Scott Galloway says young men are in crisis, urges action

Scott Galloway and Richard Reeves spent a Nov. 21 episode of The Prof G Pod answering listener questions about talking to boys about sex, device addiction, supporting teachers and modeling healthy masculinity. The discussion followed Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man, which Goodreads listed as published Nov. 4, and an essay he posted on his own site Nov. 7.

The book’s premise is blunt. NYU Stern’s page for the title says, “Boys and men are in crisis. Rarely has a cohort fallen further and faster than young men living in Western democracies.” The school also says boys are less likely to graduate from high school or college than girls, and that one in seven men reports having no close friends.

Galloway has tied that argument to his own position at NYU Stern, where he has been a professor of marketing since 2002. He was making similar points in a June 3, 2024 podcast episode focused on the masculinity crisis, then kept refining the case in later conversations with Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

That pairing matters because the debate is no longer limited to diagnosis. In the Nov. 21 episode, Galloway and Reeves moved quickly from the idea of crisis to the mechanics of intervention, asking how adults talk to boys about sex, how schools handle device addiction, how teachers are supported and what healthy masculinity looks like in practice.

The underlying policy question is whether the institutions that once gave ordinary young men structure now reach them with enough consistency. Galloway has repeatedly argued that the problem is not abstract, and his own examples point to a narrow set of supports that can still make a difference: classroom stability, adult guidance, credible role models and the daily discipline that comes from schools and families working in the same direction.

That frame has helped turn Notes on Being a Man into part of a larger national argument about boys, men and the systems around them. The data Galloway cites do not describe a single crisis point so much as a chain of weak links, from graduation rates to loneliness, that invites closer scrutiny of what schools, households and mentors are doing, and what they are no longer doing.