Last week my wife Elena and I attended the live show here in Boston with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher where they handed out signed copies of Scott’s just released book, Notes on Being a Man, which just topped the New York Time’s bestseller advice books. Audience questions included a young man proposing to his girlfriend (to which Scott responded by handing a wad of cash through the audience), and a 10-year-old boy asking Scott for dating advice about the girl whom he has a crush on, and who happens to be taller than him (“ask your parents to throw a rager, my man!”).
A few days earlier Ben Stiller interviewed Galloway at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, an event that was apparently the fastest to sell out in the history of the institution. Scott has been on every A-list show in the last couple of weeks from the Today Show to Real Time with Bill Maher.
Richard Reeves, the British sociologist, senior fellow at the Brooking’s Institute, author Of Boys and Men, and creator of the American Institute of Boys and Men may have set the table, but Galloway has brought what’s wrong with today’s young men to the masses. He frequently explains on his various podcasts the concerns that young men being viewed as misogynistic and threatening helped no one, not the young women whose rights we were supposed to champion instead, not the young men, and certainly not the mothers of those young sons, who at last got involved when their boys were living at home, spending all their time in the basement playing video games and watching porn. That’s when shit got real.
To which I say: It’s about fucking time.
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In 2009, I was wrapping up a decade as a venture capitalist. I had raised two funds, $50 million in 1999 and $100 million in 2000, and started dozens of companies right into the teeth of the tech market collapse of 2001 and housing and finance shitshow of 2007. For those readers not from the space, those vintage funds are the worst performing of all time. My partner James Houghton and I eked out decent returns for our investors in the end but it was only because we made three or four companies work by sheer force of will, and had to kill the twenty-something others in a groundhog-day experience which never sucked any less (telling a founder/CEO that the gig was up and he or she had to fire all his employees and shut the thing down, dream officially decimated).
James and I felt at the time that men—okay, we—were misunderstood. That if finance bros like us were hurting as we tried desperately to be decent fathers and husbands amidst the carnage, what about the guys who had it way worse than us? We set out to put together a collection of real men’s stories. We had a nationwide essay contest and sought out a wildly different experiences of what it means to be a man. We published the best of those essays as a book, entitled The Good Men Project, in September of 2009 and went on a bit of a crusade in an attempt to talk about masculinity in a fresh new way.
One of my favorite contributors, Julio Medina, had been a drug lord locked up in Sing Sing before turning his life around. We took stories like Julio’s, and that of the award-winning New York Times war photographer Michael Kamber, and made them into a short documentary which we screened in Hollywood, with Mad Men creator Matt Weiner and then Obama image-maker Shepard Ferry.
I went to prisons, schools, churches, bookstores, and a community center in Greenwich Village. I met with Father Greg Boyle at HomeBoy Industries in LA. The crowning event was a sold-out talk at the ICA here in Boston, where there was a lot of buzz among the several hundred people but also confusion as to what the heck we were talking about. Men were…hurting?
I don’t regret any of it. But the plane never truly took off. James and my vision were always for our efforts to be a non-profit, with any revenue going to help at-risk men. The team that had worked on the Project, including the ad executive and creative mastermind Lisa Hickey, wanted to convert GMP to a for-profit on-line community. We readily agreed. And that community continues to thrive to this day under Lisa’s leadership, doing amazing work.
I contributed my writing to the GMP magazine but over time I found myself caught between feminists who saw my man-centered narrative as misogynistic and men’s rights groups who saw me as an apologist. Caught between the whipsaw of outlets like Jezebel and MRA women haters, I tried to fight the good fight until I had made a big enough impact on the popular press, I guess, to warrant a muti-thousand-word take-down piece that not only lied about various aspects of my life but was crushing to my family.
That was the final straw. I took my shit and went home. The world, I thought, was not ready for a real conversation about manhood, at least not the one I was trying to have at the time.
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Here’s the thing about Scott Galloway. He is, admittedly, addicted to money. The front half of his book deals with his tough childhood, a son to a single mom growing up in LA with less than everyone else. I get that but all the bragging he does about his wealth now is a turn off. To my way of thinking the myth that money solves all problems, and capitalism is king, even though God knows I am a capitalist, is central to any conversation of what is wrong with masculinity. I get that Galloway has some perspective on the excess in our society and part of his message is about men as protectors. But his view of himself as having been redeemed because he got rich, and his constantly talking about the details of his deals and high lifestyle, are off-putting.
For all the above reasons, when Galloway first came into my view a couple years ago, I discounted him as yet another obnoxious, arrogant, do-gooder pushing manhood as machismo.
I was wrong.
It doesn’t matter that Scott’s advice new book is sometimes overly simplistic even while it is funny, heartwarming and at times deeply insightful. As a rabid fan particularly of “Pivot,” I was hoping for more fresh material. He repeats himself a lot in general, so maybe I had already heard too many of the stories on one of his myriads of podcasts (his daily Markets pod is a must listen for anyone interested in finance, especially young men, as Ed his young British host there is amazing) or even the live show I attended. Or maybe I just find the straight memoirs I tend to like about female athletes or rock stars more interesting than a guy who made it out of his UCLA frat house to the big time with a few “notes” to men in the mix.
What matter is that Galloway is doing what I failed to do. And for that I am eternally grateful.
What I fundamentally agree with Scott on is how much worse things have gotten for men since I stepped away from GMP, and how that problem is focused on young men who are lonely, lost, and dangerous to themselves and to us. How the desire for connection, romantic and otherwise, is at the center of all this. And COVID and now technology in the form of social media and AI is an accelerant to all these problems. At its core is the lack of male mentorship, which is what I have devoted my life to in the intervening years: in business mentoring CEOs; in recovery mentoring men trying to get sober; and in teaching undergraduate students.
I was at a dinner party last night and someone mentioned a young man who was struggling to find a job and the woman next to me casually joked, “Well, is he an incel yet?” Like that was funny. I found the comment crushing. I wanted to scream. Young men shooting up schools, like I said in 2009, or becoming incels in 2025 is not their natural state. It’s the tip of the iceberg which Scott Galloway is heroically trying to wake the country up to. I have no idea what it is like to be black and to have someone call me the N word. But sitting at that table last night gave me at least a 1% insight into how it might feel.
The most important thing Scott Galloway has done is show the world that just because we live in a patriarchal society where there is a massive amount to do to deal with sexual abuse, sexism, and discrimination against women, the complete destruction of men, young men in particular, can also be true and an issue none of us can avoid without grave danger, not only to the young men in question but our whole country.
Think about the moms of those men and the heterosexual women who long for a partner in life who can match their talents? This is not a joke about incels. This is life and death for those men and, frankly, for all of us.
Just keep the wad of Benjamins in your pocket next time a guy proposes at your live event. You and I both know you don’t need to flex. You are doing what no one, including me, has been able to up to now. Which is talk about masculinity with deep compassion in a way is universal, true, and embraced by all without the need to pick sides.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
Tom: I very much appreciate your candor and commitment to healthy men which as you know fosters healthy families & communities. Lisa Hickey can vouch for me; would enjoy connecting and exploring.
As many have said, it’s commendable that this discussion is pushed further by Scott – and I generally see two reactions – 1) heaping praise, and then, 2) giving credit for the efforts to continue the discussion but with truly valid caveats. I’m with the latter. My broader view of talking heads within the topic of masculinity is the tone and directive they use to broadcast their message is often heard as a form of gospel – and even more, I see it as another facet of bro-culture. While we men all may collectively be looking and thirsting for our… Read more »
Yeah Zach having gotten a lot of response to this piece on LinkedIn I very much agree with the more nuanced view here that oveall what Scott is doing is great but there is a lot he says that I don’t agree with. His heart might be in the right place but he oversimplifies and on some stuff is just wrong.
This is a really revealing article, Tom. I fell the frustration you have around being pushed out of the men’s work, the genuine gratitude for someone being able to be heard, and that there is a real crisis at hand. My friend Vince who spent a couple of decades in leadership at Mankind Priject and the past several at Sacred Sons, talks about the men attending MKP needing to find their emotions and those in Sacred Sons needing to be grounded in the warrior element. That speaks to the complexities in men’s work. Yes, we need mentors for our young… Read more »
Great commentary, Tom
Tom, Thanks for writing this and recognizing that the type of healthy, positive engaged, masculinity, is finally coming into mainstream practice. As you know I have been involved in this work since our first son, Jemal, was born on November 19, 1969. When I held him for the first time I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully involved and engaged with their families throughout their lives. That commitment is what drew… Read more »
While I applaud the effort, this change is a generational event. Men of latter generations have dug such a big hole with women and our persecution of them that we need to understand it’s going to take time. If we could in some way pay the debt, we would I think. The only way this change happens is we start acting better now understanding that the seeds we are planting will grow into trees for future generations, not for us. And, that’s ok
Mark I respect this view but do not agree. I do not see it as a zero sum game where the only gender issue is patriarchy. I get opression, abuse of power, rape, etc. But that does not diminish the need for some deeper answer to the problem of young men. Otherwise we end up with very, very bad outcomes for all.