How Scott Galloway Dumbed Down Jordan Peterson — and Cashed In | The American Spectator

Scott Galloway is nothing if not a brand. With the zeal of a televangelist and the charm of a keynote crusader, he markets himself as a savior for the stranded male — the messiah of masculine malaise. His new book, Notes on Being a Man, is the latest sermon in his gospel of self-improvement: half pep talk, half penitence, all performance. Galloway presents himself as the philosopher-papa you never had, armed with data, dad jokes, and the moral certainty of a man who’s monetized misery.

The premise is simple, and that’s precisely the problem. Galloway divides manhood into three tidy commandments fit for a PowerPoint slide show: protect, provide, and procreate. It’s masculinity made modular — like IKEA furniture for the soul. To protect, he says, is to be decent, disciplined, and dependable — the kind of man who breaks up bar fights, not starts them. It’s presented with the weight of revelation, as though men needed a reminder not to punch strangers. Galloway frames it like philosophy, but it’s really common sense dressed in consultant-speak — a pop-psych platitude parading as perennial truth.

Where it turns stranger is his belief that protection means looking out for anyone “less powerful” or “lower” on the social ladder. It’s noble idea on paper, until you remember that social ladders don’t measure sanity. The man “beneath” you at work might be the one throwing the first jab. Pity can’t be the basis of protection, and power dynamics don’t map neatly onto decency. Sometimes the so-called oppressed are simply dangerous, and pretending otherwise is as delusional as it is dangerous. He means well, but there’s something faintly comic about a man worth north of a hundred million dollars lecturing others on self-sacrifice while sending out signals from a soundproof studio.

Then comes “provide.” This is Galloway’s sermon on supply and demand. Men must take economic responsibility, he says, because work gives life meaning. True enough — but in Galloway’s hands, it sounds suspiciously like LinkedIn spirituality. The modern man, he implies, finds redemption through revenue streams. Provision becomes less about love and loyalty, and more about productivity metrics and self-respect via salary. It’s courage expressed in compound interest.

Finally, “procreate.” Here Galloway leans into evolutionary purpose: Men must ensure the species survives. Nothing wrong with that — until it starts sounding like a quarterly fertility report. Parenthood, in Galloway’s world, is project management with Pampers. Kids are “investments” designed to outperform their fathers. It’s the language of love replaced with the ledger of legacy. He wants you to raise stronger, smarter, faster offspring — it’s reproduction as ROI.

Taken together, his trinity of masculinity feels less biblical than bureaucratic. The structure is so neat it squeaks, the tone so tidy it could pass for onboarding material. But life doesn’t run on templates. The men Galloway claims to rescue aren’t gasping for another framework; they’re already crushed beneath them. And yet, Galloway can’t seem to grasp that.

There’s a bigger point that must be made here. Galloway’s model is a rebranded, simplified echo of Jordan Peterson’s early work. The Canadian psychologist treats masculinity as a philosophical and moral quest; Galloway treats it as a management problem. Peterson asks men to wrestle with meaning, chaos, and responsibility. Galloway asks them to manage their time, balance their budgets, and update their emotional software.

What Peterson offered, and occasionally still offers, is depth — messy, mythic, and sometimes maddening. What Galloway offers is surface-level — sleek, digestible, and algorithmically safe. He has taken Peterson’s call to personal transformation and run it through an MBA program, flattening archetypes into advice. It’s masculinity devoid of metaphysics and packaged for mass consumption: clean, catchy, and completely consequence-free.

The resemblance is no coincidence. Galloway has found the lucrative void left by Peterson’s decline: the men still searching for structure, but unwilling to wade through Jungian metaphors and biblical exegesis. He offers them the same fatherly firmness without the mysticism. In that sense, he’s not just Peterson’s successor, but his salesman — turning existential struggle into a subscription model.

Still, Notes on Being a Man isn’t without wit. Galloway’s prose, brisk and brash, often lands like a punchline wrapped in pathos. He’s funny, self-aware, and occasionally disarming. His call for discipline and dignity isn’t wrong — it’s simply been declawed. There’s no danger in his vision, no depth to unsettle or transform. It’s masculinity with the edges sanded down, ready for a conference keynote or a corporate retreat.

There’s a darker comedy at play here: the idea that manhood, once lived and tested in the arena of life, now needs a management consultant. Galloway, of course, is that consultant. He speaks to a generation of men who feel both obsolete and overanalyzed, promising them an exit strategy from the abyss. But what he’s really selling is reassurance — that if you tick the right boxes and buy the right books, you might still matter.

Notes on Being a Man may comfort some, amuse others, and bore a few — but it reveals just how domesticated modern manhood has become. There was a time when men sought meaning from those who demanded something of them — Hemingway urging them to live bravely, Solzhenitsyn reminding them that truth carries a cost, Joseph Campbell showing that heroism and sacrifice are two sides of the same sword. Those voices insisted that pain and purpose were inseparable. Galloway nods toward that idea, then sells the knock-off version. It’s dollar-store wisdom at a $26 markup, shrink-wrapped self-help for men who mistake purchase for progress.

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