Galloway: Getting A Job Is A “Nuclear Detonation Of Therapy” For Most Young Men – And A Stanford Psychiatrist Agrees

NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway, who drew fire this week for calling Elon Musk a “traitor to the West,” says for most of the young men he works with, a job, friends and a girlfriend would do more than therapy – and Stanford addiction psychiatrist Anna Lembke told him on his podcast that he is right. His book Notes on Being a Man argues that young men are in crisis.

“Bullshit, get a job, get a friend, get a girlfriend, get out of the house, start exercising,” Galloway said on a bonus episode of The Prof G Pod released Tuesday. “That is the equivalent of a nuclear detonation of therapy for 60 to 90% of the young men I deal with.”

Galloway blamed what he called “ring light therapists” on TikTok, who he said have “created these cults of therapy where you just, you need to work on yourself first.” He said therapy “is a wonderful thing,” that he defers to Lembke because “I have no training in adolescent psychiatry,” and that now and then he tells parents a kid needs a psychiatrist. But most of the time, he said, “if this kid can get a job, start working out, get some friends and maybe start asking women out, that’s going to be five years of therapy.”

Asked whether the “ring light TikTok cults of therapy” have gone too far, Lembke answered: “Absolutely. And I’ve said very similar things.”

“I do psychotherapy. It can be tremendously helpful for many people,” she said. “But the problem is that therapy is predominantly inward and backward, not outward and forward.”

She said “a huge emphasis of modern therapy is to organize and structure our experience based on past trauma.” People who take up that “trauma-based worldview,” she said, “never move past it” and “end up with like no friends, no relatives, they don’t do well, and they’re miserable.”

“We are much more influenced by what is happening to us right now than we are influenced by what happened to us 25 years ago,” Lembke said. “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.”

Her prescription sounded a lot like Galloway’s. One of her patients in recovery from long-term addiction, she said, came to see that “what he needed to do was go kickboxing, look at a rosebush, go out and meet some people and talk to them.” “Go out into the world, pay attention to reality and what’s really happening,” she said.

Lembke is a professor of psychiatry and medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford, according to her Stanford profile, and the author of Dopamine Nation. She was on the show to discuss her new book, Radical Surrender. As we noted earlier this year, she has urged a break from high-dopamine habits in favor of natural rewards like exercise and time with other people.

Galloway offered no data for the 60 to 90% figure; he framed it as his own experience with the young men he deals with.