Scott’s Struggle With Body Dysmorphia, the Affordability Crisis, and the Cost of Ambition

Scott Galloway opens up about his lifelong struggle with body dysmorphia, breaks down the psychology behind the affordability crisis, and shares hard-earned lessons about ambition, sacrifice, and relationships. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [email protected], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Speaker 04

  Welcome to Office Hours at PropG. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected] or post your question on the Sky Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Question number one. Our first question comes from neatextension6877 on Reddit. They say, "Hi, I had a question in regards to your recent procedures. I was wondering how you would address the rise in male augmentations and things, including eating disorders and body dysmorphia with young men. The topic is usually targeted towards females. I know you've mentioned your body dysmorphia and was curious if you had discussions with your sons about the condition. How can we help young men navigate these issues from a different perspective? I hope you're healing well and happy with the results." Okay, so my quote-unquote "procedure" and body dysmorphia aren't really connected. I got kicked in the face playing soccer when I was in high school. My nose has always gone to the right and I wanted to fix it. I'm vain enough to have it done, but I'm not vain enough to really, I don't know if it really did anything, quite frankly.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, my iPhone still recognizes me on face recognition, so, and most people who see me don't see any difference. That's not where my body dysmorphia has manifested. My body dysmorphia was, growing up, my mom was British and not home a lot, so that meant food was a punishment. She didn't cook a lot, and when she did cook, it was shepherd's pie. No joke. She would, on Sunday, make a giant vat of shepherd's pie, and that night it was actually tolerable, even good. And then we'd freeze it, and for the next seven nights, I had the delight of crusting off a piece of frozen shepherd's pie, putting it into a microwave that sounded like Chernobyl right before it blew, and then eating this kind of wet shepherd's pie thing. And so, food was not something I've ever enjoyed. I'm not a foodie. Food, quite frankly, no one feels sorry for me. Food is a tax for

• 3:24Speaker 04

  me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't eat a lot. My assistant will call me at 2:00 PM and say, "I can tell you haven't eaten." And she's right, I haven't eaten since I got up. I could drop 10 or 15 pounds, no problem, in about two months. And again, see above, no one's gonna feel sorry for me. But I grew up painfully thin. When I got my driver's license, I was 5'10", 120. When I got to college, I was 6'1", 140 pounds, maybe, and with bad acne, and I was just very self-conscious about my looks. Now, in some ways, that was good, because it taught me that if I ever wanted to have any social capital, I would need to develop other skills. And I developed, I think, a really strong sense of humor. And that was key for me and has served me well my whole life. What was most comical in high school, and Steve Martin, I'm dating myself, in college, I started lifting weights and started taking protein powder, went on Accutane, my skin

• 4:07Speaker 04

  cleared up. And by the time I was, kind of, end of my sophomore year, I was 6'2", 190 pounds, and quite frankly, I was ripped. And to be blunt, I started getting laid, and I really liked that. I really enjoyed that and just a lot of confidence, a lot of self-esteem came from being strong, if you will, or not being skinny. And so I associate good things with not being skinny. So even though I'm still six two, 187 pounds, you know, everything's kind of shifted a little bit. But when I look in the mirror, I see someone who's emaciated and I know that my brain's been rewired and I don't see the real me, but I have tremendous, or when I was a young person, and I think most people have body dysmorphia, but to for mine, it was more about weight. So back to cosmetic procedures,

• 4:50Speaker 04

  about 2 million men a year undergo cosmetic procedures. I would bet that within 10 or 20 years, people who have money, the two thirds of the men and women will undergo some sort of cosmetic procedures. And there's different levels. You can get botox, you can get fillers. I bet a lot of it'll be non-surgical. But it's kind of that, that saying, you're not, you're not ugly, you're poor. And we have such a luxus age of society now. I think the emphasis to look young, it's always been there for women. Women are disproportionately evaluated on their aesthetics. Men disproportionately evaluated on their economic viability. But now economic viability is, as you get older, kind of your ability to come across is vigorous and youthful. So I think a great place to invest or work is in, I don't know what you call it, the aesthetics industry. It used to be men were only about 5% to 6% of patients.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Now they're pushing 10%, I believe. So their shares doubled. I believe that'll go to a third. But I'm now doing, you're talking to someone who never took a, I literally never took a pill or had caffeine until I was 45. Now I'm just this guy, that cliche with a pillbox. I do NAD treatments, vitamin A, B, D. Do I do E? I think I do E. I do all sorts of shit. I'm on testosterone therapy. So I'm doing kind of everything. I haven't had a lot of cosmetic procedures. Mine were pretty PG 13, if you will. I don't know if they worked or not. I don't know. Anyways, I'm kind of fascinated with the technology, but I think you're going to see a, the pretty big increase. I think body dysmorphia is something. That most people suffer from. And what I would say is, I don't even feel qualified

• 6:18Speaker 04

  to talk about it. Supposedly, eating disorders are the hardest to kick. Men make up only about 10% of eating disorder patients, but community studies suggest they may represent closer to 25% because there's more of a taboo and men don't talk about it. So there's a big gap between how many men are affected and how many men actually talk about it. It body dysmorphia affects, according to research, about 2% of the general population. I think that's bullshit. I think it's much more than that. A 2025 study found that nearly 3% of young men show signs of muscle dysmorphia. That's what I had. I could never be big enough. I now look back, when I was working out a lot in my 30s, I got pretty big. And even then, I thought I wasn't big enough. So you can see how it happens. And I can relate to young women who see Instagram and think that they can never be thin enough. And that's

• 7:03Speaker 04

  what girls and young women are seeing as their aspirational figures. I think it's actually very unhealthy. But in terms of body dysmorphia, mine's gotten a lot better as I've gotten older. Simply put, I just am more confident, more experienced in relationships. I'm sort of ready to go full ugly, trying to hold on to being, you know, I always say to my friends, it's not easy to be a four on a scale of one to 10. I'm kind of ready just to just give up and go to the three, two, and the one of what it means to be old and just kind of ugly. I'm ready for it. I'm sort of here for it. I've come to grips with that. And I'm no longer trying as hard, although, having said that, I just had a cosmetic procedure. Anyway, body dysmorphia, obviously, if you feel like you suffer for it, from it, or would benefit from therapy, I think that would, that's a great idea if you have the money and access. But I think it's something a lot of us, I think very

• 7:46Speaker 04

  few people look, look in the mirror and think, nailed it. So I think it's a big issue. And this is all a long-winded way of saying I'm not qualified to speak deeply to the issue, other than to say, I had it. I felt like I was never big or muscular enough. It's something that's haunted me my whole life. And slowly but surely, I've grown out of it and just tried to rationally think about my height, my weight, staying in shape, exercising a lot, eating well, and as I get older, trying to cut down the alcohol. And do a shit ton more THC. That's the dog. He's back. He's oxygen-deprived. Oxygen-deprived? Oxygen-deprived at 6,000 feet. Thanks for the question.

• 8:24Scott Galloway?

  Question number two. Question two comes from a listener who emailed us. They say, total fan here. Well, totally thank you. A recent Economist article downplayed affordability as a crisis.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Noting that wages for the working class and working poor have kept pace with inflation or better. Do you agree? My understanding is the percentage of homeownership in recent decades has ranged between 16% and 70%. Is that still the case? Or are those 30% of us who do not own homes just coming to the sad realization there in that 30%? Appreciate your thoughts on all of the above. Okay, so some data here. I saw that article. I thought it was really interesting. The Economist article this question refers to is titled "The American Affordability Crisis Is Mostly A Mirage." It was published in late December. The Economist loves to be provocative. Hmm. It claims that real wages have risen across much of the income distribution and purchasing power is still relatively strong, undermining the idea that Americans on average are dramatically worse off than previous generations. So a direct quote from the article, "Real wages

• 9:17Speaker 04

  are close to record highs across the income spectrum, but are strongest of all for the poorest. Never has life been so affordable in America for so many." The argument there is that much of the feeling of a crisis is driven by psychology, people focusing on price levels rather than inflation rates, and politics rather than actual deterioration of fundamentally affordable metrics, rather than fundamental affordability metrics. Okay, so some additional context here with respect to wages. The Economist isn't totally wrong, but I think they missed part of the picture. According to the article, price levels are up around 25% versus before the pandemic, which means people are actually paying higher prices. But it points out that nominal wages have risen by around 30% over the same period. Real wages, meaning wages adjusted for inflation, have also recovered since the pandemic. Inflation-adjusted

• 9:58Speaker 04

  pay today is slightly higher than 2019, and lower-income workers actually saw faster wage growth. But that's an average story. Where's the real pressure? So I think a couple of things are happening here, and I think the key is, or the key word is the psychology, or psychology, and that is, when you think about the things that get you ahead and maybe help you build a family, it's education and it's housing. And housing plays a big psychological, has a big psychological impact on people. Also, I think families are really struggling with The downside of what is a corrupt cartel called higher education, of which I'm a member of, where we purposely arbitrage great kids or good kids down to an average school that engages in price collusion such that an average school charges what a great school

• 10:43Speaker 04

  charges, even a little bit more because most great schools have more donors and financial aid. So you get arbbed from Princeton and NYU or whatever down to a second tier school. I won't name a second tier school because people are so sensitive about their schools. But that school, even though it's second tier, you're paying a Mercedes price for a Hyundai product, making education just unaffordable for most middle-class households. So the means of getting ahead, the means of establishing a family have outpaced, and this takes a real psychological toll. Now, even bigger than that, even bigger than that. Okay, if you, I love Jimmy Carr, I don't know if you've seen, he's my new Yoda. He points out that if you have Netflix and a hot shower, you're kind of living, Warren Buffett said, "The, the average middle-class person lives a better life than the wealthiest

• 11:26Speaker 04

  person in the world 100 years ago." He's right. I'll take Netflix and Novocain versus being the Duke of Earl in the late 19th century. Hands down, the middle-class person has a much better life right now. The problem is that's not the way our brain works. The way our brain works is we pull up Instagram and we see that our friends are at the Amangani in Utah, having $40 cocktails after buying, you know, ETH and making millions of dollars, and are buying a condo in Miami and just bought a brand-new, you know, Range Rover. And you think, okay, that's my benchmark. Oh, and by the way, she has a boyfriend with ripped abs, and my boyfriend does not have ripped abs and is not making millions of dollars.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  I'm a failure. And so the 0.1% dominate 90%, or the image of the 0.1% dominate 90% of our social feeds and create just unrealistic expectations, and it depresses us. And that is happiness is a function of your prosperity minus your expectations. And our expectations have just been taught to vastly outpace any reasonable increase in our prosperity. I even find this, just on a basic level, the difference between men and women. Men are, at least in my generation, were raised to believe that they should earn enough money to have a family, that that's their right. And so when they're not making a shit-ton of money, they feel angry and entitled. Whereas I think a lot of women were brought up to

• 12:49Speaker 04

  think that, oh, you just want to make the same as a man, that's your goal. And so I have- Universally found in compensation discussions that it's always the white dudes, and I'm playing identity politics here, who are always pissed off about their compensation. And again, it goes back to one thing. It goes back to expectations. So I think, one, the key markers of prosperity, your ability to get certification you need to move ahead, buy a home, outpace inflation. And two, I mean, I just want to stat, first time home buyers now just make up 20% of home purchases. That's down from 40% historically. So now only one in five home purchases are first time buyers. The average age of a first time home buyer is now 40 years old. That's the highest it's ever been. Or put out, you know, wages may be keeping up with inflation, but they're not keeping up with the price of entry into wealth. And that

• 13:33Speaker 04

  is your ability to start building a life and saving money. Some things have gone down in price. The average price of retail price of clothes has gone down 50%. Cars has gone down. The college tuition has gone up. Also, medical care. And you want to talk about something that really weighs on the psyche and the anxiety of America. 40% of American homes have some sort of medical or dental debt. Imagine you're a single mother and your daughters are screaming to pain from a root canal. You have to go into debt, such and such. I mean, you gotta get that root canal, right? So this really attacks people's self-esteem. And also childcare is dramatically increased. So what do you have? It's hard to go to work and get ahead because of childcare. It's really hard to get the certification you need to substantially step

• 14:15Speaker 04

  up in your career because of college. And if you get sick, I'd help you. You're kind of out on your own. And then you layer in all of that and expectation that if you're not a millionaire by the time you're 30, you fucked up. So definitely some truth to the notion that the affordability crisis on some metrics has not panned out. But psychologically, what we have is a nation that is more fearful and more anxious and feels less secure about their position in the world relative to everybody else. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 14:48Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Built. Most of us work hard to earn our keep, but usually there's no one around to hand you a cookie when you successfully pay your monthly housing bill. No one except Built, that is. Built has expanded from their original rental rewards program, and they have a lot more going on for members now. For example, members can earn points on mortgage payments, too. Every housing payment gets you points that get you a lot more than baked goods, such as flights with top travel partners, including United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and much, much more. Here's another benefit of Built membership. You also get access to what they call a neighborhood concierge. You can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while rewarding you at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's simple.

• 15:31Scott Galloway?

  Being a renter and now owning a home feels a lot better with Built. You can download the Built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com/profg. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/profg. Use our link so they know we sent you.

• 15:49Scott Galloway?

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• 16:34Scott Galloway?

  payments, and other administrative tasks, so you can spend less time managing logistics and more time focused on what's next. Visit upwork.com/profg right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com/profg to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com/profg. Upwork.com/profg.

• 16:59Scott Galloway?

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• 17:44Scott Galloway?

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• 18:09Speaker 04

  Welcome back. Our final question comes from MoonlightClimber on Reddit. "I'm in my late 20s, in a serious relationship, and trying to balance ambition with partnership. My partner is a physician tied to one location. I'm starting a company and travel frequently for work and family. You've built a big career that requires a lot of travel. How did you maintain a close relationship with your partner? Specifically, when your kids were younger, was your travel a source of tension? If so, what actually worked? Setting up a communication cadence, boundaries, traveling together, looking back, what would you do differently?"

• 18:37Scott Galloway?

  Well, given that I'm divorced, I'd probably do a lot differently. I may not have relevant experience here because I didn't have kids till I was 42, and one of the reasons I didn't have them was I wanted to be focused on my career. My work and not being present and not investing in my marriage and my selfishness all didn't help, see above divorced. But I can't blame that on a lack of balance and not having kids. I just think I was kind of me, me, me all the time. Also, I think generally it's tough to get married when young. I think between the ages of 24 and 34, you're a pretty different person. So unless you're investing a lot in the relationship and time with each other, it's pretty easy to kind of grow apart and have different priorities. "Hey, let's move to New York where I can be a fucking master of the universe." "Hey, I want to move closer to my parents in, you know, Santa Clarita." What?

• 19:18Speaker 04

  What do you want to do? Wait, you didn't tell me that. You want our kids to go to church? What the fuck? Anyway, how do you balance? Brother, there is no balance. I think if you have the right partner and you're aligned, I'd say it's more about alignment than balance. And that is, is it important to your partner and you that you have a certain level of economic or influence capital by a certain age? If so, it's just going to require a massive amount of commitment that will involve you not spending as much time together. And is your partner aligned with that? One thing I will give to my ex-wife was she was always on board with that. She was a securities analyst. We were working all the fucking time. So I think it's more about alignment that you have the type of conversation with your partner, right? This is the life we want. And in order to get the life we want, it's going to require a certain amount of sacrifice for both of us. My sacrifice might be that

• 20:02Speaker 04

  I have to molest the earth every year. And I spent for the last 30 years, I've spent 180 days plus a year on the road. I'm at fucking Jackson Hole right now. I was in Davos three days ago. And then before that, I was in New York. And I mean, I've been in, been all over the place. And it takes a toll. But if you want a certain level of economic security, it's going to take a sacrifice. The key is just having an open and honest conversation. And then also maybe being open and honest about, all right, maybe I need to dial it back and we need to temper our expectations around what's attainable for us. Technology does play a role. What I do now that is really helpful, I have alarms to go off my phone and I FaceTime both my boys every night at the same time. So I'm in Jackson Hole, it's Mountain Central time. So my alarm is set to 2:30 PM, Mountain Central

• 20:45Speaker 04

  time, which is 9:30 their time. And then I usually call them or FaceTime them. And even if they don't pick up, I just leave them a quick note. They usually call me back. But I just want them to know I'm thinking about them every day. And I want to see them, say hi. And I find that is really helpful. And it beats when I was living with my father sometimes in the summer after my mom and dad got divorced and I'd have to shuttle downtown in Chicago to use his Watts line because my dad was too cheap to let me call my mom from our phone. Yeah, breakups. Monopoly's not a bad thing. You have to send a kid to downtown fucking Chicago to call his mom on the Watts line. Anyway, anywho, yeah, I think it's alignment with your partner and I think leveraging technology and also just, it sucks to be a grown up. I didn't see my boys a lot when they were young. I remember coming home and getting

• 21:30Speaker 04

  all bummed out because I'd be gone. Sometimes I'd be gone for three weeks at a time when I was building L2 and traveling to Europe during Thanksgiving because we thought we could lap the competition. And I'd come home and I'd see with my oldest Alec, who was, you know, five or six, I'd be like, Jesus Christ, he's grown. Like I'd pop my head in at night and I'd look at him and he'd grown and it would just really bum me out. But the bottom line is I now get to do wonderful things with my kids. As I got older and I got more economically secure, I was able to spend a disproportionate amount of time with them. So boss, you know, there's no balance here. There's just trade offs and you have to get alignment with your partner and decide, you know, what sacrifices are you willing to make or not make now? And just be honest about the consequences of those sacrifices or the upside of those sacrifices. Thanks for the question.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit. I've got a subreddit. I've got a subreddit. I like that. And we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Gennaro. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

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