Why 63% of Young Men Have Stopped Trying | Scott Galloway

What It Covers

Scott Galloway, NYT bestselling author of *Notes on Being a Man*, presents data on young male disengagement with Lewis Howes on The School of Greatness. Galloway covers statistics on male suicide, incarceration, and economic decline, while examining how big tech algorithms, remote work, and disappearing vocational pathways are producing a generation of isolated, untethered young men.

Key Questions Answered

• •Male Disengagement Statistics: 63% of men under 30 are not attempting to date, 1-in-7 males are NEETs (not in education, employment, or training), and 1-in-5 men under 30 still live with parents. Galloway frames these not as personal failures but as systemic outcomes driven by algorithmic sequestration, vanishing vocational pathways, and a wealth transfer of $1.22 trillion annually from working-age people to older generations who are 72% wealthier than 40 years ago.
• •Big Tech as Structural Threat: The top 40% of S&P 500 market value is tied to companies whose algorithms monetize every second a user spends off-screen. Young men, with less developed prefrontal cortexes and higher dopamine susceptibility, are the primary target demographic. Galloway argues this is not malicious but functionally produces asocial, asexual males who substitute Reddit for friendship, Robinhood for career ambition, and synthetic pornography for romantic pursuit.
• •Surplus Value as Manhood Benchmark: Drawing on researcher Richard Reeves, Galloway defines male adulthood not by age or ritual but by generating more economic, emotional, and relational value than one absorbs. He applies this to himself, acknowledging he did not reach this threshold until his forties, when he stopped treating relationships as transactions and began contributing more than he extracted from friendships, employees, and romantic partnerships.
• •The Three Pillars Framework: Galloway organizes masculinity around provider, protector, and procreator. Provider means economic viability in a capitalist context. Protector means intervening when others are demeaned, extending to emotional and psychological defense. Procreator reframes male romantic pursuit as a feature rather than a pathology, arguing the rejection tolerance built through dating attempts transfers directly into professional resilience and the capacity to accumulate career-defining "yes" outcomes.
• •Relationship Asymmetry and the Pay Principle: Data shows men benefit more from romantic relationships than women — widowers are less happy after spousal death while widows trend happier, and men without cohabitation by 30 face a one-in-three substance abuse probability. Galloway advises young men to always pay on dates, framing it as acknowledging asymmetric risk and benefit rather than sexism, and notes that 40% of men aged 18–24 have never approached a woman in person.
• •Mentorship as Single Point of Failure: When a boy loses a male role model through death, divorce, or abandonment, he becomes statistically more likely to be incarcerated than to graduate college — an outcome not replicated in girls from single-parent homes. Galloway identifies three times more women applying to be Big Sisters than men applying to be Big Brothers, and argues that informal mentorship — showing up at a rec center, asking basic questions, offering perspective — requires no credentials and produces measurable behavioral change.
• •Scorecard Removal as Relationship Unlock: Galloway identifies the single largest shift in his personal relationships as discarding reciprocity tracking. Rather than measuring what a father, partner, or employee returns relative to investment, he recommends defining the person you want to be in each relationship and holding only yourself to that standard. He applied this to a difficult relationship with his father, which produced decades of genuine closeness before his father's death at 95.