The Boys Are Not Alright: A Frank Conversation About Young Men and What We’re Losing

Much has been written about the “crisis of boys.” Scott Galloway sees it as part of something larger: a broader crisis of men.

A leading public intellectual, Galloway teaches graduate-level marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and hosts three widely followed podcasts. In his new memoir, Notes on Being a Man, he turns his analytical lens inward on himself and outward on the forces shaping the journey from boyhood to manhood. Traditional roles have become blurred. Time-honored paths to economic viability have become less attainable. Masculinity itself has become suspect. Underlying much of this disruption is Big Tech and the ruthless incentives of the attention economy.

According to Galloway, algorithms designed to capture young people’s attention have had the effect of isolating them from the friction and feedback of the real world. This affects girls as well. But boys, Galloway contends, are particularly vulnerable to retreat into the unreality of screens, a view supported by an increasing body of research. The result is a growing cohort of young men who struggle with school suspensions, substance abuse, porn addiction, loneliness, failure to complete college, unemployment, and self-harm.

Galloway is quick to acknowledge that men have had, as he puts it, “a three-thousand-year head start.” But addressing the specific struggles of boys doesn’t minimize the challenges faced by women. In fact, he argues, helping boys grow into grounded, capable men benefits everyone, including the women who share their lives. He calls the path forward aspirational masculinity. “At its best,” he says, “masculinity means generating value, carrying more than your share, making others feel safe, and planting trees whose shade you may never sit under.”

Below, a consolidated version of the conversation he shared on the topic with Gwyneth recently on the goop podcast.

On Boys, Belonging, and What's Broken

Gwyneth: I'm so thrilled to have you. I've followed you for many years. I read and love the book.

Scott: Thank you.

Gwyneth: I’d like to start there, since we have such a large audience of mothers of boys. You make incredibly salient points about what’s been called the decline of the American boy. Why did this topic become so urgent for you?

Scott: First off, thanks for having me. It’s nice to meet you. The data is stark. If you walk into a morgue and see five people who died by suicide, four of them are men. We talk about a homelessness crisis and an opioid crisis—but men are three times as likely to be homeless or addicted, twelve times as likely to be incarcerated, and four times as likely to kill themselves.

No group in America has fallen further, faster than young men.

Unfortunately, there's a lack of empathy and reticence to implement social programs because of the unearned benefit – or privilege -- of men of my generation. From 1945 to 2000, the U.S. registered a third of the world's economic growth with just 5% of the population. We had six times the prosperity, and all of that prosperity was crammed into the one third of the population that happened to be white, male and heterosexual. So I just need to acknowledge upfront, men of my generation and my profile had a gale force wind in our sails.

Gwyneth: At the same time, it does seem unfair that young men starting out today would be held accountable for an older generation’s privilege. Is that what you see happening?

Scott: That’s precisely what’s happening. And it is unfair. When I start talking about this issue, there's an understandable gag reflex. “Well, Scott, you guys have had a three-thousand-year head start.” The question is, should a nineteen-year-old be paying for the penalty for my privilege? And the thing that got me – the exact moment I got really interested in this – was a kid named Alex Kerns. He was trading options on Robinhood and they errantly said, “You're down $60,000.” He wasn't actually. But he furiously sent emails to customer service that night and was so distraught, he left his family a note saying he didn’t want to leave them with this debt. Then took his own life.

From there, I started down a rabbit hole around teen suicide and discovered all these stats around boys. For example, we have more single parent homes than any place in the world. And the vast majority of the time it's the mother heading the household. What's interesting is in single parent households, girls have the same rates of college attendance, and same income. They can be a little bit more promiscuous because they're looking for male attention – sometimes in the wrong areas. But on the big stuff – income, self-harm, college attendance – same rates as in dual parent households.

When a boy loses a male role model—through death, divorce, abandonment—at that moment he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. What the research shows is that while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls.

When economic and social forces strip opportunity from young people overall—those under forty are about 24% less wealthy than they were forty years ago, while those over seventy are 72% wealthier—it’s hit young men especially hard. I started talking about this five years ago, and the conversation has become much more productive since then. While I say my biggest fans are young men, my biggest supporters are single mother feminists who say, “I see something going on, we need to address this issue.”

Gwyneth: I've always been sort of stunned by that in my own life. I didn't attribute it necessarily to the lack of a male role model, because boys who have a double parent home experience trauma. But girls, in my perception, barrel through it better. I don't know if it's a pain tolerance thing or if boys are just more sensitive. I have a nineteen-year-old boy who's inordinately sensitive. And I just wonder, do we project the idea that boys are supposed to be tough and gritty and withstand punches in the face and all that stuff. But in reality, are they more sensitive than girls at a young age?

Scott: There's just no getting around it. They're emotionally and mentally the weaker sex and the data supports that view. I'll give you a really frightening statistic. Two fifteen-year-olds—a boy and a girl, both sexually molested. The boy is ten times more likely to kill himself later in life. I'm not suggesting that that makes it any less awful for the girl. But why the disparity? One theory is that because women have to endure pregnancy and menstruation, that, quite frankly, they're just tougher neurologically. Or that they've just taken so much abuse and it’s made them more resilient. But boys have a tendency not to recover as quickly from trauma or the absence of a male role model as girls do. There’s also the fact that young men are less likely to ask for help.

Gwyneth: I’d like to pivot to technology and social media. How big of an influence does that have on what’s going on with boys?

Scott: Great question. The elephant in the room is Big Tech, which has attached shareholder value to sequestering people from relationships. Every minute they can get you to spend on your screen and away from other relationships, they add tens of billions of dollars in shareholder value. They're brilliant at tapping into an immature male brain, which doesn't catch up to a woman's until later. Specifically, the part of the brain that knows how to regulate the pursuit of dopamine—you know, stop playing video games and start studying—that part of the male brain is eighteen months behind a girl until he's reached the age twenty-five.

Let’s say you have two seniors in high school, the girl, if she's competing against a boy who's a senior, she's basically competing against the equivalent of a 10th grade girl. Seven out of ten high school valedictorians are girls. College attendance is now 60 to 40 female-to-male, and it's probably 2 to 1 female grads to male grads because boys are dropping out at a greater rate. And let me say it, the K-12 school system in America is biased in that the behaviors schools reward and encourage tend to favor girls.

Gwyneth: Sit still, be organized, raise your hand, be a pleaser in other words.

Scott: Exactly. A boy is twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior adjusted basis. If it's a boy sitting in the principal's office, he’s twice as likely to be suspended. The lack of strong male role models is already making it harder for boys to thrive. Add to that they mature later. Then layer on a society that’s stripped opportunity from young people. That hits young men especially hard, because they’re still judged largely on their economic viability.

And women are disproportionately and unfairly evaluated by society based on their aesthetics as well as their economic viability. Young people in general don't have the same economic opportunities that our generation had and it's hard on all of them. But it's especially hard on young men because relationships—romantic relationships—are the new luxury item. By that I mean, four out of five men in the upper quintile of household income will get married. Only one in five men in the lowest quintile. We don't like to talk about this, but men date socioeconomically horizontally and down, and women date horizontally and up. When the pool of “horizontal up” keeps shrinking, there's just less household formation. And without relationships, men suffer more than women. There's this myth of the thirty-year-old woman who never found romantic love, and it’s this huge tragedy. Well, for the most part, she’s just fine. Men come off the tracks when they don't have a relationship. Widows are happier after their husband dies. Widowers are less happy after their wife dies. A woman in a relationship lives longer—two years longer on average. But a man lives four to seven years longer. The reality is, men need relationships more than women. One of the things I say that triggers people is that a man should always pay for dates. And the reason why is a woman's fertility window is shorter. A man will benefit more from a relationship than a woman. The downside of sex is much greater for a woman than a man. And I think there's an asymmetry in value. Every mammal has a courtship process. What I tell my sons is when you're in the company of women, you pay.

I do think that traditional distinctions between male and female roles have blurred—social expectations about who does what, who provides, who leads, etc., are less clearly defined than in the past. Unfortunately, we've done a great job of convincing ourselves that it's the other gender's fault.

I think the worst thing that happened on the right, they recognized the problem, but unfortunately their answer is to take non-whites and women back to the fifties. That's not the answer. And they blame men's descent on women's ascent. That couldn't be further from the truth. Women's ascent has supported the economy. It's a reason we won World War II—women went to work in factories. Men need to be much more supportive of our sisters’ and our mothers’ progress and do nothing to get in the way of that. But at the same time, there is a certain feeling from a lot of young women that these boys don't have problems—that they are the problem. The far right conflates masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. I think the far left says be in touch with your emotions and act more like a woman. I don't think that's the answer either. There is a masculinity crisis, if you want to call it that, and young men are just really struggling in the United States right now.

Gwyneth: It is sort of an incendiary topic. In your book you talk about toxic masculinity and that there are certain attributes of masculinity, like archetypal masculine traits, that actually help to set a woman free. For example, I feel more powerful and in my strength when my husband is protective. That to me is an important dynamic. But I do feel that the culture's trying to wrestle with this idea of masculinity and how it pertains to femininity and all these different permutations.

Scott: Well, hearing you talk about this—I know you're choosing your words very carefully because one can come across as not being empathetic to the struggles women still face or worse being discriminatory against the 5% of the population that's non-binary.

The first thing I think we need to acknowledge is that empathy is not a zero-sum game. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. We can still acknowledge the huge challenges women still face. They go to seventy-three cents on the dollar when they have kids. Professionally, men stay at a hundred cents on the dollar. We haven't figured out a way to maintain women's professional trajectory when they decide to keep the species alive. I believe everybody needs a code. Some people get it from religion, some from church, some people get it from the military, their family. But it's hard to make all these decisions every day in a world that's throwing so many things at you.

I'd like to think that masculinity can serve as a code or an aspirational vision. For young men who appear to be struggling right now, they're not going to church, not going to work as much. Where do they find that code? And simply, if I try to distill the aspirational form of masculinity down to three things, it's the following: being a provider, a protector, and a procreator. I think in a capitalist society you have to be economically viable. And sometimes that means getting out of the way of your partner and being more supportive because she happens to be better at that whole money thing.

I think that's a form of masculinity, but you should assume at the outset that you might at some point need to take economic responsibility for your household. Because your partner may have to gestate and produce children and take time off. And also, our society still will evaluate you based on your economic viability. I'm not saying that's the way the world should be. It's the way the world is.

And something we don't like to talk about is it, generally speaking, women are less attracted to men who are not making more money than them or as much. That's changing. Women are the primary breadwinner in 14% of households but when the woman in the relationship starts making more money than the man, the likelihood of divorce doubles, and the use of E.D. drugs triples.

Now, some of that is because of the expectations the man puts on himself and his self-esteem goes down. But to be fair, divorce rates have skyrocketed in the last forty years. A lot of that is a function of a good thing. And that is, women no longer feel economically indentured to men. But you also have this situation where men are not keeping pace with women in terms of what we call emotional labor.

While women's economic ascent has been tracking upward, men's ascent around domestic and emotional labor hasn’t kept pace. A lot of women are just kind of waking up and going, “Okay, you're no longer the provider or, quite frankly, boss. But I'm still doing the majority of the stuff around the house.”

Gwyneth: What do you attribute that decline to?

Scott: Well on the economic side, it's a lot of the traditional on-ramps for a man to have a good middle class living are in decline. A lot of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced. Remember in high school we used to have wood, metal and auto shop? A lot of these guys weren't going to go to college. They didn't care about class, but they could fix your car. I knew a bunch of these guys. Vocational work, auto, metal, and wood shop are gone now. We've replaced it with computer science, hoping all of our kids end up being Mark Zuckerberg.

Gwyneth: But why did we do that? Europe still has vocational schools.

Scott: America has become a place where we used to love the unremarkable. Now it's about how do we create a super class of billionaires in the top 1%? There are all these stories about kids in the Midwest taking auto shop and learning how to install HVAC energy efficient heaters. And they're making $80,000 their junior year in high school. But in the eyes of Gen Z, being a barista is higher prestige than being a pipe welder. Meanwhile, a welder makes a hundred-and-twenty grand a year.

Gwyneth: That will change with AI, right? I mean, if those middle jobs are getting replaced, do you think the premium will be placed on those jobs again?

Scott: At some point you need them, especially with our immigration policy the way it is now. My kid is applying to college. I'll be heartbroken if he doesn't go to an elite university. The reality is that two thirds of our kids don't even graduate from college. We've created this aspirational path for them, and if it doesn't happen, they feel shame and the parents feel shame. Society needs to readapt and say, “Okay, being able to fix EVs is a really good job and we need to have more training and a more obvious path for vocational and trade schools because young men tend to enjoy working outside and with their hands and using some of their physical strength and deploying that.” But the whole point of prosperity is to protect. If you want women to be attracted to you, the ultimate skill is to make them feel safe around you. Not just physical protection. But when people are talking critically about something behind their back. Your first default should be to say nothing or to defend them.

You're the guy that breaks up fights in bars—you don't start them. You're the guy that defends your country and talks it up—doesn't criticize it. The whole point of prosperity is the move to protection. Young men are always going to look up to the president and the wealthiest man in the world. And I think that some of our male leaders right now have entirely skipped the protection part. They’ve conflated masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. Quite frankly, they're terrible role models for young men.

The final thing that gets more pushback or more controversy is procreator. We have pathologized young men's desire to have romantic and sexual relationships. I think that's a feature, not a bug. I think wanting to have sex or establish a relationship is actually very productive when channeled correctly. It makes you want to work out, dress better, have a kindness practice, be able to demonstrate excellence. Wanting to have sex should turn you into a better man. I worry with the plethora of synthetic relationships—specifically the emergence of synthetic porn—that a man’s mojo to go out and make the approach is waning. 80% of women say they want the man to initiate romantic interest.

Gwyneth: Just going back briefly to something you said—who would you identify currently in the culture that you think are good role models?

Scott: I can point to Kris Kristofferson. Army helicopter pilot, Rhodes Scholar, really generous to other artists, married for a long time, procreator, grandkids. I can also point to some women who are tremendous role models of masculinity. I don't think it’s sequestered to people born as male or female. My closest male friends tend to be more feminine, more nurturing. I like people who take care of me, but I think the guy who gets up every morning and hauls his ass to work because he takes his responsibility as a provider seriously is admirable.

Some women say they want a “sensitive man.” I quite frankly think that's bullshit. I don't think they want a sensitive man. I think that leaves, I jokingly say, two people in the car crying in the parallel parking spot, still empty. I think what they want is a man. I think what they want is a man who notices their life. Who says, “Okay, I don't get this, but it's important to you. I notice you. I recognize how goddamn hard what you're doing is.” I think a man has a responsibility to try and make the marriage work for the kids and as often as possible reflect sexual desire and affection and say, “I choose you.” Women want to be wanted. I know just saying that triggers people. They conflate those statements with wanting to take women back, that men are entitled to relationships, that I'm focused too much on money, or that it's women's fault. I'm not saying that at all. No group is obligated to service another group. But I do think embracing some of the traditional attributes usually associated with men—people born as males—have an easier time leaning into these things. My point is, I do think that an aspirational form of masculinity can be restored and really serve as a guiding light or a code for young men. I can't tell you how much more productive the dialogue has become. Five years ago, I was called Andrew Tate with an MBA for saying some of these things.

Gwyneth: Well, I think it's difficult for people who get entrenched in their ideas—when people like you start to talk about things that challenge those existing paradigms and are a bit iconoclastic in their thinking—there's always going to be faux outrage. But then the conversation starts to change, and I think you do that all the time.

Scott: Yeah, I hope so. It definitely has. Even Governor Newsom just announced an initiative to focus on young men. If they'd said that five years ago, there just would've been, oh my gosh, it would've been unthinkable for a Democrat to say that five years ago.

Gwyneth: Do you think it's because the discourse had gone too far to the left? And that what we’re seeing now is a kind of correction?

Scott: I don't think it's a correction. For example, on the far right, there’s this idea that women have been told to be economically viable and now it's a disaster for them. They're alone and depressed. I've never bought that. What’s the alternative? To be potentially alone and broke? I've always thought that that's just a thinly veiled attempt to take us back to the fifties where white men got disproportionate advantage. But we're just not going back there. Nor should we. I think women's economic viability is hugely important. It's not going to help a man's mental health if his household is that much poorer because his wife isn't working. Women's economic ascent is a wonderful thing, but what we have to also acknowledge is it does create some externalities and some problems.

It's still worth it, but we've ripped up the script and said a woman can be anything. That's great. But we've also said to men, “Alright, you're supposed to be the provider, and now you have many on-ramps to be a provider, but you're not being the provider.” Approximately one in seven men are now considered what's called a NEET—Neither in Education, Employment, or in Training. They're basically doing nothing. One of three men under the age of twenty-five is living at home. One out of five men at thirty is still living at home. More single women own homes in the US than men. Women in urban areas under the age of thirty are now out-earning men. Fine. These are all great, except we have to struggle with the fact that men get a ton of their self-esteem and worth from their economic viability. And women don't seem very attracted to these men.

I go out and guys come up to me and they want to talk about this stuff, but so do women. And the thing I hear most from women is, “I'm single. I'm ready to mingle. I look amazing. And no man approaches me. They don't even try. They don't even come up to me.” In this regard, men have gotten a lot of mixed signals. The difference between a romantic moment and a creepy moment is the perceived attractiveness of the person who initiates it. And men don't want to be that guy. And I think young men, quite frankly, they think, “Why am I going to risk the potential humiliation, demonstrate kindness, have perseverance, follow up, shower for God's sakes—when I can go home and have synthetic lifelike porn.”

I worry that we're literally going to start seeing fewer young men out in the wild because they'll have decided they can get all their friendships online on Reddit and Discord. “I don't need to go into work. I can trade stocks or crypto on Coinbase or on Robin Hood, or bet on who's going to win Mayor in New York on a Cashli. Why would I go through the incredible hassle of trying to establish a romantic and sexual relationship when I have porn that every day gets better and better?” I just find it very depressing because when I think about, and I know this, the most rewarding thing in people's lives, if you really distill it, it's their relationships. But a lot of men have been told you can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm, and they're just not developing those skills. And when a woman doesn't have a relationship, she oftentimes pours that energy back into work, back into her friend network. She's better at finding other places to fill that void of love. Men, when they don't have a relationship, oftentimes pour that energy back into online conspiracy theory, misogyny, porn, and video games. And some men need relationships much more than women. They need the guardrails. We have what I call this indomitable foe trying to suck them out of society every day. And their immature brains are much more prone to that constant dopa feed of online gaming, online porn, online conspiracy theory.

Gwyneth: Right. There's this whole system in place, led by the most profitable companies in the world, and they’re incentivized to keep this going. They want men in the basement. They profit so heavily off of that. So how concerned are you about that subset of boys—like the lady in Chicago whose son is in the basement vaping while her two daughters are out in the world. How concerned are you, given the economic incentives around the Chicago lady’s son, and that growing group of boys?

Scott: That's probably the biggest question. There's three times as many women applying to be big sisters in New York as there are men applying to be big brothers. A lot of men aren't stepping up. But if you were to kind of allocate the different factors driving this crisis, the biggest one would be big tech. Supposedly one in three people under the age of eighteen is now in a synthetic relationship. They're getting therapy, friendship advice, sexual stimulation from a synthetic character—AI. And it appears that boys as they grow older don't grow out of it, or that young men are more susceptible to this constant dopa hit that they can get online.

I don't think synthetic relationships should be illegal for anyone under the age of 18. But I think we need to do a better job of age-gating pornography for men under the age of 18. I think we need to remove protection for big tech for algorithmically elevated content that’s elevating conspiracy theory or really incendiary content beyond its organic natural reach. I'm not talking about censorship, but when they become an editorial platform, they should be subject to the same standards you're subject to.

Gwyneth: How for example?

Scott: If you said something that was blatantly untrue and it resulted in kids self-harming, this podcast would be in a lot of trouble. I think we need to regulate big tech. I think there's a lot of things we could do economically to restore a progressive tax structure and put more money in young people's pockets. I think the universities need to expand their freshman class size in proportion to the population growth, or lose their tax-free status. Because they're no longer public servants—they're hedge funds with classes. I think we need to red shirt boys. Start them at age six in kindergarten. Start girls at five. The boys are just less mature. Full stop. More vocational programming. I'd love to see mandatory national service where kids from different sexual orientations and incomes realize that they're serving in the agency of something bigger than themselves. I'd love to see universal childcare. I think that would benefit men immensely because to live in these expensive areas, you need two incomes. And if we were talking about suicide earlier, a man is most likely to engage in self-harm the year after he gets divorced. He loses his primary relationship and sometimes access to his kids. The reason why young people get divorced, they think it's infidelity or lack of shared values. It's economic strain. If we could relieve some of the economic strain on young people, I think it would benefit all of them. But it would disproportionately benefit or level up young men.

A lot of this anxiety is coming from a lack of, they can't afford a home, they can't afford to go to college, they're not attractive to potential mates—especially men—when they're not economically viable. So, let's make them more economically viable. And then some policies that address putting more men into K-12 schools. It sounds like your son is about the same age as mine. I think two years in national service would be enormously beneficial for my son. The country with the lowest levels of young adult depression is actually Israel, despite all its existential threats. I'm convinced it's because they all serve in the IDF. All these beautiful young men and women with huge responsibilities—learning how to handle equipment, learning that the key is character and grit, not your identity. There's nothing like being in a foxhole that makes you appreciate someone for their true skills and character, and you don't care about their sexual orientation or who their dad is. And they meet mentors.

Gwyneth: By necessity, right? There's no incentive to do that here.

Scott: Well, that's what I'm saying. I think we would benefit from that mandatory national service and it doesn't need to be the military. It could be working in a dog shelter or helping seniors.

Gwyneth: I agree. I personally think that the public school system needs to be completely overhauled to support different ways of learning. They should be open from seven AM to seven PM They should have three meals a day. They should do what Germany does and recognize if a kid is not going to attend Harvard, they should put them on a different track. It’s always astonishing to me why we don't start there. It's daycare, education, socialization, nutrition.

Scott: Well, to your point, the stats around this are extraordinary. A public school in the US spends $15,000 per student. A public school in a poor neighborhood, eight to $10,000. An elite private school similar to the one my kids go to—and probably your kids go to—spends on average $75,000 a year on that kid—50 to 60 on tuition—then through gifts and fundraisers and charity events where they auction off dinner with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Gwyneth: Oh, I'm aware.

Scott: Look at it this way: You have an education institution in the United States and with poor kids, we invest $120,000. And rich kids—we invest $900,000. The kids who get an incremental three quarters of a million dollars invested in their education score on average 370 points higher on the SAT than poor kids and are 77 times more likely to get into an elite school. And we're like, what's going on here? Well, we know what's going on.

Gwyneth: It's resources.

Scott: Yeah. And if we’re serious about reforming education, we should de-link school funding from property taxes. Right now, a public school’s resources rise or fall with its local tax base. I agree K–12 is weak in the U.S. What’s striking is that while our primary and secondary system struggles, our colleges are the best in the world. It’s strange to be so weak at one and so strong at the other.

Gwyneth: So in the absence of a mandatory program, or mandatory service, it seems like what you're saying is that men need some kind of rite of passage. They need some sort of design in order to help them become men. In the absence of that, what if you could design a rite of passage that didn't involve those things. I'm just thinking about individual households or communities. How would you design it?

Scott: It's a really interesting thought. I can think of programs around education, national service, tax policy, vocational programming. I can think of individual programs, but this notion of a rite of passage—like a bar mitzvah, or high school and college graduation, or you become a man supposedly when you lose your virginity. I don't think any of those are what I'd call a real rite of passage. I think there are a lot of people born as males who live eighty years, die, and never became men.

Gwyneth: I agree.

Scott: The way I would describe it is—and I pared a lot of this from my Yoda on this topic—a guy named Richard Reeves from the American Institute for Boys and Men: A boy becomes a man when he moves from being a net consumer of resources to creating surplus value—when he gives more than he takes, economically and emotionally. Masculinity, at its best, means generating value, carrying more than your share, making others feel safe, and planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit under.

Gwyneth: So, for the mothers listening, what would you say are the most critical things that we can instill in our boys in order to grow up more in this model, or how to avoid all these pitfalls that we're currently experiencing culturally?

Scott: Well, in general—and this is true of just parenting—we overprotect our kids offline and under protect them online. Half of kids by the age of twelve have never been allowed to walk down a grocery store aisle alone. And yet they're on these platforms where fifty-year-old men are commenting on their physical appearance. I would say that my parents' biggest fear was I was going to get into too much trouble. My biggest fear is my kids aren't going to get into enough trouble. I don't believe in tracking your kids. I tell my kids, on a weekend night, I need them to go out. I'm like, you need to get out of the house. I used to leave my house Saturday morning with a Schwinn bike, thirty-five cents and an Abba Zabba bar, and I was gone for fourteen hours. And if it got to be ten o’clock at night, my mom might start calling neighbors. But my kid is fifteen minutes late home from school in London, and we call fucking MI-6. I mean, we got helicopter gunships searching for the kid, and I don't think that's a good thing. The one thing I would say to a single mother is that it's really important that you get men involved in your boy's life. Boys just respond on certain levels to men in a way they won't respond to a mom—as talented as she is and as extraordinarily important as she is. Make sure that there are men involved in his life and to the extent you can, try and get them as involved in as many activities outside of the house as you can. Because if they're inside the house with broadband, they're going to find a lot of cheap dopa that's going to be very seductive.

Gwyneth: There’s also a disparity among boys. The ones who are naturally good at team sports get pulled into structured communities and competition. But boys who aren’t wired that way—like my son, who loved swimming but hated competing and preferred surfing or skating, where he could compete with himself—don’t always have that outlet. And those boys sometimes end up retreating into the online world, which can deepen the problem.

Scott: Men between the ages of twenty and thirty are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates right now. If left to their own devices, a lot of men just don't leave the house now. You've put a casino, a porn site, an arcade, Netflix—you've put it all in their pocket or on their computer. The temptation to just stay at home and get that constant dopa hit from all sorts of different receptors online is just more tempting than going out and doing stuff.

If I could communicate one message to men and boys, it would be this: The fear, anxiety, and loneliness you will ultimately feel spending a lot of time online is so much greater than the fear of anything that lies out there outside of that room. Your happiness, productivity, wealth, relationships, the likelihood you're gonna have sex, is all inversely correlated to the amount of time you spend on a screen. A screen will make you poor, less attractive, and less likely to have a relationship. Nothing wonderful is going to happen to you on a screen.

Gwyneth: Can I ask you what feminine quality of yours, or just in general, that you think is important to cultivate in order to become a better man?

Scott: I just did this podcast tour with Kara Swisher. The most rewarding part of it, Gwyneth, was when I arrived in LA and I brought a couple of my mentors in when I was thirteen. The first was the stockbroker who took an interest in me and gave me a lesson in the markets. I used to call him every day and talk about my stocks and I’d go to his office and hang out with him. I've been in the markets my whole life and it has served me really well from an economic standpoint. The other person I highlighted was my best friend Adam’s stepfather, Paul. He met Adam's mom when she was thirty. He was twenty-three. They were in law school together. She had two kids from a previous marriage and they've been married fifty-five years. This guy, Gwyneth, is something out of a bad seventies film. Super handsome. Always had the hottest cars—240 Z, Porsche, a Ferrari. Great provider, a baller professionally. First guy that ever took me and Adam to workout. Quiet, stoic, all the cliche masculine stuff. The last ten years, he's been taking care of his wife of fifty-five years. He's been sole caregiver in a situation where most of us would've decided that she'd be better off in a home. I just find it so inspirational. I struggle with the question of what's masculinity and what's femininity—what are the attributes of a man versus a woman? But these aren't necessarily attributes of masculinity or femininity, but just of humanity. We're finally recognizing the emotional labor women are bringing to the table in the house. They're more empathetic. My partner can hear my kid get up at three in the morning. I will sleep right through it. She just has an innate sense.

Gwyneth: Yeah. I think most women do.

Scott: She'll say to me there’s something wrong with our oldest son, Alex. He's not doing well. And I'm like, “What are you talking about? He's fine.” And then we find out the next day that he had his heart broken. We're finally recognizing the importance of the emotional labor that women put in. The best thing I think you can do for your sons is be really good to their mother and stay married—unless it's really toxic. And then being a caregiver, like Paul, who’s been such an outstanding role model. He’s decided that his job now is to take care of his 85-year-old wife. It's just so inspiring and so human.

The natural inclination is that women are the caregivers. I like the idea that protection extends to being a caregiver and that that is not a feminine thing, but a masculine thing. But I'm really questioning to the extent I can outline attributes of masculinity while not recognizing that it's a wonderful thing when a man can take on the attributes more commonly associated with women.