The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:26:48 · Scott Galloway
[00:26:48] S2: That are living with their parents in their basements, living, you know, quiet lives. You know that saying about millions of men live quiet lives of desperation. I think there's millions of young men living quiet lives of isolation. Yes. And we just don't see them. And it's not even that they're criminals or that they're joining the Taliban or that they're not necessarily inherently bad people. They're just, They've just disappeared. Yeah, that's They're just invisible to the world, invisible to themselves. And they wake up in their late twenties and they don't have, maybe they're overweight, they're anxious, they're fearful, and they've never learned the skills to have friends, mentors, mates get into an office, figure out how to get along with others. They just kind of become almost unsavable. Do you think there's a role, and this comment is pregnant with a question, this question is pregnant with a comment, so I'll just make the comment. I would like to see, and maybe they have this, in junior and senior years in high school, I think it's gotta start pretty early, something resembling what I'll call an adulting curriculum. Just very open and honest conversations around, I remember taking psych 10 at UCLA and it changed my life because I'm like, oh wait, insecurity is a thing. I'm not the only person that feels imposter syndrome doesn't. I mean, of these neuroses I learned about, I'm like, wait, that's an actual thing other people had? I thought it was just me. And it was so helpful. I wished that in an earlier stage, I mean, things like, what is interest rate on a credit card? I lived alone with my mom. Like I wish someone had kind of dialed me in as a young man into this thing called menopause and what your mom might be going through. Do you think if you, and I imagine you are, asked to consult to different lawmakers, governor, Governor Newsom calls you and says, how do we better prevent bad behaviors in high school? Is it education? Is it coursework? Like what, if you could have influence over the curriculum of all the public schools in California, what would that influence look like?
00:29:03 · Anna Lembke
[00:29:03] S3: Yeah. Wow. Great question. So first, just going back to some of your earlier commentary about how men have disappeared. The statistics bear this out. Men are not entering... Men and young men and of all ages are not not entering the job market. So we have a ballooning number of young men who are not working, and the data suggests that it's because they're at home, you know, playing video games and on social media. So they're they're literally not engaging, you know, with their milestones at their... At various ages. In terms of how to change the curriculum, I would recommend three things. Number one, I would teach young people about the neuroscience of pleasure and pain, and about how as we continue to bombard our reward pathway with highly reinforcing substances and behaviors, we don't get more pleasure. We get the opposite. We change our hedonic or joy set point, and we actually tilt our mood and our baseline capacity for pleasure to the side of pain such that we need more and more over time, more and more of our drug of choice to get any pleasure at all. And when we're not using, you know, we're in misery. We need to use just to feel normal. I think this is really key for young people to understand that what feels good or pleasurable or reduces anxiety or depression or insomnia in the moment actually probably makes that worse in the long run because our brains will immediately adapt to that surge of dopamine. So I think that's really important. Number two, embodied anything. So way more curriculum that involves using our bodies, using our hands, doing real things in the real world. So this is for... And, you know, a lot of people have talked about this, but I I really think this is important. Lots of options for sports, for engagement in sports. Mhmm. They actually did this experiment in Iceland. It was called... You know, they they had a a growing youth drug and alcohol problem.
00:31:09 · Scott Galloway
[00:31:09] S2: I saw this.
00:31:10 · Anna Lembke
[00:31:10] S3: Yeah. So they did two things. They... Number one, they made a curfew. So at a certain point in that night, you know, kids couldn't... Late at night, young young kids couldn't go out. And number two, they built a whole bunch of gymnasiums and sports centers and organized sports teams, and they saw a really significant decrease in the number of kids both using and getting addicted to drugs and alcohol. Now this was many years ago, but, again, an embodied physical option where kids can get their dopamine, you know, and get that pleasure, but they pay for it up front by by moving their bodies and doing hard things, which is how we evolved. Right? We evolved to do a whole lot of work, to get a little bit of reward, not to do no work at all, to get a lot of reward, which is the world that we live in now. And, again, this whole embodied idea with, you know, also learning a craft, right, or learning a profession, We have all these industrial jobs that nobody fills. Like, it's not that the jobs are not out there. It's that young people do not have the basic skills to to weld, to to be an electrician, to be a plumber, to, like, use their hands and do real things. And I think a lot of people would enjoy that work and find it highly satisfying and a wonderful antidote to this virtual world. The other thing that's happened in the world that I think we've massively under underappreciated is the extent to which the digital media has proliferated bureaucracy that rolls downhill. So now it's like the consumer that needs to do all of these things that the bank used to do, but now we have to do, or for taxes, or for signing your kid up for anything at school. It's like this massive bureaucracy, and, like, we don't learn any... Kids don't learn anything in school about how to, like, navigate, how to pay your taxes, how to make sure you have car insurance, how to make sure you have health insurance, and navigate the insanity of the health care system. I mean, all of those... I mean, I I frankly barely have those skills. But those are the types of skills that that young people really need in order to navigate the modern environment. And, you know, especially kids who, like, tend toward ADHD or, you know, or impulsivity, Like these kids are gonna need really a lot of extra help with all of these layers of bureaucracy.
00:33:34 · Scott Galloway
[00:33:34] S2: I wanna give you the profile, and this sort of bleeds into what you talk about in your book Surrender. So a young man, early 20s, and I mean, this is the profile of the kid or the young man that I deal with. When I mentor a young man, I generally end up with a kid, and this is the profile, good kid, did okay in high school, not great, did okay. Parents put a lot of pressure on him to go to college. He goes to college, doesn't work out. And there's this shame that comes over the And it's a shame that is so ridiculous because two thirds of our kids aren't going to end up with a traditional BA. But we've decided in America, something's wrong. You have failed as a family and as a kid, And you know, the kid starts at a school and then everyone goes quiet and doesn't talk about it, but it's clear. And he moves home. He's in the basement or in the garage or spare bedroom. Has sort of a job, has sort of a thing. You know, gets maybe, you know, decent. Not, you know, he's not a bad kid. He gets a job, maybe takes a couple classes at community college thinking he's gonna go back to wherever next year. But it's clear college just probably isn't in the cards for him. And it's one, two years go by. And when I talk to these kids, what I see is not like full blown addiction, but mild addiction to video games, to online gambling, to Reddit and Discord, and never go outside. Right. Start to believe their parents are their enemy, you know, not their allies. And I can just start to see this kid, if this happens, if this goes on for another three or five years, and I hate to say this, I feel like they're unsavable. That if they don't get to a point as young men where they develop that muscle around life and leaving the house and negotiating friendships, and I I I... These kids, these young men, they are everywhere. And the parents don't know what to do. They don't know if they're enabling them, their natural inclination is to be patient and give them support. But the line between support and enablement is just such a weird it's not even a thin line. It's a giant line that's incredibly hazy that's
00:36:10 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
[00:36:10] S3: hard to discern. Right? Yes. [00:36:12] S2: So how would you coach a coach or someone who wants to be a coach of young men? This is the profile I see everywhere. They're not meth addicts. They're not bad people. They're just... They're slowly but surely going invisible. Mhmm. Your thoughts.