own.

[A]

So I want to go to. The first thing first is I want to just touch on Navy. I went to Annapolis when I was 17. It was because my dad was looking to get out of the paying for college and decided I should go to Annapolis. And he took me and we did a tour, and we weren't very sophisticated. And it became so clear so fast that I was totally unqualified for Annapolis. The kids, the average sat. These are the finest young men and women in the world. And also you have to get a recommendation from a senator. And it was just so ridiculous that we were even there. I was just not of that quality and that standard. But my dad was in the Royal Navy and decided go to Annapolis because we don't have to pay for it anyways. But that was the last time I was at Annapolis. But if I could have one policy. So I'm advising a lot of Democrats running for president, which is like 40 of them right now, who all claim they're not running. They're all running. If you call me and say you're really interested in my viewpoint, it means you want my money and you're running for president. And I just say, look, that's fine. Come on the podcast and I'll write you a check. If I could have one policy, one blanket. If I had a magic one, one policy, it'd be mandatory national service. If you look at the lowest levels of young adult depression in the west, it's two countries, it's Israel and Singapore. And despite all the existential threats facing Israel, what does mandatory national service do? It gives you the sense that you're serving the agency of something bigger than yourself. It gives you purpose. You're handling dangerous equipment. It's the great equalizer. You don't care that this gay kid is totally different than you. You respond to his or her character and competence. Because if you're getting fired on, you don't give a shit how rich their father is. All you want to know is, is this person good at what they do? And you put people's lives in your hands and they put their life in your hands and you're serving in the agency of something bigger than yourself. I spent time with an IDF battalion in Israel and had the same kind of experience. It sounds like you had at Annapolis. These are young, beautiful, fit people outside all day meeting friends, mentors and mates in Singapore. The president there, who's arguably one of the greatest leaders of the last century, said, this is the most religiously diverse society in the world. We're going to have ethnic violence. There'll be a strongman who will weaponize this diversity and get people to turn against each other. So we need a different religion and it's going to be the flag. And we need to get people praying to the flag again. And if you look at the great legislation in America in the 60s and 70s, which was probably the most productive, unified time in America, it's because many of our elected leaders had all served in the same uniform and they saw themselves as Americans before they saw themselves as Republicans or Democrats. And I'm not just saying military service, senior care, donating time at a no kill animal shelter, being a smoke jumper. There's a lot of ways to serve. But I think young Americans would benefit so enormously from getting outside of their own circle and seeing just how wonderful America and Americans are and having a chance. And not only that, people say, well, it's easy for you to say, you've aged out. I can tell you as a father of boys, if we set it up well and invested in it, I think they would really enjoy a rotation through different parts of America and different opportunities to serve. So the one thing I would do going back to Annapolis and the IDF and what they do in Singapore is mandatory national service. On drinking. First, my acknowledgment as it relates to the intake of any substance, if it's Andrew Huberman or Scott Galloway, defer to Andrew Huberman's advice. I just want to say that up front, you just have the qualifications and the domain expertise here. I think personally the risk to a 25 year old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation. I worry that with 40% fewer pubs now post Covid in Britain and a lack of mating and a lack of connection that the data I've seen, and correct me if I'm wrong, that 95% of people are able to integrate alcohol and drugs into their life without serious consequences. If you have a history of addiction, if you for whatever reason don't enjoy it, then by all means avoid it. If people are telling you that you're having an issue or a problem or it's getting in the way of your work life, or you're one of those people that gets violent or mean under the influence, then for God's sakes, tone it down. But what I ask people is to look back on their younger days and say, what is the most important thing in your life? Relationships, friendships, finding someone to mate with. And I ask them, did alcohol play a role? You know, it's not easy to come in and lean in for a kiss without a glass of wine. Or let me put it this way, it is easier with a glass of wine. It's a lot of fun. I smoked a lot of pot and I drank a lot of alcohol in my 20s and in college and it created a lot of wonderful bonding moments. And so what I'm saying, there's a balance and a trade off. And what I would suggest is that everyone needs to make their own decision. But what scares me is the anti alcohol movement in remote work has led to a level of isolation and fewer moments where people can bond, where people are willing to take a risk and go up to a strange person and say, hey, what's going on? So I worry that the anti alcohol movement, what I see among young people is that while they've demonized alcohol, it's not that they're not getting high, they're just doing a shit ton of drugs. And the thing I don't like about many of these drugs is that they're more solo activity or small group activity. I think alcohol is a group of people, I like to think, meeting new strangers. Whereas when I was in college, all the dudes who were doing cocaine, where it was because they had no sexual currency and they would sequester a woman who liked cocaine and go into a bathroom that's creepy as fuck, totally creepy as fuck. And eventually everyone's like, if a dude's into cocaine, it means he has no game, I find with people when they do drugs, it's a small group of people, and they sequester, and it's isolating. Whereas with alcohol and to a certain extent with marijuana, I found it's more social and more bonding. So absolutely be cognizant of your addiction history. Absolutely be mindful of that or any other substance you're addicted to. But I believe, and I've said this, I've said this on Bill Maher a bunch, and I've got some shit. But I think there's some truth here. I think young people need to drink more, go out and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off. I don't think there's anything wrong with some alcohol. I worry that the risks of loneliness far outweigh the risks of alcohol, and that alcohol has been demonized as something that if you take one drip of alcohol, drink of alcohol, you're going to get cancer or you're going to become an addict. And I don't think the data is there to support that.

[B]

I really appreciate the candid expression of where you stand. I agree that isolation is worse than alcohol, and it's compounded by alcohol. So to make that point clear, I went to UC Santa Barbara. We majored in speaking of alcohol. It was like it was part of the general education.

[A]

I remember they had sand in the dorms. I'm like, why didn't I go to school here?

[B]

Well, you know, it did select for alcoholism if people had that predisposition and you had to be disciplined to get your work done, you know, My messaging around alcohol was. It was intended to land in three places. One, people who don't like drinking but felt that they had to got a great reason to not drink. Many, many people wrote to me and said, thank you. I always feel like garbage after drinking. I don't want to drink. Now I understand why I feel like garbage. It's not that I was casting it toward a particular age group, but there are many people who hit their 40s or 50s, and they're like, God, I'm aging fast and I look like shit and I sleep like shit, and my workouts are no good. And you might be drinking too much. Right? And then there are the optimizers. There are people that are really just going for maximum vitality. Not just longevity, but maximum vitality, which is, to me, one of the most important things. In any case, people should do as they wish, but know what they're doing, provided they're not harming anyone else. There's one Thing that I want to kind of, you know, lump in with this discussion about alcohol and your statement, which on the top contour, I totally agree with. Go out, drink and make a few bad decisions, and probably some good ones, but bad Ish. Bad ish. Right. So this is the thing. Phones.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Somebody says the wrong thing, they loosen up too much. Now it's not a problem. Three years ago, you might be sitting in front of hr. Your classmates might isolate you. Right. You were in a fraternity. I wasn't a fraternity. I grew up in the fraternity of skateboarding, punk rock music, and just the fraternity of Y chromosomes. Guys drink, they start saying stupid shit with phones around. Stupid shit is recorded. When stupid shit is recorded, it can be very harmful. And when you're drinking, you make less filtered decisions about what to say than when you're not drinking. So I'm not pushing back in that sense, but I could understand why a guy in his 20s or 30s would be afraid. A guy that would never, ever, ever push himself on a woman, let alone something far worse, would never ever drug somebody or anything. So I'm not talking about the Bill Cosby examples of this. I'm talking about the fear that exists in a lot of young guys and probably should exist in a lot of young women too. Nowadays, based on what we've observed in Cancel Culture in particular, I'm just gonna say a lot of white women are afraid of the Karen movement. Right. That if they say anything, I think even beloved Billie Eilish, whose music I love, was called out for something she did a sort of impersonation of Asian.

[A]

Always going to happen to famous people, right?

[B]

Okay. Always going to happen. Right. But people see famous people get into these situations, they go, oh, my gosh. So do I think Billie Eilish is a race? No. And I love her music. And she was mortified and she apologized, but it's enough to make people go

[A]

100% and like, maybe I just stay

[B]

in my room and like scroll on Instagram so you can kind of get why the fear of drinking might also compound some of this social media stuff that we're talking about.

[A]

Yeah. So I want to acknowledge the point. I would like to say, or I hope that at some point I'm really glad a camera wasn't following me around 24 by 7 when I was 18.

[B]

I can't imagine that one time you said that one dumb thing. Right.

[A]

I just can't imagine. What I do think we are headed to, though, I'd like to think is that in an era of Social media and phones, that slowly but surely we're heading to a point of more grace where we forgive people, especially young people. So. And there's been a bunch of movements where a lot of young people did things I really disagreed with on campus. After October 7th, I was less angry at them than some of the faculty because I'm like, I cut an 18 year old. A lot of grace, right? Or I try to. The thing I would push back on is that I think there's certain looking glasses in people's soul and how they treat their pets and how they behave when they're drunk. And what I find is for people who. For every person who would say something stupid, there's more people when they get drunk who say, you know, I just think you're wonderful. I'm so impressed by you. Or walk up to a woman and say, I just love your dress. Or, God, you have such a beautiful smile. Or just walk up to her to begin with and say. And express interest. Expressing interest to someone is a wonderful thing.

[B]

Or, do you want to dance?

[A]

Yeah. It says, I saw you. And by the way you move and the way you smile, I want you. I'm interested in you. That's a wonderful fucking thing. And so my sense is that for every negative thing, it may of course, increase someone's. If someone's bad judgment is revealed in an awful way, they got bigger problems than alcohol. What it also does is lower inhibitions. And I generally think the majority of people are good people. And I have found that the majority of my friends and the majority of people I'm with, when they have a little bit of alcohol, it lowers their inhibitions and they're more likely to hug you and they're more likely to say how much they appreciate the friendship. You know, when I was younger, I don't know if you ever did this. When I had a few drinks, I used to call my mom, you know, and tell her how much you meant to me.

[B]

Don't let my mom hear that, please.

[A]

But I think that alcohol, to a certain extent, without getting into issues of abuse, which are much bigger, lowers your inhibitions. But you get to see to a certain extent that real person. And I know a lot of people will say, well, that's pathetic that you have to be the real you under the influence. But I think a lot of people reveal some wonderful things about themselves and also have the courage to reveal those things to other people. And I worry that there's so many barriers now that people, young people, just aren't connecting. So I Just want to acknowledge the point. I think you have to be really cognizant. It's not a great idea unless, you know, you can handle alcohol. To drink at work, at a professional function, it can fuck up your whole career.

[B]

Oh, I mean, one thing that I observed coming up through the academic ranks and that just, I could not believe it, that at every gathering where you have graduate students and faculty members and postdocs, it was like the happy hour was like sort of the highlight of the meeting for many people. And it became the place where in theory, everyone meets at the bar to talk about the data from the day.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like these beings in reality, 90% of the problems that existed between faculty and students and postdocs and faculty and faculty that were independently married and all that stuff, alcohol facilitated that. I really believe that. I saw it over and over and over again, caused an immense number of problems. And it was funded by grants. I mean, I'm not like, I'm a big proponent of China and I have worked very, very hard on the phone to try and keep NIH funding at least from to not getting cut. And it looks like it hasn't to not get the indirects cut. This is a kind of academic, you know, inside ball stuff, but looks like, you know, it could be far better. But, you know, at least the cuts that were going to happen didn't happen. So I, the NIH funded my career. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the nih. I had grants reviewed, grants, et cetera. But the idea that you could spend money on alcohol way back when, and then people were gathering around alcohol, it created a lot of problems. Now students drinking with other students, less of an issue.

[A]

Well, let me, let me propose some negative reaction. I think they should study and thoughtfully consider lowering the drinking age back to 18. I live in the UK and see by your face where this is going to.

[B]

I live in the UK military drinking age 18. I mean, I like some of the things I do.

[A]

Well, if you're in the military, you can drink under the age of 21, because the idea is that if you're going to die for your country, you should be able, you're adult enough to order a drink, at least the logic is there. That makes sense. Right? But in the uk, if you're with an adult at a meal, you can order a beer at 17. And even without an adult at the age of 18 in a pub, you can order a beer. And when my son comes home, he doesn't do it as often as I would like. But when my son comes home on the weekends from boarding school, I like to take him to a local pub and we have a beer. And I found out that after one beer, he's more inclined to tell me a little bit about what's going on with him. And as a father, all you really want. You just really want conversation with your kids. You want to know what's going on with them. And so he doesn't get drunk. He's not into alcohol. He listens to you. He listens to other people. He's very wary of it. But I find that easing young men and young women into alcohol as opposed to 21, and then they kind of go, I don't know. I wonder if we should be lowering the drinking age. And the reason we raised it was Mothers Against Drunk Driving were very effective and very on point because of all the young people who were dying in automobile accidents.

[B]

I remember that era.

[A]

I think it's gone way down because of Uber and because of airbags. So I'm proposing, would it make sense to do a study on whether you'd have more social connection and perhaps less alcoholism later in life if you let kids ease into it at the age of 18 and if they can be drafted. We're now trying to get, you know, the administration is proposing they be drafted. So if a kid can be drafted, shouldn't he or she have the judgment to know when they can order a beer or not?

[B]

All great arguments. I didn't know we were going to end up with.

[A]

Well, I mean, you talked about cannabis. I want to get your view. Yeah, I smoked a shit ton of pot in college. I could make a bong out of any household item. I learned every line from Planet Pipe

[B]

out of an apple. That's a very. That's like a 90s trick, dude.

[A]

That's sophomore. I can go much better than that anyways. But then 22, got a job at Morgan Stanley. Got very focused on getting my shit together, and I basically didn't smoke for 20 or 25 years. Now I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble winding my brain down. And I take edibles. I do edibles probably twice a week. If I'm amped or think I'm gonna have a tough time sleeping, I'll take a 5 milligram edible. The stuff that takes you down, I forget which one that is. And it's been an enhancement to my life. But I'm reading a lot of stuff about potential psychosis or whatever.

[B]

Not for you. The psychosis, predisposition doesn't Apply. You would already know. You'd be psychotic by now.

[A]

There you go. Or I just haven't acknowledged it, but it's been accretive to my life. I really enjoy thc and I do it packaged so I know where it's come from. I like edibles because I like the dosing of it. But I would argue that THC is something. When my mom had stomach cancer, I was living with her, and the only thing that worked for her nausea was marijuana. And I found myself, literally, Andrew, on the streets of downtown Las Vegas trying to score marijuana because I was too scared to travel with it. And this was the 20th of July of 2004. And I thought, jesus Christ. Here I am on a street corner in this weird place in Vegas trying to score marijuana for my mom, who has stomach cancer. So, you know, I think there's some benefits to. Well, I'll stop there. The THC usage I enjoy, I think it's been added into my life.

[B]

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes. When I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try elementary, you can go to drinkelement.comhuberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's DrinkElement.com Huberman to claim a free Sample pack. Yeah, I think with THC it's highly individual young males in particular who have a predisposition, genetic predisposition to psychosis or bipolar disorder need to be really careful, especially with high concentration thc. Not just the edibles, but they do need to be careful. I think that young, again, mostly young men who are challenged with apathy, obesity, self loathing, porn, masturbation addiction, shouldn't be using thc. I think high agency, that seems to be the term nowadays. Right. The guys that you mentor a year in who are working out three times a week and they're, they have a goal and they're hopefully seeking or in a relationship, they have a different self view of themselves and yeah, I don't see why that can be a part of their week. It'll nuke their REM sleep. You know, to be specific, if they come off, their dreams are going to be wild because they'll get more REM sleep. But creatives, there are a number of creatives who can use it appropriately to increase focus, get them out of anxiety or get them to cope with anxiety. And then there are just as many people that take it and it makes them incredibly anxious. So I think it's, it's sort of on what backdrop? And I think the alcohol thing also is on what backdrop. If somebody's overweight, not working out, you know, a guy in their 20s or 30s that's dealing with, let's just paint a picture here. He's like playing video games, he's not like morbidly obese or anything, but he's like kind of overweight and he's kind of feels like shit. He shouldn't be drinking and smoking weed. He should be going to the gym and get himself in shape and then maybe have a couple beers at one week with his buddy. So the context really matters.

[A]

Well, I would argue never do substances alone. And during the week try not to do substances. If you got to be on point the next day that it's something to be, you know, it's a recreation. The thing I'm curious to get your take on is one of the things I'm working with some young men on is I think the most under researched addiction is porn. And my fear is that, I mean, if you look at what again I go back to big tech. Big tech's trying to convince young men, why go through the pecking order and the effort of trying to develop a friend group when you have Reddit and discord? Why go through the bullshit of putting on a tie and trying to go into the office and make a good living and navigate the corporate world when you think you can make money trading stocks or crypto on Robinhood or Coinbase. And why would you go through the effort, the expense, the potential rejection of trying to have a kindness, practice, look good, work out, endure rejection, all the expenditures of going out and trying to get a date when you have lifelike porn. And I'll use myself as an example. When I was at UCLA, I graduated from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA, which isn't easy because it means you almost. I failed nine classes, right? And I still graduated. And by the way, talk about a different age. We're both children at the University of California, UC San Diego. Talk about how blessed we are. Talk about how just what winds, hurricane like winds we had in our sales of prosperity. When I applied to UCLA, admissions rate was 74%. Now it's 9. Graduated with a 2.27. You know what happened? Berkeley let me into graduate school with a 2.27 GPA. But anyways, back to UCLA. One of my motivators for going on campus was that there was a non zero probability that I might meet a woman, establish contact with her, see my buddies, maybe get her to a fraternity party or get her to go on a date with me and maybe at some point be physical with her. That was an enormous motivator for me. If I had lifelike porn on my phone, on my computer screen 24 by 7, I don't know if I would have been as motivated to go on campus as much. And there was little margin for error in terms of going on campus a few less times. And I worry that that mojo that desires to quite frankly go out and make your own bad porn is being reduced so much with lifelike porn that men aren't evolving into risk taking, aggressive in a positive way. Men who are motivated to dress well, to work out, to approach strange women, to go through. I mean, it is hard. It is hard to find a partner. And what I say to these men is welcome to the fucking work week. It's been hard forever. That's the whole point. Women are choosier than men. And there's a reason, right? We're trying to spread our seed to the four corners of the earth. They put up a much finer screen to pick the smartest, fastest and strongest seed. And that's the reason why our kids are going to be smarter and taller than us. That's the way of the world. But when you reduce that desire, it's going to get in the way of not only you finding a mate, but developing the skills to be successful in all other parts of your life. So back to the basic premise. I wonder and worry if porn is the most under researched addiction and the damage it's having on young men. Because what I see amongst my colleagues, and I'd be curious if I actually spoke to a really thoughtful woman about this who's an addiction professor at Stanford. I'm sure you know her, I forget her name.

[B]

Anna Lemke.

[A]

Anna Lemke.

[B]

Yeah. She runs our dual diagnosis addiction.

[A]

Fantastic.

[B]

Amazing woman, amazing human being, immediately when

[A]

we got off the podcast, said to me, if your marijuana ever becomes a problem, just call me. And she was sincere.

[B]

And I'm like, that's total marijuana.

[A]

Do you sense it?

[B]

Immediately I'm like, she's the real deal.

[A]

And I'm like, do you sense it's a problem? I mean, hold me, Anna. Anyways, but I don't think there's enough really good research out there on porn because I don't think people want to be known as the porn professor. And so I worry that we really don't know the impact. And what I see anecdotally is that I see a lot of young men who don't have that healthy fire because they think that they can just, they think, oh, it's like in the last 20 years, the guys who didn't have their own game or didn't want to be that successful, they would go to some low income country and basically become sex pats. This has become, I think, a much broader version of that. That rather than level up, you'd rather just sit home and get a reasonable facsimile of a relationship or sex with porn. I wonder if that is more damaging than people estimate right now.

[B]

Yeah, it's a really important topic and it's one that people contact me about all the time. Your analogy of what's happening with porn to sex pats, we should probably explain what expats are. People that leave the United States. I'm not sure everyone's going to follow that one. And sex pats are the. It's this community of people that what they. I think they go to Southeast Asia or something and where they can. Or South America where they can essentially buy whatever experience they want.

[A]

Right.

[B]

In general, I have to assume truly never done this, nor do I have any interest, but I have to assume that these are men who just basically figure, well, that's low effort once they have the money and real dating, real sex. If I may you know, it takes some work, it takes some learning. And, you know, especially if you want to be told genuinely, good job and know that it's true, it's gonna take. You have to get some reps in there. So put your ego on the line. Learn to communicate, learn to listen, all that stuff. The idea that porn is the much broader and more destructive analogous thing, I think, is bullseye at the moment. You said, I'm like, I think people need to hear that. Do you want to be that guy? I think with any behavioral change, the neuroscientist in me says, okay, we have circuits for things that are aversive to us. You have to engage the aversion, and you have to engage the appetitive aspect. So there's a win, and then there's something to avoid. I really think in order to get any real behavior, you need to push away from something and towards something else. Okay? So I think that porn, I mean, it's our most fundamental wiring. The two circuits in the brain that really crank out dopamine. Okay? Circuits for reproduction, sex, and anger. There's this incredible study by a very controversial guy named Robert heath. In the 1960s, he was a neurosurgeon who would stimulate different areas of the brain. And unfortunately, he was into conversion therapy. So, you know, he appropriately got run out of science for trying to make gay people straight by stimulating certain areas of the brain. Yeah, he was kind of a piece of shit person. But again, let's look at what he did, separate from that immediately. People are like, I don't care about his data. But he gave people with electrodes in their brain in certain studies, the option to stimulate anywhere they wanted. They could stimulate and get sexual arousal. They could get laughter, they could feel drunk. All the things we're talking about, really. They could feel soothing of the sort that their mother was holding them. The area that they chose to stimulate the most is in the central midline nucleus of the thalamus, an area that my lab has spent a lot of time on in other situations. And they would just lever press and lever press and lever press for the feeling of mild frustration and anger, because the arousal associated with it is its own reinforcement. A student of mine who's now hopefully soon to be a faculty member, I won't name the university, but she has an offer from a phenomenal university. Her name is Lindsay Soleil, and she's worked on this in a very, very mechanistic way. When we're angry, when we're frustrated, the link to the dopamine Circuitry is just pounded out. We just all day long. And what's amazing is it doesn't attenuate. There's no threshold for anger. The more angry you get, the more frustrated you get, the more arousal you feel from that. You never satiate. There's no post coital bliss. There's no. My belly is so full, I feel like I'm going to explode. And so this gets to the social media thing too. That's the circuit that I worry about. And I think that's the circuit that, yes, I think big tech has tapped into, whether they want to or not. And I think that that's the one we really have to be careful of. And I've experienced it myself. I think I actually, in this moment, I'm experiencing a little bit of it. Like that kind of arousal of like. Yes, the forward center of mass that we feel. But when it's fuck them, like fuck the Republicans or fuck the left or the extreme woke. I mean, people are just high all day long on their own anger and frustration. And I think we just see it everywhere. And I raise my hand, I'm sure I'm guilty of this at times too.

[A]

Yeah, that's illuminating because I correlate my anger to a pathway to feeling depressed. I struggle with anger and depression and it usually starts as something triggers me. I get really angry and then I feel like my blood turns to some sort of corrosive acid and it just wears me down.

[B]

That's adrenaline.

[A]

And I'm just replete. I'm just depleted for two or three days. So I was. I have a practice around trying to calm my anger. But just hearing you say that occasionally on one of my podcasts, when I see something that's inherently wrong and I point it out or injust. I do feel like a rush, like I'm being a leader or a baller or pointing something out.

[B]

You are. I mean, I will say, you know, testosterone, a conversation we've had a little bit before, offline at the level of the brain, it makes effort feel good. Anyway, I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent, but I'd like your thoughts about how testosterone can be leveraged for good versus bad and maybe even, I don't know, that we put everyone on testosterone. I'm not suggesting that it can nuke your fertility if you don't do other things to offset it. So, kids, be careful. But what are your thoughts on testosterone and just sort of proactive male behavior? Testosterone in adults, Older generations taking testosterone.

[A]

Well, I'm one of them. I'm on T therapy and I do it because I quite frankly want to feel younger. It makes me stronger in the gym, better erections, even weird things like my skin. The way I would describe T therapy is it just kind of took me back three or five years in the gym. So I'm an advocate for it. You should do it under the guidance of a doctor, which I'm doing. But I'm a fan of it. And I think you've done really interesting work about hormone replacement theory. I've listened to a lot of your work on it. The argument around testosterone and masculinity, I think is a really important one in the political spectrum because to the far right's credit, they recognize the problem with young men before anybody else. The problem is they conflate masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. And their solution was to take non whites and women back in the 50s.

[B]

Some of them, I'm not trying to protect them, but I would say I don't know his political leanings, but my friend Jocko Willink has daughters. He's not that guy you just described.

[A]

No, I'm talking about the far right. I'm talking about whether it's Donald Trump or the traditional manosphere, it's about the subordination of women and it's about demonstrating a certain harshness and coarseness and I would argue cruelty and conflating that with masculinity. Whereas the far left, and this isn't helpful either, their advice to young men is to act more like a woman and that they conflate masculinity with toxicity. And there has to be something in the middle. There has to be an aspirational form of masculinity. And I would argue that we need to celebrate that initiation, aggressiveness. Jimmy Carr, who's one of my idols now, says, all right, you can demonstrate cruelty or you can demonstrate valor. You can be a lover or you can be an addict. And Richard Reeves has this great saying. He's like, you want a man to be invaluable in a shipwreck, but acceptable at a dance. So there is a certain needle to be threaded here. But the Carnegie Award, which is given out to people who put their own physical safety in danger to save someone else's physical safety. It's literally the running into a burning house award. You see a car on fire, you put your own safety in harm's way to try and protect someone else's physical well being. They gave out 83 awards last year, 75 of them were men. Men are more prone to take those types of not only bad risks, but good risks. And we need to celebrate that now. You need both. You need both on the. By the way, on the combat field, because men are more likely to rush out and try and save their comrade, but women are more likely to say, let's not be stupid, let's think this through. You need both of those. I mean, this is the great thing, is that both energy, when they come together, make a better world. But we seem to be very suspicious of that masculine energy right now. And I think it needs to be celebrated. There needs to be someone who sees movement in the tribe and immediately grabs the spear and goes and tries to kill it for the benefit of the community, who wants to put people on Mars and makes these crazy, ridiculous investments that make no sense and is super aggressive around these things. I think that's a wonderful energy. And when I went to the Democratic National Convention, I saw a parade of special interest groups talking about the very real issues they all face. But I didn't see one mention of the group that has fallen further, faster than any group in recent history, and that is young men.

[B]

Well, I think that's because based on the feedback I've received, for instance, when we had Terry Real on the podcast, who talks about some balance of masculine and feminine phenotypes and therapy and partner. Partner communication and these kinds of things, the pushback that I always get, or I got there, not because of Terry specifically, was, as long as we can't talk about toxic femininity, these were clearly men writing to me. Then this whole discussion feels imbalanced. That's how they feel. They feel like there's this idea that they're good men and they're bad men and they're really bad men. Totally agree. I've got the optics of a macaque monkey blindfolded on LSD when it comes to certain things, members of our species. But when it comes to men, I grew up in a big group of boys, et cetera. Big group of men. I get it. That statement is true. They're great ones. They're ones. And then they're like really bad dudes. So when you talk about manosphere, you know, I would say it the if I had my way, manosphere would apply to just the really bad ones, because that name has become synonymous with really bad men. Okay, we can come back to that. Perhaps. But there is this issue that no one is allowed to say. There's wonderful femininity, there's women with issues Right. And then there's bad women. You're not allowed to say it. The only women that I can have that conversation with are lesbians. They were the ones who explained to me there are truly bad women. And I said, well, how come no one talks about that except lesbians? And they said, ah, because we are living in a time now where men talking about women or having things they wish for women to do differently itself is seen as toxic. That they've. That women feel, this is what I was told. So I'm regurgitating that they've suffered so much at the hands of men that we need like a good 20 or 30 years before we're going to get to that conversation. Which of course for young men growing up just like makes them feel like, okay, it's all, it's all on us, and that's good. Like agency, advocacy for one's own life is important. Stay out of the really bad men category and ideally the not so good men category category too. But the polarization, I think, is set by the fact that, sure, we can talk about toxic masculinity, we can talk about the male crisis, but why aren't we talking about the suicide rate? Well, because women's issues, I think, in a good way, we're still thinking that we need to protect and provide for the women and the children in our society. We're holding that as in the highest regard, like those, they get the life rafts when the Titanic goes down. So it's complicated and there's a lot of off limits terms. And I'm glad that they're coming up today just organically, because those off limits terms, I think, are the potential bridges between where we sit now, where we look at men and we go, oh, shit, they're a mess. Some of them are just like downright awful. We look over here and we go, man, they're really dissatisfied. The assumption is if a woman is dissatisfied or somehow not doing well, that a man failed. That's a presumption that a lot of people make. I don't make that presumption. And I can look back to times in my youth where 90s narrative probably fed that a bit. But now I think we need to really pull back the veil and go take a real hard look at ourselves and try and do this mesh that we're talking about.

[A]

Yeah, the only way you get there is with data. So from 1945 to 2000, America registered a third of the world's economic growth, a third of its prosperity, with only 5% of the population so we had 6x the growth of the rest of the world, right? And within that 6x, the majority of that prosperity was sequestered to the 1/3 of the population that were white, male and heterosexual. It was just a lot harder to participate in that uplift if you weren't in that group. So men of my generation, born with my sexual orientation, skin color and gender arguably had 15 to 18x the wins in their sales. The question is, should a young man now pay the price for my privilege? And I understand the gag reflex when I start talking or advocating for men because they look at me and they said, you had unfair advantage. 100% guilty as charged. But now a young man who is four times as likely to kill himself, three times as likely to be addicted, 12 times as likely to be incarcerated, and men in my generation aren't stepping up and providing the mentorship or voting for the programs. It might take a little bit of money away from my generation to support all young people and bring them up. And most of the programs and policies I advocate for would advocate for all young people. The average 7 year old is 72% wealthier than the 7 year old 40 years ago. The 25 year old is 24% less wealthy. And then every day it's speedballed with 110 notifications telling them that they're failing. And what do you know, they're the most obese, depressed and anxious generation we've had in a long time. And there really isn't an honest conversation. And I've said this on stage and it gets some pushback. I'll say I think women make better managers. I think that they are more emotionally in touch with other people, they have higher eq. I think they'll probably make better doctors and lawyers. I think their attention to detail, genetically or anthropologically, whatever you want to call it, their bedside manner. And there's more women in both law school and medical school now, especially medical school. If I say that women are better managers, will make better doctors, Nodding, everyone, everyone. The women agree. And the guys will look around and go, nod, right? If I say men on average make better entrepreneurs. And that's not to say that women shouldn't be offered the same opportunities. And they haven't been, right. 95% of the capital has been not only allocated to men, but the majority of it has been allocated by men who went to one or two schools, Harvard and Stanford. There's a I don't feel safe around

[B]

you, who doesn't feel safe around you.

[A]

It's fine to Say women make better X, Y and Z. To say men are better at anything.

[B]

Well, if you said combat soldiers, I mean let's be honest, if you said it on X, everyone would be like cool males make better entrepreneurs. If you set it in a room, I mean again, I don't want to make this political, but we can't avoid this. If you set it among a more center to right leaning crowd, I think you'd probably get less pushback also from women.

[A]

I think that's fair.

[B]

I'm not saying it's who you're hanging out with, you know, yeah, I barely hang out with anybody, so I've got a very small world.

[A]

But well, but to your point, if you go to the democratic national website dnc.org and they change this. But I talked about this a lot on cnn, left leaning website. They said they have a page saying who we serve. And they outlined 16 special interest groups, Veterans, the disabled, black Americans, Native Americans, seniors. And I added it up and it was 74% of the population. And when you say you're advocating for 74% of the population, you're not advocating for 74%, you're discriminating against 26%. And basically the only people they didn't mention were young men. So I understand the notion that men have had so much disproportionate advantage that there needs to be a catch up period. But I would argue it's gone a little bit overboard. Our school system, K through 12, I would argue is biased against boys. A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior adjusted basis as a girl. A black boy five times as likely. 70 to 80% of K through 12 teachers are women who do people naturally advocate for the people that remind them of themselves at that age. Seven in 10 high school valedictorians are girls. It's now 60, 40 female male in college. And so the bottom line is we level the playing field and there's a little bit of bias and women have totally blown by men, fine, more power to them. But what do we do now? That young men just quite frankly don't have obvious paths to prosperity and young people aren't as economically prosperous relative as they used to be. And young men are disproportionately evaluated in society, especially in the mating market, on their economic viability. And I get a ton of pushback saying no, I'm just looking for emotionally in touch male. I think that is such bullshit.

[B]

Oh, it's total bullshit.

[A]

There's still economic hypergamy, educational hypergamy, has leveled out. There's a lot of people who. Women who will marry a guy who didn't go to college or educational hypergamy has vastly reduced. But in cities where women make as much as men, so there's an equality. If you find a couple twice as many couples, the male earns more money than the woman. Economic hypergamy is still an absolutely full force. So if we don't figure out a way to level up all young people economically such that there's more pass for economic viability for young men, I think it's just going to tear at our society. We're going to have lower birth rates, fewer people to support the very expensive programs which make up 40% of our government spending now on people over the age of 65. And we're going to have real issues. And people say, well, that's repackaged violence, that men are more violent. I'm like, no, it's just the reality. If you look at every unstable, violent society in history, it always has one thing at the core of it and, and that is a group of young men with a lack of economic or romantic opportunities. I don't care if it's Weimar Germany or some of the most unstable places in the Middle east or Africa. When you have the most dangerous person in the world is a young man who is lonely and broke. And we are producing way too many of them. And by the way, I don't think the remedy here is affirmative action for men. I just think that's too politicized. But we have to stop transferring wealth from people their age to people my age. Why the hell are we transferring every year $1.3 trillion from a generation that is the most anxious, depressed and obese in American history to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet called Social Security. That's a third whale in politics. I'm not suggesting anyone should die in poverty. Should you and I get Social Security?

[B]

No, no, I don't need it.

[A]

Probably a third, a third of seniors really don't need Social Security. But you get near that, you can't get elected. Right? 40% of all government spending is going to people over the age of 65. It's going to be 50% within 10 years. We spend more money on ice than we spend on children. I mean, it's just. There's my generation. I don't even think of us. I'm on the edge of Gen X, baby boomer. The best way to describe my generation would be the vampire generation. We were never drafted into war. We Never really had to serve. And what has my economic complexion been in America? Unprecedented prosperity. But the lowest taxes in modern history. So a lot of these solutions, I just think are common sense. We need to do away Social Security tax, right? 6% up to 160,000. So a kid working for me making 150 or 160k, good living, they pay $9,000. I make a lot more than that. I pay $9,000 because it tops out at 160 grand. Why does that make any sense? Two biggest tax deductions, mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and stocks? People our age. Who rents and makes their money from current income? All the dudes in this office, the young kids, right? We are literally transferring trillions of dollars from young people to old people. And we wonder why young men feel anxious when they are disparate. But 75% of women say economic viability is key to a mate. It's only 25% of men. Women still look at men as economic providers. And so you have this entire generation of young men who feel like they have no purpose, no on ramps to the middle class and are being evaluated on a set of criteria that get harder and harder for them each year. And then this like unbelievable set of expectations that they're taught they should have because it seems like everyone else is making a million dollars selling eth or is in amazing shape or has a ridiculously hot boyfriend or girlfriend and has artist passes to Coachella. So it'd be shocking if they weren't depressed and obese. Wow.

[B]

The analogy that comes to mind is academic science. You know, I used to joke, the advantage of having a dad who was a scientist who was also a little bit irreverent was that I grew up around an understanding of how academics works. And early on I thought, look at as much as I love my colleagues, like a lot of them need to

[A]

retire, they just need to go 100%.

[B]

And the reason they need to go is because they were having three, four, two to four NIH grants, like million dollar a year grants. And that itself isn't a problem, except that there was enough money for young investigators. And so fields die and science dies. They don't retire. And so it was very interesting. Right before the Trump administration came in, I started logging into these NIH hearings. And I think our previous NIH director and I will go on record in saying, and our current NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, both very good directors in different ways, trying to do important, different things. And you'll notice the Budget was not cut under Jay and IDC for the academics out there was not cut. But an interesting problem was outed at the kind of end of Carolyn's role at nih, the former director, and it was the following. Someone said, what is the deal? Why are people living longer and young people are killing themselves? And we have all these mental health issues, mostly among men, but also among young women. And she said, it is true that we've been very successful in medicine at getting people 65 and older to live much, much longer, to treat late stage diabetes, to treat cancer, to treat. We don't have cures for these things, but we've extended life for the older generation and to a large degree, the quality of life, especially if they're willing to get sunlight, exercise, probably not drink alcohol at that age or drink a lot less, not smoke. People are living longer and longer and longer, and tons of research money is being poured into this. There's this enormous gap where many of the problems that are most important to young people to thrive in every way, not just health, but mental health, et cetera, they're just not even being studied. So there's this top weighting of age and of seniority, clearly in what you're describing, but also in the science and that we're funding. And that clearly, clearly harms young people because no one's studying porn addiction in a serious way at scale. Nobody's studying social media addiction in a serious way at scale. I think what Jonathan's done is fantastic and others are now getting involved in this. But, you know, it's a problem if you look at the numbers as serious as cancer for people who are, you know, in their 50s and older, and actually cancers and diabetes and deaths of despair, as our previous, you know, surgeon General pointed out, are among the greatest killers of young people. So we've totally lost perspective in many ways. I don't know what to do about Social Security. That's your domain, not mine. But I vote very strongly for what they do in Japan. Force scientists to retire. I'm going to earn some hate from my colleagues. But anyway, force them to retire at 65, they still collect a salary and in many cases a pension. If they're state funded schools, they still have healthcare, Their kids still probably went to college partially for free. The inside ball of these schools that you and I work at, right, this whole network. And they got in and they got in and so let them retire, let them keep their office. I do believe there's a lot of wisdom in the older generations, but I Was quite happy to.

[A]

There was your land. Acknowledgement. Let me go on some.

[B]

Well, I just want to say there were senior faculty members like Lubert. Str. I'll just call these people out who wrote the book Biochemistry Ending when they were starting. Lubert retired, closed his lab. He made a bunch of money at Affymatrix, the Genech company. And he used to come around to the lab and go, hey, what are you guys working on? He would talk to the students and give them amazing ideas. I think that generational wisdom passed down is great. Guess what he wasn't doing? Consuming grant dollars, consuming square footage on campus. He was shedding knowledge for free because the system had taken care of.

[A]

He's a Yoda. He's an ally. So you work at Stanford. One of the finest faculties ever assembled. NYU has an outstanding at the business school. We have an outstanding faculty. I would argue one of the best in the world. Not because it's our fault, but because every great faculty member loves the idea of coming and spending four, eight, ten years in New York and living in SoHo.

[B]

That's pretty good.

[A]

That's our advantage. Hey, come here. We'll give you free housing. You and your wife, your kids are out of the house. Come teach accounting here. We get amazing faculty. A third should be up, put on a fucking ice floe. They get to a point where they darn adding as much value. They were the bomb on Gap 1 accounting in 1988. They get tenure and they won't leave. And they leave feet first. And the result is young people who could bring a certain creativity, a new way of looking at things. There's no room for them to come up. And I want to go back to the notion of vampire generation. We talk about sunlight being social, eating well, sleeping well. All the keys, Right. I would argue the number one predictor of longevity is one thing. Money. China's gone from an average life expectancy of 47 to 77 in 60 years as their wealth has gone up. You're in the bottom decile, I believe, of income. You live 12 years less long than someone in the upper decile. Right? It's about money. And all we have done is not only suck money from young to old, we have sucked life because we are so selfish and so unwilling to pay it forward. Old people elect even older people to vote themselves more money in. What they are doing, maybe unwittingly, but they are doing it is they are robbing life and happiness from young people and transferring it to old people. There not only needs to be term limits Washington, D.C. the people allocating capital has become a cross between the golden girls and the land of the walking dead. Enough already. We have totally robbed not only money, we have robbed life and health from young people because money in our society is health.

[B]

How do we create financial incentives inside of uniqueness? I think that's what makes the United States great, because I saw social media that way. But I will say that's because it worked out that way for me. I love learning, I love teaching. I flipped on a camera and I started the podcast with that guy sitting over there. And it worked out great.

[A]

The way I would describe the transition that's been bad for America, is that the way I would describe it is that back when I was growing up, America had a commitment to and even loved the unremarkable. I was remarkably unremarkable. And that's not a humble brag. I got 11:30 on the SAT. I had a 3.1 GPA. We didn't have any money. But this is what I got. I got assisted lunch, right? And the great state of California used to send coupons to my house. They were the same colors the kids would buy in school so I wouldn't be embarrassed. Right? I got Pell Grants, I got accepted to UCLA on appeal. 74% admissions rate I got. I was one of the 26% that didn't get in. And I was installed. And Chalavin came home really upset one day and said, is this my life? I was always told I was funny, I wanted to be a doctor. And my mom said, well, is there an appeal process? And I remember the day the admissions director called me and said, you're not qualified, but you're a son of California. We're going to give you a shot.

[B]

Son of California.

[A]

Son of California.

[B]

Imagine that.

[A]

What a great statement. I get emotional just thinking about it. And then I got, as I said, I got into Berkeley and this is a brag and a flex, but I'm going to make it. I've given 20 million bucks back to the University of California in the last five years.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

So it's worked out for all of us. America isn't about identifying a super class of rich kids and the freakishly remarkable. It's about betting on unremarkable kids. So this is what we need to do. If you're a university and you have more than a billion dollar endowment and you're not growing your freshman class faster than population, you're a hedge fund with classes and you should lose your tax free status. If 20% of your degrees aren't for non traditional things such as nursing or specialty construction or vocational programming. You don't get access to tax free money in my opinion. Mandatory national service. I think there's a ton of things we need to do. I think we should tax the shit out of private schools and reinvest that in public schools we need to disassociate house property taxes from the quality of the schools. Think about the disadvantage. The average public school spends $15,000 a year on a kid. The schools in Poer is $9,000. The average private school spends $72,000 a year per student. So if you're fortunate enough to go to a private school like my kids, we're spending 850 grand on them and some kids were spending 120 grand. And you want that kid to compete against another kid to get into an elite university. And we all tell ourselves this myth now that oh, with AI to college doesn't matter. It's not never been more important. And if you had a drug that can make it twice as likely that you get married, half as likely that you kill yourself, three times as likely that you become a millionaire, ten times as likely that you run for office, four times as likely that you become an officer in the military, three times less likely that you become obese, would you hoard that drug? And then when someone gets into the working environment or the economy, would you create a tax policy that just transfers money from you to the wealthiest generation in the world? There's just so many basic common sense solutions around higher ed and K through 12 that we come up with all these reasons. We use terms like network effects or globalization or tech and it's nothing but thinly veiled bullshit to transfer more Money. The bottom 99% in young people are just nutrition for older people. And it's just to me it's fairly obvious they're just common sense solutions. And higher ed has become unfortunately and emblematic of the rejection LVMH of America, where you either at the age of 18 have to be freakishly remarkable. Are you captain of your lacrosse team and building wells in Africa? Then fine, come in and we'll put you on a glide path to potentially being a billionaire or president. But say you're unremarkable, sorry, you're shit out of luck. Maybe you can build a data center somewhere and maybe get into the middle class. And by the way, we don't even have an apprentice culture in this environment. So many parents feel so shamed when their kid doesn't get into elite university. 11% of LinkedIn profiles in Germany and the UK say apprentice. It's 3% here because parents feel shamed if their kid doesn't get into an elite university. We need to dramatically expand vocational programming, freshman classes, and stop this insane transfer of wealth and health from young people to old people and higher ed. Unfortunately, our industry is at the tip of the spear of fomenting this rejectionist bullshit culture where we've identified we're the arbiters of success. You know who gets into Stanford and NYU? Two cohorts. The children of rich people. You're 77 times more likely to get into elite university if you're a top 1% household or the freakishly remarkable. And here's the thing. I can prove to us all mathematically that 99% of our children are not in the top 1%. America loved the unremarkable when I was a kid. It's fallen out of love with the unremarkable. Is America about identifying a superclass to become billionaires? Or is it about planting as many seeds as possible? Because no one can be the arbiter of greatness at 18. No one was going to see me at 18 and go, someday you might have an impact and you'll be wealthy. No one would have known that. And we've decided no. We're about the children of rich people and we're about the freakishly remarkable. And everybody else, in my opinion, hopefully, hopefully gets to the middle class. But if you don't, there's big tech waiting there to addict you. There's a tax policy that might impoverish you. I think that young people, people say about young people they're entitled. I think they're entitled to be enraged. I can't imagine the rage they must feel right now. They look up, they look sideways and they see all this prosperity and they look at my generation and see the benefits we've accrued. And we want to spend $2 trillion a year on their credit card. We spend $7 trillion a year. We take in 5 trillion. And that 2 trillion is all going. That incremental. 2 trillion is all going to seniors. I'm in the club doing rails of ketamine and champagne. And the closest a young person gets is they get to throw their credit card in. And I'll keep swiping it. I mean, it is literally morally corrupt what we are doing in terms of deficit spending and how we are prioritizing our budget. Our budget reflects our values and our values are all fucked up and have said let's party, right? The baby boomers. Let's party like there's no tomorrow. And the young people, well, they're going to have to clean up the house and the garage is on fire and the dogs are going to be pregnant. But that's their problem because I'll be dead by then. This generation, my generation for some reason does not feel the same obligation to pay it forward or back and create infrastructure and investments for young people. And to me it feels fairly obvious and the solutions are fairly common sense. But, but we'll have thoughtful conversations and Social Security will be a third rail and we'll have thoughtful reasons for why. When I sell my business, the first $10 million should be tax free. The last business I sold first 10 million bucks is tax free. What the actual fuck they say? Well, Scott, entrepreneurs are more productive. We want to unleash our productivity, our most productive. I had no idea what tax. People don't start businesses because of tax policy. Did you know what the tax did you know about 1202? If you sell this business, the first 10 million bucks is tax free. If it's a C corp. That's not why people start businesses. No, but every day there are new tax policies that do one thing, transfer money from those dudes to us. More me than you. Because you're 10 years younger than me. It needs to stop. There's basic tax policy, basic health and human services policy. Right? Why on earth. You're a doctor for God's sakes. We spend $13,000 per individual for more obesity, more anxiety, more depression than every other G6 nation. We should absolutely have nationalized, socialized health care. The bottom 99% again are just a fucking body bag of nutrition. For the top 1%, monetizing health care, I'll put that to you. I absolutely think we need single payer socialized medicine right now. I think it is indefensible to healthcare in this country. 40%. I apologize, I'm going off script here. 40% of households, medical or dental debt. You don't have kids. Do you realize what kind of shame you would feel as a father if your 16 year old girl gets a screaming toothache and you have to go into debt to get her a root canal and that hangs over you for the next two or three years?

[B]

I'm all for robbing it from Social Security because I like that idea. The moment you say nationalized health care, I think, oh boy, here we go again. But I like the idea of robbing it from Social Security. I'm not talking about taking old people and turning them out to pastor and letting them wander the streets mumbling to themselves. I do think that taking care of the older generation is important, but I do think we are a very top heavy culture and maybe because I want to, I consider you Gen X as opposed to Boomer. I appreciate that, I really do. And actually it raised a question for me. Feel free to say pass. You don't want to answer, but earlier you said you're somewhat, I don't know, bashful or you have this issue around your age. Like I my friend Kelly Starrett, who's a PhD in physiology, amazing trainer and stuff, he said the best thing about turning physics when I was turning 50, he's like, you're gonna be among the best in shape for your decade. And I think, I mean look, you look great for a 40 year old. Like you're killing it, you know, you're fit, all this stuff. So. But I wonder, is this kind of shame around it because your peer group kind of sucks in the way that you're describing, or is this actually about age? Cause to me one of the best things is to feel like your friends, your people, the people you associate with are awesome. And your generation I loved. I think Gen X is an incredible generation. As this conversation continues, I'm thinking more and more about the responsibility and both the failures and the opportunities to remedy things for the next generation. That's how we started this conversation. So two questions there. First of all, is that what that's about? Like your peers kind of suck and you don't want to be a part of it? Because I consider you Gen X and I'm not just trying to. What do the kids say glaze you here? That you're winning on every dimension and you got two health what sounds like healthy, productive boys. Like, like you got it all, man.

[A]

Like, I think a lot of it comes down to very just base things and that is a fear of death. I mean I'm not, I'm, I'm afraid of getting old and being unhealthy. I don't mind the death part also just a fear or just wanting to feel young and vigorous and masculine and feel like that's slipping away from me. Biology is undefeated. So I think I'm a little bit youth obsessed and a little bit ageist. So I think I have just a fear of aging. But just the call out about paying it forward and the call out to your. I know a lot of young men and a lot of successful men listen to this podcast. I think my Generation on a lot of levels, we're talking about tax policy, but men aren't stepping up with respect to young men. If you look at the single point of failure, if you were to reverse engineer when a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model through either death, divorce or abandonment. When a boy loses a male role model and 90% of the time single parent home is headed by a woman, as mine was at that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. And men aren't stepping up. There are three times as many women applying to be Big Sisters in New York as there are men applying to be Big Brothers. And some of it is a taboo. The men are concerned or self conscious about expressing an interest to get involved in a boy's life because of sexual abuse from the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson and the rest. But there are a ton of men out there in their 30s. I think you have a bunch of them working with you that may or may not have kids of their own. You don't have to be CEO of Goldman Sachs. You don't have to have a degree in adolescent psychiatry. You just have to be a good man trying to live a virtuous life. And as someone who mentors young men, I can tell you it is so easy to add value. Just showing an interest, answering basic questions. This is a question I literally got now six weeks ago from a young man I'm mentoring. I'm on this new diet. I'm just drinking pineapple juice and creatine. Okay. I don't have a medical degree and I can tell you that's wrong. Another question I got eight weeks ago. I saw this amazing thing. I'm moving to Alaska. Scott. I saw this amazing thing on National Graveyard. I've decided I want to move to Alaska. You have a good job and your mom is sick, right? Yeah. Why are you moving to Alaska? You're going to quit your job and move to. If you just ask basic questions, you add value to these young men's lives. Just real basic stuff. Well, I'm feeling depressed. Did you get outside? Are you working out There needs to be a societal zeitgeist. That a moment a young man doesn't have men in his life. That the tribe moves in and injects young men into their life. And the call out to men is. Is. You know, there's this great quote in one of the Paul Wes Anderson movies, Magnolia, where the guy says, I have loved to give, I just don't know where to give it. I just don't know where to put it. It's such a wonderful statement. I think there's so many men out there that have real like. I think some of the most rewarding types of love is to give fraternal and paternal love. My purpose, my thing in life is to try and prepare my men for others, prepare my boys for others. That's my job. It gives me purpose. I think there's so many men out there that could offer so much fraternal and paternal love to a young man or a boy and they don't do it either because they're too lazy or they're not stepping up or they're worried that people will suspect them of something and there's so much need. And this is what you do. You find a single mother in your workplace and say, going to a game, does your son want to join me? Or join me and my boys? Does your son want to hang out, washing your car, going to a game, Whatever it is, that is the. In my opinion, that is the easiest solve that doesn't involve the government right now. But the bottom line is men of our age aren't stepping up and I couch it in masculinity. You take care of yourself, that's the first circle. You affix your own oxygen mask. You can't take care of other people unless you're economically and emotionally somewhat viable. You take care of your family, you take your extended family, you take care of community. But the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved and the life of a child that isn't yours. And not enough men are doing it. Even really successful men, they're not stepping up, they're not helping young men and the easiest thing to do. And it's so rewarding, I can't tell you. It makes me feel. And I don't do enough of it. But I do mentor young men. It's just so easy to add value. They make such stupid fucking decisions. My job with my sons is to be their prefrontal cortex. No, you have to wear shoes to school. I know this is right. Wear shoes to school. So anyways, the call out if we want better men, we have to be better men. I don't think you can really hit the pinnacle of what it means to be successful in masculinity unless you're involved in the life of a child that isn't yours. We have the most single parent homes of any nation in the world. We used to be number two to Sweden. We'd pass them two years ago. But that's what I would call. I constantly talk about government fixes because I'm a lefty. The easiest societal fix is, quite frankly, is just male mentorship.

[B]

Yes, yes, and yes. Totally agree. I was very proactive in going out and seeking them. One feature of that that I just wonder if we can kind of superimpose or, you know, or superimpose some solutions on top of would be a better way to put it, is, for instance, that I had no interest in playing football but kept getting hurt skateboarding. So I learned how to weightlift and make my body stronger from the football coach, who was this amazing guy who wrote the original script for Mr. Mom, that he wrote a play, wait till your mother gets home that became Mr. Mom. He's like, big guy.

[A]

His wife, Michael Keaton, Terry Garr.

[B]

That's right. But so people would say he didn't write that. But this guy, Bob Peters was like a physical specimen. And he also played the piano, and he raised these kids. And his wife dared him. She said in the early 70s, she said, you couldn't do what I do. And so that was how the whole thing came to. He realized, you're right, it's really, really tough. So I went to him for working out advice, but not for other sources of advice. I went to different men for different sources of mentorship. It'll become clear what I'm saying here in a moment. My academic advisor, my PhD advisor was an incredible woman, so I was mentored by women, too, but that's characteristic of academics.

[A]

Was your father very involved in your life?

[B]

He was. I mean, we had my parents split up at a, you know, in adolescence. And so we had our, you know, our challenges over the years, over time. You know, my dad being a scientist, first generation immigrant.

[A]

How old were you when your parents split up?

[B]

14.

[A]

And did other men kind of move in, or was your father still very involved?

[B]

I sought out other mentors at that point. I resented science. I resented what he was a part of. We eventually made amends. He's actually been a guest on the podcast.

[A]

He's a.

[B]

He's a physicist. Really helped me understand his trajectory. And, you know, and we've worked out our stuff, but at that time, it was, you know, it was skateboarding. It was lifting weights. It was, I want to become a firefighter. Actually took fire science courses and. And did that. And then eventually tripped and fell into science and menteed myself to a wonderful professor at Santa Barbara. And then the story unfolds.

[A]

Yeah. And you're gonna gag on this but you're exceptional. Most 14 year olds aren't exceptional. And go out and find mentors. Mentors have to find them cause they don't even know. Most 14 year olds don't even know they need mentors. They don't even know the concept. And my mom was smart enough to get men involved in my life really quickly and it was everything for me. Everything. My mom's boyfriend gave me 200 bucks and said I started asking about stocks and he said if you haven't spent this or bought stocks by the time I'm here next weekend, I'm taking it back. So I went to Westwood and Wilshire Boulevard and walked into Dean Witter and this guy with a big jufro came walking out Cyro and said hi, I'm Cy Sero. And every day I would call. I didn't have a lot of friends at 13. Him from the Emerson Junior High pay phone, 20 cents and he'd give me a lessons on the market. I bought 12 shares of Columbia Pictures and be like Close Encounters. The third kind is a hit. That's why the saga's up. Casey Shadow is a bomb. When there's more buyers for the stock and fewer sellers, the stock goes up. And he taught me about markets. I've been investing in stocks since I was 13. I've made a lot of money selling my companies. I've made a shit ton of money investing in in stocks. And just this guy and by the way, he came to one of my live podcasts about two years ago. He's now 82. Just this guy's interest in me like just meant the world. And also, and this is a weird story but he recently just passed away. You know how in media there's that second family. People talk about the dude who has a family and you find out he has a second family. My mom and I were the second family. My mom's boyfriend and my kind of male role model had a family unbeknownst to her. No, benoist to her but we didn't have any money. And I'm not going to judge my mom but. And I'm not going to judge him. And he was actually a really good man to me. He was really a good mentor but he was only around every other weekend. But I had some great. My athletic coaches took a really nice active role in my life. And when I think about what it would have been like because the reality is you have this healthy instinct as a boy to start rejecting your parents at a certain age. And not only that I see it with my boys. Their mom's voice literally becomes white noise to them. They, like, stop hearing it, and they take her seriously. Or literally, but not seriously. But even just saying that boys needed men five years ago, this dialogue has come so far. Was triggering to some people. What? Women can't raise good men? No. My mom raised me light of my life, but if I had not had a bunch of men who just naturally stepped in. There was a guy across the hall who noticed that it was just me and my mom. He would come over with his girlfriend to me every other week and say, do you want to come horseback riding with us? Right. Because he knew I was being raised by my mom. It was a natural instinct for him to come over and take me out. And I worry that we've lost that, that we don't have enough male mentors.

[B]

Wow. We're gonna have to do 10 podcasts. You know, I've got so many more questions, and I didn't get to a lot of things. Scott, I have to say, it's been amazing to get to just sit with you.

[A]

Thanks, Ron.

[B]

And learn from you. I'm delighted that we had this conversation. I hope the fact that we had it. I don't know how polarized people view us as, but that alone was important to me. But I'm going to think a lot about many of the things you've said. You've talked about having a code, this notion of really being a provider and a protector, building a financial foundation for oneself, you know, putting service over attention to self and. And just so many things of value. This is one that I know many people are going to come back to over and over again. And I'm just grateful for you doing what you do. You defy all the stereotypes of the. Of the groups that people assign you, to, which those are my favorite kind of people. So appreciate that. And again, you're. You're killing it on the health front. Whatever you're doing, man, it's probably your boys. They're probably like, this is what it's like to have vigor.

[A]

Like, well, tonight I'll go through everything where I do, and I want you to edit it. But just the mutual fan club here. One of the things I don't like about podcasting is it's emblematic of American politics, and that is the more outrageous you are, the more ratings you get. So the podcasting algorithms encourage people to say outrageous things, and sometimes they're not very informed. And I'm guilty of this. Sometimes I've fallen to this Dunning Kruger, where I think I know something about something because I know it is decent amount about marketing or business. And I think in our leaders we need to make intelligence and honesty and science cool again. And you're doing that. And I worry sometimes a lot of our most senior elected officials on the health side are not making intelligence or science cool again.

[B]

I have friends there and I'll just tell like they're not biologists, they need

[A]

to talk to them. That's my point. You have real domain expertise. I think you are making science and intelligence cool again. And I think the nation is in desperate need of that, that certification. Domain expertise being measured. About your comments, citing data, putting out disclosures, telling me no Scott, you don't understand dopa. This is what actually is going on. I think that's important. And so I think you're a really positive influence for young people who are getting seduced by the algorithms. And there's got to be people like you out there that young men aspire to be more alike, that say no training, domain expertise being measured and science matter. I like that you're making that cool again.

[B]

Thank you. Well, it's a labor of love and a bit of a compulsion, so I plan to continue. But I'm excited for whatever comes next and especially in these very tense political years. You're a brave one.

[A]

Go on.

[B]

You got balls and brains, man. That's how I'll wrap this one. You got balls and brains. I've been here the whole time and you're willing to take risks and make mistakes. And clearly you're making mistakes more better decisions than less good ones on average compared to your peer group and then some. So come back again.

[A]

Thanks again Andrew.

[B]

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Scott Galloway. To find links to his new book and to find links to his various podcasts and other resources, please see the show Note Captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcasts or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast. Please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre [e-mail] there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter. The Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold expense exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com Go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Scott Galloway. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

[A]

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[B]

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