Dave Rubin’s recent sit-down with Scott Galloway left the host visibly stunned — and for good reason. On the November 22, 2025 episode of The Rubin Report Galloway delivered a blistering diagnosis of what ails a generation of men, and offered straightforward prescriptions that cut through the coddling narratives filling college campuses and cable news.
Galloway’s new book, Notes on Being a Man, released November 4, 2025, is the backdrop for the conversation: part memoir, part call to arms for restoring competence, responsibility, and meaning to men’s lives. The publisher’s description makes the stakes plain — lower educational attainment, loneliness, and deaths of despair among men are not abstract statistics but symptoms of a cultural collapse that demands real solutions.
What made Rubin go quiet was how plainly Galloway named the culprit: a frictionless digital life engineered by Big Tech to capture attention and monetize isolation. Galloway warns that endless scrolling, porn, and gaming are rewiring behavior and leaving young men emotionally clumsy and terrified of rejection — the very thing that for generations forged resilience and grit.
Conservatives should applaud the bluntness of that critique because it aligns with what common-sense Americans have known for years: victim narratives pumped out by elite institutions encourage helplessness, not recovery. Galloway repeatedly pushes back on campus culture that infantilizes students, and his book argues that agency — not grievance — is the true path out of malaise.
Practicality is the theme of the interview: reclaiming eight to twelve hours a week from your phone, choosing real-world community over the algorithm, and learning to earn money and take rejection as a teacher. Those are not glamorous policies; they are the building blocks of stable lives, stable families, and a stable society — things the professional class has too often taken for granted or actively undermined.
This is cultural conservatism in action: insistence on personal responsibility, support for institutions that teach character, and skepticism of profit-driven platforms that hollow out civic life. If we are serious about reversing the tide of loneliness and despair, we ought to stop pretending the solution is another study group or institutional trigger warning and start rebuilding places where men are asked to do hard things and rewarded for getting up when they fail.
Galloway’s blunt advice is a reminder politicians and opinion-makers ignore at their peril: you cannot outsource maturity to apps or administrators. Whether you agree with every anecdote he tells or not, the core prescription — less screen time, more work, more community, and a willingness to face rejection — is a commonsense counterpunch to the softness that’s hollowing out a generation. That’s the sort of conversation conservatives should lead, loudly and unapologetically.
