The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:41:37 · Anna Lembke
Getting off makes them less depressed. So it's a contingency plan with a behavioral expectation that is appropriate for a young adult, and then it's just letting that kid have the negative consequences of their behavior in the world and letting go. And trust me, as a parent, I know how hard that is, but unless our kids go out there and have their own failures and their own experiences and see that they can get through it, they are never going to develop into real people. And then finally, connecting, you know, with greater meaning and purpose. And for this, I really recommend pursuing virtue. Like, if you want a challenging difficult life, try to do the next right thing. It's hard. We're given opportunities every day to choose between doing the right thing and just passing it by, and doing the right thing is hard to do. And it's simple things. You know, it's not like saving the world, a la effective altruism, you know, Sam Bankman Fried style. It's the opposite of that. It's like, what are the good things that I can do right now today? Because our ability to to discern the good thing is much more accurate in the here and now. You know? So it's that doing the next right thing. And having that be kind of your mantra to pull you through. The stoics said that in order to live in accordance with God, we need to live in accordance with nature. In order to live in accordance with nature, we need to pursue virtue. And I think that's absolutely right. And it also gives our lives a deeper meaning, a purpose, and it's hard. It's challenging. Right? I mean, you want something that's hard and challenging? Like, pursue virtue.
00:43:26 · Scott Galloway
[00:43:26] S0: We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from engine. When 1,600,000,000,000 moves through travel every year, it's a shock to remember that most of it still runs on tech from the eighties. I mean, work travel works fine, but it certainly isn't all that intelligent. That's why businesses and travelers book directly through Engine. Engine closes the gap between wanting to be somewhere and actually being there. Developers, expense tools, and AI agents all plug into Engine's API. And as AI spreads, Engine only becomes more valuable. Every AI agent that wants to book travel needs real supply, real pricing, and real payments. With 40,000 businesses relying on Engine and growing fast, they're powering travel for the masses with partnerships like Nivon and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Strong hotel partnerships, proprietary supply, real time rate shopping, and payment rails. That's the kind of foundation that takes years to build. Eight years in Engine's case, and it can't be bought. The future of business travel runs on Engine. Visit engine.com/propg. Support for the show comes from Framer. Picture this. You launch a website and your whole team's celebrating. Then the support tickets start to roll in and put a damper on the mood. That's when you could use a website platform that lets teams build, ship, and improve their sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. For that, you could use Framer. It's a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. Framer lets you prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, AI agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale while people bring taste, judgment, and control. And that all takes place in the same workspace where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. Framer is an enterprise level solution that the world's leading brands, including Perplexity and Miro, rely on to build their websites. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/profg for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/propg. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Talkiatry. Trying to figure out how to get the right mental health treatment if you can feel overwhelming.
00:45:44 · Scott Galloway
Talkiatry helps you move from I know I need help to actually having a psychiatrist who listens and provides a clear, personalized treatment plan. Talkiatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions including ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. Unlike therapy only platforms, psychiatry is psychiatry. You're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate. All 800 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out of network costs. Just complete a short online assessment to match with clinicians who fit your needs and schedule your first visit in days, not months. Head to tochiatry.com/propg to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatry.com/propg to get matched in minutes. talkiatry.com/propg We're back with more
00:46:45 · Scott Galloway
[00:46:45] S2: from Anna Lembke. I wanna talk a little bit about, I wrote a post on this that got a lot of feedback, polarized feedback, the cult of therapy. And that is, see a lot of people thinking, oh, there's an issue here with one of our kids. And I don't, I'm being critical to parents, but I think sometimes, especially parents with money outsource it and think we'll just fix it with therapy. And I want to be clear. I think therapy is a wonderful thing and it benefits thousands of people. Probably not millions because there's not enough therapists, but if you have the resources and it's something that can help pun. What I worry though, is that with TikTok, there's so many, what I call ring light therapists, that we've created these cults of therapy where you just, you need to work on yourself first. And I'm fairly like bullshit. Get a job, get a friend, get a girlfriend, get out of the house, start exercising. That is the equivalent of a nuclear detonation of therapy for sixty to ninety percent of the young men I deal with. And there's this notion that they learn on TikTok or that their parents want to put them in therapy that, oh, they need to work on themselves. And my attitude oftentimes, and I realize there's a fine line here, and I will defer to what you say as I have no training in adolescent psychiatry. But to be blunt, I work with a lot of young men. I find that a lot of this is, okay, the best therapy here is going to be life outside of the house. And occasionally I run across a kid and I'll say to the parents, I am in over my head, I'm over my skis. There's something going on here. You need a psychiatrist. This kid needs therapy. There's something going on here that I can't even begin to understand. But I think most of the time it's like, if this kid can get a job, start working out, get some friends, and maybe start asking women out, that's gonna be five years of therapy. Right? Right. So I'm putting forward a thesis that has what I'll call this ring light TikTok cults of therapy. Has it gone too far?
00:48:54 · Anna Lembke
[00:48:54] S3: Absolutely. And I've said very similar things. I mean, again, wanted to qual... Wanna qual... Qualify all this by saying I do psychotherapy. It can be tremendously helpful for many people. But the problem is that therapy is predominantly inward and backward, not outward and forward. And we are spending way too much of time inward and backward, thinking about ourselves, and importantly, thinking about past trauma. So a huge emphasis of modern therapy is to organize and structure our experience based on past trauma and see everything that happens to us as causally related to some past trauma. That is a worldview that is not, like, fact. Like, we could choose to navigate the world in a very different way. And although I think it's important to process and understand what's happened to us in the past, including the bad things, what is effectively happening with a lot of people who develop this trauma based worldview is that they never move past it. And every single felt experience or emotion they have, then they tie it back to this past trauma. And those folks end up with, like, no friends, no relatives. Mhmm. They they don't do well, and they're miserable. And and so we absolutely have to think about different ways of doing therapy, first of all, that it can't all be this Freudian concept that, you know, everything that that any form of sort of mental suffering and adulthood is tied to some conscious or unconscious childhood experience. That's just not realistic. We are much more influenced by what is happening to us right now than we are influenced by what happened to us twenty five years ago. I'm sorry, but that just that is a fact. We we cannot hold on to, like, the, you know, what happened to me when I was eight as an explanatory model for everything that happens to me when I'm 25 or 35, for that matter, 55. So... And then also I would just add, we we just have to get out of our own heads. We spend so much time not We in have to get out of our heads, and we have to be very suspicious of the stories that we tell. I mean, one of my my patients who got into recovery from long time addiction finally kind of came to the realization that, like, he couldn't really trust his own narratives. Like, in some ways, they were all sort of not real.
00:51:35 · Anna Lembke, Scott Galloway
And what he needed to do was go kickboxing, look at a rose bush, go out and meet some people and talk to them. And I think that's exactly right. When we are feeling down, distressed, anxious, we're usually ruminating. We're caught up in our own heads. If we can pivot our psyche outward, surrender that desire to try to control things through our mental mentations and ruminations, because that's what we're trying to do. It's this illusion that if I just keep thinking about this, I'm gonna be able to, you know, fix this and solve this problem. It's like, no. No. Stop. Stop thinking about that. Go out into the world. Pay attention to reality and what's really happening. Like see what needs to be done, do that thing, move forward. [00:52:28] S2: I really do. I find your work so powerful. I wanna talk a little bit about, I think the most undiagnosed addiction, and this is because sample size of one in a modern age is, I'd like to think I'm fairly aware of my own addictions, is the addiction to the affirmation of strangers. And quite frankly, it's made me successful. I'm so concerned with what other people think and that they'll like me if I have a lot of money. And that if I'm on CNN, that I pursue those things at the cost of the health of my relationship with myself, my own health, my own self esteem and my relationship with my family. [00:53:06] S3: Right.