The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: Office Hours Special: Algebra of Masculinity Part 1

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Welcome to a special series of the Prop G pod. If you've been following us for the

past few years, then you hopefully registered that we care deeply about

changing the conversation around masculinity and failing young men. In

fact, we believe this is a crisis and that in some, we are producing too many of

what are the most dangerous and unproductive citizens in the world. And

that is lonely, broke young men. Why are we passionate about this? One, I relate

to these young men. I was an unremarkable kid growing up in a single-parent

household. My mother lived and died a secretary and could have easily come off

the tracks. And as a matter of fact, did come off the tracks a couple times. And

it was the generosity and vision of the University of California taxpayers. And

what saved me was the big, warm hand of America and government. Had it not been

for the vision and generosity of the Regents of the University of California

and California taxpayers, I just wouldn't be here right now speaking to you and

have the opportunity to advocate for a group that I believe has fallen further

faster than any group in recent history, specifically young men who are four

times more likely to be addicted, three times more likely to kill themselves,

12 times more likely to be incarcerated. You've heard the stats before. I think

this is an opportunity also to demonstrate that compassion is not a

zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt wide people, gay marriage didn't hurt

heteronormative marriage. And a conversation around men is something that I

think a lot of groups are engaged in. And who wants more economically and

emotionally viable men? Women. And by far, with respect to this conversation,

which I'll say has become a lot more positive over the last 24 or 36 months,

as this conversation or this void was filled by some very unfortunate voices.

And I think, understandably, a lot of people have a gag reflex when you start

talking or advocating for young men. But by far, the cohort that has been most

supportive of this conversation and us bringing up these issues, simply put,

mothers. And it goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters, one son.

One daughter is at Penn. The other is in PR in Chicago. And my son is in the

basement playing video games and vaping. There really is a crisis here.

What is the single point of failure when a boy starts to come off the track?

Simple. When he loses a male role model. And what it ends up, the research shows

is that when the parents split up and you lose a male role model in a house of

girls, the girls have similar outcomes. But it's much different when the boy

loses a male role model, usually through divorce. As it ends up, the majority of

research points to one thing, and that is boys are physically stronger, but

girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. Over the past year, we've been

asking our male guests how they think about masculinity and what it means to

be a better father, husband, and partner. Being a man is to be a person that is in

service to others and just ask yourself, like, how can you be in service and just

ask yourself, like, how you can be a value to others. There's a movement of more

awakened manhood that's emerging. And it doesn't mean you can't be strong. It

doesn't mean that there's no role for men and for women and people in between. It

just means we've got to do a bit of a reset. I mean, I just try to model for

them, you know, what a leader looks like, you know, what kindness and caring

looks like. Sometimes she just has to be gentle. Just be gentle. The story that we

tell about masculinity can be really dangerous. I think one of the things

about masculinity, which is different from femininity, is that masculinity is

seen as this kind of prize that's given to men. Like, you can be a man or you can

not be a man. And there was an interesting study that was done a few

years ago over here in the UK where they asked men and women, what does it mean

to be a man? And answers were like, you've got to be a fighter, a winner, a

provider, a protector, you've got to maintain mastery and control at all

times. And if you fail to do any of these things, then you weren't a man, which I

think that's a story about masculinity. It's a very toxic one.

Over the next three weeks on Office Hours, we're answering your questions on

all things masculinity, from gender dynamics and adolescent development to

the psychological and societal challenges that men face. We're also

bringing on a few guests to paint a better picture of how we ended up here and

what we can do about it or where we should go. So with that, in today's

episode, we're speaking with Christine Emba, a columnist at the Washington

Post and author of Rethinking Sex, to set the scene of where masculinity

stands today, the role that women play in redefining masculinity, as well as

what current dating dynamics look like. Christine, where does this podcast find

you? I'm at Washington DC. Is that where you live? You live in DC? I do, on the

Sweet Home. I didn't know that. Nice. So let's bust right into it. Your blockbuster

essay, and I don't use that word lightly for the Washington Post titled Men Are

Lost, Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness, that catalyzed a lot of

conversation regarding men in crisis, specifically young men. From your

reporting, what surprised you? What are the attributes or the reasons for men

struggling so much that you don't think people fully understand? What set some

context for why young men are struggling? Yeah. So I mean, first of all, I'll say

that the first thing that surprised me in that essay was simply the response to

it. Right now, it's reached over a million readers. We closed the comments at

10,000 comments. The number of people who have just reached out to me, men,

parents, people from all over saying, oh, finally, someone is talking about

this. I personally have found pretty overwhelming, which makes me think that

this is a real problem that needs to be addressed. But context to the piece, I

started thinking about this question of what's going on with men, because as I

said, in the piece, just the men I saw around me were getting kind of weird,

getting really into sort of these mannisfur influencers, sort of trying

gone, almost knew what felt like dress up practices that seemed focused on

shoring up their masculinity, either getting really into weightlifting or

getting really into the alt right, or both perhaps, or just kind of disappearing

from view, spending all their time on the internet or maybe watching porn and

just not showing up. And I looked at the statistics because there's this idea

that, oh, no, American men are falling apart, the Republic is going to

disintegrate has been a recurring theme in our public discourse. But the stats

are really bearing out the idea that there has been a shift in how men

feel about themselves and how they're acting in our society. As women have

surged ahead, you know, at the workplace in education, men are quite

literally falling behind. So when it comes to college graduation rates for

every 100 women who receives a bachelor's degree, only 74 men do and that

number is falling. When it comes to people who are out of work or falling

out of the labor market, the biggest drop in employment has been among men

aged 25 to 34, which you would think is kind of prime working age. But also

when you talk to women, when I talk to my friends, when I think about my own

dating life, there's a real and clear felt sense among women that the men

who they thought would be their partners are just not there.

I was thinking about you coming on the show and we've had kind of the

yodas of this issue on the show or most of them, I think. And I was trying to

think, well, what could we explore that would be different with Christine? And

you wrote a book called Rethinking Sex of Provocation and what you just said

about women, you know, where all the good men is what I hear. Talk a little

bit about the role of dating or the dynamic in dating and mating as it

relates to this, I won't call it crisis, but the fact that men are declining, if

you will. Chris Williams calls it the high heels effect that as women

metaphorically get taller and taller and taller, men are getting shorter and

shorter and shorter. And women, not all women, but a lot of women state that

they won't date anyone shorter than them. If we talk about mothers being

concerned, parents being concerned, young men are obviously struggling. How do

you think women perceive this issue? Yeah, that's a really good question. I

mean, I'll go back and give a little bit of context for the book you mentioned.

Rethinking Sex of Provocation is the title of my first book, which I started

writing around the time of kind of the Me Too moment crisis revolution. And it

was basically a look at whether, you know, the sexual revolution and the

feminist movement had brought us to where we thought we were going to go, had

delivered the results that we wanted. It was kind of a critique of our current

sexual culture. And I told the story through mainly through the lens of

women as I interviewed just a ton of women about their dissatisfactions with

the current dating scene with the sexual culture, what was expected of them and

what they couldn't expect. But, you know, I spoke to men about this too. And I

would say that while women's stories really inform the book, you know, I

talk about how consent isn't enough to be a good sexual ethic, how men and

women are are actually different in their desires and how they want to form

sexual relationships, something that many women feel like a bad feminist or

something for saying. I was struck by how the men I spoke to again, interviewing

for this book seemed more kind of infused than anything else. Like they

didn't know what they were supposed to do, what they were allowed to do, how to

just talk to a woman. And increasingly, they seem to be socially falling behind.

And I think that experience stuck with me and also pushing me towards thinking

about the topic now. But when it comes to how this this high heel situation,

that's such a great analogy, you know, is reflected in in the dating market. I

would say one place where you can see a really clear example is on college

campuses and directly after college, you know, the gender balance on many

universities is shifting to be really like a high number of women, sometimes

up to sort of 70% women and 30% men. And this is not a great thing. My

competitor publication The New York Times actually had a piece about this a

couple weeks ago about how many private colleges were kind of practicing

sneak affirmative action to let men in because there just simply weren't enough

men on campus to make it attractive. And you can think about how this plays out

in a kind of relational sense. If women want to date men generally, who are

kind of at their level, or, honestly, above it in some ways, the the height

analogy is one thing, but you can also think of it in terms of educational

achievement of career achievements of financial stability and emotional

stability. If there are, you know, 70 women and only 30 men, then a lot of

women are left without a partner. And, you know, the men who are present suddenly

have perhaps too many options to choose from. Too much opportunity. Yeah, which

makes the dynamic for mating and dating really skewed and unpleasant. And

actually in that timespiece, you know, the young women who are interviewed kind

of talk about how, you know, they thought that they should be an empowering

experience being at a university that has a surplus of women where women feel

confident talking in the classroom, where they have all these opportunities. But

actually when it came to finding partners, dating, sort of all of that, the

kind of outside life goals that one might achieve in college, they said they

found the experience really humbling and kind of sad.

Yeah, the term that I've heard that is sort of apt is this term of Porsche

polygamy that because of online dating, where everyone has access to everyone,

that the men who are in the top call it decile of attractiveness get 60, 80, 90

percent of the opportunities, which doesn't encourage good behavior. And I

guess my question is, given that you kind of have written about the intersection

or can talk about the intersection of mating or dating and sex and the

crisis young men face, do you think that women expect or don't want men to be,

I don't want to use the term aggressors, but the initiators of romantic contact?

One of the things that I've observed in conversation and sort of candid discussions

with women, and actually you and I talked about this, Scott, and I mentioned you in

the piece, is that a lot of women I think feel like they should want to date,

you know, a feminist, a guy who treats them as their exact equal, you know, a sensitive

emotional guy, or you know, they either they feel this or they feel like they

should feel it to be sort of a good young modern who is progressive, etc.

But in their real lives, often, that's not quite what they want. I think that most women

actually do want to be asked out, would appreciate, in fact, a guy, you know,

taking them on a date and offering to pay for drinks, sort of performing a little bit of a

traditional masculinity, while of course, you know, not being over aggressive or overly sexually

aggressive or, you know, rude or sort of a neanderthal. But I think a lot of women still

appreciate a guy playing that role, but it feels like a little bit anti feminist, I think,

to some women to say this. And then I think men get the message that like, oh, well,

women don't want me to walk up to them and approach them like it would be rude to talk to

women in public, it would be rude to go up to someone at a bar. And so they don't.

It just shocks me, and I'm curious if you have found this. I have a lot of women in my life

that would be very open to being set up. And then they sort of under their breath in a different

way to go, oh, and by the way, I really like alpha males. And maybe I'm looking for shadows where

there aren't any, but don't you think there's some dissonance here between, and you said this a little

bit, between what maybe people state they want and what they're actually attracted to. And I guess

the question is, have women's desires, have they're what they find attractive in a man actually evolved

over the 20 or 30 years? Because I find it's loosely still, you know, pretty similar to what

it was 20 or 30 years ago. I think that, first of all, people's stinking desires almost never

match up with their actual desires. And that's a thing that sort of experts in dating and mating

at have seen for years, right? People may say that like, oh, I want to date someone who's six

feet tall, it has a six pack and like works an ex job. But then they meet someone who is

five foot nine and cool. And has the right and has the right pheromones. Yeah, and it's fine.

And so I think sometimes both sides sort of deceive themselves by saying, well, I'll only go for this

sort of person and then discount everyone else who might be a good match. And I think in our

current moment, our reliance on the internet and dating apps in particular really facilitates this

because it's super easy for both men and women to just set some sort of arbitrary standard that

aligns with what they think they want and filter out everyone else would in fact,

the other people might be great. You know, my sense is there's a lot of things that

younger men can do take responsibility for their lives trying to better themselves,

get out of the house, find a job, work out, put on a clean shirt, whatever it might be, join an

organization. There's a lot we can do as a society, third spaces, vocational opportunities and training,

empathy. What do you think women's role in this is? Do you think that women,

and I want to be clear, I don't think anyone has an obligation to service anybody or

but what is the role of women in this problem, this issue?

I do think that women would do well to be more honest with themselves and with others about

sort of what they want. Like it's interesting that these women who you talk to are still willing

to say to you, albeit under their breath, like, oh, actually, I kind of go for this sort of alpha

kind of guy. You know, then they're not lying to themselves or the guys that they date and they

can sort of look for what they want. I also think that you mentioned third spaces.

One of the real sort of failings of our current moment, and I think it's also affecting men and

like leading or assisting in this sort of crisis of men, is that it's really easy to not go outside,

not exist in real life, not talk to people, not talk to strangers. And I think for men who

like actually want to meet someone, also just want to be sort of good men, the humans in the world,

you have to be forced to get up, get dressed, like work out so that you look decent, work on

your conversational skills, go out in the world and talk to people. And I think it's possible that

women need to do that too. Get off the dating action, like be open to meeting guys in, you know,

maybe at a bar or in your kickball league or whatever. But then as I think about this, I think

that most of the women I know are willing to do this. And they're kind of just waiting for the

people to show up or for someone to talk to them. In the past, I think you would see women

date down or settle in a major way. I also think everybody kind of settles in some way because

you're never going to find like your twin, your perfect partner and everyone should be

realistic about that. But women would, you know, date guys who weren't a good fit or who didn't

bring that much to the table because they didn't have any other options. You know, if they wanted

economic security, if they want to start a family, they just had to have a guy to do that.

And in this moment, they don't have to. Women are making their own money. They actually can have

families themselves with artificial reproductive technology. And they don't have to settle for

guys not at their level. And I'm not sure that I want to, I feel like a lot of conservatives are

sort of trying to tell women that they need to get ready to date down and lower their standards.

And I don't know that I want to tell women to do that, actually. But I think if this mismatch

continues, a certain number of people will have to get comfortable with the idea of being on their

own. That is a scary thing to contemplate and I'm not really sure what the advice is for that.

And then actually, I will say one thought about what women maybe can do to help. Over the past,

I would say decade or two decades, there's been a tendency to talk and act as though men are kind

of garbage. Like the phrase men are trash became just like a running joke in some progressive

circles, even in, you know, sort of professional spaces. We talk a lot about toxic masculinity and

how men can be less toxic. And there's not a lot of empathy there for men from not all women,

but some women, and even women who like love men, if they're kind of joking constantly about how

much men suck all the time, that is probably going to influence how they view the men in their lives,

how easily they find it to be in a relationship, how they treat the men around them. And I think

being sort of aware of our, both our internal and our external messaging towards men and about men,

because at the end of the day, right, the sexes rise and fall together. I say this a lot,

if men are trash, like women aren't going to have a great time either. So kind of we need to help

each other here. I think this is the kind of the, I don't know, the big, the big issue of our generation.

But anyways, Christine Emba is a columnist of the Washington Post where she writes about ideas

in society for the opinion section. Christine is the author of Rethinking Sex, A Provocation.

She joins us from Washington, DC. Congratulations on that landmark article. I heard from so many

people. I'm so glad you reached out to me. Yeah. Thank you so much for being interviewed for it.

All right, Christine. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye.

We'll take one quick break before we answer a few listener questions on relationships,

porn and masculinity. Stay with us.

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we always say, great. So how can you actually figure out how your buddy is doing? It starts

with registering and looking out for some general signs. Those could be change of their appearance

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but where do you start? It's actually as simple as reaching out to them. I think many of us will

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You don't need to have the answers. There's no magic pill. Connection, connection, connections,

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Visit movember.com slash profg today to sign up or donate to the cause. That's movember.com slash

profg. Welcome back. Let's bust into some questions. Question number one. Hello, Scott. My name is

Gerardo. I live in Sydney, Australia, although I am originally from Bogota, Colombia. I moved to

Australia 11 years ago and I am now married to an Australian woman. We have a beautiful, smart,

half Colombian, half Aussie girl. When I became a father almost four years ago, I started thinking

about how to raise a kind, caring, smart woman. My biggest fear, however, was and still is how to

make sure she makes the right decision when it comes to selecting a life partner. I know that

would be here from now, but I want to make sure I give her the right tools starting early.

Learning about this topic from multiple sources led me to create an interest in how boys are being

raised today. I very quickly went down the rabbit hole of the current issue with boys and men and

how much they're struggling to the point where I've now started running an online men's group I

called Menlightment and I find this extremely fulfilling. Throughout this journey, however,

I've received, let's call it questioning primarily from women about how much light I am

shining on men in a world where women are still struggling with inequality. This questioning

becomes even stronger when people realize I have a daughter. So here is my question for you.

How do you think I should go about continuing to focus and helping men but keeping women in mind?

I often tell people that raising kind, caring, and compassionate boys is one of the best gifts

we can give girls. Any ideas? Thank you. Gerardo, I think you're ahead of the game with a one-year-old

thinking about these questions. You're clearly very thoughtful and I would argue that at this

point you just want to enjoy having a little girl and being really supportive of your partner and

wrestle with these issues. I think you have a few years to figure this out. So I mean a few things.

Anyone who doesn't understand you advocating for men and has a gag reflex about it doesn't recognize

that compassionate empathy are not zero-sum games. Civil rights didn't hurt white people,

gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage, and you advocating for men doesn't make you

decrease the likelihood that your little girl isn't going to grow up to be a very confident woman.

In terms of building confidence, I think this is, gosh, this is sort of the age-old question

in parenting, and there's a lot of, the word you keep hearing is mattering, that you want your kid

to know that he or she matters regardless of whether or not they're achieving, you know,

in the top, if they're a heads list or whether or not they're a great athlete. I think in terms of

modeling how to be a good man or, you know, a good person, being affectionate, supportive, thoughtful,

treating your partner well, I think kids do mimic or model after the parents in terms of what they

see in that dynamic with respect to the relationship. There is some evidence that when the mother works,

the daughter is much more likely to work herself, so I've never bought into this notion. I think a

lot of people decide that one partner, usually a woman, should stay at home, that it's good for

the kids. I can understand the inclination, but the research shows that especially girls go on to

have greater employment prospects and make more money when they grow up in a household where

mom is working. So, I don't, it sounds to me like you're sort of ahead of the game, and I think

your question was, how do you think I should go back continuing to focus on helping men by keeping

women in mind? You know, the one thing I can guarantee you will not work is trying to advise your

daughter on what types of men to date or not date. I think that is likely to backfire in a pretty

severe way. And to a certain extent, we as parents like to think that we're engineers, that we

engineer this sheep, it doesn't. It comes to you. We're shepherds. We get to decide whether sheep

grazes point in the right direction, decide what food it eats. But, you know, we'd like to think,

because we're a narcissistic species that we have more impact on the child than we probably do. I do

believe a bad parent can screw up a good kid, but I'm not sure a good parent can save a bad kid.

I think a lot of it is you do your best. You create a loving support atmosphere for them. You model

the types of behavior that you hope your boy and your girl mimic, and you just do your best. But

anyways, thanks for the question. Question number two. Hi, Scott. My name is Jank and I live in

Nashville working in the supply chain for a major retailer. I have found your material at just the

right time as a younger parent of two under four with a few years left in my 30s. My new worry,

like many, has been directed to parenting and setting my kids up for a successful and safe youth

with the looming pros and cons of AI right around the corner. I have a two-pronged question that I

do not think is discussed enough around the lack of emotional skills, respect, empathy, and affection

that my generation of men faces when it comes to relationships and sexuality. I'm a millennial that

hit adolescents during an explosive era of a sexualized MTV Howard Stern, American Pie, etc.

when dial-up internet pornography went online. How much do you think this has had an effect on so

many millennial males soon to be out of your figure at outstage? More importantly, what are

your thoughts on the risks AI poses relating to pornography in the extremely malleable male

adolescent mind? Thanks for all that you do. All the best. Jank from Nashville, thanks for the question.

This is an interesting topic and a lot of people, including myself, believe that porn is probably

the largest unsupervised experiment on young men in the history of our generation. That's

because the majority of academics don't want to be known as Professor porn. If you think about it,

I think other than search, it's the second most trafficked content online. It's dramatic how much

time people spend on porn. Richard Reeves from the Brookings Institute and now his own foundation

in my interview with him said that he wasn't as worried about porn as I was. He thought it was a

small number of people consuming most of the porn, but I think about half of men say they have

intentionally sought out porn this week. About one in eight men would describe themselves as

addicted to pornography. It's much lower for women. Only about one in six women said they intentionally

used pornography in the past week. I don't know how you unintentionally use pornography. Let me

just run across it. Only one in three of them versus one in eight described themselves as addicted

to porn. I think it's a more complicated issue, but I think that to tell a young person not to

engage in porn is somewhat unrealistic. What I tell young men that I coach is that you want to

modulate. Now, what do I mean by that? A certain key attribute of finding a relationship, of finding

someone establishing a relationship such that you can, amongst other things, have sex, is the

desire for sex. Anything that dampens that desire means it's less likely that you are going to

develop skills and take the risk such that you can establish your own relationship and have your own

sex. I believe that leads to more and more young men living in or living what they think is a

reasonable facsimile of life vis-a-vis digital means, whether it's trading on Coinbase or Robinhood

or believing they have friends in some deep discord group or on Reddit and believing that

they can get the sexual satisfaction they need with porn and why engage in the hassle and the

expense and the rejection of trying to find somebody to have a relationship and sex with.

When I was at UCLA, a big part of the reason I went on campus and probably a big part of the

reason I graduated was the hope that I would meet someone, establish a relationship and get to have

sex with that person. The prospect of sex is very powerful for young men and I also think it's a

good thing. I think it's a good motivator. It teaches you to put on a shirt. It teaches you to

work out. It teaches you to be kind. It teaches you to try and be funny and engage in. It teaches

you to be more risk aggressive and initiate conversations with people and these skills,

how to make someone, how to express romantic interest while making someone feel safe,

those skills will serve you well the rest of your life. I worry that with this kind of reasonable

facsimile of life or reasonable facsimile of sex known as porn, that men lose their mojo and don't

develop those skills and go down a rabbit hole where they become unsalvageable, that they don't

develop those skills. They get further and further reinforcement that they have no value or no

attractiveness in the mating community and they literally withdraw from society. I think AI,

unfortunately, is probably just going to make it worse. They're supposedly an AI girlfriend that is

clocking millions of dollars a month and searches for AI girlfriend have exploded.

And here's the thing, romantic comedies are two hours, not 20 minutes for a reason.

It is hard. It's hard to find someone. It's hard to engage in conversation. It's hard to get them

to like you. It's hard to get them to kiss you. It's hard to get them to have sex with you. It's

hard to maintain a relationship and all of these things when they happen at the end of the romantic

comedy, which is two hours, not 20 minutes, are what it means to engage in victory. It's what it

means to engage in life. It's what it means to hopefully use sex and affection as a means for

establishing something deeper. So what would I tell or what would my advice to young men be?

Modulate your usage. Don't have unreasonable expectations around what your partner is supposed

to do sexually and get out there, do what's required, get a plan, work out, make money,

be friendly, endure rejection and realize that you're going to be okay and so are they

and keep at it, find someone to have a relationship with and then make your own bad porn.

Question number three. Hey Scott, I'm a huge fan of your work and I appreciate you sharing your

brilliant mind with the rest of us. Giovanni here, I'm a 32-year-old male living in New York City.

I moved from Italy to New York about seven years ago and absolutely love it. I work in sales at

a tech company where I am working and doing well on my path to financial security with a salary

north of 300k. One question I'd love to ask you is about monogamy. You seem to be someone that

lives a traditional monogamic lifestyle but I am not sure I can be satisfied with it for myself

as I lose sexual interest in partners quite fast. I am one of the lucky winners of the inequity of

mating in this city and I believe that influences me a lot as temptation is always lurking. My

question is, as an amateur anthropologist, do you believe male Homo sapiens are or can be monogamous?

Something I should mention, this is an AI-generated voice as this is a quite personal topic for me

to expose myself. Hope you understand. Giovanni, I am so glad and I knew that this was AI because

you sound like a shit-eating talk show host and nobody wants to be around whatever that is.

Anyways, but I appreciate your anonymity. Look, boss, it sounds like you're killing it. I'm not

going to lecture you on monogamy. If you're a young man enjoying the fruits of being a young,

attractive man who's making a lot of money and is attractive to women, have at it. Recognize

everything as a trade-off. Recognize that being single is awesome. I have a lot of single friends

that live a life similar to the one you live and they enjoy it, but be clear it's a trade-off.

Being in a monogamous relationship has got a lot of wonderful things about it,

specifically the opportunity to build some together, having a partner. I think kids are

wonderful, very stressful but wonderful, and a feel that you're kind of building something.

That you have someone who loves you for more than just kind of the transaction and will be there

for you. I think the hard part about living the lifestyle you're leading is when you get a bit

older and you don't want to be out every night. For me, being out meant alcohol. There's a lot of

effort. Being single is sort of like a job. I found that once I got into a relationship,

or when I was in a monogamous relationship, that my career did much better, that I economically

was much better off. Not chasing the scene and chasing women all the time. It gave me the chance

to focus on my professional life, have someone to download with, someone to relax with, someone

to share your life with. There is something very rewarding about that. Having said that,

everything's a trade-off. You have to decide where you are in your life, your opportunity said,

and what works for you, boss. I'm not going to lecture you on the benefits of monogamous.

As a matter of fact, about 97% of mammals are not monogamous. Most of the research

from evolutionary anthropologists indicates that humans are meant to be monogamous, but the wrinkle

is we're meant to be serial monogamous. That is, we're meant to be with one person,

but then we're supposed to swap that person out for another. Actually, our natural state is to be

married, but to be married more than one time, which I'm not suggesting. By the way, it's very

expensive to do that. Look, every situation is different. What works for you may not work for

someone else, but I'm not going to judge you. If you're enjoying your life, what I would tell you

is try to be thoughtful and considerate of other people's emotions and always be straight with them

and make sure they're expectations that you're being open and honest about what they're getting

out of it and what you're getting out of it. You might change as you get older, but this is...

Monogamy is something that is kind of an age-old question in our society. I believe that monogamy

is inversely correlated to your opportunities. I think actors and athletes have a tough time

because they have more opportunities. The majority of men have that million years of instincts

whispering in their ear that your job is to spread your seed to the four corners of the earth,

and women's job is to put up a much finer filter to only let the strongest, smartest and fastest

seed get through, such that the next generation is smarter and faster and stronger than this

generation. That's the basic peanut butter and chocolate cocktail of evolutionary progress.

But anyways, getting back to it, boss, this is a tough one. If you're happy with where you are,

then fine. Who gives a shit what the Moors are around monogamy? If you're fine, then do it at

some point. At some point, what I would hope for you is that you meet someone where you think

it's kind of worth the trade-off, that I would like to be in a monogamous relationship with

this person. I would wish that for you. I think that that ultimately usually leads to building

some sense of one plus one equals three in a good relationship and having kids

and a family, which I think as you get older is very rewarding. But until then, my brother,

enjoy yourself. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email

a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofpropgmedia.com.

Support for this episode of Prop G came from November. For over 20 years,

November has been at the forefront of men's health. They've helped fund cutting-edge tests

for prostate cancer, encouragement to check their testicles for bumps, and yeah, they got all of

us to grow a mustache that people in our lives hated. Now, they're locking in on men's mental

health, encouraging guys to open up with each other. And this November, they need your help.

It's time to bring back the stash, raise some cash with your buds,

and help change the face of men's health. The mustache is calling.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.