No Mercy / No Malice: The Cult of Therapy

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. When it comes to managing your company's spend, finance leaders face a brutal truth. You often have to choose to move fast and lose control or carefully control money and slow everything down, but not anymore. Brex breaks that trade off. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that helps you spend smarter and move faster. With Brex, you get high limit corporate cards with built in expense management, plus a team of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks for you. Brex's AI agents do all the stuff you don't wanna do, like collect receipts and memos, enforce your policy, and monitor transactions for abuse and fraud, all according to your rules. So you're free to focus on the business. Over 30,000 companies run on Brex, from anthropic to Zoom. Join them at brex.com. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, and they spend a week trying to sell each other on the weirdest gadgets you've ever seen in your entire life. This week on the Vergecast, we're talking all about everything happening at CES, from the TVs to the AI gadgets to the humanoid robots that everybody is hoping might someday do your laundry and wash your dishes. All that and much more on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. I'm Sky Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. America's mental health crisis is a multidimensional challenge with multidimensional remedies. However, online, all remedies lead to the same place, the same recommendation, therapy. The Cult of Therapy as read by George Hahn. Don't read the comments. I tell people just before I have a drink and read the comments. I knew my book notes on being a man would spark controversy as you get the most flack when you're over the target, and some of the criticism likely misses the mark. The comment that hits home, I reverse engineer what's worked for me, economic security, relationships, to masculinity and don't acknowledge other paths to fulfillment. Fair. Many others offered constructive criticism, and some of the criticism has merit. What surprised me was how many of the commenters were therapists parroting talking points along the lines of, before anything, men must work on themselves, I e, get therapy. This is nonsense. I wanna be clear. Therapy is a good thing, especially for the twenty three percent of American adults who experience mental illness. But mental health influencers positioned therapy as a prerequisite for a better life, rendering it a Birkin bag for …