Scott Galloway on being young, male... And Jewish

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 1 I need to catch up and make sure my kids who've had no religious indoctrination feel a connection and, in a nod to me, even if they don't feel it, are always going to be supportive of Israel.

Speaker 1 Because what I find is: okay, 2 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Catholics, a billion Chinese, 1.4 billion Indians, and 15 million Jews.

Speaker 1 It's like, if you're not like in the game and advocating for us, we're going away.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's just not going to take a lot to take out 0.2% of the population when it appears that a lot of people seem pretty dead set on that.

Speaker 2 It's 4 p.m. on Wednesday, November 26th here in New York City as Americans get ready to turn to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. It's 11 p.m.

Speaker 2 on Wednesday, November 26th in Israel, where Israelis are winding down their day. On Tuesday night, fallen hostage Dror Orr was returned to Israel.

Speaker 2 Dror was murdered on October 7th at Kibbutz Beri by Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who took his body hostage. His wife, Yonat, was also murdered.

Speaker 2 On October 7th, two of his children, Noam and Alma, were abducted alive and returned during the first ceasefire deal in November of 2023. As of now, there remain two more deceased hostages in Gaza.

Speaker 2 On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order that seeks to designate certain country chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terror organizations.

Speaker 2 The directive stops short of an official designation, which will take more time, but if successful, will lead to sanctions against these groups.

Speaker 2 Following this development, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated, and I quote here, the state of Israel has already outlawed part of the organization and we are working to complete this action soon, close quote.

Speaker 2 This statement prompted some journalists and others in the political class in Israel to question whether Netanyahu is suggesting an impending ban of the Arab-Israeli political party called Ram, which is led by Mansur Abbas.

Speaker 2 This is because Ram is linked to the southern branch of the Islamic movement in Israel, which in turn is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, a feud between Defense Minister Yisrael Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Ayel Zamir is unfolding in the public eye.

Speaker 2 The dispute regards the IDF's investigations into the failures of October 7th, as well as Katz's decision to freeze senior IDF appointments for the time being.

Speaker 2 On Tuesday, Prime Minister Netanyahu met separately with both Katz and Zamir in an attempt to de-escalate the public spat.

Speaker 2 Today, speaking at a ceremony commemorating the death of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, Zamir stated that Israel needs, quote, courageous, transformative leadership that does not quote, evade responsibility.

Speaker 2 In other news, according to a New York Times report, the Trump administration is pushing for the swift construction of residential compounds in the Israel-controlled area of the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 2 These, quote, alternative safe communities would each house between 20 to 25,000 Palestinians. Now on to today's episode.

Speaker 2 Our guest today is Scott Galloway, who's been on the podcast several times before. Scott is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business.
He has founded nine companies.

Speaker 2 He's authored a number of best-selling books. He's the host of the Prof G podcast, and he's also the co-host of Pivot.
He also runs the No Mercy, No Malice newsletter, which you can subscribe to.

Speaker 2 We'll have a link to it in the show notes.

Speaker 2 Scott has also been very open about the impact that October 7th and its aftermath had on his worldview, on his Jewish identity, something we've spoken with him about before on Call Me Back.

Speaker 2 So today we talk a bit more about this. Mostly, we discuss the ideas Scott explores in his new book titled Notes on Being a Man and how it intersects with Scott's Jewish identity.

Speaker 2 This is Call Me Back.

Speaker 2 And I am pleased to welcome back to the podcast now for the third time my friend Scott Galloway. Why don't you tell our audience the podcast you were recording just before you came on to join me?

Speaker 1 Well, it's very similar. I was on with Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop podcast.

Speaker 2 So this means many of our listeners are going to hear this conversation twice because there's huge overlap.

Speaker 2 Like we're basically cannibalizing the conversation by Gwyneth and I sharing you back to back like this.

Speaker 1 We're clearly all going to talk about $75 scented candles. She's got a pretty nice life.
She lives in Montecito. She still looks 25.
She looks great.

Speaker 1 And she's selling like shit for 75 bucks to a hugely devoted audience. She's living her best life.
Anyways, how are you, Dan? Where are you?

Speaker 2 I'm in New York City. I'm in New York City, the capital of the Jewish diaspora.
I've been watching you from afar bounce around in these live podcasts you've been doing, this live tour.

Speaker 2 And I will say, try to imagine your 1980s or 1990s self and telling that person that in 30 years or so, 30 plus years, you'll be traveling around the United States, filling out live concert halls, doing live recordings of something called a podcast.

Speaker 2 And it would be like all the rage. I mean, it is sort of nuts, right? You basically record a conversation in front of an audience and this is treated like a rock concert tour.

Speaker 1 It makes no sense to me. The whole thing seems strange to me.
In terms of expectations, I had high expectations for success.

Speaker 1 You can never imagine, as I'm sure you can't, the format it's going to take. I came out of the gate strong.

Speaker 1 Like right after business school, I started a company and it was in a strong economy and I hit something and I was in the right place at the right time and I had a bunch of early success.

Speaker 1 And then I kind of went sideways for 10 years.

Speaker 1 And I think that that was especially hard because having had registered some initial success, you assume that your trajectory is going to maintain.

Speaker 1 And when it doesn't and you kind of wake up and you're in your 40s and you're like, I'm not as successful as I thought I was going to be at 30. Like I was more successful at 30 than I was at 40.

Speaker 1 That, quite frankly, really messes with your head. And I always say, after working my ass off for 35 years, I'm an overnight success.
Yeah, it feels great to be the fans and the cities.

Speaker 1 It was a ton of fun. A lot of work, but a ton of fun.
Actually, I'm pretty sure you could fill pretty big halls right now. Well, we.

Speaker 1 I saw you fill a big hall at some temple or something. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 We did a live podcast at the Stryker Center after the Gaza deal was announced. We announced it with like six days' notice.

Speaker 1 That must have been a laugh riot.

Speaker 2 Six days' notice, by the way. Six days' notice.
And we, you know, had a big turnout for me and two of my Israeli regulars, a meeting the dove.

Speaker 2 And, you know, what I realize is the stage stage is an important part of it but the smallest part of it what i realize with many of these events is the sense of community is a huge part of the attraction people feeling as connected with one another as with what's happening on the stage so there's i can't quite figure it out but there's something going on there that is more than just the experience of just like watching a performance it is very rewarding it's fun in person the other thing that's rewarding is releasing a book and having it the number one best-selling book on amazon that's also rewarding yeah you've left uh number one on the New York Times.

Speaker 1 I need you

Speaker 1 to invest in this relationship, Dan.

Speaker 1 Dan, Dan, Dan, I don't like to fall into the trappings of your capitalist metrics.

Speaker 1 I don't care.

Speaker 1 If it touches some people's hearts, that's the whole objective for me. Yeah.
Right. Daddy's number one, Dan.

Speaker 2 Notes on being a man. I mean, I know you've been talking about this issue, and we're going to get into it for a while.

Speaker 2 I'm just, before we get into it, I am curious, did you anticipate it finding such a big audience? Because there was always a risk that there was going to be a backlash.

Speaker 1 It's sort of strange. It has inspired some backlash.
Online, I've had a lot of people say, you know, point out the soft tissue in it.

Speaker 1 And actually, some of the criticism I think has been valid. But it felt like the timing was good.
It feels like the dialogue, people were nibbling around the edges.

Speaker 1 But it's a conversation I think a lot of people are having in different environments. And I have the platform right now, and I've been talking about this for a while.

Speaker 1 You know, I have a big enough footprint to create awareness around it. So I got the sense this was going to do well.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's get into it. I have a bunch of specific questions, but let's just start in macro terms.

Speaker 2 How would you summarize what happened to men in American society, Western society, since you, Scott, came of age?

Speaker 1 Disproportionate amount of advantage to people my age. From 1945 to 2000, America registered a third of the economic growth on the planet with 5% of the population.

Speaker 1 So reductively six six times the prosperity of the rest of the planet.

Speaker 1 And then within that massive prosperity, it was all crammed into one-third of the population that was white, male, and heterosexual. And so I had gale force wins in my sales.

Speaker 1 Everything from applying to UCLA 74% admissions rate, bought a home in San Francisco for $280,000, tuition for all seven years undergrad and graduate school cost me $7,000 total tuition.

Speaker 1 So I had a lot of environments, a lot of places to meet women and demonstrate excellence, a lot of romantic and mating opportunities, a progressive tax structure that invested in these big technology bets, whether it's GPS or DARPA, post-apocalypse communications network.

Speaker 1 And I was able to start companies building on that infrastructure that was from the government. I got assisted lunch.
I got Pell Grants. Immigrants built my businesses.

Speaker 1 All these things that were just incredible advantages for me and also unfair advantage. Through the 90s, I probably raised a couple hundred million dollars for my startups.

Speaker 1 And I never stopped to bother and ask, why are there no women raising money? Why don't I know any gay CEOs?

Speaker 1 And the reality is there was this huge conscious and unconscious bias against anyone who wasn't a white heterosexual male. So growing up, unfair advantage.

Speaker 1 And then slowly but surely, I think over the last 20 or 30 years, for a lot of reasons, sociological, biological, economic, young people have really struggled.

Speaker 1 The average person our age, Dan, or my age, is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24% 24% less wealthy.

Speaker 1 That has taken an especially difficult toll on men because men are still largely evaluated based on their economic viability. And I'm not talking about the way the world should be.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about the way the world is.

Speaker 1 Relationships have become a luxury item. If you're in the upper quintile of income earning homes, there's a four in five chance you're going to get married.

Speaker 1 If you're in the lowest quintile, there's a one in five chance you're going to get married.

Speaker 1 So relationships, including what is considered the key relationship, the opportunity to mate and procreate and have a real life partner, has become a luxury item.

Speaker 1 We have seen a total reversal in education.

Speaker 1 And that is, I think the education system is in fact biased against boys, twice as likely to be suspended on a behavior-adjusted basis if you're a boy, five times as likely if you're a black boy.

Speaker 1 And when we kind of leveled the playing field and tilted it towards girls with Title IX, which I think is a wonderful thing, I don't think we should get in the way of it.

Speaker 1 We now have 60-40 female to male. And it's more like two to one when you look at graduation rates because men drop out at a greater rate.
And then you have the big tech enters the scene.

Speaker 1 And while we know it's bad, I don't think people really realize how much damage it's doing to young men. Men biologically have a prefrontal cortex that is 18 months behind a woman.

Speaker 1 They're sort of gas on, gas off break. Stop playing video games and study.
And what's happened is.

Speaker 2 No, you call it in the book the CEO of your brain.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the brain CEO. And the reality is, 12 seniors in high school, boy and a girl, the girl's competing against a 10th grade girl.

Speaker 1 And you have big tech. 40% of the SP by market cap now is 10 companies whose sole mission is to get you to spend every day another 30 seconds on a screen versus with relationships.

Speaker 1 And there's billions of dollars at the incremental second they can put you online.

Speaker 1 And they found that polarizing you and sequestering you from your families, friends, and potential mates in the workplace is hugely profitable.

Speaker 1 So I feel like the economy has now attached to one objective, and that is to take advantage of the immature male brain and evolve an asocial, asexual species of young men.

Speaker 1 And I worry now that with a combination of fewer economic opportunities because of destruction in our manufacturing base, mixed messages from the community around what it means to be a man and how men probably shouldn't approach strangers or mental contact with women.

Speaker 1 I think they get mixed messages, a lack of the kinds of jobs that usually existed for men who may not be as academically oriented as their female counterparts.

Speaker 1 And then this indomitable enemy with godlike technology trying to convince them they can have a reasonable facsimile of life on a screen with an algorithm.

Speaker 1 And we end up with one in three boys under the age of, or men under the age of 25 living at home. One in five men at 30 are still living at home.

Speaker 1 And while women continue to get taller metaphorically and economically, that is amazing. We should do nothing to get in the way of that.
I want to be clear. It's been great.

Speaker 1 I think something the far right gets wrong is it's come at the expense of men. That's just not true.
We needed women in the factories in World War II.

Speaker 1 The 70s and 80s, we wouldn't have maintained economic growth without women in the workplace.

Speaker 1 It does have some knock-on effects, though, and that is men made socioeconomically horizontally and down, women horizontally and up.

Speaker 1 And when the pool of horizontal and up keeps shrinking, there's just an absence of mating opportunities for both sexes.

Speaker 1 Because as many subscriptions, The Atlantic and the New York Times as you have, there's still a very strong correlation between sexual interest and perceived economic viability of the man.

Speaker 1 And when fewer are more economically viable than women, there's just less mating.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how we're going to change that. And I think we need a new definition of what it means to be a provider, including supporting your spouse who might be better at that money thing.

Speaker 1 But when the woman starts making more money than the man, the likelihood of divorce doubles and the use of erectile dysfunction drugs triples.

Speaker 1 So as much as we'd like to think, well, it's fine, you know, this is great. I do think that dual-income homes are key in this society where it's gotten so expensive.

Speaker 1 And I think men would really benefit from universal child care that eased up economic anxiety.

Speaker 1 But you now have about one in seven men qualify as what's called a NEET, and they're neither in education, employment, or training.

Speaker 1 And I think we're going to start to see, Dan, fewer and fewer young men out in the wild. I think they're literally sequestering from the rest of society.

Speaker 2 So you talk in the book about deaths of despair, which is a topic we dedicate a whole chapter to it in our last book about Israel.

Speaker 2 And there's been this direct correlation where Western societies are becoming wealthier and wealthier, and yet we've had this crisis, this public health crisis of deaths of despair.

Speaker 2 So how does the phenomenon you're describing connect to the deaths of despair?

Speaker 1 So deaths of despair, alcoholism, opiate overdoses, drunk driving accidents, suicide.

Speaker 1 Since 2004, so over the last 21 years, the incremental number of deaths of despair amongst men, not what was happening every year, but the increase in deaths of despair in the last 20 years amongst men has taken more male lives in World War II.

Speaker 1 So more incremental deaths from deaths of despair than young men died in World War II. So I think it's a lot of things.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of young men are purposeless, are not attaching to church, not attaching to work, not attaching to relationships.

Speaker 1 I think they feel a lot of economic anxiety and they have a brain that is more prone to addiction. You know, we talk about the homeless and the opiate crisis.

Speaker 1 What we really have is a male homeless and a male opiate crisis. They're three times more likely to be addicts, three times more likely to be homeless.

Speaker 1 Gambling really freaks me out right now, the availability. or ubiquity of online gambling.
One out of two college-aged men bet on the Super Bowl, and it's just impossible to win over the long term.

Speaker 1 It's not investing, it's gambling. So I think a lot of young men end up obese.
We have a food supply that is, quite frankly, monetizing obesity.

Speaker 1 I think that whether it's McDonald's or PepsiCo, their stock price is directly correlated to obesity, and then they hand them over to the industrial healthcare complex of knee replacement, hip replacement, kidney dialysis, statins.

Speaker 1 I think there's just a lot of money in obesity. And we continue to tell people they're not obese.
They're finding their truth, which is bullshit. They're finding diabetes.

Speaker 1 And I'm not suggesting we don't have empathy for them. But we end up with a generation of young men who are,

Speaker 1 they don't have relationships. They don't have the guardrails of relationship.
They have romantic opportunities. They don't have economic viability.

Speaker 1 And then 210 times a day, they're reminded on their phone that they're failing.

Speaker 1 And I think you wake up, a lot of these men wake up with real anxiety and real depression and unfortunately turn to substances. Much more.
Six out of seven gambling addicts are men.

Speaker 1 Three out of four drug addicts, men. So, you know, the numbers here, if you walk into a morgue and there's five people who have died by suicide, four are men.

Speaker 1 And unfortunately, because of the unearned privilege of my generation and to a lesser extent, of your generation of men, my age, there's a lack of empathy for them.

Speaker 1 If there was any special interest group killing themselves at four times the rate, we'd weigh in with programs as we should. But when it's men, it's like, sorry, you've had a 3,000-year head start.

Speaker 1 And the question I present to everybody is, hold me accountable. Don't hold a 19-year-old accountable.
I get I had unearned privilege.

Speaker 1 I'm even up for like, I don't think a wealth tax would work, but conceptually I get it. I've had a disproportionate amount of privilege, but we appear to be holding young men accountable.

Speaker 1 And by any metric, they have fallen further faster than any group in American history.

Speaker 2 So anyone that knows you knows that this is all very personal to you. You talked a little bit about that.
I was struck by it.

Speaker 2 It was very much, it's not what I expected because I've heard you talk about these issues on and off over the years.

Speaker 2 The book almost feels to me, Scott, like part memoir, personal memoir, coming of age, growing up, memoir. So that's what I didn't expect from the book.

Speaker 2 So the book is like, it's very much your story, right? I mean, was that what you had intended to do?

Speaker 2 Like when you said, I'm going to write this book on lessons for men and boys, I'm going to wind up doing it through the lens of my own story.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And everybody says the same thing.
They think they're going to read something about what it means to be a man from an endocrinology or anthropological or societal.

Speaker 1 And it's really just a lot of it is where I, quite frankly, came up short as a man and what I learned from it and what I would try and teach my boys.

Speaker 1 And I talk a lot about my childhood and growing up without a father figure and what it was like to be raised by a single mother and economic success and what it meant.

Speaker 1 But the book initially started as, all right, chapter one, testosterone.

Speaker 1 And I'm trying to figure out, okay, I tried to do a ton of research, like, okay, there's a surge of testosterone in utero, then at three months, and then again at 17.

Speaker 1 And finally, I'm like, I am out so far over my skis. I'm not an endocrinologist.
I'm not an adolescent psychiatrist.

Speaker 1 And my agent, Jim Levine, who's a role model of mine, guy, 75, great shape, married for 50 years, just great at what he does. He says, you're approaching this wrong.

Speaker 1 He said, you're opening yourself up for so much criticism because you're not an expert in any of these things.

Speaker 1 But you do have an ability to talk about your own life experiences in a very raw, authentic way and set it against the context of trying to become a man. And so it did become more autobiographical.

Speaker 1 Like, this is what my observations around a certain code and a certain means of behavior around what I think it means to be a man and how it has, you know, where I've done well and where I've missed the mark.

Speaker 1 You know, the bottom line is I don't have the skills or the domain expertise to talk about what happens in utero that separates, you know, someone who's born as a male or a female.

Speaker 1 I'm not a gender studies PhD, but this is meant to just be, okay, this is what I think I've learned, where I've screwed up, where things have worked for me, and what hopefully young men can take from it and try and form an aspirational vision of masculinity.

Speaker 1 And I'd like to think most of it is right, but I know some of it's wrong. And I'm very open to a debate here or a dialogue.

Speaker 1 But what I want is my life's gotten much easier as a quote-unquote, I don't know, author or thought leader when I said, all right, my job is to inspire a dialogue and my heart's in the right place.

Speaker 1 And I do the research and I have 15 pages of notes and citations here. But also recognize that if I inspire a dialogue, that's the key.
I just want to get a dialogue.

Speaker 1 I'd like to be right, but more importantly, I want to inspire a dialogue. And that's what I'm trying to do here.

Speaker 1 But it's definitely much more autobiographical and less like academic than anything I've written.

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Speaker 2 We have a number of listeners to this podcast who either live in Israel or are very familiar with the Israeli story.

Speaker 2 And when I say the Israeli story, I don't mean the Israeli political story, but I mean the Israeli societal story.

Speaker 2 Saul Singer and I wrote a whole book about Israeli society and why we think it's so much healthier for everybody, especially young people, than Western society today.

Speaker 2 And I want to just tick off a few phrases or words that you use in the book because I read those and I thought, wow, that's how Israelis raise boys and young men.

Speaker 2 So I just want to rattle some of these off back to back because they come from different parts of the book. And then I want to go through each one.
So the ones that I made note of was fraternities.

Speaker 2 You're a champion for fraternities, meaning Greek life on college campuses here.

Speaker 2 quote, being a warrior in your 20s, not being ashamed of your failures, and friendship, the importance of all of those things. Now, some of those things actually could be quite controversial here.

Speaker 2 And to me, they speak to something that Israel is actually doing quite well in terms of how they raise young males. And I'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker 2 But before I do, I want to go through each one of these. So why are you a believer in fraternities? Because that's controversial.

Speaker 1 I needed to be around other men. I didn't grow up with a lot of men.
And also just getting to UCLA on a very basic level and shrinking it down from 30,000 people to a group of 100 people.

Speaker 1 I also needed the guardrails of male mentorship. My third week at UCLA, you get a quote, quote unquote, a big brother, right?

Speaker 1 And by the third week, my big brother sat me down and said, you need to smoke less pot. You're getting stoned every night.
It's a lot of fun. But I was 17 when I showed up to UCLA.

Speaker 1 I just didn't have the judgment to handle all the temptations.

Speaker 1 And having an older man who was 21, who seemed like this incredibly impressive guy, tell me to stop smoking pot because he was living in proximity to me.

Speaker 1 And also just to do shit like, no, no, no, no, you don't take chemistry. That's a hard course.
Take psychology. That's easy.
You need the confidence of passing your classes your first semester.

Speaker 1 So just having a small group of men who immediately you have something in common with and who seem to have a vested interest in your success.

Speaker 1 So when you join a fraternity, I went on to be in a fraternity council president. I was king of the jarheads.
When you join a fraternity, you become twice less likely to drop out. Really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you kind of have your people. Wow.
Also, they give a lot more. They stay much more involved in the university, give a lot more money.

Speaker 1 Some people would say that's white male privilege, but there's some very positive things. They do better academically, kids and fraternities.
The bottom is you need to find your people.

Speaker 2 But Scott, how do you juxtapose that or contrast that with this perception that fraternity is, you know, full of crazy parties, a lot of booze, a lot of hazing?

Speaker 2 Like, how does that connect with do better academically, more likely to stay in college?

Speaker 2 Actually, the way you're describing it, it's more likely to lead a constructive and responsible life in college, which is not the perception of John Belushi and Animal House.

Speaker 1 So I want to acknowledge, and I'm not really in touch with the fraternity system anymore, but when I was there, I want to be clear, on the whole, I thought it was a net positive.

Speaker 1 I also had a pledge brother almost die of alcohol poisoning. And I remember it was pledge pinning where you were hazed.
You were encouraged to drink more than you should.

Speaker 1 This kid next to me passed out and his eyes were rolling back. And someone said, just put him to bed.
And someone had the wisdom to say, no, we need to take him to the emergency room.

Speaker 1 And by the time we got him to the emergency room, he was breathing seven times a minute. There was real, real abuse in fraternities, real ugliness.
There was racism.

Speaker 1 One of the fraternities used to have a south of the border party where you'd have to crawl under barbed wire to get into the party. There was some really ugly shit.

Speaker 1 And I think a lot of that happens in the dorms and in other parts of the campus. I think a lot of that is just young men behaving stupidly.
I do think it's gotten better. I'd like to think it is.

Speaker 1 And I still think the risks of partying and alcohol are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation when you don't find your group.

Speaker 1 Now, you can find your group in theater, in the gay and lesbian sports teams, whatever it is. But people need to find their people and shrink that big space down.
I was 17 when I showed up.

Speaker 1 This was back in the space race where they thought anyone that could do well on a math test should skip a grade. My roommate was 16 when he showed up at UCLI.
Can you imagine being 16?

Speaker 1 Think about your kid when he got his driver's license. Alcohol, partying, pressure to meet girls, academic pressure.
So it's not right for everybody.

Speaker 1 Had I not personally not had the friendship and male bonding of the fraternity and quite frankly, the enjoyment, I would have not graduated from UCLA.

Speaker 1 I would have just not had the incentive to stay there. I wanted to stay in school, quite frankly, so I could stay in my tribe and be with my friends.
And also, You do get male mentorship there.

Speaker 1 They will step in and say, you know, you're screwing up. You need to stop.
So, are there real issues? Yes, but I would argue it's a net positive. All right.

Speaker 2 What about being a warrior? That also is provocative. The idea of encouraging young men being a warrior in their 20s.

Speaker 1 I think you play to your advantages. And something I think we need to celebrate, we celebrate the female form.

Speaker 1 It can grow bones and muscles and do something singular, give birth, and they're better balanced, more coordinated. I think we celebrate the feminine form.
And I guess we celebrate the male form.

Speaker 1 But what I would say, my advice to young men is under the age of 30, you're going to look back on your dense bone structure, your double twitch muscle and this amazing substance called testosterone, and you're going to wish you turned yourself into just a fucking monster.

Speaker 1 The strength you can acquire, the speed,

Speaker 1 it's just a marvel. And I jokingly say any man under the age of 30 should be able to walk into any room and know if shit got real, they could either kill and eat everybody or outrun them.

Speaker 1 I think taking advantage of that incredible physical form when you're a young man and having a bit of a warrior mentality, like I rode crew, and basically crew was who was willing to put themselves through more pain, one.

Speaker 1 Like we all had decent technique. We were all in decent shape.
It was about who was willing to endure more pain.

Speaker 1 And it has paid dividends my whole life.

Speaker 1 Whenever I'm really heartbroken and think I can't take anymore, no one wants to love me, or I have a business go chapter 11 and I think, fuck, I just can't handle this anymore.

Speaker 1 I know that when I think I'm at my limit because of crew, it means I'm a third of the way to my actual limit.

Speaker 1 So having that sort of intensity and testing your limits, I just think it's fantastic for a man.

Speaker 1 And also, I imagine for a woman, but I think that young men should take advantage of their aggression and their strength and channel it in really positive ways. Who breaks up fights at bars?

Speaker 1 Big, strong men. Who starts fights? People who feel bad about themselves.

Speaker 1 And being strong and having a little bit of aggression around lifting heavy weights and running long distances in your mind and in the gym.

Speaker 1 I used to, when I started at Morgan Stanley, I was just less educated than my peer group. And it wasn't because UCLA wasn't a great education.
It was because I graduated with a 2.27 GPA.

Speaker 1 I just didn't take it seriously. So I said, okay, what are my strengths here? I'm in great shape.
I have no relationships. I'm mentally strong.
Every Tuesday morning, I would show up at 9 a.m.

Speaker 1 and I would work till 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
I would work 36 hours straight. I wanted to show them I came to play.
I like that kind of warrior mentality. I was strong.

Speaker 1 I was a bit of a, you know, I was aggressive. I was willing to push myself really hard in the agency, not of my nation or of anything good, but of Morgan Stanley.
And it sent the right signal.

Speaker 1 And a lot of people would say, well, you're, you know, that's abuse and you're setting up unreasonable expectations. Yeah, fuck that.
Show up and be ready to play. Be aggressive.

Speaker 1 Push yourself really, really hard. Because what you're going to find is that confidence that you get from that serves you well the rest of your life.
So I like a little bit of this warrior mentality.

Speaker 1 Be strong, be aggressive, use it to protect people, use it to achieve, but yeah, be a warrior.

Speaker 2 So my younger son plays now. He's in the second season of playing tackle football.
And I sometimes, even especially recently, I watch him on the field.

Speaker 2 And he's now like developed real techniques for tackling. And I watch him.
And it's like when he gets on the field, this like switch goes on.

Speaker 2 And I sit there thinking, this is going to sound, I don't want it to sound overly harsh, but like it's almost like he's been trained in violence like when he gets on that field he's playing i mean let's just say it football is contact football is it's a violent sport and he's been trained now with technique 100 to deliver that to execute on that violence now what's interesting is he's also very careful about turning the switch off when he's off the field like really he's very mindful of that i don't know that that's in the coaching or something but when he's on that field this is like a different person

Speaker 2 and you know he's our baby i mean he's not a baby anymore but he's like our little kid and it's just it's sometimes a little unnerving to watch that, like the, you know, like his eyes lock in when he gets on that field.

Speaker 2 What you're basically saying is that it's not such a, we shouldn't find it so unnerving.

Speaker 1 The moment the game is called, they shake the hand of the opposing team. That guy just ran me over, hit me so goddamn hard and so violently.
But this is part of the game.

Speaker 1 And at the end of the game, great hit, brother. And they shake hands and they learn how to modulate that aggression and that violence.
So I, they learn how to play on a team.

Speaker 1 They learn how to be invested in something bigger than themselves. And I think that stuff is fantastic.

Speaker 1 Now, I would hope that your son is not that talented such that he doesn't spend his career in it because of head injuries.

Speaker 2 His mother feels the same way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you want him to just have a little bit of athletic talent, not a lot. Exactly.

Speaker 2 That's the Jewish dose, like just enough to play.

Speaker 1 The Jewish dose. I love that.
The J-dose.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 you know, pursue a different career. Friendship.
You talk a lot about friendship.

Speaker 2 It almost seems obvious the role that friendship plays in life and that you list it among some of these other items I just rattled off as as important as anything.

Speaker 1 If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and have friends and you don't smoke and don't have friends, you're going to live longer if you smoke a pack a day and have friends. We're a herding species.

Speaker 1 We're meant to be around other people. One in four men doesn't have a best friend.
One in seven men doesn't can't name a single friend.

Speaker 1 And also when men are less romantically viable, they tend to have fewer friends because oftentimes as you get older, you make your friends through your kids, friends, parents.

Speaker 1 Your partner, a woman, is usually more, has more talent from a relational standpoint, does a better job of maintaining friendships in environments where it's not as easy.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, and I've done a lot of, you know, I struggle with anger and depression. I wrote a book on happiness because I struggle with it.
Every study kind of says the same thing.

Speaker 1 And that is it all comes down to the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have across three areas.

Speaker 1 One, at work, do you respect and admire people and do you feel like they respect and admire you? Amongst your friends, do you feel a sense of joy and camaraderie?

Speaker 1 And what's really interesting is what's even more important or more accretive to your happiness is celebrities and rock stars have a lot of people that want to be their friends, but the happiest people are the ones that know they provide a lot of joy and camaraderie to other people.

Speaker 1 that they know they're a great friend and they know their friends get a lot of joy from them. And then finally, across your family, do you feel an intense level of love and support?

Speaker 1 And as important or more important, do you know they know they are intensely loved and supported?

Speaker 1 But friendship, I think that's one of the real problems with men right now is that they have very few venues to make friends. They're not going into work as much with remote work.

Speaker 1 They're not going to church or temple enough. Attendance to religious institutions is hit an all-time low in America.

Speaker 1 And they're not, they don't have as many venues to demonstrate excellence or find friends. I mean, it's just so important.

Speaker 1 And also, you can, romantic relationships, you can try hard, but they're a little bit more unpredictable when lightning strikes. Friends is a competence.

Speaker 1 You can figure out a way to find your people and have friends. And also, when people ask me, they say, I've been laid off, or I'm looking for a job, what's career advice you have?

Speaker 1 I think first thing is you need to be social.

Speaker 1 You need to be put in a room of opportunities, even when you're not in it. Google puts out a job opening.
They get 200 REST CVs within like 15 minutes because it's Google. They shut it down.

Speaker 1 They bring in the 20 most qualified people. 70% of the time, the person that gets hired has an internal advocate.
Oh, I know Dan. I can personally advocate for him.

Speaker 1 So if you want to be put in a room full of opportunities, if you want to have more professional success, be more social, make friends.

Speaker 1 Take every opportunity to help other people establish friendship and help other opportunities such that they think, you know, I would really like to help this guy or gal out.

Speaker 1 And that way, when they're in a meeting and they hear, oh, we're looking for someone to be a controller or CFO or in marketing, they go, oh, I know. I know this guy named Bob.
He'd be amazing.

Speaker 1 I think that's, and friends, you know, there's this cartoon of rich people that they're Monty Burns. They built a nuclear power plant and they crawled over people to get there.

Speaker 1 And I said this at your conference, generally speaking, other than men who have or people who have inherited money, really wealthy people generally over-index in friends.

Speaker 1 Because the only way you get to that point is if you've established a lot of allies along the way, that people want you to win and they keep finding opportunities for you.

Speaker 1 And I generally find on the whole that really wealthy people are generally high-character people.

Speaker 1 And the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you know, faction of the party want you to believe that rich people are not nice. Now, I would argue rich people are not paying their fair share.

Speaker 1 I think we should have more progressive tax structure. I am especially disappointed in the very wealthy people in the tech community.

Speaker 1 It seems to me they have not connected their good fortune and their blessings being born in America. They credit their grit and their character entirely.

Speaker 1 But on the whole, I think very successful people have one thing in common. They, generally speaking, have a much broader set of real friends.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: You talk a lot about mothers and the role of mothers in digging us out of this crisis, and you talk a lot about your own mother. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 How you think of the maternal role in dealing with this?

Speaker 1 Well, look, I'm a 60-1-year-old man that's still not over the death of his mother. I still, like, I have a tough time talking about my mom and not getting emotional.

Speaker 1 Every time something nice happened to me, you know, my mother would light on my life, single-immigrant mother,

Speaker 1 lived and died a secretary, raised me on her own.

Speaker 1 And anytime anything good happened to me, anytime, you know, my first bonus at Morgan Stanley, I got the number of an attractive woman in line at Starbucks, I'd call my mom right away, right away.

Speaker 1 Because you can brag to your mom, right? Your mom and your dad are the only people that want you to be more successful than them. And I'd say, oh, you know, I just got this number.

Speaker 1 And my mom would be like, well, of course you did. You're so handsome and you're so funny.
And you're, you know, it's like, okay, bring it up. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 And I used to call her after anything good that would happen to me because I know she would cement it for me and she just loved it so much.

Speaker 1 And I literally, Dan, anytime something good happens to me, my natural inclination is to call my mom, despite the fact she's been gone for 21 years.

Speaker 1 And for the longest time, it just didn't feel like it happened. If something good happened and I couldn't call my mom and tell her, it was literally like, oh, it doesn't really happen.

Speaker 1 It was like not cemented. My mom was, you know, pulled out of school at the age of 13, not well educated, not very sophisticated, but worked hard.

Speaker 1 And like every day in small and little ways just told me I was wonderful.

Speaker 1 And I do believe that, you know, as you get older, you like to reverse engineer your blessings and your success to some things and then try and reinvest in those things.

Speaker 1 And one of those things was I do think that if you have someone who's a good person and my mom was a good person, just telling, you know, giving you the sense that you're wonderful every day, you start to believe it.

Speaker 1 And I feel like I've had.

Speaker 1 a real base or cornerstone of confidence because of the irrational passion my mom had for my well-being and how emotive she was about just how much she not only loved me, but really liked me.

Speaker 1 She used to laugh hysterically at my jokes. And so what I say is I do think we recognize the importance mothers play.

Speaker 1 What we haven't recognized or what the data shows is that unfortunately, when a boy loses a male role model, he becomes at that moment more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting is that girls in single-parent homes actually have similar outcomes as girls in dual-parent homes, same rates of college attendance, same rates of income.

Speaker 1 They tend to be more promiscuous because they're looking for male attention in the wrong places. But on the big stuff, college attendance, self-harm, same rates.

Speaker 1 It ends up that while boys are physically stronger, they're mentally and emotionally much weaker than girls. And without male mentorship and male involvement, they tend to come off the tracks.

Speaker 1 And even just stating that five years ago, got huge pushback. What, you're saying women can't raise boys? No, look at my life.
Lie to my life.

Speaker 1 But you have to have, if you want to increase the likelihood of success of a boy, you need to have men in his life.

Speaker 2 I wasn't planning to get into this, but we've never, we've never talked about this in the podcast, but you and I have talked about this. Your mother was Jewish.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You were raised basically atheist, but your mother was Jewish, but yet there was some, I remember you telling me you had some experience with her.

Speaker 2 I can't remember listening to the rabbi's sermons and you guys would discuss it or refresh my memory.

Speaker 1 There was some kind of experience you had that clearly had made an impression on you from her in that regard well my mom occasionally would take me to temple and it was always sort of like it was more like a class she'd be like oh he's talking about israel he's talking about this and we should go it's going to be really interesting i think my mom was looking to meet single men quite frankly but we used to go and i remember thinking oh this guy is smart and it was more sort of educational than it was spiritual at least the temples i used to go to for a lot of synagogues i mean the rabbi's sermon is almost like a class i mean it's like a good university lecture yeah so it was very intellectual.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 I'd say I had sort of two basic exposures of Judaism. I was also in a Jewish fraternity.
I didn't realize it at the time.

Speaker 1 I rushed a bunch of fraternities and my criteria was, do you have live-in spots? And I walked into ZBT and then I found out after I got a bid, it was a Jewish fraternity.

Speaker 1 And the majority of the kids were Jews from the valley. And the thing that struck me there is that relative, I had a lot of friends in a lot of different fraternities.

Speaker 1 The kids at ZBT were quite frankly just more ambitious economically. They, from a very early age, and I think some of it's probably bad.

Speaker 1 It probably imparts a certain amount of pressure that might be unhealthy in some ways, but there was just a real focus on commercial success from a very early age.

Speaker 1 You know, the Phi Caps were just great guys who were partiers. The Phys were like handsome, cool guys.
The Zeebs were guys going to medical school. Right.
Right. I needed that.

Speaker 1 I liked being around guys who were very focused on success.

Speaker 1 And I never picked up on the spiritual side of it. I've never, and we've talked about this, felt much connection to Judaism.

Speaker 1 But what I picked up on was I found that these guys held in high esteem by the Jewish religion rabbis really loved ideas and loved communicating them. And I was very interested in that.

Speaker 1 And I still like, you know, I follow rabbi leader on TikTok. I still like the whole lessons and incorporating history.
I still find that fascinating.

Speaker 1 And also, I just think I came out of ZBT more ambitious. The SAEs aspired to be big and strong and ripped and athletes.
The Pfiz aspired to be cool with the ladies, and we all kind of aspired that.

Speaker 1 The Lambda Kais aspired to be good dressers and super dapper. And the Zeebs aspired to go to law school.
They aspired to go to top law school.

Speaker 1 I mean, and it's sort of a trope and I guess a stereotype. I'm probably offending a lot of people here.
I benefited from that. I wanted to have success.

Speaker 2 So these past two years, you and I have talked a lot about what's happened the last two years, post-October 7th.

Speaker 2 And I'm thinking about it in the context of what we're talking about now because you talk in the book about the importance of being part of a community and seeking purpose.

Speaker 2 And a lot of the mob mentality that was organizing against Jews, against Israel, you saw a lot of it on college campuses over these last couple years was some of it was naked, you know, just anti-Semitism, but actually I often felt some of it wasn't.

Speaker 2 Some of these kids that were joining these protests and the encampments and all of that, because I would sometimes, you know, I was visiting a lot of college campuses, so I'd like walk by some of these scenes and I would, you know, I wouldn't really engage the kids, but I kind of watched, and there was something sad about a lot of these kids that had joined this war on Israel, war on genocide, war on the apartheid, whatever you want to call it, right?

Speaker 2 And many of these people really didn't know what they were talking about. They didn't really understand the issues.

Speaker 2 You know, I hate to say this, they were a lot of young men, boys, who were looking for something, like community, a purpose, a calling.

Speaker 2 I don't want to read too much into this from like pop psychology here on the one hand. On the other hand, you do talk about this boys being lost.

Speaker 2 When I was reading your book, I was thinking about it in the context of the last couple years.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I mean, what was really rattling for me was there's a lot of Jews.
A lot of Jews with these protests. You're right.

Speaker 2 Although I would say many of those were Jews who were disconnected. Not all, but mostly, if you look at it, it's mostly Jews who were disconnected from Judaism, which is interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or had no sense of the history.

Speaker 1 Right. I think there's a lot that went into this.
And let me just acknowledge upfront. I don't think Israel has draped itself in glory from a perception standpoint.
We used to be the good guys, Dan.

Speaker 1 We're no longer the good guys. We were in Tebbe, Munich, acts of heroism, fighting back against unfathomable odds.
Now we're the dominant military power in the Middle East.

Speaker 1 And there's some credibility to the notion of oversettlements. I don't think Netanyahu is perceived as a person who sometimes is.

Speaker 1 There's just some,

Speaker 1 we've gone from David to Goliath. So let me start with that.
And I'm hoping that Israel, you know, I don't get to vote there.

Speaker 1 People get to vote for their own people, but I'm interested in the survival of Israel.

Speaker 1 And I do hope that there's a bit of a reckoning around some of the things that have happened in Israel and that they changed the leadership. I know that you're closer to the administration than I am.

Speaker 1 But then the primary things are sort of rooted in the following. And you can call it anti-Semitism, but it's more nuanced than that.

Speaker 1 And that is, at universities, we have done a real disservice to kids. And that is we have basically created this orthodoxy of oppressed and oppressor.

Speaker 1 That it's great that America is coming to grips with its history. There has been a lot of oppression of special interest groups.
So what happens is kids go on the hunt.

Speaker 1 They have some of that warrior aggression mentality and they're just learning about that we intern Japanese people or look at the bullshit that gay people have had to put up with.

Speaker 1 Look at the fact that women were not, you know, we're at 60 cents on the dollar from a just a pure sexism standpoint. There's a lot to be angry about.

Speaker 1 And you're either oppressed or you're a oppressor. And what I find is a lot of young thoughtful kids who are understandably upset about our past go on the hunt for what I call fake racists.

Speaker 1 And you're going to have a difficult time finding true racists on a campus. And yet we have a 200-person DEI group in Michigan when 55% of the freshman class identifies as non-white.

Speaker 1 I've always said wherever there is a DEI department, it means you're at one of the most diverse, equitable, and inclusive places already on the planet.

Speaker 1 And so you have these kids who are on the hunt for fake racists or fake oppressors in their proximity so they can express their outrage and be warriors of justice. It comes from a good place.

Speaker 1 The problem is that they don't, you know, to your point, well, which river and which sea are you talking about? Have you done any real research here?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 So the easiest way to do shorthand around oppressed and oppressor is two attributes, how rich and how white you are.

Speaker 1 And fairly or unfairly, Jews have been conflated with the richest, the whitest people on the planet. So boom, we have our oppressors, right?

Speaker 1 And then you have this zeitgeist on campus where we've decided the DI has gone so goddamn far that you can say things about the quote-unquote really rich white people, Jews, you would never be allowed to say about anyone else.

Speaker 1 If I passed out bans,

Speaker 1 the most shameful part of all this, like the moment I'm like, wow, we have really lost the script here.

Speaker 1 And I got involved and I reached out to the Regency, University of California, was when a UCLA, I'm pretty sure you saw this, a group of kids were sequestering the Quad Royce Hall, which is the main area of the campus, and you had to have a band and they only gave out bands to non-Jews.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm like, damn, do you realize if I found a group of students at UCLA in the 80s to pass out bands only to white kids and not to non-whites, and then I sequestered black kids from coming on campus, they would have called in the fucking National Guard.

Speaker 1 Right. I mean, that shit would have been shut down so fast, but instead there was like a need for nuance and context.
And I thought, and I love Chancellor Block.

Speaker 1 I'm still very involved in UCLA because I think the test of friendship is loyalty is when they screwed up, when, you know, your friends screw up. Oh my God, they screwed up.
And so.

Speaker 1 Israel has not draped itself in glory. You have this accidental DEI where the snake is eating its own tail on campus.

Speaker 1 And then the third thing we don't talk about as much, I just believe big tech is so fucking with us, specifically the CCP and TikTok. There's 55 pro-Hamas videos for every pro-Israel video.

Speaker 1 Young people are where they spend time, as are the rest of us.

Speaker 1 So when you see 55 to one pieces of content talking using words like genocide and mass starvation event, and there just aren't a lot of videos on, well, actually the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths is is lower than it's been in any previous war.

Speaker 1 And they're leaving millions of voicemails and dropping leaf. You don't do that when you're trying to commit a genocide.
You don't leave voicemails saying, please get out of this area.

Speaker 2 There have been hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed since October 7th.

Speaker 2 It would have been much simpler for Israel if they wanted to genocide the place to not send ground troops in and just obliterate the place from the air.

Speaker 1 They have nuclear weapons. They have nuclear weapons and heavy artillery.
Right. I believe somewhere between 2% and 3% of the population of Gaza has been killed.
That's a tragedy.

Speaker 1 But you want to talk about a genocide. I mean, Hitler took out 40% of Jews.
The Armenian genocide, it was like 50%.

Speaker 1 The Rwandans,

Speaker 1 80% of Tutsis were murdered, and about 100. If Jews in Israel are trying to commit genocide, they're not very good at it.

Speaker 1 So I thought there was this alchemy of just like a bunch of things. And what I just shocked me.

Speaker 1 When I look at World War II, I like the notion of distilling something down to its most basic level to try and understand it. I see World War II as the following.

Speaker 1 Germany and Japan killed 40 of the 60 million people that died. We're wringing our hands over Dresden and dropping the atomic bomb.
Japan killed 40 million people. They were brutal, brutal.

Speaker 1 What the Germans did to Russia was just inhumane. But we want to talk about, okay, fine, what we did, the nuclear, I get it.
Should we have dropped a second one? I don't know. War is terrible.

Speaker 1 But basically, I'm just shocked at how many people in Europe enabled the genocide.

Speaker 1 And when I tried to summarize October 7th, what I say is, if I try to distill it down, it's like, okay, a group of people butchered a group of Israelis and the whole world sort of said with their actions over the next 12 months, well, you know, maybe they had a point.

Speaker 1 Maybe there's a reason they did it.

Speaker 1 Maybe it comes from trauma, that they were so emotionally oppressed and devastated that it could justify, you know, taking people underground and then when they rescue them finding 53 different specimens of sperm on them.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's the victim's fault here. Like, and it's not, it's like, this isn't, in my view, if you just do any goddamn research, this isn't about trauma or emotional retribution.

Speaker 1 It's about a playbook that is excused by religious doctrine and enforced by violence. This isn't some acting out of trauma.
This is a playbook.

Speaker 1 And it is a threat to the West to think that we're going to sequester it to the small group of people we've decided are rich and white, so maybe they deserve a little bit of come up.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Dan, I still don't feel a lot of connection with Israel. I've talked to you.
I want to get back into it. I want to get back into Judaism.
It's just not going to happen for me.

Speaker 1 I think it's too late.

Speaker 2 I disagree.

Speaker 1 I know you're still trying. I'm still trying.
You're still trying. I appreciate that.
But where I do go is the following. I love American values.

Speaker 1 I love no child labor, jury trials, academic freedom, freedom of speech, democracies. And if the Knesset took over the White House and the Congress, the next day, we wouldn't know any different.

Speaker 1 Still problems. They're fucked up just like we are, but they're not going to start throwing gay people off roofs and calling me an apostate.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you want American values to flourish around the world and our aircraft carrier, the way I see Israel is just very real politic.

Speaker 1 It's the biggest, most talented aircraft carrier representing our interests in the Middle East. That's how I see it.
So I'm at a minimum, I see my support of Israel. It's just being very pro-American.

Speaker 2 Okay, you've said this to me many times. It's too late for me.
I'm sort of drawn to Judaism, you say, and you feel this connection to it, but it's too late.

Speaker 2 In your book, in the closing, which I thought was the most moving part of the book, which is your letter to your sons, you keep coming back to community.

Speaker 2 Find a community, be part of a community, be willing to defend a community. The advice you're giving your son, Scott, is one of, if not the cornerstone, I'd say one of the most important cornerstones.

Speaker 2 of Judaism and Jewish life, which is being a part of a community.

Speaker 2 And what I find one of the most powerful things about being part of a community, a Jewish community, is all the relationships in the community are non-instrumental relationships.

Speaker 2 When you go to synagogue on a Saturday, you're not sitting there next to the person whoever you're at synagogue with and thinking about, like, do they work at Goldman Sachs or not?

Speaker 2 Or, you know, what credential do they have? They're just part of your community. And they would help you through a difficult time and you would help them.

Speaker 2 And you'll wish them a Mazotov when they're going through some celebratory life cycle event.

Speaker 2 And they're a community of relationships where people are not calculating calculating the value of the relationships. That is so central to Judaism.

Speaker 2 And it sounds to me like that is what you want for your kids in that letter.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, I don't regret, I just never found faith and I'm envious of it from the people who do find it. I've never found it.
I have found community elsewhere. I have fantastic friends.

Speaker 1 I'm really good at with friends. I have found those communities.
So I've kind of scratched that itch. What I do regret then,

Speaker 1 I regret, and now I'm trying to catch up. Like, you know, I'm going to do the proverbial trip to Auschwitz with my sons.

Speaker 1 I do, like, I need to catch up and make sure my kids who've had no religious indoctrination feel a connection and, in a nod to me, even if they don't feel it, are always going to be supportive of Israel.

Speaker 1 Because what I find is: okay, 2 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Catholics, a billion Chinese, 1.4 billion Indians, and 15 million Jews.

Speaker 1 It's like, if you're not like in the game and advocating for us, we're going away. It's not about ideology.
It's about numbers.

Speaker 1 I mean, I mean, it's just not going to take a lot to take out 0.2% of the population when it appears that a lot of people seem pretty dead set on that.

Speaker 1 So what I do regret, and I'm trying to catch up with my kids, and you have to be careful because if you press anything too hard in the face of TikTok, they're going to go the other way.

Speaker 1 Like one of the things I'm planning to do before we leave is to go to Tel Aviv. And my strategy is simple.

Speaker 2 When you say before you leave, just because our listeners understand, you and your family are living in London right now, that's what you mean before you leave, not before you leave the world.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. You mean before you leave Europe? We're moving back.
We've lived there for three and a half years. We're coming back in six months.
Right. So before you leave, yeah.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But I know that my 18 and 15 year old son, they will love Tel Aviv. I'm going to take the cheap way out.
I'm going to be like, this is a cross between Miami and Berlin.

Speaker 1 I'm going to take them to great restaurants. I'll take my son to a couple cool bars.
They'll see how hot the women are. They're just going to like it.

Speaker 1 And they're going to be like, okay, this is, I would like to roll with these people. This is a cool city.
But I'm trying to think, okay, I need to get like the high low, like the fun of Tel Aviv.

Speaker 1 And then we go to Auschwitz. Right.

Speaker 1 But how do I ensure my boys, who I just don't think are going to end up in any religious institution at this point, a connection that when shit gets real, there's at least two more people who will devote their time, their treasure, and their talent to the survival and the flourishment of Israel.

Speaker 1 I feel like at a minimum, that's my obligation. I did not feel that sense of obligation previous to October 7th.
I love how you call me. What is it you call me, an October 8th Jew?

Speaker 2 An October 8th Jew.

Speaker 1 I deserve that.

Speaker 2 But I want to call you an October 2025 Jew too, which is now the war is over. And now it's like, so where do we go from here?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Those are the Jews that don't just, that weren't just Jews for the two-year war, but are actually, and it sounds like you are actually thinking about that.

Speaker 2 I want to talk to you about public service because you talk about it in the book

Speaker 2 as a remedy to some of the problems we've discussed. So can you say more about that?

Speaker 1 I got this from you, Dan. I am going down and speaking to the 47 Democratic senators about storytelling or about media.

Speaker 1 And what they want me to come down is they say, for positioning for 26 and 28, what programs, what big ideas? They basically said, we can't be the party of indignants.

Speaker 1 We have to be the party of ideas. And I know you're a Republican, but I'm coaching a lot of Democrats.
And that sounds pretentious, but it's true.

Speaker 1 And the one idea, they said, what are there like one or two ideas that you think would be really important for America?

Speaker 1 I'm like, okay, if there was anything I could do as related to young men, and this is an idea I got from your book, Startup Nation, is mandatory national service. It doesn't have to be military.

Speaker 1 It could be working at a no-kill shelter for dogs. It could be helping seniors.
It could be being a smoke jumper, teaching preschool, whatever it is. but in the agency of other kids.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned it, and I love this data. I think I even got it from your book, Lowest Levels of Young Adult Depression in the Western World.
Yep.

Speaker 1 When you're outside, when you're finding friends, mentors, and mates, I spent some time when I went to Israel with an IDF battalion, like whatever it is, 120 beautiful young men and women fit outside, learning that nothing like being in a foxhole.

Speaker 1 gets you to evaluate people based on their character and their grit and not on their identity, their income. They don't care who their dad is when you're being fired on.

Speaker 1 You don't care if they're gay or not. You just want to evaluate them on their skills and their character.
And these kids, the data is clear. This helps give young people a sense of purpose.

Speaker 1 I think it would be hugely accretive to the mental and emotional health of boys. I think a lot of boys at 18 are not ready for college or what's next.

Speaker 1 And I think a structured environment with around other people, high expectations, wake up early, work hard. The Mormon church does it with mission.
I think it's a really great idea.

Speaker 1 And the real free gift with purchase here is America has been so frayed that we have to get back to a point where people think of themselves as Americans before they think of themselves as Republican or Democrat or gay or whatever.

Speaker 1 And if you look at the periods where we had the most legislation, it was because all of our leaders had served in the same uniform.

Speaker 1 So if I could pass any one thing, if I had the magic wand, it would be mandatory national service for our young men and women.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I couldn't agree more. As you know, it is not only so healthy for boys, but it's also for, as you said, it's breaking down socioeconomic barriers.

Speaker 2 Because as you said, like you're in the hull of a tank, son of a tech billionaire from Tel Aviv, son of a bus driver, son of a religious Jew from the periphery of Israel.

Speaker 2 I mean, just everyone's in there and they're in the fight together, whatever that fight is. And I see it with these Israelis.

Speaker 2 These are relationships they have for life, and they don't view one another as the other. That's the most important thing.

Speaker 2 They go through these crucible experiences together, these crucible leadership experiences, these crucible bonding experiences together.

Speaker 2 And when they have that in like a bubble, if you will, meaning they're not around the normal environments that they grew up in, those relationships are formative and rock solid for life.

Speaker 2 And it really changes the whole complexity of the country. Scott, thanks for doing this.

Speaker 2 The book is Notes on Being a Man, which you should order today, lest Scott slips from number one on Amazon to number two. We want to make sure he stays on number one.

Speaker 2 And I will say, if Amit Segel or Nadavael are listening to this podcast, my regular contributors, if they now ever come on the podcast and say, I'm sorry, I'm running a few minutes late, I was on with Gwyneth Peltrow, they will have learned, if nothing else from this podcast, the ultimate flex.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I don't know, is that a weak flex? Is that a flex or a weak flex?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, it was good. It was good.
It was good.

Speaker 1 That was a good flex.

Speaker 2 It's the best excuse anyone has ever given for running late. So, anyways, good seeing you, Scott.

Speaker 1 Likewise, brother.

Speaker 2 Talk soon.

Speaker 2 That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Speaker 2 Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling.

Speaker 2 To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes, or you can go to arcmedia.org. That's arkmedia.org.
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Speaker 2 Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marianne Khalis Burgos.
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Speaker 2 Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.