Speaker 1: Last week I delved here into recent data from the CDC suggesting major problems with regard to the mental health of our adolescents, surges in depression and suicidal ideation, especially true for our girls. This week I found cause to worry about young men. This headline from The Hill, it caught my eye. Most young men are single. Most young women are not. The story reported that as of 2022, Pew Research Center found 30% of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner, nor engaged in a committed relationship. Nearly half of all young adults are single. Now, look at these numbers. 34% of women, twice as many, a whopping 63% of men. What explains that? I pulled the Pew study and I read with interest. Turns out since 2019, the share of single men who say they're looking for dates or a relationship has declined from 61% to 50%. In 2018, 28% of men ages 18 to 30 reported they'd had no sex in the past year, compared with 18% of women of that age. The Hill report said men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless, and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality, and relationships that afflicts all of young America. Among the causes, among the factors, a reliance on social media and online porn. But also, more young women are hooking up with each other, or dating and marrying slightly older men, and heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Other troubling statistics about men come from a 2021 study from the Survey Center for American Life. They found the share of men who have six or more close friends, which in 1990 was 55%, by 2021 had shrunk by half. Meanwhile, those with literally zero close friends, which stood at 3% in 1990, has zoomed to 15%. An expert quoted by the Hill said this disconnect can have catastrophic consequences for young men. Quote, in the worst case scenario, the young American man's social disconnect can have tragic consequences. Young men commit suicide at four times the rate of young women. Younger women are largely responsible for rising rates of mass shootings, a trend that some researchers link to their growing social isolation. Well, those words reminded me of a conversation that I had over a year ago, right here on CNN, with NYU professor Scott Galloway.

Speaker 2: But the issue is, when you have a group of men, the lower half of attractiveness of men, and online dating, which has doubled, now it's about half of relationships, and the top 20% of men in terms of attractiveness get about 60% of the interest, you end up with a group of men that are more prone to conspiracy theory, more prone to misogynistic content, more prone to believe, not believe in climate change. So this is the American story. If it's written with a pen whose ink is failing young men, does not end well. This is an existential crisis, failing young men.

Speaker 1: As always, Professor Galloway was prescient. Back with me now is Scott Galloway. He's a professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's the host of the Professor G podcast and author of multiple bestselling books, most recently, Adrift, America in 100 Charts. Scott, thanks for returning. Hasn't the advantage always been to those with the looks and or the money? What's changed?

Speaker 2: First of all, I just want to say thank you for raising this issue a year ago when a lot of media companies were afraid to talk about this for fear of it being pro-men with somehow being anti-women. Look, this is returning to the natural order of things. For the majority of history, a small percentage of men have had the majority of the mating opportunities. But in America, we decided to make a huge investment in what would probably be the greatest innovation in history, and that is in the middle class. From 1945 to 1947, 7 million men returned from war were discharged from the service, and we decided to give them the GI Bill, subsidized mortgages. We saw education rates go from 5 to 45 percent. They were valued, and we had such a strong manufacturing base that you had massive marriage and household formation. And some men were seen as more economically and emotionally viable. And you've seen the reverse happen with the offshoring of much of our manufacturing base, with a society that, quite frankly, doesn't value young men. When we talk about problems with people of color or women, we see it as a systemic societal problem. When we see problems or the stats that you just mentioned, we see it as accountability or the men just need to level up. But married households and household formation are better citizens. They vote. They save at twice the rate. They're less likely to commit crimes. And we have fewer and fewer viable men. We have a dearth of economically and emotionally viable men. But the middle class is an accident. Unless you invest in it, it doesn't happen. Eisenhower decided to invest $500 billion in a national highway project that created tons of jobs. We have—and by the way, the tax rate back then was 91 percent. We raised money and we redistributed in social programs that made young people more economically viable.

Speaker 1: And then, Scott, you toss in the influence of social media and how relationships today, they don't come from, in our era, happenstance and mingling, right? They come from swiping. And that further accelerates this issue. Am I right?

Speaker 2: Oh, it's been the chaser to it. I mean, to have an honest conversation about this, we have to be honest. And that is that men and women have different mating criteria. One quarter of women—excuse me, one quarter of men saying economic viability is a key criteria in a mate. Three quarters of women say that is important. And when you're on a two-dimensional format, where now it's one and two relationships begin online—it used to be one and four just a few years ago— it gets distilled down to a small number of criteria. Specifically for men, it's does she look attractive? And specifically for men, is he able to signal his ability to garner resources in the future? An average attractive male on Tinder gets swiped less than 1% of the time. And there's three men on Tinder for every one woman. So you've distilled it. You've taken out one of the key components of mating dynamics, and that is vibe, humor, body language, pheromones, the ability to be, quite frankly, a little bit persistent in the pursuit of a romantic relationship. We have no third places anymore. No places to meet. People aren't going to bars. They aren't in sports leagues. They aren't going to church. They aren't even going to work. So it gets distilled down to very one- or two-dimensional attributes. And the reality is women are much choosier than men, and they can apply those screens. And they allocate all of their attention to a small number of men that results in just essentially, at the end of the day, a lack of opportunities. Chris Williamson—Chris Williams summarized it perfectly. He called it the high heels effect. In the last 40 years, more women have graduated from college than men, and they're not interested in mating with non-college grads. They now own more homes, single women than single men. So what you have is women say they won't date anyone shorter than them, 50 percent of them. Effectively, what you have metaphorically over the last 40 years is women have been getting taller and taller, and men have been getting shorter and shorter. How many of us have said, I know a ton of great single women. They can't find a date. That's not true. They can't find a date. They can't find a man they find economically or emotionally viable. If we don't make a massive investment in young people and make more economically and emotionally viable men, we're going to see a lack of household formation. We're going to see a decline in the middle class. And we're going to see, quite frankly, just a lot of young men who are terrible citizens.

Speaker 1: So is the answer to fix this economically? And who will champion this conversation? You felt obliged to compliment me at the outset because we had engaged on this a year ago, and here I am revisiting it. And I read into that the fact that you think that it's politically incorrect even to have this dialogue.

Speaker 2: When you're seen as advocating for men, because of the 300,000-year head start we've had, it seems somehow it's anti-female. There's a lot of very unfortunate misogyny online that is masquerading as being pro-men. A lot of TikTok celebrities who talk about advocating for men, it's just thinly veiled misogyny. What do we need? We need more freshman seats in colleges. We need a massive investment in vocational training. We need to figure out a way to get more permitting for housing so young people can afford housing. We need to recognize our economic policies literally allocate wealth from young people to old people. The percentage of wealth that young people control under the age of 40 has been cut from 12 percent to 6 percent. These are concerted, deliberate decisions. We did away with the child tax credit. We don't want to make it any easier for people to have kids. But seniors just got their largest cost-of-living adjustment increase in history. We have made the decision to make it harder and more expensive for people to find each other, for people to mate, and for people to have children. And without children, we turn into Japan and Italy, and that is we go into population decline, and our economy goes into decline. We are about to become a society, by the turn of the century, there will be eight times as many people over the age of 60 and half as many kids under the age of 5. Nursery schools will become these strange situations with old people staring through fences at these creatures they don't see in the wild called children. Is this the world we want? Do we want a lack of kids? Do we want a lack of ability to create households? The happiest, most prosperous, most purposeful people in America are middle-class families. And we have made a concerted decision to punch it in the gut and make it harder for that type of family formation. And we're going to lose prosperity, and we're going to lose purpose.