• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Seven young men from around the world joined a roundtable hour with NYU professor and podcast host Scott Galloway to talk about his new book, “Notes on Being a Man.” The premise was simple: give the people he’s writing about a chance to press his thesis on economics, dating, mental health, and masculinity, and let the cameras roll. Here’s some of what happened:

Daniel Gerlei, president of the Global Young Entrepreneur Society, opened the hour from Vienna. He asked Galloway what a world looks like where young men are actually doing well.

Galloway answered by describing a society where everyone has “a shot” at dignity, economic security, basic healthcare, and the ability to form deep relationships. Then he went straight to policy. “If I could get one thing through Congress,” he said, “it would be mandatory national service.” He pointed to Singapore and Israel, arguing that a year or two serving something larger than yourself gives young men purpose and “connective tissue” across class and race.

From there he zoomed out to the economics. People his age, he said, are 72% wealthier than their peers were 40 years ago, while people in their 20s are 24% poorer than the last generation at the same age. Tax policy, home ownership, Social Security, and capital gains, he argued, have all combined to shift wealth upward. “We’ve effectively transferred money from young people to old people,” he said.

Then came Logan Mercer, from Birmingham, Alabama, a recent grad spending a few months at home helping his mom raise his younger siblings before preparing for law school. Mercer said much of Galloway’s diagnosis felt right, but pushed him on the frame: Class often seems more decisive than gender. He noted that graduation rates vary far more by state than by sex, and that suicide ratios between men and women differ widely across OECD countries.

Galloway didn’t flinch. If he had to pick, he said he’d focus on inequality before gender. “If you solve income inequality,” he told Mercer, “a lot of these problems get better immediately.” Attendance, obesity, anxiety, and suicidal ideation all map closely to household income.

But he added a second truth he didn’t want lost. Economic pressure, he said, lands differently on young men. “We still judge men on economic viability,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”

Matthew Stevens, a student at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, who works with the Log Off movement and Design It For Us, shifted the conversation to dating. Young women he talks to say young men are “sex first.” Young men tell him they’re afraid to even approach women because they don’t want to come off as a creep. What, he asked, is driving that, and how do you fix it?

Galloway began by acknowledging the long history of male violence against women, but said the social narrative has swung too far in the other direction. “We’ve turned all male desire into something suspicious,” he said. He pushed back on that framing. A young man’s desire for connection, he told Matthew, is “a feature, not a bug.”

Then he gave the statistic he said alarms him most: Only one in three men under 30 in the U.S. is in a relationship, compared with two in three women. “That’s a crash,” he said. Younger women, he argued, are dating older men because they’re seeking emotional and economic stability. Seventy-five percent of women say a partner’s economic viability matters; only 25%  of men say the same about women. For Galloway, the dating crisis isn’t separate from the economic crisis — it’s a symptom of it.

From Palo Alto, Saheb Gulati introduced himself as a Stanford student in computer science and philosophy who runs an organization called the Center for Youth and AI. He said Galloway is right to describe a structural crisis, but pressed him on the other half of the equation: how much of the problem in young men’s lives is structural, and how much is self-imposed? The manosphere tells guys everything is society’s or women’s fault. If you had to put numbers on it, he asked, would it be 80/20 structural to self-imposed, or the reverse?

Galloway said you can’t disentangle the two. “When you abandon young men economically, culturally, and educationally, someone is going to come along and weaponize that resentment,” he said. He argued that the vacuum has been filled by influencers and ideologues who monetize anger and misogyny. But he pushed back on the idea that young men are powerless. “Victimhood is a tempting drug,” he said, “but it’s also a dead end.”

He said the fix starts with what he called “boring structural stuff”: economic reforms that give young people a real shot, and more male teachers in K–12 so boys see adults who look like them succeeding in school. “If you repair the structure,” he told Saheb, “a lot of the self-pity and manosphere bullshit evaporates.”

Then Seán Killingsworth came in from Orlando, Florida, introducing himself as the founder of the Reconnect Movement, which builds phone-free social clubs in high schools, colleges, and communities. His question was simple: How are young men supposed to build real social and romantic lives when no one looks up?

“We’ve taken the most powerful technology in history and handed it to 14-year-olds,” Galloway said. He argued that no one under 18 should be on social platforms or in synthetic relationships with AI, and he compared age-gating to long-standing norms around other addictive products. “We don’t let teenagers buy cigarettes or alcohol,” he said. “Why do we let them mainline algorithmic content?”

He also pushed for a return to physical gathering spaces. “We’ve starved young people of third places,” he said. Parks, gyms, clubs, community centers — all the spots where people meet by accident. And then he offered one of his more candid takes, defending alcohol in moderation for young adults as a social catalyst. “The danger right now isn’t a beer,” he said. “The danger is isolation.”

Later in the hour, Zach Severyn from Vancouver said he’s noticed something odd: Galloway’s message hits hard with parents, yet doesn’t always feel aimed at the generation actually living the crisis. How, he asked, does Galloway balance speaking to the parents while the kids are the ones inside the blast radius? And what would it take to get both groups in the same room?

Galloway said his audience splits in a predictable way. “My biggest fans are young men,” he told Severyn, “but my most vocal supporters are mothers.” They see daughters thriving and sons withdrawing into video games and vaping, and they’re desperate for answers. He said his advocacy is partly an attempt to repay the support he got from an earlier era. “I’m a product of big government,” he said. “College was cheap. Housing was attainable. The ladder was there.”

On what needs to happen now, he went straight to politics. “We have the oldest Congress in history,” he said. He repeated his offer to send a thousand dollars to anyone under 40 who runs for office, and pushed young people to stop treating politics as something happening to them. America, he said, is still more promising than many young people believe, but only if they show up. Otherwise, “the sucking sound of prosperity from your generation to an older generation is going to continue.”

The hour ended not with a policy question but with a father-to-father ask.

I asked Galloway to share something he does with his teenage son that brings them both joy. He said he still lies down with his 15-year-old at night and talks for about ten minutes as he falls asleep.  The moments that matter, in his view, happen in the car, or on the couch, or in the dark when no one is performing.

Galloway closed with the line that may linger longest with any fathers who read the book: The thing that will make his sons better men, he said, is not what he tells them, it is how he treats their mother. Modeling respect and affection for her will do more to shape the kind of men they become than any speech he will ever give, he argued.

The conversation did not resolve the contradictions it surfaced. What the young men drew out of Galloway was not a neat answer, but a clear picture of what they're asking for: structure and purpose, economic oxygen, spaces to meet in person, room to desire without being demonized, and a political and economic order that does not treat them as an afterthought.

You can watch the entire roundtable here.