The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:00:01 · Scott Galloway, S1
[00:00:01] S0: Support for the show comes from Morgan Stanley's podcast, What Should I Do With My Money? Your financial plan got you here. The next stage calls for a different thinking. On What Should I Do With My Money, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, real people sit down with their advisors to work through questions too big to tackle alone, things like diversifying concentrated stock, investing in private markets, or evaluating crypto risk. Listen as they hear from advisors who know their goals, their families, and their worries. The strategies are complex. The emotions are real. Search for what should I do with my money to listen. Support for the show comes from Bill. When it comes to managing money, forget the hype and look at results. Bill has trillion dollars of secure payments powering the Bill Pay tools. Instead of just moving money, Bill is powering the financial operations of nearly a half a million customers. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the Proven choice. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.com/proven to get started and grab a $150 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. [00:01:02] S1: Give you and your team more time to focus on the work that matters. This is Amexcorporate, one intelligent platform for company spending. With smart expense management to help capture details, categorize spend, and streamline expense submission and approval, there's less manual work
00:01:02 · S1, Scott Galloway, Scott Galloway, Anna Lembke
[00:01:02] S1: Give you and your team more time to focus on the work that matters. This is Amexcorporate, one intelligent platform for company spending. With smart expense management to help capture details, categorize spend, and streamline expense submission and approval, there's less manual work [00:01:35] S0: Welcome to a bonus episode of the Prof G Pod. We're now bringing you an extra conversations episode on Tuesdays, more time with the people who help us think differently about work, life, and what matters. Today, we're joined by Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, bestselling author and psychiatrist specializing in addiction medicine. We discussed with Doctor. Lembke her new book, Radical Surrender and Why a Surrendered Life is a more purposeful one, What Recognizing and Addressing Addiction Should Actually Look Like, The Modern Teen Rebels and How We Can Help Them From Falling Behind, and How to Avoid Endemic Narcissism and The Urge to Constantly Measure Our Own Success. That hits home. I absolutely adore Doctor. Lembke. Her previous episode with us was one of the most downloaded. I am fascinated. People say this is an attention economy. No, it's not. It's an addiction economy. Anyways, with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Doctor. Anna Lembke. [00:02:33] S2: Doctor, where does this podcast find you? [00:02:35] S3: I am in Stanford, California in my office. [00:02:39] S2: Makes sense. And I imagine as as is the case three hundred and sixty four days a year, I imagine it's beautiful out there.
00:02:39 · Scott Galloway, Anna Lembke
[00:02:39] S2: Makes sense. And I imagine as as is the case three hundred and sixty four days a year, I imagine it's beautiful out there. [00:02:45] S3: It is gorgeous. We're having a great fall. [00:02:48] S2: By the way, I really enjoyed our last conversation. I was excited to see that we're having you on again. [00:02:52] S3: Thank you. I enjoyed it too, and I got a lot of credibility with my sons and their friends. So that was awesome. [00:02:59] S2: Yeah. There you go. You're you're with that crazy guy. So let's bust right into it. Your newest book, Radical Surrender, which comes out November 10, offers readers the tools for letting go in a world engineered for certainty and control. You argue that we live in a time of unprecedented control over all aspects of our daily lives, which has made us unable to tolerate uncertainty. When we do face it, we often experience anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or self loathing, shame and response. Set the table here. How has the world changed and created, if you will, this level of anxiety? What's changed about the world, if you will?
00:03:47 · Anna Lembke
[00:03:47] S3: First of all, we evolved over millions of years of evolution to exert our agency to reduce uncertainty. It's what's allowed us to survive in a chaotic natural environment where famine, flood, fire was, you know, always imminently threatening our survival, we have evolved science and technology to really create an unprecedented amount of control over the natural environment, which you would think would make us all feel much safer. But the paradox here is that the more levers for micro control that we have over our lives, the more anxious, fearful, and lonely, I would argue, as well as bored we've become. And it is a paradox because, again, we are sort of teleologically or biologically evolved to exert agency. It feels good. It's adaptive in a chaotic environment, but now we are sort experiencing control at the micro level. And also, we've created this sort of virtual space where we have sort of engineered a reality that we have an incredible amount of control over. But what I'm seeing is people, more and more people, especially young people gripped by paralyzing anxiety because they feel like because they have so many choices and so much control, that if they make the wrong choice, they're going to miss out on their best lives. Also, a lot of shame that goes along with that when, like, things don't work out perfectly. People feel like they only have themselves to blame. So there's an incredible amount of self loathing. Also sadly more and more people harming themselves, young people ending their own lives after really quite minor minor failures, like what a generation ago would have been considered sort of tolerable, like social rejection or an academic reprimand. It's like becomes intolerable. And of course, the virtual space and the Internet makes that worse as our mistakes ricochet around the world, as we see these constant curated images and narratives of these perfect lives. So, again, the the paradox of control is that we have so many more ways to quote, unquote optimize that we all feel we should be engineering perfection.
00:06:14 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:14] S2: So I wanna talk about social media, and that's sort of my go to for the world's ills. As I immediately look like, what social media has done to cause this? But even before that, as a parent, I adopted, I forget, I saw this wonderful movie with Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller where the protagonist Ben Stiller's wife passes away and all he thinks about is protecting his kids. And it's a movie from about twenty years ago. And it really struck me because I remember my youngest broke his arm when he was like, I don't know, maybe four or five. And my partner was just so upset and said, we need to rearrange the living room. I'm like, we're doing no such thing. And I remember when I was in elementary school, it was like the outpatient emergency room. There were kids with eye patches. Remember signing casts? That was a thing. Someone always had a cast and we'd sign it. Right. And you don't want them in danger, but you do want them in uncertainty and risk. And I used to leave my mom's house on a Saturday at 9AM with a Schwinn bike and Abba Zaba bar and 35¢. And she wouldn't see me for twelve hours. And in those twelve hours, I faced a lot of uncertainty and even mild amount of danger, whether it was, you know, roaming stray dogs or, you know, sixth graders who like to beat up second graders. And I think that was good for me. And I find that we inevitably, you know, if my kids are fifteen minutes late home from school, we call MI6. And so talk about even before they have screens, what parenting, what role parenting or over parenting, I'll say, plays in all this.
00:07:59 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
[00:07:59] S3: Yeah. So this is hugely relevant. You know, I think many of us, maybe not you, but many of us are guilty of kind of trying to raise our kids in these padded cells so that they are insulated from any kind of pain or uncertainty so that we can also reduce our anxiety. And and in many ways, it's a kind of a codependent phenomenon where we are protecting our kids so that we're not experiencing the anxiety about how they might get hurt or fail in some way. You know? And as a result, we are raising a generation of young people that has no tolerance for uncertainty and also no kind of psychological touchstone for resilience, for knowing that they can encounter failure, that they can have a negative experience, and it's gonna be okay, and they can lift themselves up. And the technology really exacerbates this problem. I mean, the ways in which we can now track our children from infancy, you know, with a device in the other room to make sure that their breathing is okay. And, of course, these are natural worries that parents have. [00:09:09] S2: Mhmm.