Scott Galloway asked Anna Lembke to set up her new book, Radical Surrender. She argues that modern technology has given us unprecedented control over our lives, and that this has left people less able to tolerate uncertainty.
Thank you. I enjoyed it too. And I got a lot of credibility with my sons and their friends. So that was awesome.
…which has made us unable to tolerate uncertainty. When we do face it, we often experience anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or self-loathing, shame, and response. Set the table here. How has the world changed and created, if you will, this level of anxiety? What's changed about the world, if you will?
First of all, we evolved over millions of years of evolution to exert our agency to reduce uncertainty. It's what's allowed us to survive in a chaotic natural environment where famine, flood, fire was always imminently threatening our survival. We have evolved science and technology to really create an unprecedented amount of control over the natural environment, which you would think would make us all feel much safer. But the paradox here is that the more levers for micro control that we have over our lives, the more anxious, fearful, and lonely, I would argue, as well as bored, we've become. And it is a paradox because, again, we are sort of teleologically or biologically evolved to exert agency. It feels good. It's adaptive in a chaotic environment. But now we are sort of experiencing control at the micro level. And also, we've created this sort of virtual space where we have. Sort of engineered a reality that we have an incredible…
So I want to talk about social media, and that's sort of my go-to for the world's ills. I immediately look like what social media has done to cause this. But even before that, as a parent, I adopted, I forget, I saw this wonderful movie with Gene Hackman and Ben Stiller, where the protagonist Ben…
Right.
And you don't want them in danger, but you do want them in uncertainty and risk. And I used to leave my mom's house on a Saturday at 9 a.m. with a Schwinn bike and Abba Zabba bar and 35 cents. And she wouldn't see me for 12 hours. And in those 12 hours, I faced a lot of uncertainty and even mild…