Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Emotional Fitness and Entrepreneurship — with Dr. Emily Anhalt About this episode Dr. Emily Anhalt, a clinical psychologist and the co-founder of Coa, a mental health startup, joins Scott to discuss her work with entrepreneurs and her tips for becoming mentally strong. Dr. Anhalt also talks about the implications of mixing technology with mental health. Follow her on Twitter, @dremilyanhalt.
Scott opens with his thoughts on the tumbling markets, the return to fundamentals, and the fate of meme stocks.
Algebra of Happiness: find moments of engagement
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Transcript 10,391 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 133. Prohibition ended in 1933. I haven't drank at work in over 10 years. And you know what? I haven't touched a job since. What? Alcohol won't solve your problems, they tell me? Well, guess what? Neither does fucking milk. Go, go, go!
1:44 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 133rd episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Dr. Emily Anholt, a clinical psychologist and a co-founder of KOA, a mental health startup that offers therapist-led emotional fitness classes and therapist matchmaking. We discuss with Dr. Ann Halt the traits that make an emotionally fit leader, what it means to be mentally strong, and the implications of mixing technology with mental health. Okay, what's happening? What's the dealio? Let's dial in the dog 4011. The markets took a tumble, a tumble. Most of you don't recognize this because most of you have only experienced a bull market. True story, true story. Economic history shows that one in five years of the Dow's
2:29 Scott Galloway? or in the Dow's existence, the market has been off more by more than 20%. So guess what? It's been champagne and cocaine for pretty much the last 12, 13 years. So a lot of people, if you're under the age of 35, 36, you've never really been through a bear market, and this doesn't even feel bearish yet. This feels like a mini cub. So, so my pretties, get ready. And this may not be it, but when it happens, this is going to feel like a fucking Easter parade compared. I just remember in 99 or 2000, I should say in 2008, Jesus Christ, it just wouldn't stop. Anyways, we're coming up on the one year anniversary of when Redditors formed a movement, movement, big quotes, big quotes, air quotes, movement to drive GameStop's stock
3:14 Scott Galloway? up from roughly 60 bucks a share to get this 483 and ending the week at $197, up 204% from the previous week's close. A lot of billionaires have plotted the efforts of Wall Street Bets telling them to stick it to the man. The Winklevoss twins went on CNBC to offer their support with a, with a side of their two cents on how crypto offers the same weaponry for such rebellion. Just keep in mind that when someone claims they're William Wallace, it usually means that they are in fact the Kingsguard. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, a couple of billionaire rowers from Harvard telling you to stick it to the man. Well, okay, does that make any sense? They are the man. So back then I went on national TV to remind young investors that anytime a billionaire
3:57 Scott Galloway? Tells you to stick it to the man, you're likely the man's stick. And that's exactly what happened. Retail investors were left carrying GameStop at 40 bucks a share. And while the movement trade appears to be unwinding, fund managers are trying to stay ahead of any possible short squeezes. The Wall Street Journal reported that 85% of hedge funds and 42% of asset managers are now tracking retail trading message boards. They will not be fooled twice. This was sort of, as Swat Demodran said, this whole phenomenon was, he, I think correctly identified it as a mob squeeze. And also, I think these Wall Street Bets and other boards are really interesting. There's some fantastic analysis. And to their credit, they identified some stocks where there was,
4:40 Scott Galloway? I guess, 110 or 120% notional shorting, which means that somehow through synthetics, investors had figured out a way to actually short more shares than actually existed, such that when they convinced a group of their peers to begin buying the stock, there was so much exponential covering of the stock it created. You know, a crowd through a small door effect and the stock just absolutely took off. The problem is when equities begin to detach from the underlying fundamentals. Because I do think there are some truisms of the market. One is fundamentals, and that is, simply put, that the markets will reattach at some point to fundamentals. Stocks typically trade for three reasons. One, fundamentals, that is an increase in earnings or growth.
5:23 Scott Galloway? Two, some sort of technical movement. And that is similar to Reddit discovering a short squeeze. Or third, this quote unquote movement. I think the third thing is unwinding. I don't think that existed before. This unicorn, this mythology of a young man or woman whose parents lost their house and now was looking for a way to get money back from it. I just, I could never actually find that person on CNBC. This was a mythical person invented by people who are already staked. And I think when the story is written here, we're going to find that, yeah, some, some people, some of those people did make some money. But the people making and losing money and moving the markets were the same people as before. And that is hedge funds. So in sum, the way you would describe this is that the story stocks,
6:04 Scott Galloway? the meme stocks are unwinding, or the movement trade is unwinding. Everything from crypto, EV stocks, SPACs and high-flying techs are plunging from their historic highs. It's the boring shit that seems to be holding on. Yeah, you know, Apple might be down 10 or 15%, but, but Virgin Galactic is off 80%. The S and P 500. And the NASDAQ both reached correction territory earlier this week, which happens when an index closes at least 10% below its record closing level. Per the Wall Street Journal, more than 220 US large-cap companies were down at least 20% from their highs as of Monday, January 24th, and around 40% of stocks on the NASDAQ have been cut in half from their highs.
6:45 Scott Galloway? Think about that, almost half of the stocks on the NASDAQ have been cut in half from their highs. So what's going on here? The golden era of bullshit that was driven by story stocks, meme stocks, and blatant frauds is, it may not be coming to an end, but it feels as if it's unwinding. And that is typically, typically, stocks are kind of a function of two things. And that is, one, the performance, their earnings, their growth, and then the promise or the story. And typically, it's sort of 70, 80% performance and 20 to 30% promise. The vision of the CEO, the branding. That has flipped. And because many of these companies are so forward-looking and promising a vision, they're very hard to value. How do you value crypto?
7:30 Scott Galloway? There are no benchmarks, there is no underlying cash flows. So they're sort of, if you will, totally detached from any sort of benchmarks, which gives people the ability to take them to the moon without having any rational benchmark that would pull them back down, or logical benchmark. But at the same time, when this story unwinds and people say, well, what is Solano or Doja Coin? Does that make any fucking sense? Equities are in fact, let's go back to the stock market, equities are in fact, ownership in an asset that produces cash flow. And at some point, people begin, and the markets begin to look at those cash flows. So AMC and GameStop are not a movement.
8:12 Scott Galloway? They are an instrument that represents ownership in an underlying company, in this case, a really shitty retailer, and a business that is likely going out of business, specifically movie theaters. At some point, at some point, the reattachment will happen, and I think we're starting to see it now. Also, another reason, another reason that we oftentimes ignore, because it's kind of boring. Is interest rates. Interest rates are the gravity of the markets. And when the Fed decides to drop interest rates, investing becomes as easy as dunking on the moon. People become more confident and more optimistic. When interest rates are low, it's a disco party where the cocaine is cheap capital. The chatter is about what stock or coin is going to the moon. And the regulators are passed out drunk on the couch.
8:57 Scott Galloway? CEOs can make promises about the future and face no consequences when they fail to deliver. And it is great to be an overlevered investor because it is so inexpensive to borrow money. And your returns get even more and more juiced. In addition, the fixed income market is really unattractive because you're getting shitty returns. So what happens when interest rates start to tick up, even a small amount? The alternative to the equity market, the bond market, becomes more attractive. And you see flows out of equity markets into bonds. And what do you know? That puts pressure on stocks. And in addition, kind of a second basic pillar, cyclicality. And that is almost every sector and every geography goes in and out of fashion at some point. At some point. We first saw this with Peloton,
9:41 Scott Galloway? which led 28% last November when they missed earnings and now has an activist investor calling for the CEO's head and for the company to pursue a sale. Get this, Peloton is now below its IPO price. It's about 80% off its high. I think it got as high as about 160. And it's somewhere in the high 20s right now. It's about a $9 billion company, down from 50 billion. Think about that. Think about that. Netflix, even the star Netflix, dropped by almost 22%, shedding 50 billion in value after reporting disappointing subscriber growth and a weaker-than-anticipated forecast. But again, the difference between a 20% decline and an 80% decline is that Netflix is more performance than promise. Right? However, however, Peloton, you would argue,
10:25 Scott Galloway? is probably more promise than performance. It's got a, it's got, you can't have 2.5 million subscribers at a $50 billion market cap. It's got to show that it was going to get to 20 or 50. And the moment it didn't live up to those lofty promises, boy, did it get taken to the woodshed. However, however, Netflix added 18 million subscribers in 2021, which by those metrics and that valuation was not enough. That's the lowest number since 2015 and about half of what the firm reported during its pandemic surge. According to the New York Times, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings appeared to be frustrated by these numbers and attributed it to COVID effects, or that the market is smaller than they originally thought. But he's still not all that sure why the growth has slowed.
11:06 Scott Galloway? Maybe it's the 140 billion being spent on the streaming wars in 2022 alone. In other words, there's just more competition. Remember, essentially Netflix have the entire market to themselves. I mean, there was HBO, but they weren't really streaming, if you will. They were totally part of the cable bundle. It wasn't on demand. And then Hulu came in, but come on, it was basically in this enormous, growing, intoxicating market. It was sort of Netflix and the seven dwarves until really, you know, just a few years ago. Also, who's really taking a beating, at least at reference to their highs? Crypto, with nearly 1 trillion wiped off the market capitalization of the sector just since the peak last year. What's happening here is that history is beginning to rhyme, whether it's junk bonds or the
11:51 Scott Galloway? internet. You'll have excitement, new technologies, some innovators, and then you'll have mania, and then you'll have a huge fallout. And it's likely a bunch of good companies, good tokens, good DAOs, good platforms will get thrown out with the baby or the baby water. But there will be some enduring technologies. I do think that certain tokens, NFT businesses, platforms will in fact endure. Where are we right now? I would bet we're somewhere between the mania, the mania. The question is just how deep are we going to go? How much of the baby is going to be thrown out here? How do you protect yourself? Simple. The algebra of wealth is the following. One, focus. Get really good at something. Hopefully
12:33 Scott Galloway? it's something people will pay you for. Two, stoicism, and that is make more than you spend such you can start saving and specifically investing. Three, diversification. God help you if you're in one of these assets, or too much in one of these assets. Yeah, there's great stories of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates being very concentrated in one asset. Assume you are not Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. You want to diversify as soon as possible. And then finally, time. Let time take over. Buy assets unless you have the skills and you're paid to look at assets every Day and you're a trader, which most of you do not have the skills nor are you really paid to do it. You've just talked yourself into believing that being a day trader has something to do with learning or investing. No, it's not. It's just a dope hit because you're bored. Get on with your life. Get back to the focus part. Get great at something.
13:16 Scott Galloway? What do we want? We want focus. We want stoicism. We want diversification and we want the most powerful force in the universe, time to take over. What is a decent strategy? Find great companies or good assets or interesting platforms that you would feel comfortable owning for at least three years, ideally 10 years. And then you know what? Look away.
13:39 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Emily Anhalt to discuss the traits that make an emotionally fit leader, what it means to be mentally strong and the implications of mixing technology with mental health.
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16:12 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. Emily Anhold, a clinical psychologist and a co-founder of Koa, a mental health startup that offers therapist-led emotional fitness classes and therapist matchmaking. Dr. Anhold, where does this podcast find you?
16:26 Speaker 02 I am in the Mission District of San Francisco.
16:29 Scott Galloway? The Mission District, where the dog used to live. I was on Guerrero and 21st, or Dolores. I was on 21st between Guerrero and Dolores. True story, true story. Let's turn this interview back to me. I own the home that is next to where Mark Zuckerberg lives right now.
16:44 Speaker 02 Oh, nice. That's very close to me as well. It's great seeing his guards out there 24/7.
16:51 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I figure I could have held out and charged like $100 million just for security detail. And what I would have done to take the price of my house up is sat out on with a lawn chair. And every time he rolled in, just be like, "Hey bitch, what's it like to depress America?" I think that would have absolutely motivated him to put his crazy offer. But anyways, enough about me. So, we're big fans of your work here. And can you walk us through your background in clinical psychology and how it's informed your work with entrepreneurs?
17:19 Speaker 02 Absolutely. So I grew up in Silicon Valley. I think that was really the heart of it. I had raging ADHD as a kid. I still do. And so I didn't really feel like I fit into a lot of the systems that I was subject to. And then in high school, I had a psychology teacher who told me that when you know a lot about psychology, you know a little about everything because the world is spoken in the language of relationships and psychology is the study of relationships. So I went to school for psychology, went to grad school right after college. And because I was in Silicon Valley, a lot of the people I was seeing were in tech and my community and my family and my friends were in tech. And so as I was doing this work, I was starting to realize that there was this huge blind
18:00 Speaker 02 spot to how all of the things I was learning about general human psychology were really messing things up in the world of tech and not being seen as an important factor in the success or lack of success in a company and in leaders.
18:12 Scott Galloway? Mm-hmm.
18:13 Speaker 02 And so I started specializing in working with founders and entrepreneurs. And this led me to an interest in figuring out a more proactive approach to mental health because the average entrepreneur is fairly high functioning. They're not suffering from seriously debilitating mental health issues, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a lot of work that they need to do and support that they should have. And I also realized quickly that the leaders at the top of these tech companies were deciding a lot about society. And so the more mentally healthy they are, the better it is for everyone. So I had my private practice for a while and then I co-founded Koa, which is a gym for mental health. And it was really interesting after working with leaders and founders for a long time to become a founder myself and seeing that it's a lot easier to tell people what to
18:58 Speaker 02 do differently than it is to do it yourself. So I learned some of those lessons along the way.
19:02 Scott Galloway? And so tell us about Koa. It's essentially therapist matchmaking and emotional fitness classes, is that right?
19:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Koa is a gym for mental health. We're trying to make working on your mental health as a modern, accessible and proactive a practice as working on your physical fitness is. And so we do this through these therapist-led emotional fitness classes and then we do one-on-one therapy matching and it's all really rooted in community.
19:28 Scott Galloway? And tell us about, you have this interesting notion of emotional pushups.
19:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with what emotional fitness is because it's a relatively new term. So emotional fitness is the ongoing proactive practice of strengthening your mental and emotional health. It helps build the internal tools we need to face and move through the inevitable ups and downs of life. And I wanted to know what that actually meant. So a number of years ago, I did a big research study, something called an interpretive phenomenological analysis, which is just a fancy way of saying that I interviewed 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs about what makes a leader emotionally healthy. Like, what does that look like? What does it feel like? What do those people do? What do they not do? And out of this research came these seven traits of an emotionally
20:15 Speaker 02 fit leader. The seven traits being self-awareness, empathy, mindfulness, curiosity, playfulness, resilience, and communication. And so all of our classes at Koa are based on these seven traits. And what we've essentially worked to do is to figure out what an emotional workout looks like and what an emotional pushup is. So to speak to this idea of an emotional pushup, if you think about what a regular pushup is, it's a small physical exertion that puts you just a little bit outside of your comfort zone, and it helps you grow. And when you do them often, not only are you going to be able to do more pushups, but you're also going to be able to do more of other things, and it's going
20:56 Speaker 02 to prevent issues down the line. And so we are figuring out what is the emotional equivalent? How can we put ourselves just a little bit outside of our emotional comfort zone so that we can grow and be able to do more emotional work and also to prevent mental health issues later? So, you know, every person's version of an emotional pushup is going to be different. Like, some examples are, if you're someone who says yes to everything that's asked of you, and then you end up feeling overwhelmed and resentful, an emotional pushup for you might be just saying a kind but firm no to one small thing today. Whereas if you're a person who tends to focus on yourself, an emotional pushup might be to offer to help someone else with a task once today. Uh, some other examples are like apologizing for a mistake,
21:41 Speaker 02 or asking for feedback from a direct report, or meditating for five minutes in the morning, or celebrating win, letting yourself feel sadness about a loss, pausing before you pour yourself a drink to ask why you're having that drink and what you might be trying to avoid, or putting your phone away after 10:00 PM. And based on what I've read of your writing, Scott, it sounds like an emotional push-up for you might be a small expression of admiration or affection toward a friend, something like that. And then the most important part of this is the reflection of how the push-up made you feel. Because it's not really our experiences, it's our reflection on our experiences that leads to change. So after expressing your affection, you might pause and think, okay, how was that for me? It was uncomfortable, but why?
22:24 Speaker 02 And did I worry about it more beforehand than it actually ended up being uncomfortable? And what might I have gotten out of it? Things like that. And over time, we get stronger and help ourselves in all areas of life.
22:36 Scott Galloway? In those seven traits that you sort of, the pillars of leadership or emotional fortitude, or I don't know, the emotional ingredients to the cocktail of a successful entrepreneur, which of the seven do you find that most entrepreneurs are usually most lacking in?
22:55 Speaker 02 Uh, I would say probably self-awareness. And that's just because it's a really complicated moving target. And just when you become self-aware, there are new things to become aware about. So you have to really commit to it as an ongoing forever practice. And what I hear from a lot of leaders unfortunately is that they don't have the time or the space to do that, which to me is hilarious. That's a little bit like saying, you know, like being an Olympic athlete and saying, yeah, you know, I, I want to work on my physical health, but I'm too busy training for the Olympics. So all I eat is fast food. It's like, if you're a leader, you need these traits to succeed, I strongly believe. So I'd say self-awareness is also kind of foundation for a lot of the other ones. Like it's hard to know where you're lacking
23:40 Speaker 02 before you know what you're lacking. It's hard to change before you know what you need to change.
23:45 Scott Galloway? So tell me if you think there's any truth to this, but I always thought that the cold reality of being an entrepreneur, or the CEO, I should say, is that there's a certain amount of sociopathy that's required because you have to make very difficult decisions that sometimes impact people's lives in sometimes a negative way. You have to, the term is exaggerating,
24:11 Scott Galloway? exaggerate, the line between exaggeration and vision is, you know, that line is kind of drawn after you ship or don't ship a product. There's, there's some emotional attributes of successful entrepreneurs that I've oftentimes think aren't exactly like hardcore, grounded, emotionally balanced attributes. You've got to really figure out a way to, and maybe I just, maybe I'm not a good entrepreneur, but you have to drive yourself and others pretty hard. A lot of this sounds like what ideally the small business workplace should be like, but there's some, are there unhealthy attributes that are oftentimes not only common
24:52 Scott Galloway? across entrepreneurs, but sometimes a function of their success in a capitalist hard knocks society?
24:59 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, big time. I talk about this a lot, like a classic cocktail you see in founders is the narcissism posture syndrome cocktail, as I call it, like for sure you need to be a little
25:09 Scott Galloway? Bingo, ding ding.
25:11 Speaker 02 You need to be a little narcissistic because there are all these people telling you that your idea isn't going to work and that you're not going to make it. And you have to be able to say, okay, well, fuck you, I'm going to do it anyway. And I can do it better than anyone else. So I believe in that. And I believe in all of the other things that make it sometimes tough to live in a regular society that push you to being a founder, like being bad at celebrating wins and always wanting more and having a chip on your shoulder. The, the thing I'm trying to put out there is the idea that the things that are your strengths that might get you towards success are also going to be your undoing if you're not paying attention to them and, you know, watching them over time. So yes, you want a little bit of that narcissistic defense, but you don't want to get to the point where you're not listening to people who are giving you good feedback
25:54 Speaker 02 and showing you your blind spots. And yes, you want to always be pushing to the next goal, but you don't want to be at the point where everyone's quitting because you don't believe in vacations or rest. So it's really just, you know, our weaknesses are the other side of our strengths.
26:09 Scott Galloway? So let's play, I play armchair psychologist a lot with entrepreneurs just as a commentator, but you can play psychologist. When you, Mark Zuckerberg, when you observe his behavior, or Sheryl Sandberg, and you kind of see a lot of them, what would you diagnose it with? Is it, we're hating the player, not the game, or is there something wrong here? These individuals to me strike, well, I'll stop there. When you, when you see a guy like Mark Zuckerberg, if he showed up and said, how do I become more emotionally fit? What would you say his issues are?
26:42 Speaker 02 So it's a little known ethical code that psychologists are actually not allowed to diagnose public figures.
26:48 Scott Galloway? Really?
26:49 Speaker 02 So, yeah, because they're not our patient, and we hold some kind of gravitas because we have expertise, and so, yeah, we're not allowed to do that. So I couldn't give you a diagnostic code here. But I could tell you that when I see these instances, I think that power is just complicated and corrupting, and our minds weren't designed to have that much control over that many people's lives. And I think it's impossible for all of our own shit to not leak into what we do. And when what we do is make decisions that change the course of, you know, society, then that can be really problematic. I do think if some of these leaders had thoughtful, depth-oriented, ongoing emotional fitness support, maybe they wouldn't have reached unicorn status quite as quickly, but they perhaps would
27:33 Speaker 02 have done so more ethically and with a better impact on society.
27:38 Scott Galloway? But isn't it, and I'm on, I'm on, I'm not, of course, speaking about Mark or Sheryl here, but you recognize some incredible success. The people around you have made a lot of money, so they're grateful to you, the press fawns all over you, and you kind of start developing this, they call it a reality distortion field, but I was talking about Jobs' approach to products or the marketplace. But you become delusional, I think. I try to be cognizant of this. You have some success, and you have domain or command over people's future and how much they make. They tend to want you to like them, and so they're nice to you. And you slowly but surely detach from reality, and... And then you get, you know, the worm turns on you publicly and you get attacked so
28:23 Scott Galloway? much that you have to become almost just numb to it. And you end up just incrementally becoming, I don't know, just detached. I don't know if the term is a sociopath or, or let me, I mean, I'm, I'm pretty, I find that these individuals, it just shocks me that they can sleep at night. It shocks me that they've been able to develop the coping mechanisms. So now, okay, this research has demonstrated that one in eight teen girls in Britain who have contemplated suicide cite Instagram. And yet I get the sense they sleep like babies. How does one get to that point? Do they, does someone like that start
29:01 Scott Galloway? out? And again, I'll frame it more generally. Is it an incremental thing? Or are people born that way? Because I, I generally don't understand how, how these people got there, got this way. It strikes me that they have become so immune from any signal around them. Is that an incremental process? Are you born that way?
29:26 Speaker 02 Well, when it comes to the great nature versus nurture debate, I tend to think that nature loads the gun and nurture pulls the trigger. So it's both.
29:34 Scott Galloway? That's great. Let's just stop there. Nature, wait, nature, nature loads the gun and nurture pulls the trigger?
29:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:42 Scott Galloway? Yeah. I, by the way, and I apologize for interrupting you. If you want to, I've always said, if you want to believe nature over nurture, just have two kids.
29:49 Speaker 02 Yes.
29:50 Scott Galloway? Because you don't treat them that differently. And boy, they are different. Anyways, I'm sorry.
29:54 Speaker 02 Twins even, identical twins. Yeah. So, you know, there are some people who, no matter what position they're in, they're not going to get corrupted. That'd say is a smaller percentage of people. And there are some people who even with all the support in the world, might end up getting corrupted. But, you know, my work has shown me in all kinds of profound ways that each one of us is deeply capable of hiding the things from ourselves that we would need to, to proceed on in our life in particular ways. And these people doing these horrible things and sleeping well at night, it didn't happen by accident. And the average person who's living a perfectly lovely, kind life is still doing a poetic
30:37 Speaker 02 job of hiding what feel like basic truths to someone else who might be looking in from themselves. We all do it. And it's just on a bigger scale when so much is on the line.
30:49 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I'm reminded, I'm going, I always go to dark places because I'm, I always look at stuff through kind of gray or clouded lenses, but I wish I knew his name, but the lawyer who was charged with prosecuting members of the Third Reich in the Nuremberg Trials, and they asked him, what his sort of takeaway from all of this was, you know, getting to know the story and the individuals that had just committed these, you know, simply put, crimes against humanity. And he said that what I take away from this is that war turns otherwise decent people into murderers. And I thought that was very, it was kind of rattling because we want to believe that they're just evil people.
31:34 Speaker 02 No, that's not a thing.
31:35 Scott Galloway? And I started thinking about tech and capitalism, and I feel as if a lot of it comes down to the incentives. That in a capitalist society that is consistently figuring out new ways to extract money from you with more amazing services and products, the disparity, the incentives to be wealthy are just so incredibly dramatic. You get more respect, you get more service, you get, people laugh at your jokes, and some to be wealthy in America is to be loved. And we all want to be loved. And so when it's raining money, it clouds your vision. And you just find yourself incrementally on this path to hell because the incentives are just so strong to do whatever, whenever is required
32:18 Scott Galloway? to make money and create shareholder value. Do you ever think about linking incentives to how some of this emotional fitness can come off the tracks?
32:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, what you were talking about reminds me of a quote by Susan Sontag when she was asked what she learned from the Holocaust. It was that 10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, 10% is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80% can be swayed in either direction. Yeah, the incentives are really important. I think, again, though, the idea of emotional fitness as a practice is important here because you can change the incentives, but you, you know, a person's still going to move in a particular direction if they're not constantly examining. What motivates them, what their values are, what's important to them, what they're moving away from, all of that. But yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And you know, clinical integrity
33:11 Speaker 02 is my truest north star with Koa because it's tempting in the world of mental health tech to do something that moves quickly and you know, has magical solutions. There's a pull from that for that from investors and from people. And you know, I feel that pull. And I think if you're not constantly examining whether that's really going to get you where you want to go, it's really easy to be taken off track.
33:35 Scott Galloway? And so let's talk a little bit more about Koa. What, how do you, the thing I find about therapy or services in general, and I always struggled with this because I always had services companies, is how do you scale it? Is it, is it simply just finding, using technology and remote work technologies such that you can find great therapists and then figuring out tools and diagnostics to match people the right, the right therapist. And there's enough margin in that that you can build a big business because most VCs want to back technology that takes humans out of things. And this feels very human centric.
34:07 Speaker 02 Yes, and it's human centric by design. My biggest nightmare is these companies that are using technology to replace what I think is the true mechanism of healing, which is relationships, instead of support relationships. And so a Koa goal is to use technology, but to support more interactions and relationships. And you know, that can look like a lot of things at scale, but I will say there are really sharp business minds on my team who have an eye on scale. And my focus is to keep an eye on integrity and on making sure that we're not doing something that's actually causing more harm than good, which you know, I see a lot of unfortunately.
34:44 Scott Galloway? And so we've gone a good 10 minutes without talking about me. So let's go back to me. I struggle with, I struggle with anger and what I'd call mild depression. And I'm not good. My blessings don't foot to my mood or happiness. And that is I have enormous blessings and good fortune. I know, I know this rationally. And yet I still find an incredible ability to be pissed off and angry all the fucking time. Pissed off just talking about it. Pissed off at myself that I get pissed off so much. What, what are some pushups? Someone who wants their mood to foot better to their blessings? What are some ideas and pushups for that, that type of problem?
35:30 Speaker 02 I mean, even this idea that if you have certain blessings, you don't deserve your emotions, I think, is problematic. Like, you have beautiful blessings, but I know enough about you to know that you come from complicated circumstances. And a lot of times, they're complicated circumstances. And this don't have to be wildly trauma with a big T, complicated. It can just be as simple as, you know, the key relationships in our life early on weren't everything that we needed them to be. Those are happening when our mind is forming, our neural networks are being created. And that's really hard to undo. And I think even this idea of like, how can I just make that not a thing? Is a pull that we all feel, but just, you know, is easier said than done. So I think the first step is like, understanding it.
36:14 Speaker 02 Why might I be angry? When I'm angry about this thing in the present, what are the other things I actually might be angry about? And this is just a convenient place to put that anger. Or why is that, you know, circuit so much shorter for me? Like, why do I go to that place so much more quickly? Once you understand it, you can have some compassion for it. And you can decide, is it still actually serving me now? Or did this serve me before? And it's not serving me so much? And then from there, you can put shock absorbers in place. And, you know, that can look like a lot of things. For some people, it's sublimation, which is a word that means channeling societally unacceptable impulses into societally acceptable places. So like, taking a boxing class, or journaling, or, you know, whatever that might be,
36:57 Speaker 02 to get out some of the physical aspects of the emotion. But there's a whole branch of psychology called humanistic existential psychology. And it centers around this idea that just being human is a total clusterfuck, because we are trying to make meaning in an intrinsically meaningless existence. And that's so complicated and so painful sometimes, that even someone who led a really charmed life is still going to feel angst and overwhelm and anger and confusion that, you know, is worthy of being understood.
37:33 Scott Galloway? Coming up after the break.
37:35 Speaker 02 There's such a deep desire for this silver bullet and I understand why. Like, no one wants to sit with their pain and people want things to get better quickly. But that's just not how it goes. And I think sometimes the concept of do no harm and the mantra of move fast and break things don't always support each other.
37:56 Scott Galloway? Stay with us.
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39:38 Scott Galloway? So I think a lot about this and I want you to critique. I think self-awareness is something that I think most people, as they get older, hopefully get better at. And I know there's triggers and there's signals when I start feeling down or especially angry. Specifically, I've become just awful to be around. And I developed this algorithm for ways of addressing it. And I'd love to run it by you and tell me what hits for you, what should be modified or what's just not a good idea. And I've distilled it down to what I call SCAFA. S stands for sweating and that is whenever I really feel myself, you know, I can recognize
40:20 Scott Galloway? I'm getting especially angry or depressed, I really hit the gym and physical activity really hard. I find that sweating just kind of, sort of, almost like turning a computer off and on. It kind of resets me. So let's stop there. Real exertion and exercise around mental health.
40:39 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Hard agree. The two are so tied. It is amazing that people will come in and they'll say, "My mental health is really off." And I'll ask a little bit about their life and they're only sleeping five hours a night and they never exercise and they're only eating fast food and they're working all day long and they're confused about it. So, yes, definitely in for the S.
40:59 Scott Galloway? So the C, you know, these are pretty obvious and I think, I think I'm mostly not. The C is what I call clean and that is I try and not eat out, not a lot of trans fats, really clean, organic food, a lot of water, just, you know, for lack of a better word, just eat really clean. I'm going to assume that that makes a lot of sense.
41:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely. I mean, everything in moderation, including moderation, but for sure.
41:22 Scott Galloway? There you go. My A is abstinence and I'm not a puritan. I love alcohol. I love marijuana. Actually, I think some of that is the drawbacks and the harm. I don't want to say they're overstated because they ruin people's lives, but I think a lot of people manage it really well and it enhances their life. And I'm, I think I'm one of those people. But when, whatever that chemistry is, it's in my brain that's gone off, I just don't, I just cut out all THC and I try and really reduce alcohol intake until I'm feeling kind of more back to normal.
41:56 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, anything that can be used to enhance life can also be used to escape it. So that's my barometer is are you using this to enhance your life or to avoid or escape your life? And if you see yourself heading over that tipping point, then pulling back, I think, is a great idea.
42:11 Scott Galloway? And then family, it sounds a little bit like a Hallmark channel, but I find especially time with my boys is just grounding because they're such, they're so needy and can be such jerks that I don't have time to be the usual self-absorbed person I am. I'm just kind of focused on them and it kind of takes me out of my head. So family, again, I can't imagine you're not going to agree there.
42:32 Speaker 02 No, of course. I mean, I think emotional fitness in general, it's an individual journey, but it's a communal pursuit. We are communal creatures. We need each other. We are who we are in relation to other people. We don't exist on our own. So absolutely surround yourself with loved ones.
42:48 Scott Galloway? I like that we don't exist on our own. And then the final thing is affection. I live with beasts and dogs. The beasts are my boys, but I find that just piling on the couch and being in proximity or touch, we all like have this thing where we kind of flop on each other and watch TV. I find that as very, I think as mammals, we're meant to touch, but I try to dial up the affection, if you will.
43:12 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, absolutely. Oxytocin is the best drug I know and we get it from affection and it's the one responsible for bonding and you know, the feeling of being loved and cared for. And you know, it's key between mothers and infants and really we all need it. So absolutely, I mean, they have all kinds of studies that have shown that like orphans who were not picked up enough have horrific mental and emotional problems down the line because we so need the touch of other people.
43:42 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I read that kids, I think it's probably the same study, that kids with a lack of affection and good nutrition had worse outcomes than kids with poor nutrition, but a lot of affection, that affection trumped nutrition.
43:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, we need each other in that way.
43:55 Scott Galloway? What am I missing? If you were going to add to my SCAFA acronym, is there any other letters that you would say when you're, when you feel yourself struggling? I mean, the first thing is I find it helps to just say to someone in my life or whatever, like, you know what, I get the sense I'm struggling. And it just helps to like, it's almost like verbalizing it. Maybe there should be a V's, you know, SCAFA V or something, but just kind of acknowledging it to yourself and other people. What am I missing? What would you also throw in there?
44:26 Speaker 02 So I like verbalize because a lot of our emotions exist differently inside of our minds than they do when we speak them out loud. We have this kind of distance from them when we say them that can give a new perspective and it gives someone else the opportunity to reflect a different reality to us. And I think, you know, putting your thoughts into words changes the chemistry of those thoughts. It changes your relationship to them. So I like that one a lot. I think another one is like a P, pausing, like sitting in the feeling for a moment instead of immediately rushing to change the feeling. I feel like so much of what we do in life is in service of moving away from discomfort, but so often the discomfort is less intense than whatever we end up doing to avoid that discomfort. Like whatever
45:10 Speaker 02 we do to avoid it ends up causing more discomfort. And so if we can, you know, the mindfulness trait in the seven traits is not just like meditation, it's becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable, like sitting with those emotions for long enough to understand them. And that opens up more choices for you about what you actually want to do about them.
45:30 Scott Galloway? And you were a practitioner and you're still a practitioner, but you're also an entrepreneur now. What do you like least and most about being an entrepreneur versus being just a straight practitioner?
45:43 Speaker 02 Being a practitioner is an interesting kind of work where you are doing work with a person for a really long time and it can feel like nothing's happening. And then you have these profound moments of change and they don't always happen all at once. Sometimes you just realize, oh shit, everything's different. I don't know when that happened. But there's a lot of delay and gratification to it. And as an impatient person, that's both tough and also hugely beautiful and validating when it does happen versus, you know, there's sort of a version of that in tech where you're working toward this large goal, but there are a lot of little mini goals all the time that you're achieving that I think are really nice. I of course feel really honored to be.
46:27 Speaker 02 Speaking up for this kind of change at a bigger scale. But I also think that the deepest changes don't happen at scale. The deepest changes happen in a room with other human beings, getting your hands dirty, doing the work. So I feel really grateful to be doing both. I'd say what can be tough for me is the landscape of mental health tech sometimes is very frustrating to me. I think that there's such a deep desire for this silver bullet. And I understand why, like, no one wants to sit with their pain. And people want things to get better quickly, but that's just not how it goes. And I think sometimes the concept of do no harm and the mantra of move fast and break things don't always support each other.
47:08 Speaker 02 So balancing those two things and, you know, knowing that we'll, we'll get there if we're willing to be a little bit patient.
47:17 Scott Galloway? And a couple of things we talk about a lot that involve mental health. And that is the damage being done to girls at the hands of social media. Studies showing that teen depression really started skyrocketing once social went to mobile. Do you think the problem is sort of underestimated, overestimated, kind of where it should be? And do you have any thoughts on what solutions we might want to implement?
47:46 Speaker 02 What a big question. I don't know that I have the answer. I was listening to another one of your episodes, talking about how there need to be more consequences to the companies that are causing these issues. And so like big structural change, I think is definitely needed. And I think that we do need to encourage the idea that, yes, social media does make us feel more connected than other, but it also leaves us feeling more profoundly lonely and separate than ever, ever. And so I'm personally on the train of young kids should not be connecting with each other in that particular way. So young, because it's so addictive and it's so much easier and less uncomfortable to connect with a person online than it is in real life.
48:31 Speaker 02 But then you don't learn the skills that you need to go through your real life. I had a patient once who was a 14 year old girl. And she was telling me that she and her friends sit on the couch next to each other and text. They don't actually talk to each other. And I just thought, how profoundly sad.
48:49 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I see it with my boys. I've noticed just in the last couple of years as they've gotten into video games. One of the things I like about video games, and I think there's some good things, is that they're social. But what I've also known, they play with their multiplayer, they play with their friends. But what I've also noticed is whenever we would say to them, "Do you want a playdate with Harrison this weekend?" It'd always be "Yes." Now it's, "No, I'll just see Harrison online." And I think about some of that awkwardness and discomfort of mixing with other boys and girls at, you know, kind of those formative years, those awkward teen years. Some of it was really painful. And they're avoiding some of that pain, but they're not developing the calluses, they're not developing the muscles to... Yes.
49:34 Scott Galloway? Yeah, and we see it at universities, the suicide rate has gone up dramatically because a lot of these kids show up just unprepared. They've never had their heart broken before, they've never gotten a C before. And it happens, and it's sort of this princess, I mean, this feels like we're not building strong, um, strong kids. And I don't know, is the answer getting off? Uh, video games? Is it, are we to blame as parents? I'm going, I'm going in a lot of different directions here. So I'll, I'll, let's, let's put a pin in that. But something I want to make sure we discuss, because we talk about it a lot here, is I'm just struck at what I call this emerging generation of failing men. You know, three
50:15 Scott Galloway? times more likely to, uh, overdose, four times more likely to be arrested, much more likely to kill themselves, um, really having trouble connecting with mates. Um, and with online dating, it seems like there's this inequality effect where a small number of men get the attention of most of the women, which kind of leaves the bottom half of men in terms of attractiveness kind of alone. And I worry that we're raising a generation of the most dangerous person on the planet, and that is a young, broke, and alone male. Do you see evidence that this generation or upcoming generation of men are having a more difficult time or not performing as well as previous generations?
50:59 Speaker 02 It's interesting because I see what you're talking about. And I even read a study that was showing that 18-year-old boys are having trouble getting it up for their 18-year-old girlfriends because they've been exposed to such extreme pornography from such a young age that they've been completely ruined for regular sex. So, you know, I'm seeing that. I also see this brilliant resilience of the younger generation, too. I think we're sort of in the midst of a crisis of sorts that at some point will hopefully peak and will actually do something about it. And I think, you know, the kids are all right, kind of thing. I believe that. But yes, I'm with you.
51:37 Speaker 02 It makes me sad to think how lonely we've left our children in pursuit of connection, or at least, you know, the more vocalized pursuit is connection. I think the unvocalized one is money, obviously.
51:54 Scott Galloway? Dr. Emily Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the co-founder and chief clinical officer of KOA, the Gym for Mental Health. She is a leading researcher into the seven traits of emotional fitness, specialist in therapy for entrepreneurs and executives, and international speaker and author. Doctor, thank you so much for your time.
52:13 Speaker 02 Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.
52:24 Scott Galloway? Algebra of happiness, not a real lesson here, but just an experience that I wanted to share that was really nice for me and my boys this weekend. I grew up rooting for the Los Angeles Rams. We lived in Anaheim, and I had Roman Gabriel pajamas, number 18. And some of the moments I remember with my father were going to Rams games or watching the Rams where every year we would do really well and it was going to be our year, and then we'd get our hearts broken by Roger Staubach and Fran Tarkenton of the Dallas Cowboys and Minnesota Vikings, respectively. Anyway, it's not what this is about, but I love sports, played a lot of sports growing up, but I've always thought sports are a bit of a waste of time. As an adult and have started getting into them recently. Why? Because I want moments of engagement with my sons.
53:09 Scott Galloway? And my sons have gotten really into sports. They're into Premier League soccer. So I got into Premier League soccer and all of a sudden my youngest started asking about the NFL. Saw that the Rams were in a playoff game. We watched both games on Sunday. Fantastic games, actually. The Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Rams, both played incredible games. And they're both so into it. And I think part of being a good dad, or a part of me becoming a better father, was recognizing that being a good dad isn't... Or maybe it is sharing what you're really good at and getting them engaged in it, or something you really enjoy and getting them engaged in it. But it's also recognizing, and I came to this conclusion pretty quickly, that your kids may not share the things you're passionate about.
53:54 Scott Galloway? And quite frankly, you engaging in their passions, there's a word for that, dad. It's your responsibility to engage in what they're passionate about. And you're gonna find it goes so fast, you just want to engage. And so whatever they're into, guess what? You should be into it. So my kids have recently got into NFL football. We watched the Rams games. I've told them stories before they go to sleep about my experience with the Rams growing up and living in Anaheim. And then we went and saw a wonderful movie to kind of cap it off called American Underdog, which is a story of Kurt Warner, who I never really knew much about or appreciated because I was already out of college and not following sports. But it's a story of faith. It's a story of love.
54:38 Scott Galloway? It's a story of perseverance. It's a story of economic adversity. It's a story... It's just a wonderful story about a man who was stocking shelves and there's nothing, there was dignity in all work, and ended up becoming the MVP of the Super Bowl and married a divorcee who had two kids, including one, that was physically challenged. And just, just a wonderful story. And it was such a nice weekend to top off, kind of a football weekend in the Galloway household. But anyways, if there's a lesson here, it's that is, your job as a dad is to engage with your kids. And guess what? If you really want to engage with them, you gotta engage with the shit they're into, not necessarily what you're into.
55:23 Scott Galloway? And this last weekend, what I engaged with, again, which was a lot of fun, was the Los Angeles Rams.
55:31 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.
55:53 Scott Galloway? Does that work? There's just too many good alcohol jokes to not go double, to not double up. There's a lot. There's a lot. What about, "I wait till the kids go to school until I start drinking." Does that make me a bad teacher?
56:09 Scott Galloway? That's not good? I like that one, too.
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Previous Office Hours: Trader Joe’s and the Paradox of Choice, Telehealth’s Future, and Planning an MBA Next Office Hours: America’s Super App, Online Sports Betting, and Career Bubbles Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
