Name: Scott Galloway on the Importance of Role Models For Young Men
Uploaded: 2025-04-14T13:15:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scott Galloway on the Importance of Role Models For Young Men' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scott Galloway on the Importance of Role Models For Young Men' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-04-14. Transcript available.

so how does it start so let's say like how does it kind of start to if a lot of
people are growing up
because it feels like a lot of times that a lot of our media or our society has
wanted to break up
the nuclear family right yeah and i don't know if that's sometimes like i buy
into that um you know
i grew up outside of a regular family like you did and so you know you
definitely see the side
effects of that you know like um i have siblings that went kind of errant ways
and found uh you know
hope and purpose um and friendship in people that were making poor choices you
know i got kind of
lucky and and found some friends that were doing the opposite kind of um but
not having that role
model i think in the home probably um is probably a big start so if that's
something big that's going
on how do we like like where do we even start with that you know um like how do
you start to
fix the family first i guess i mean what do you fix first you know well like
role models you you've
exactly zeroed in on on the the ground zero of it if you look at so first off
let's look at the problem
if you go into a morgue and you have five young people who've died by side four
of them are men wow
but women aren't i mean women aren't there women don't want to they would
rather have somebody kill
them i think or you know what i'm saying that's crazy to say but it's like i
agree with you that
was crazy but they love dateline you know saying like women there's something
well they like crime
dramas there's a difference between like crime drama yeah but they want a guy
to unexpectedly come over
type of well there's there's some weird like so for example women are just as
prone to try to commit
unfortunately men are more comfortable with gunplay and are more successful at
it
but if you look at where a guy comes a boy comes off the tracks it's when he
loses a male role model
right more single parent homes than any any uh country except for sweden and
the interesting thing
is is that a girl in a single parent home when we say single parent we men we
mean 92 of the time
headed by mom right because usually children stay with the mom the family court
is very biased towards
women for a lot of good reasons some some less good reasons so a girl in a
single parent home just
living with mom has the same college attendance the same levels of self-harm
and depression the same
the same um likelihood of depression she's fine once a boy loses a male role
model he becomes dramatically
more likely more likely to be incarcerated less likely to go to college more
likely to engage in self-harm
what most of the studies show is that while boys are physically stronger they're
mentally
and emotionally much weaker than girls they mature later they mature later they're
more prone
to violence they're more prone to self-harm they're literally 18 months behind
their prefrontal
cortex they're biologically less mature and without the male role model the
deep voice
the admiration the the virtuous role model of a man they come off the tracks
and when you look at a lot
of our communities with how many single parent homes they have when you look at
a lot of kids aren't in
after school programs kids are obese not playing sports as much so they don't
have as much interaction
with a coach maybe they don't know a pastor because they're not going to church
or temple there are
millions of young boys who grow up and the first male role model they have as a
prison guard
and so wow the solution if you were to try and weigh in with programs
it's all right i think of another i think of mask i go back to masculinity the
first circle of masculinity
is you take care of yourself you're in good shape you have good self-care you
are economically viable
right you take care of yourself next ring out you can take start taking care of
your family okay help
out your parents help out your siblings you can start taking care of people at
work you overpay them
you're concerned about them you're empathetic with them out
because yeah two of them are in here you start taking care of your community
okay and then yeah
things that make you feel good things that make you feel purpose surplus value
and then i think
also we need to create a kind of a gestalt or default or zeitgeist in our
society where one of the ultimate
expressions of masculinity is you take an interest in the well-being of a boy
that's not yours and
unfortunately because of some very unfortunate instances in the catholic church
or well publicized
stories about chucky cheeses or michael jackson oh yeah i was on bill maher and
i said more men like
you bill need to get involved in a young man's life he's a single guy he's a
good role model he's like i
can't get involved in a 15 year old boy's life you know what they'd say about
me and that's the
problem because there's a lot of men out there with a lot of love to give who
feel a lot of
fraternal and paternal love and if you just did a quick survey of the people in
your work and your
neighbors you're going to find single mothers or a lot of your friends whose
sons are struggling
and you don't have to be a baller you just need to be a virtuous guy trying to
live your life
yeah and my mom was really good at that i had a guy down the hallway come over
with his girlfriend
and say we're going horseback riding and he took me and he would start taking
me my mom a couple of
my mom's boyfriend stay involved in my life after they were broken up i had a
stock broker uh theo when
i was 13 i walked into dean witter reynolds with 200 my mom's boyfriend had
given me and i bought 12
shares of columbia pictures for 16 bucks a share and every day for two years i'd
go to emerson junior high
pay booth put in two dimes and call him i wasn't a very popular kid two or
three times a week after
school i'd go to the stock brokerage if you're buying stocks at lunch yeah you're
not popular
you know hey you're forward thinking sure yeah but sure it's paid off now yeah
no i get that part
got me cool made me cool later in life yeah at a certain point yeah for sure
this guy cy sarah
this 30 year old guy working at dean winter and i'm 46 years later i got a text
from cy yesterday
we're still close oh that's cool yeah we we were out of each other's lives for
30 years and then we
reconnected i actually asked my class to try and track them down and they did
but if you're you know
i love the statement i think the true expression of manhood or being a good
person is planting trees
the shade of which you'll never sit under but i think more specifically for men
i'll give i'll ask
you straight up yeah are you mentoring any young men or boys let me think about
that
uh maybe my neph one of my nephews but i mean he has his father you know but i
think i keep a
constant relationship with him because i want to be a part of his life but in a
more local environment
in my community no do you realize in new york there's big sisters and big
brothers there are
three times as many applicants for big sisters than there are for big brothers
and why is that because
young men just aren't mothers don't get there or the kids the male the boys don't
apply i think men have
been told that if you take an interest in the life of a boy that there's
something wrong and people need
to be suspect of which yeah people would yeah people would definitely question
it oh it's crazy i
remember this started maybe about 10 years ago if i saw somebody's kid or
something and i wanted to
give them a compliment you feel like you couldn't gotta be careful yeah you and
then like suddenly like
you gotta be careful everything there's a legal issue or you can't um or people
are suspicious yeah
there's a famous case of this kid greg kelly can you bring that up who was uh
his mother was watching
she ran a home in their uh after school care in their home and one of the kids
accused him of
something and they don't it seemed very flippant but he ended up going to jail
for three years and
it seemed like a witch hunt you know yeah there was that child care place in
california where it
ended up it was all made up but but theo what you were talking about with your
nephew you can still
play a huge role because i can attest to this there's research showing your
nephew right now especially
once he hits 15 or 16 he's more he's more inclined to listen to you than his
dad wow
so i noticed this yeah did you notice things yeah who were some people that
yeah when you because
sometimes i do i think about a voice that could be just like dude sometimes it
was like um i remember
one of my mom's boyfriends bought me and my brother tickets to go see a saints
game right and we were
so excited it was like a big adventure for us you know um so i it is funny how
little things that
somebody shares with you um or moments that they have i remember there was a
teacher that would sit
outside with me and talk to me sometimes after class that was huge to me um
yeah it's it's it's
amazing the effect that you can have i guess you know that you don't realize
who were some of those
people for you i was really lucky i had i played sports so i had coaches a
couple of my mom's
boyfriends like i said after they broke up stay involved in my life i had cy
the stockbroker um and
also i'm a big fan of the greek system at colleges i joined a fraternity yeah
and while people talk about
everyone's got to find their tribe you got to find your brothers or your
sisters you got to shrink the
world down to a small group of people and for me i i don't think i would have
graduated from ucla had
i not joined a fraternity i immediately got something called a big brother i
had roommates we all kept
tabs on each other we all gave each other a tremendous amount of but it was
sort of like
a guiding guidepost yeah it's fun yeah oh dude there's so much fun like there's
nothing better than
like when you think about the times you were on a team of some sort right 100
just like the feeling
you know did you play sports growing up i did until i was like 11 years old i
didn't get i didn't do
much sports i played a little bit of baseball but it was like the field was
like uneven in our town
you know and so the every ball went to the same guy the field was uneven yeah
we had a bad field
over there and so all this dude and i was there you couldn't get the guy with
the radical like the
amazing fence to so to give you the new field yeah that's not a bad idea right
but it doesn't have to
be sports it can be banned it can be chess club it can be church but everyone's
got to find your tribe
right so that's so now we're looking at some solutions to some of the things
you're talking
about for young people and even for mothers that have single that you know
because a lot of times
with moms it's hard to find that space like how do i um put my kid into a place
that's going to be
safe or what's the type of thing to get them involved in you know and yeah i
think that was one
thing that was tough for my mom she just didn't have as much time i was
fortunate i had a
basketball coach that would give me rides home from practice and so that
changed a lot of things
because then as long as i could get to practice and i could get home um so that
was like an amazing
role model that had this guy coach steve that was really awesome um yeah i
think and and yeah you're
right like how can i do that in my own community like what are ways that i
could start to do that
but yeah so creating a group for your kid finding a group for your kid to be in
well there's a lot of
and there's a lot of more systemic things we could do so for example yeah i'm a
big fan of vocational
programming in america we have this kind of zeitgeist that if your kid doesn't
go to dartmouth and end
up at google then not only is the kid failed but you failed as parents and two-thirds
of our kids
are not going to end up with a college degree three percent of linkedin
profiles in the us say
apprentice it's 11 in the uk and german we need more of an apprentice culture
and we need to stop
shaming kind of trades jobs yeah i think we should start uh boys we should redshirt
them we should start
them a year later in um kindergarten because they're literally biologically
less mature than their
female counterparts you don't notice this as much because you don't have kids
but i have a 14 year old
my 14 year old just had a halloween party 15 boys 15 girls the boys are 14. a
couple of the
girls look like they could be the junior senator from pennsylvania yeah they
look 35 and they act that
way they act that mature they literally mature faster i think if a college isn't
growing its freshman seats
faster than population it should lose its tax-free status because it's no
longer a public service
it's a hedge fund with classes i'm a big fan of the idea of mandatory national
service i've spent some
time in israel recently despite the existential threats and the problems in israel
there's less
young adult depression in israel than almost any western country and i think it's
because of national
service they're serving the agency of something bigger than themselves they're
outside they're in great
shape they're learning how to handle weapons equipment it's where they meet co-founders
of businesses
it's where they make lifelong friends it's where they meet potential mates so i
think mandatory national
service would be huge for us what would you say to you to mothers who have
children right single mothers
who have children how can they do that for their kids you know one thing i do
that i will think is
put your kid into uh brazilian jiu-jitsu class i think it's the best it was the
best place that i ever
went i trained for like maybe a year and a half right yeah it was the first
place i ever went where
you would be wrestling one second but then having an emotional conversation
with somebody the next
second because it was very you and lex friedman you're both really into you
know he's really he's
still doing it practicing right yeah i just kept getting hurt so bad and it was
affecting my ability
to work yeah um but it was like you were like monkeys you know like you you
would like be battling
against somebody but even if you lost they still cared about you so there was
this element of safety
that you started to learn yeah right and um that felt like years of manhood in
months that i was learning

Scott Galloway on the Importance of Role Models For Young Men

so how does it start so let's say like how does it kind of start to if a lot of
people are growing up
because it feels like a lot of times that a lot of our media or our society has
wanted to break up
the nuclear family right yeah and i don't know if that's sometimes like i buy
into that um you know
i grew up outside of a regular family like you did and so you know you
definitely see the side
effects of that you know like um i have siblings that went kind of errant ways
and found uh you know
hope and purpose um and friendship in people that were making poor choices you
know i got kind of
lucky and and found some friends that were doing the opposite kind of um but
not having that role
model i think in the home probably um is probably a big start so if that's
something big that's going
on how do we like like where do we even start with that you know um like how do
you start to
fix the family first i guess i mean what do you fix first you know well like
role models you you've
exactly zeroed in on on the the ground zero of it if you look at so first off
let's look at the problem
if you go into a morgue and you have five young people who've died by side four
of them are men wow
but women aren't i mean women aren't there women don't want to they would
rather have somebody kill
them i think or you know what i'm saying that's crazy to say but it's like i
agree with you that
was crazy but they love dateline you know saying like women there's something
well they like crime
dramas there's a difference between like crime drama yeah but they want a guy
to unexpectedly come over
type of well there's there's some weird like so for example women are just as
prone to try to commit
unfortunately men are more comfortable with gunplay and are more successful at
it
but if you look at where a guy comes a boy comes off the tracks it's when he
loses a male role model
right more single parent homes than any any uh country except for sweden and
the interesting thing
is is that a girl in a single parent home when we say single parent we men we
mean 92 of the time
headed by mom right because usually children stay with the mom the family court
is very biased towards
women for a lot of good reasons some some less good reasons so a girl in a
single parent home just
living with mom has the same college attendance the same levels of self-harm
and depression the same
the same um likelihood of depression she's fine once a boy loses a male role
model he becomes dramatically
more likely more likely to be incarcerated less likely to go to college more
likely to engage in self-harm
what most of the studies show is that while boys are physically stronger they're
mentally
and emotionally much weaker than girls they mature later they mature later they're
more prone
to violence they're more prone to self-harm they're literally 18 months behind
their prefrontal
cortex they're biologically less mature and without the male role model the
deep voice
the admiration the the virtuous role model of a man they come off the tracks
and when you look at a lot
of our communities with how many single parent homes they have when you look at
a lot of kids aren't in
after school programs kids are obese not playing sports as much so they don't
have as much interaction
with a coach maybe they don't know a pastor because they're not going to church
or temple there are
millions of young boys who grow up and the first male role model they have as a
prison guard
and so wow the solution if you were to try and weigh in with programs
it's all right i think of another i think of mask i go back to masculinity the
first circle of masculinity
is you take care of yourself you're in good shape you have good self-care you
are economically viable
right you take care of yourself next ring out you can take start taking care of
your family okay help
out your parents help out your siblings you can start taking care of people at
work you overpay them
you're concerned about them you're empathetic with them out
because yeah two of them are in here you start taking care of your community
okay and then yeah
things that make you feel good things that make you feel purpose surplus value
and then i think
also we need to create a kind of a gestalt or default or zeitgeist in our
society where one of the ultimate
expressions of masculinity is you take an interest in the well-being of a boy
that's not yours and
unfortunately because of some very unfortunate instances in the catholic church
or well publicized
stories about chucky cheeses or michael jackson oh yeah i was on bill maher and
i said more men like
you bill need to get involved in a young man's life he's a single guy he's a
good role model he's like i
can't get involved in a 15 year old boy's life you know what they'd say about
me and that's the
problem because there's a lot of men out there with a lot of love to give who
feel a lot of
fraternal and paternal love and if you just did a quick survey of the people in
your work and your
neighbors you're going to find single mothers or a lot of your friends whose
sons are struggling
and you don't have to be a baller you just need to be a virtuous guy trying to
live your life
yeah and my mom was really good at that i had a guy down the hallway come over
with his girlfriend
and say we're going horseback riding and he took me and he would start taking
me my mom a couple of
my mom's boyfriend stay involved in my life after they were broken up i had a
stock broker uh theo when
i was 13 i walked into dean witter reynolds with 200 my mom's boyfriend had
given me and i bought 12
shares of columbia pictures for 16 bucks a share and every day for two years i'd
go to emerson junior high
pay booth put in two dimes and call him i wasn't a very popular kid two or
three times a week after
school i'd go to the stock brokerage if you're buying stocks at lunch yeah you're
not popular
you know hey you're forward thinking sure yeah but sure it's paid off now yeah
no i get that part
got me cool made me cool later in life yeah at a certain point yeah for sure
this guy cy sarah
this 30 year old guy working at dean winter and i'm 46 years later i got a text
from cy yesterday
we're still close oh that's cool yeah we we were out of each other's lives for
30 years and then we
reconnected i actually asked my class to try and track them down and they did
but if you're you know
i love the statement i think the true expression of manhood or being a good
person is planting trees
the shade of which you'll never sit under but i think more specifically for men
i'll give i'll ask
you straight up yeah are you mentoring any young men or boys let me think about
that
uh maybe my neph one of my nephews but i mean he has his father you know but i
think i keep a
constant relationship with him because i want to be a part of his life but in a
more local environment
in my community no do you realize in new york there's big sisters and big
brothers there are
three times as many applicants for big sisters than there are for big brothers
and why is that because
young men just aren't mothers don't get there or the kids the male the boys don't
apply i think men have
been told that if you take an interest in the life of a boy that there's
something wrong and people need
to be suspect of which yeah people would yeah people would definitely question
it oh it's crazy i
remember this started maybe about 10 years ago if i saw somebody's kid or
something and i wanted to
give them a compliment you feel like you couldn't gotta be careful yeah you and
then like suddenly like
you gotta be careful everything there's a legal issue or you can't um or people
are suspicious yeah
there's a famous case of this kid greg kelly can you bring that up who was uh
his mother was watching
she ran a home in their uh after school care in their home and one of the kids
accused him of
something and they don't it seemed very flippant but he ended up going to jail
for three years and
it seemed like a witch hunt you know yeah there was that child care place in
california where it
ended up it was all made up but but theo what you were talking about with your
nephew you can still
play a huge role because i can attest to this there's research showing your
nephew right now especially
once he hits 15 or 16 he's more he's more inclined to listen to you than his
dad wow
so i noticed this yeah did you notice things yeah who were some people that
yeah when you because
sometimes i do i think about a voice that could be just like dude sometimes it
was like um i remember
one of my mom's boyfriends bought me and my brother tickets to go see a saints
game right and we were
so excited it was like a big adventure for us you know um so i it is funny how
little things that
somebody shares with you um or moments that they have i remember there was a
teacher that would sit
outside with me and talk to me sometimes after class that was huge to me um
yeah it's it's it's
amazing the effect that you can have i guess you know that you don't realize
who were some of those
people for you i was really lucky i had i played sports so i had coaches a
couple of my mom's
boyfriends like i said after they broke up stay involved in my life i had cy
the stockbroker um and
also i'm a big fan of the greek system at colleges i joined a fraternity yeah
and while people talk about
everyone's got to find their tribe you got to find your brothers or your
sisters you got to shrink the
world down to a small group of people and for me i i don't think i would have
graduated from ucla had
i not joined a fraternity i immediately got something called a big brother i
had roommates we all kept
tabs on each other we all gave each other a tremendous amount of but it was
sort of like
a guiding guidepost yeah it's fun yeah oh dude there's so much fun like there's
nothing better than
like when you think about the times you were on a team of some sort right 100
just like the feeling
you know did you play sports growing up i did until i was like 11 years old i
didn't get i didn't do
much sports i played a little bit of baseball but it was like the field was
like uneven in our town
you know and so the every ball went to the same guy the field was uneven yeah
we had a bad field
over there and so all this dude and i was there you couldn't get the guy with
the radical like the
amazing fence to so to give you the new field yeah that's not a bad idea right
but it doesn't have to
be sports it can be banned it can be chess club it can be church but everyone's
got to find your tribe
right so that's so now we're looking at some solutions to some of the things
you're talking
about for young people and even for mothers that have single that you know
because a lot of times
with moms it's hard to find that space like how do i um put my kid into a place
that's going to be
safe or what's the type of thing to get them involved in you know and yeah i
think that was one
thing that was tough for my mom she just didn't have as much time i was
fortunate i had a
basketball coach that would give me rides home from practice and so that
changed a lot of things
because then as long as i could get to practice and i could get home um so that
was like an amazing
role model that had this guy coach steve that was really awesome um yeah i
think and and yeah you're
right like how can i do that in my own community like what are ways that i
could start to do that
but yeah so creating a group for your kid finding a group for your kid to be in
well there's a lot of
and there's a lot of more systemic things we could do so for example yeah i'm a
big fan of vocational
programming in america we have this kind of zeitgeist that if your kid doesn't
go to dartmouth and end
up at google then not only is the kid failed but you failed as parents and two-thirds
of our kids
are not going to end up with a college degree three percent of linkedin
profiles in the us say
apprentice it's 11 in the uk and german we need more of an apprentice culture
and