Scott Galloway has been a panelist on Real Time With Bill Maher several times. For this week’s episode, he was in a different role, taking center stage for a one-on-one interview. He was there to talk about his new book Notes on Being a Man. And Maher pointed out the difference, saying, “I noticed you didn’t wear a tie when you were on the panel!”
Galloway pointed to suicide, addiction, and homelessness as areas where men are doing badly relative to women. He also noted the existence of sexism and racism, pointing out that “empathy’s not a zero-sum game.”
Much of his criticism was directed at the tech world. Galloway argued it had “unwittingly built an economy which is dependent upon our ability to evolve a new species of asocial, asexual males.”
Maher pushed back against this. “Doesn’t the phone make you hornier?” he asked. Galloway disagreed. “It reduces their mojo,” he said, and went on to speak about the need for young men to have “a code.”
Some of Galloway’s advice was good, and in the category of tough love. He spoke about the need for men to bolster “your ability to endure rejection.”
“The only way you ever get to amazing ‘Yes’es is with a lot of ‘No’s,” he said, and spoke about his frustration that more young men are not pursuing a relationship — which encompasses both romantic and social bonds. “If you think about the most rewarding things in your life, the things that really matter — they are, essentially, relationships,” he said.
He also noted that there were some challenges there. Specifically, as he phrased it, “To figure out a way to express romantic interest while making that person feel safe.”
Maher did push back against one point that Galloway made: that “men need relationships more than women.” (This is an aspect of Galloway’s book that Reuben Brody also critiqued in a recent InsideHook article.) He also quizzed Galloway about his assertion about the importance of having kids.
“Kids aren’t for everybody,” Galloway said. “I have found purpose in having kids. Not everyone has to have kids.” Galloway then took this to an interesting place, speaking about the importance of “paternal and fraternal” love, which didn’t need to be with blood relatives. He then argued Maher’s relationship to the show’s staff is akin to that.
Galloway concluded with an emphatic call for more socialization: “Get out, drink more and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off.”
Two more frequent Real Time guests showed up for the panel discussion: Josh Barro and Fareed Zakaria. Their first topic of discussion was whether or not the president’s support is starting to show cracks. “This movement has been told there’s a grand conspiracy around everything,” Zakaria noted.
It wasn’t long before the panel also raised the issue of men in trouble. “Men in the top one percent of the income distribution have 15 years’ extra life expectancy than men in the bottom one percent,” Zakaria said. “There is no other civilized country in the world where you have this kind of gap.”
A Male Therapist’s Take on Scott Galloway’s New Book
“Notes on Being a Man” isn’t bad — but it isn’t exactly therapy, eitherThat sense of economic anxiety continued as the panel talked about what the Trump administration might have planned for healthcare. “Everybody’s going to get two grand, and then you get to buy the healthcare you want,” Maher said. “This can’t work, right?”
Barro’s response was both terse and accurate: “Not if you get cancer.”
Maher concluded the episode with a segment critiquing socialism — which seemed a little odd, given that Maher has, in the past, pointed out that elements of socialism already exist in the U.S. After invoking North Korea and Venezuela, he returned to this very argument after taking digs at Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders.
“I want a Democrat who assures me, ‘If you want your Whole Foods, you can keep your Whole Foods.’” (I’d argue that this is not an accurate critique of New York City’s mayor-elect’s grocery store plan.) Maher also contrasted Mamdani with another Democrat who won big on Election Night: Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, a much more center-left candidate. Though there’s also a compelling argument that both Mamdani and Spanberger — one leftist, one centrist — each succeeded by focusing on affordability; we’ll see if Maher addresses that question in a future episode.
Other notable moments from this week’s episode:
- Maher on the Epstein files: “We can get back to the important business of government: reading a dead pervert’s emails.”
- Maher on scaffolding in NYC: “It’s like a haunted house.”
- Maher shared an anecdote about Seth MacFarlane and a Senator getting their drinks swapped on the Real Time stage years ago. (One had whiskey, one had water. Hilarity, presumably, did not ensue.)
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