10% Happier with Dan Harris
You Need A Code: Scott Galloway On Men, Risk, Rejection, and Kindness
08 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, hey, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. My guest today is one of the busiest humans in the entire media landscape. Here are just a few of his activities. He co-hosts the hugely popular Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher. He also is the host of his own podcast, the Prof G podcast. He's also a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business.
He gives speeches all over the world. He's very active on social media and YouTube.
Chapter 2: What strategies does Scott Galloway suggest for overcoming anxiety?
He's a regular listener. a commentator on CNN and other cable news outlets. And every year or two, he puts out a book and his latest is called Notes on Being a Man. So today we're going to talk to him about his prescriptions for being a better man and a happier human being, no matter what your gender is. We'll be right back with Scott Galloway. A few things before we hear from our sponsors.
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Chapter 3: What is Galloway's three-pillar framework for modern masculinity?
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Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash happierfree. Hey, Scott, before we jump in, how are you doing? Anything you want to get off your chest? Any questions or concerns?
This is a genuine moment of gratitude. Every once in a while, someone says something, and I adopt it as my own because I find it so instructive, and it's a handful of sayings. And I constantly parrot one line of yours. Do you know that line?
I do, and I'm a little worried because it's not actually my line.
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Chapter 4: How can one effectively handle criticism according to Galloway?
I like it. Okay, so let's talk about your new book, Notes on Being a Man. Let me just ask an overarching question before we get too deep into this. I have a lot of female listeners. Why should they care about this?
Because women and society aren't going to continue to flourish as long as men are flailing. And who wants more economically and emotionally viable men?
I understand there's an understandable gag reflex when you ever start advocating for men, because I'd say five or seven years ago, the people that, quote unquote, at least see men, maybe not even advocate for them, were unproductive voices who blamed women for men's decline.
And my kind of premise or pillar here is that part of, I think, masculinity and part of what it means to be a man is to celebrate the progress of women, and I think men played a big role in that. And to celebrate the progress of our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters, and that it's not a zero sum game that we can still hopefully be the afterburners for women's progress.
Twice as many have been elected to parliament in the last 30 years. 23% increase just in the last, since COVID, of C-level female executives. We now, in urban areas, women are making as much as men, especially under the age of 30. So I understand the gag reflex of like, oh no, it's one of those guys.
But I think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time and still recognize the real challenges that non-whites and women face.
especially in the workplace once women have kids, I would argue that's where there's still serious discrimination and issues, while at the same time recognizing that if you walk into a morgue and there's five people who've died by suicide, four are men, and that one in three men under the age of 25 are still living at home, and that men really do, young men really do seem to be struggling.
And talk to someone who has brothers or or sons, and they're going to nod their head and say, okay, I'm a feminist. I'm deeply committed to the progress that women have made and ensuring that progress maintains its trajectory. But they can also acknowledge there is definitely something going on with our young men.
I would argue back to the question of why should women care that as I read your stuff and listen to you talk about it, a lot of your advice is applicable to anybody. And that includes action, absorbs anxiety and many other things you talk about. So there I just want to signal to the listener, no matter what your gender is, there's a lot here for you.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of technology on real-world relationships?
There's an award called the Carnegie Award that's given out to people who literally rush into burning homes, put their own physical safety in danger to save someone else, a stranger. Last year, they gave out 83 awards. 77 were men. So a lot of this risk aggressiveness results in bad things, overdoses, unnecessary violence, reckless behavior.
But some of that testosterone and that aggressiveness or recklessness, if you will, can be heroic. It can be, and has played, I would argue, an important part in society. But since 2000, the deaths of despair, drunk driving, opiate overdoses, suicide, the incremental deaths of despair amongst young men has claimed 440,000 lives.
So we have lost more young men, incremental to what we were losing before 2000, to deaths of despair than the number of young men we lost in World War II. And anyone who has kids, Dan, how old are your kids? I have one boy, he's 11. One boy, okay. So this is what's gonna happen to you. At about the age of 15, you're gonna have a Halloween party or something.
This just happened to us, I have a 15-year-old son. His whole class comes over. The boys are dopes. I mean, they're fine, but they're dopes. They can't look you in the eye. They're dopes. There will be three or four 15-year-old girls who could be the junior senators in Pennsylvania. So biologically, biologically, girls are maturing faster than boys.
A boy's prefrontal cortex doesn't catch up until the age of 25. A senior girl in high school competing against a senior boy for a college spot is effectively competing against a 10th grade girl. Seven in 10 high school valedictorians are girls. The majority of 70 to 80% of our primary school teachers are female. I would argue the education system is biased against boys.
Boys are twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior-adjusted basis as girls, a black boy five times as likely. And if you were to reverse engineer to the single point of failure for when a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model to death, divorce, or abandonment.
And at that moment, when a household becomes a single-parent household, and we say single-parent nine out of 10 times, that means mom has stuck around to raise the kid. At that moment, the boy in that household becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. Now, what's interesting is
is a girl in a single parent home has similar outcomes as a dual parent home, similar rates of college attendance, similar rates of self-harm. What it ends up is that while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls. And the lack of male involvement and male mentorship is the kind of biggest single point of failure.
And even saying that boys need men in their lives five years ago was triggering to some people what women can't raise men. I was raised by a single immigrant mother on her own, lived and died as secretary a lot of my life. But the research shows that boys need men in their lives. I think it's just healthy to acknowledge that. that boys and girls are different and that's okay.
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Chapter 6: Why is embracing rejection important for building resilience?
Until three years ago, there were more CEOs named Bob than there were female CEOs. I mean, so there's no doubt about it. You get into our generation, there's just a disproportionate amount of advantage that was registered by men with a specific skin tone and a specific sexual orientation. But if you go all the way down to an 18-year-old, there's now 50% more women in college than men.
It's now 60-40. And it might be two to one in the next five years in terms of college graduation because men drop out at greater rates. And then you look at the fact that many of the on-ramps to the middle class that non-college graduate men used to have in manufacturing. I mean, we all knew. Did you know the guy in high school? He clearly wasn't going to go to college.
Maybe drank a little bit, maybe smoked a little bit of pot, wore a journey shirt, but he could fix your car. And that guy was really good in wood, metal, and auto shop. There was a job, there was a place for that. By the way, wood, metal, and auto shop have gone away. They're no longer even offered in high school. Where does that guy go now?
And when you've seen our manufacturing base, not evaporate, we still have a strong, we're the second longest manufacturer in the world, but when a lot of the on-ramps go away, and also when online dating and the number of venues where men can demonstrate excellence to a potential mate, let me back up. There's this cartoon. of a woman in her 30s who didn't find romantic love. Let's call her Lisa.
And there's this cartoon that Lisa focused on her career, and yeah, she's successful and financially independent, but she never found romantic love. What a tragedy for Lisa. Okay, this is what the data shows. Lisa is just fine. And fertility rates actually go up as women make more money.
So the notion that if you sacrifice your career or sacrifice personal relationships for your career, you end up alone and depressed, that's just not true. Women over the age of 40 are now giving birth to more kids than women under the age of 25. It's directly correlated. Birth rates are now directly correlated to income.
A man who hasn't cohabitated with a woman by the time he's 30 or been married, there's a one in three chance he becomes a substance abuser. In general, when women don't have a romantic relationship in their lives, they tend to pour that energy back into their friend network and their professional lives.
When men don't have the guardrails and benefit of a romantic relationship, they oftentimes pour that energy back into video games, conspiracy theory, porn, the manosphere, and online. And so while we like to think of this tragedy of women who don't find romantic love The reality is, and the data reflects this, men benefit more from relationships than women.
Widows are happier after their husband dies. True story, widowers are less happy. Women live longer in relationships, two to four years, but men live four to seven years longer. And when men, fewer and fewer men, are seen as economically or emotionally viable and have fewer venues to demonstrate excellence, which men need to do to mate.
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Chapter 7: How should young people choose between passion and talent?
So in your view, what can and should be done about this? Well, that's the good news. I think there's a lot that can be done. Let's start... With education, I think, and I'm parroting a lot of my, kind of my Yoda on this, is Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I think we should redshirt kindergarten boys.
I think boys should start kindergarten at six, girls at five. I just think that equalizes the maturity level. And there's actually data showing that the youngest boys in each grade are more likely to be depressed. later in life because they're smaller and have trouble in school. So start boys in kindergarten at six, girls at five.
I think we need to increase the pay, especially for after school participation in sports and coaching such that we get more men in K through 12. You're naturally going to champion the person that reminds you of yourself. And we have very much feminized K through 12. And there's very few male role models for young men in K through 12. I think we need more vocational programming.
I think any university that has over a billion dollars in endowment that doesn't grow its freshman class faster than population growth should lose its tax-free status because it's no longer a public servant. It's a hedge fund with classes. Dartmouth has an $8 billion endowment. Their freshman class is the size of what a good Starbucks serves over a weekend, and they're in the middle of nowhere.
They could let in 8,000 students, not 800. I'm not suggesting that Harvard let in everyone, but if you have the endowment the size of the GDP of Costa Rica, letting in 1,200 kids means you've decided you're LVMH, not a public servant. So dramatically encouraged through tax policy, expansion of our freshman class, non-traditional four-year degrees in things like nursing, specialty construction.
I'm a huge fan of mandatory national service. People now see young Americans, only one in 10 young Americans feel good or very good about the country.
We desperately need Americans to get young men and women to get out there and see how wonderful other Americans are from different ethnicities, sexual orientations, ethnic groups, demographic groups, and realize that the rich kid from Boston has his own struggles. And the gay kid from a low-income neighborhood in Lubbock, Texas is not that different than me.
And what I find is that we're actually not that divided when we meet each other. We're being divided by online algorithms. But I'm not talking about military service necessarily. I'm talking about elder care, working at a nonprofit, being a smokejumper. But I think we are desperate to restitch the threads of America.
And I think one or two years of service, mandatory service at the age of 19 or 20, would restore that sense of patriotism and give young people a chance to see just that the real threat is income inequality or climate change or the CCP or Russian soldiers pouring over the border in Ukraine. It's not their neighbor. Americans are wonderful. They're an interesting group of wonderful people.
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Chapter 8: What role does humor play in signaling value?
Bullshit. This has been a conscious decision by old people who elect old people to transfer wealth from the young to the old. Every year, the largest transfer of wealth in history happens, $1.3 trillion from young people to old in the form of Social Security. So we are transferring money from a group that is less wealthy to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet every year.
I'm not suggesting we cut it off for people who need it, but Dan Harris and Scott Galloway should never get Social Security. We need to do away... with mortgage interest rate deduction and capital gains deduction, because who owns homes and stocks? People our age, who rents and makes their money from current income? Young people. Stop robbing money from young people.
Build 8 million houses in 10 years. Every 10% housing increase, Decreases birth rates by 1%. It ends up that housing prices are an effective form of birth control. Young people can't afford the certification to get ahead in college. They can't afford a house to start building a family in a monogamous relationship and building towards something together.
And yet, Pop-Pop and Nana are upgrading from Carnival to Crystal Cruises. We need more effective tax policy. We need to recognize the biological differences. We need an educational system that recognizes, expands more opportunity for the middle class. We have screwed this up. We can unscrew it. There are common sense solutions for all of this.
Yeah. I mean, I find many of your policy prescriptions to be really compelling. Support for today's episode comes from Square, and they've got big news during Square's biannual releases event. They launched a wave of innovative new tools to help local businesses run faster, smarter, and more profitably.
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