NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway has a simple diagnostic tool he uses when mentoring struggling young men: he asks to see their phones.
“The first hack is I say, ‘Unlock your phone,'” Galloway told Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast. “And I’m going to look at it.”
What he consistently finds is hours of wasted time hidden inside apps. He said, “Within about 5 to 7 minutes, I can find eight hours of time from TikTok, from X, from p*rn, from gambling sites, from YouTube.”
Once he identifies those lost hours, Galloway redirects them into three specific behaviors. The first involves physical training, and he is direct about why it matters.
“We’re going to get really strong,” he said. “I just think the best anti-depressant is moving weights, building some bulk or running far.”
He frames physical fitness as something young men have a biological advantage in pursuing, and he does not shy away from making the case bluntly.
“I’ve jokingly said every man under the age of 30 should aspire to be able to walk into any room and know if things got real they could outrun everybody. There are different forms of fitness,” he said.
Galloway continued, “You can be fast, you can be flexible, you can be strong, but there’s no excuse. The male form is blessed with more bone density, double twitch muscle, all the things you talk about, this incredible thing that pours over called testosterone. You’re going to look back when you’re my age and think, why wasn’t I just fast, sleek, a monster, just strong. So we’re going to work out at least three times a week.”
The second behavior Galloway prescribes is earning money outside the home, and the third is consistent involvement in community or group activities. Together, he argues, these three things produce a measurable result.
“If a man under the age of 30 works out three times a week, works 30 hours a week outside of the house, and is volunteering, that immediately puts him in the top 8% of all young men,” he said.
He goes further when describing what full commitment to those habits can produce. “If you do those things right, just those three things, work outside of the house, work out, have a kindness practice, volunteer in the service of others, you’re immediately going to put yourself in the top decile of young men.”
Galloway is equally clear about what stands in the way. He describes big tech as the primary obstacle, arguing that the design of these platforms is working against young men whether they realize it or not.
“The anti-christ of your progress as a young man, the villain here, the Bond villain with trillions of dollars, is big tech,” he said. “They are trying to figure out with AI a million times a second how to convince you to spend one more second a day on your phone, sequestered from your relationships.”
He connects screen time directly to the deterioration of young men’s social and professional development. “If you do not figure out how to modulate big tech products, whether it’s Instagram or YouTube, you are falling into a trap of eventually being sequestered and not developing the skills to establish the most important thing in life, and that is relationships.”
