Redefining Masculinity and Mentorship

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It's the number one OBGYN recommended brand of emergency contraception, and it won't impact your future fertility. That's Freedom to Be. Use us directed This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responssees setup required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus without a doubt GenzZie is suffering and without a doubt, they're suffering more than other generations. We know that they are more likely to be anxious all the generations that have come prior. One in four young men does not have a friend. When my dad was my age His friends would just drop over for the weekend. That is so bizarre now. this loneliness economy where you can immediately solve most problems by tapping a button. If you don't have partner G got older fans for that. No one. in liberal circles likes talking about masculinity. No one likes talking about What's happening here? Influencers are probably the main the main role models for boys end model It's something that people like you and I need to talk about more So let's do just that Gen Z gets a bad rap. People like to complain that the TikTok generation is nothing but a bunch of lazy whining kids who are addicted to their screens. Here's the thing Oer generations have been complaining about younger generations since the dawn of time. As a millennial, we were accused of bankrupting ourselves on avocado toast and living our lives on Facebook. These criticisms are nothing new, but that's not to say Generation Z or the group born between approximately nineteen ninety seven and twenty twelve doesn't stand out. They speent some of their most valuable developmental years under the weight of the pandemic, with isolation, remote learning, and smartphones frequently as their only means of connection to the outside world. It turns out, that mattered. That's why I wanted to talk to doctor Alimau, a clinical psychologist from the Bay Area, who has been a loud defender of Gen Z sayaying the criticism waged against them is unfair. In this episode, Dr. Ali and I discussed the nuances of school phone bans, social media age restrictions, the loss of real world third spaces, and a widespread loneliness epidemic that is impacting all of us know A very tough case I had here in New York U someone came to me for OCD treatment for their son for their teenage son. I was working with the son We were probably four weeks into treatment It didn't feel right. and feel like OCD I met with the parents again and I said, is there anything else you haven't told me and u the The mother started crying and said, yeah, my aunt has schizophrenia. It's it's in the family. And so I said, thank you for telling me this. I know This is hard. It's scary. It's scary It's scary Let's get all the testing done. Let's understand this One of the things with these early onset psychosis symptoms If it's in this prodromal phase before it develops into a larger problem If you can catch things early, you can bend the curve take the person's life into a very different direction, which I think my physician has done for me Yeah. You know, which we never talk about that. Preventive psychiatric care. No or psychological. Yes. Yes I these are all the kids I've worked with in It is Because for physical health Getting a colonoscopy. You know, heart disease screening, sugar checks, blood pressure. It's so standardized Yeah Outside of doing some IPV screening Oh trying to think anything else. you do a pHQ two Yeah as a screener We're not doing much No. And there's very easy things we can look at You know, one of the easiest things we can look at is asking Teachers How's this kid doing Not academically I don't wantan to say I don't And you don't mean like on a Vanderbuilt or No one of these. No, no I I I I less interested sometometimes there's some standard measures, especially for things like ADHD. There's some great standard measures. We can get some fast information The number one thing I'm looking for is how is this kid doing relative to peers That is critical information I want to know Are they alone Do they have friends? Are they isolated? Do they seem strange Are they do they have more than you'd expect conflict with peers? These kinds of things are critical They are critical to helping me understand How is How is this kid presenting in their natural context Generational stuff changes, right There are new norms are happening every day But you can always look at how is someone doing relative to their peers in the culture and community that they live in. And that information is critical. We look at that a lot early on We look at early developmental milestones a lot And then we stop looking at them And then we are overly focused on these academic milestones that tend not to have a big impact long term. I could care less what stupid extracurriculars you do. I could care less about your homework. That stuff does not link to long term advantages in life, but your social, emotional, your connections are critical, especially as a teenager, especially as a young adult. Yeah. I think people use them as surrogates oftentimes where they say, oh, we're doing extra cururricular activities. So that means the child is having social interactions and creating friendships instead of actually seeing if the child is creating friendships. A they? Are they are they just doing like work Yeah, is it just a checkbx?? Is it just a checkbox? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, man. And I think this idea of evaluating children in their natural setting surrounded by their peers is oftentimes undervalued and instead replaced by things that are perhaps more in your face. Like what do they post on social media? or how are they like when they're on social media? And to me, that's a less relevant question because people change. Oh, absolutely. So much. They put on a bravado, they try and be funny, they take chances They're not who they are when they're in school where they are on social media. Yeah, social is performative. Yeah. and that is one of key problems we have seen in society is social interaction has moved more and more towards performance. There's more metrics involved, more cameras on you, People have less opportunities and less situations in which they can have non performative social interactions And the more you become performative, the less The less nourishing it is for you, the more it feels like work, the more people are like, o, I don't really want to do It's why I think I struggle doing podcasts in a pop culture sense. where folks ask me questions about some streamer who's viral. What do you think about this guy? Cloavicular is going viral? What do you think about I don't know him. Yeah. I can tell you if I like his content. Yeah. But besides that, I can't tell you anything about who he is as a person because we've never met. I've never seen him in his natural environment. I didn't even get to observe him interact with someone because what he's doing on social To me is almost irrev. I mean, I could say it's impact on children Yeah. and I can I guess make a comment on that that might not be great. but he is? I have no idea. Well, this is one of the problems you and I have is ethics. we have. We start there. It would be a lot easier for us to make content if we didn't have an ethics code. Yeah. But we can't diagnose anyone who's not our patient And then someone who's our patient We can't reveal anything about that treatment, about our diagnosis, about our conceptualization without their consent It sounds like we're complaining but I want people to wr. This is a good thing. This is a good thing. Yeah It's just that is why we will sometimes struggle to get virality Yes compared to those who Don't care about those. Yeah. I mean, this is why I'm bad at content Now I know, I know. I hear your voice. And I hear my colleague's voice in my head and every other YouTuber I ever say this to. they're like, Oh can't you can't be that hard on yourself. But what I mean by I am bad at ten is Things that are going viral now A lot of the frameworks that are working right now I have to be incredibly cautious about approaching those things. do need to make sure number one, In the psychologist ethics code is whenever I'm speaking publicly, I need to speak in my competence I need to speak to things that I know well. I have experience with or I've read the research on So I try to speak only to things that are within my competence And already that limits what are the topics I'm taking on And then I need to make sure I'm doing it as consistent with the evidence base as possible, as consistent with what science shows us. And increasingly more so than when we spoke two years ago There's a big lag between where's culture, where's society? where's technology and where's the science How do you balance that? How do you overcome that? What's the in your mind Be I have my own strategy, but I don't want to pollute your thought on it. Yeah, it's a great It's a great question I I think my role has changed in the last ten years making, making content And where I started from I started from an idea of There's some really critical information that I have gained I have gained that information through a ton of time a ton of money and a ton of experience This knowledge that I have about ment health, about relationships, about thoughts, about confidence, about courage, all of these things come at a very, very high price Meaning For someone to come to me, they have to Number one, they have to be aware that they have a problem. Right, right? Wh we just talked about earlier, I didn't know I had all these problems developing inside of me, these intergenerational problems that have been floating around. in my genome For all this time, I didn't know that, right So you have to be aware of a problem You also have to be aware of a solution You have to be aware of that there is someone out there with expertise that can help me And then you also need to be able to jump over that hoop of it's okay to seek out this type of help That's what we call the mental stigma is people don't want to seek help for these things. They don't want to be identified as having these problems. They're afraid of what a label might do. they're afraid of what it might mean to be seeking help for anxiety, depression, all this kind kind of stuff And then Let's say they're aware they have a problem. they're aware there's a solution. They're okay seeking out that solution. A solution has to be available. which For most of America, It's not in most of the world, it's not And they have to also not fall victim all of the false shortcuts that look very promising before the solution. Yeah, becausecause how easy is it to Take all the steps you mentioned findinding out that they have a problem, being okay with them, having a problem, beating the stigma, seeking help, and then online getting targeted by something that push them away from seeing something that's evidence based that sounds way easier, way more tempting. They have to fight through that. Yes. ye. so twenty twenty to thirty percent of Gen Z tends to seek out medical health, mental health related content on TikTok. And what we also know is about fiftycent to eighty percent of the mental health content on TikTok is false, is wrong, is mis Misleading putting it nicely is putting it nicely. Yeah, it might be it might be more disinformation. It might be actually intentionally false information, right? So fifty to like eighty percent of the stuff on TikTok related to mental health is wrong. completely wrong, as Charlatans is snake oil salesmen peddaling their whatever solution, right We were talking about the Pit before this. One of my favorite storylines in Pit from season one is the Beauty influencer ye, right who bought all the stuff and got mercury poisoning from it I watched that episode and I turned to my wife and I'm like, this is what I complain about. This is the problem. Yeah, right So It's very easy to to see all that and be like, why are people getting their information over there? It's because people like me are very difficult to access And my field of mental health professionals has historically kept this information hidden away in the Iivory toer. It's not been very accessible. You don't live in their pockets No No, I don't I don't. All these influencers do. Yeah. And so the problem And they live there partartially because They don't have the ethics that you have Yes. Also because the barriers that exist in seeing you some of which are really important barriers that are actually good barriers that we need to have and we need not cross the line like what? disiscussing patient information on sure like advertising yourself as a psychologist in ways where perhaps you're using patient testimonials, which I know are against rules. very goldwater rule. like all of these barriers is what's coming in mind And then Final point. is that our own societies and the leaders in our fields have discouraged us from being in people's pockets. Absolutely. Absolutely Yeah, that is not what we are trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. No, all of those things are there for the public trust. You know, every Every mature healthcare field needs to self regulate itself We have licensing boards of our peers that make sure that we are held to a high standard so there is a public trust And there's a way if I do something wrong There's an avenue for you to make sure that that is addressed. You go to the state licensing board, you file a complaint, And then they send me a very scary email and then they investigate. These are there protect the public All of the stuff is there to protect the public Influencers do not have to protect the public And so what happens on these platforms that That I think is is that is a huge problem Early generation social media likeike Facebook, when I was in college Facebook first came online and Everyone wanted to get on it because it was a way for you to connect with the people you knew One of my favorite features of early Facebook, which is long gone, Is you could sign up for you could put what your class schedule is and then you could see other people in the coll. Wow, I didn't know that. Oh. this is like twenty. Well becausecause Facebook came out and I wasn't allowed to be on it because I think it was only for colleges. Yeah. Yeah's now you're making me feel old. Yeah I I'm sure this years there grade when Facebook. It came out my last year of college Yeah, YouTube and Facebook both came out like around my last What year did Facebook come out? twenty two thousand three or two thousand four. Okay. Yeah, I got on around two thousand five, I think. Freshman year of high school. Yeah. there you go. Yeah yeah yeah it was only it just specific. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah Um, So I got on and this feature was amazing. It actually really helped me one night because I think I had a neurosite class and I forgot my notes or maybe I hated this class. It was taught by Dr. Butcher Um of course doctors, now was a doctor. That was a professor. Yeah, yeah. And something he would do is he would get in front of a class and for a good chunk of the class, this is eight AM two I'm not a morning person, especially not a morning person in college. And he would spend the beginning of class reading from the textbook that he wrote. First of all, I have to judge you a little bit. who signs up for an eight AM neurosych class? It was putting off this requirement. was like my second to last semester.. I had to for punishment. Yes. Yes, yes. It's my own fault, doctor Mike Um, So that I needed ye, I needed notes And I he would read of the textbooks Is that what you were going to say? Yeah he read I couldn't say those professors that did that I get it I just don't understand. Like I could just read the book myself then. But yet they a salary. Yes, yes. interesteresting. Well, tenure is a funny thing So I needed I needed notes. There was an exam coming up I logged into Facebook, it had this class feature. I logged into the class And then I found somebody who I sit next to. Every day in that class, whenever I showed up. which is not every day And I asked her I was like, Judy, you do you, can I borrow your notes? And she's like, Yeahah, sure. And she just messages them, messaged them to me. And so social media back then It was a reflection of your network Now they did some shady stuff. I don't have any love for Ma as a company. because I think every time they have come up against someome difficult ethics, they've made the wrong decision. every time That is the clear consistent history of meta and Facebook as a company is that Um Every time We could get into all these details about that. I mean, not just from an ethical standpoint, sometimes from a business standpoint as well, Metaverse? Yeah. How many billions were suck to metaverse? That is officially closed Is officially closed. Yeah, No more metaverse. I mean, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area now. I have a lot of friends who work at Meta. There are very good people there I think the company direction they have no idea what they're doing. And it's really too bad because U what Facebook started out as was a great way to connect with other people that you know and the people you know who they know. And I loved that and it's been in shitified to this new place Um where most social media has actually been ins shitified into this place, where you are now less You know, only seven percent content you see on Instagram. from people you know. seven percent. I'm surprised it's even seven these days. Yeah. How much do you scroll and you like actually see somebody? It rarely happens. It's mostly It's really an ad platform with DMing features to share chats. Yeah. That's most of what Instagram is and if you If you look at Instagram or TikTok What so concerns me, getting back to the influencers that kind of operate in our space health, mental health. All it takes is for you to be scrolling and just one second pause on one video teaches the algorithm. Oh yeah that there's something here that you are interested in And the brilliance of TikTok was looking to see, oh, people who watch this video and are interested in this video, they're also interested in these other videos. I'm going to recommend these to you All you have to do is watch one video about Uh your problem is actually because these people are trauma dumping on you And now you're getting these videos about, well, you gott to protect your peace. and you got to have these boundaries because there's all this narcissism happening. and you have this attachment style that makes you really vulnerable to these kind of relationships. and these people are really going to abuse you. And so what you really need to do is buy my solution right here, right All it took was a momentary hesitation. And for most people This is where I argue with my colleague, Dr. Jonathan Heite For most people This is actually okay Most people, social media is actually a source of connection For most people, social media is not going to destroy your brain. It's not going to rewire your brain the same time are people who the people who are vulnerable to making comparisons peopleople who are chronically lonely. and isolated People who are vulnerable to having sleep problems People who are at risk for anxiety, depression eating disorders For them Is that group that you just mentioned Pretty descriptive Teenenagers Or like let's not even say te U developed or pre developed frontal lobes becausecause like To me, that's the definition going through My teenage years was High risk for anxiety because you're always anxious about something You're making questionable decisions. You're lonely because you don't have friendships that have established over years. It felt like you were talking about my kage. Yeah Yeah, yeah. when Yeah, ye. I mean, that's it's a great point. So Yes, it's develop mentally normal. teenagers to be really wired to be worried about what other people think about And it's also very normal for teenagers to make comparisons about themselves versus other people. Um All of that absolutely. the other thing that's very common for teenagers is to be experimenting with their identities So they're going to be trying out very different ways of carrying themselves, of associating with different groups, all that stuff is normal I'm talking about is above and beyond. It gets back to that question of how is this person doing relative to their peers So what we would expect is we would expect people to have at least one good friend That's what the research has shown. all you need is one good friend as a teenager. All you need, not AI. of that Man, you're asking all the right questions today, doctor Mike Not AI. a real human being. Okay. Yeah yeah. A flawed human. Yes. a flawed friction full human Connection You need one. U, you need you need appear you also need to be able to operate in these social in all the social networks you have within your family, with your friends and family With school in those places, you need to be able to be present, communicate, interact not be stuck in your head Everyone hates me. I'm so stupid, not being able to express any of those kind of things, right? What I'm talking about is above and beyond Those people are much more vulnerable to He. The warping ism of social media. Those are the people I worry about Now, Pblem with this is It's very hard to figure out who those people are h. It's a Goldilocks problem. Here's another thing about social media that I haven't been able to figure out a solution for Australia Banning it for under sixteen Under sixteen. Yeah. ye Something like that huge experiment. My fear is Knowing teenagers Every single teenager I've ever worked with We'll find a way to we'll find a way, right? And so what are we doing if we are taking Young people off of these platforms push them into other corners of the internet are less regulated that have less safeties put in. As much as I don't like meta They still have a trust and safety team They still have something to lose. They have ye, a lot of money to lose. They have a lot of money to lose. They can't have a platform that is allowing for child abuse and sexually explicit content of minors floating around, you can't have that. My nephew, who is in high school He's constantly getting Instagram DMs from drug dealers, like asking them to come to these parties. So there's problems on these platforms and those problems are very difficult to solve But some of the big things, there's still trust and safety there So with Australia are all these kids going to go off platform to like the four chan or eight chan equivalent where it's much more of a wild West frontier You know, the dark web of it the dark web of it all, right The other thing that scares me about this is You know, we We criticize Gen Z for being bad at social interaction, but we don't look at what is the social world that we have created for them We talk about how hard it is for people to have casual, consistent social interactions with other people, with peers. We don't talk about how all these third spaces spaces outside of your home, outside of your school, outside of work, they've been in decline. They've been in decline all of the twentieth century People are calling the twenty first century the antisocial century because all the structures in place are making it actually very, very difficult for people to hang out with each other not just Gen Z, not justen Alpha, but us too Millennials, gen Xors, poor gen Xors, always ignored and all of this stuff, right? So The reason these social media bans also concern me is the people who need it most are the ones who have the most to lose. And so who are the people who need it the most over fifty percent transgender kids have been Over fifty percent doctor M. Let me ask you because I'm not super familiar with this research Has that been tied to Their existence in the world at how they're treated? Yes O Perhaps it's both situation. Is it because inherently struggling with your identity. creates those feelings. That's a great question and it gets back to some of the history around homosexuality. And for a long time, psychiatry, mental health, identified homosexuality as a mental just being gay. meant you had inherent problems. And what that research cleared up, one of my favorite Favorite episodes of this American L is called eightighty onene Words. And it's about the eighty one words of the psychiatric definition of homosexuality as a mental illness and how those eighty one words were removed from the DSM, the diagnostic statistical Manual of Mental Iillness, how it was no longer considered a mental illness Part of it was science Do the actual research, what we found is There's no inherent problem with being gay It's not like Having a bipolar disorder inherently creates a set of Problems are your ability to function in society It's not like that If you are gay, it doesn't mean you're going have all of these problems What tends to be the problem with being gay, what going back to the seventies, was a lot more of the stigma and culture associated with being gay And now we've made a ton of progress there But when it comes to trans kids It's a very different situation. And in some cases, we're falling back on a lot of our legal protections that we've had for trans people. We're seeing that right now with the administration and a lot of the attacks that are going on these things It's primarily because of The isolation, the stigma, the bullying that happens in the trans to the trans community And that is why the statistic is so high. Like if we talked about that with any other group of people that Half of them. have been We'll be raising Public health flags all over the place. You know, but we're not. we're not talking about that. So Trans kids. LGBTQ plus kids. Black and brown, people of color A lot of these marginalized groups for them All they have is social media. Social media is really an in shitified place It should not be This DM platform is tied also to this content platform We really deserve to have better tech. We deserve to have better ways of finding our people, finding our communities, of having these safe places where we can connect with like minded people, support each other feele like we're not alone. You know, shame is so massive right now Shame, I see this problem of shame. with notot only young people, but adults as well And the way we deal with that shame is we find people like ourselves and we share part of our story and we realize we're not alone We need those spaces And unfortunately right now, Many of those spaces only exist in online spaces So you ban this stuff taking away the crutch of someone who's got a broken leg But what are we giving them in return? No, they still haven't they need that support The healing is not done. We're taking away this crutch. We're like, yes, we've done it. We have banned social media. It's not in our schools A what cost, you know, and what are we replacing it? is the hope that they will return back to the third spaces? Yes, but we're not building them. It's not going to happen It is not It is not going to happen A lot of homes and condos that are being built now Many of them are being built without dedicated dining space. These homes are being built smaller structurally There are less places to connect You know For me, the big place I connected with my friends growing up was the mall Go to the mall spend like four hours day four hours there doing nothing, maybe one of us would like buy a pretzel Right S. I a b. Yeah, yeah, yeah, That would be me Orange Julius was my stop. I'm going I'm going to get the Oangies,m get the pretzel. It's going to be a rock and day U those opportunities have gone down The places where kids can hang out for low cost or no cost have gone down We're much more suspicious of young people just walking around. I mean, we're recording this in New York City, which is America's America's great third space You live here not because of what's inside your walls. You live here because of what's outside I was just getting together with a friend before before recording And what a beautiful place the city is where you can live anywhere And in thirty minutes, you can meet each other in the middle And there's a space where you can meet For free, you can find a park, you can find a coffee shop, spend five bucks. You can get you can go to the Halal cart and, you know spend more than that or you can get like a really great meal a great restaurant. I G gott to hire you for New York City tourist. Is the mayor hiring? I want to come here right now. Come to New York. I don't have a smile, but I love I'd love to work with the mayor. I miss this place, man. I lived here, I lived here a decade. This is the greatest place Four third spaces. It's funny because most people, at least in my demographic of me in my mid thirties now People are having a lot of kids in my friend group from high school And everyone's notion is Well, I'm gonna to have kids soon so I'm going to leave the city. Yeah. Which is kind of opposite of what you're Yeah. Why is that Um, you you com about it so positively develop. And yet we're doing the opposite Yeah. I don't Wh's the message not America does not support young families America does not support it at all. Um So part of it is cost. All right, so let me give you a good false dichotomy to play with. to raise a child, better to have a big front yard and a gated in backyard where they can play sports or tiny studio or one bedroom apartment in New York City, but there's a lot of activities to do. m neither because they're extremes No. because Focusing on the wrong thing What should we focus on We should focus on immunity Better to raise a kid in a place where there are opportunities for them to connect with other peers outside of school and do things together with other kids And one of The most important things about resilience is connection with an adult That is not the parents That could be a coach It can be a teacher. It can be the dad next door of the kids you play with R. Those are the important things. I'll tell you away U my daughter got in trouble And my daughter was doing something at school secretly that she shouldn't have Which makes it sound a lot worse. keep blowing up her spot right. Yeah. she's catching a stray on the doctor Mike vx for no reason. You just said this is a patient encounter. I should have said, I should have said this. Five years from now, my daughter's gonna look this up and get bad of me. Now Now I've said this thing and it makes that thing sound so much worse It was pretty benign. Yeah, o. Like what she was doing was pretty benign She was hiding at It was called minimizing.. Doctor reacts to psychologist complaining about his daughter U, she was doing a thing And she felt really guilty about it. Okay, right Which is good. Which is good. Yeah, which is good. This is how like the way kids figure out how to be a human is by constantly pushing up against boundaries and then seeing like, oh, too much I need to back up That was a wrong thing That guilt, like learning from it, Great. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So she didn't tell us that this was going on She also didn't feel comfortable telling her teacher this is going on because it was happening in the classroom. She goes to after care And she goes to a very U Hippie Dippie, let's play in the dirt climb trees after care thing, which I love. great. Yeah I love it. I can't believe that's called Hippie now. U It's just ye it's like my normal like It's like throwback nostalgic old school after school. Okay. Yeah. a lot of parents don't like it. Okay. They're like, Ch to me homes like hide the peanuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hippie means hide the Oh, they still hide the peanuts. Oh they do. o. So they let them play in the dirt but they hide the peanut. There's a kid with a peanut allergy. Okay. Which that's a whole other thing we could talk about. Safety is. Yeah, yeah So yeah, they had the peanuts, which is super annoying because peanut butter sandwiches are like the easiest thing to make, you know Um, And the other annoying thing about my daughter is she's Sorry, sweetie. She is like prorogrammed by New York. ' we lived here until she was like three years old. She got that much programming in three years Food She can only eat good pizza She can only eat goodood hot dogs. She can only have Good Italian. You should feed your child hot dogs Good hot day withith your genetics. Unbelievable. Bad. Dyphus is not how you react to a patient. She got so used to really Good high quality food. and again Um mister Mayor, please hire me. The greatest thing about New York is cards is well, good food at every price point. Oh fair Man, you can spend five bucks An amazing meal, you can also spend five hundred and get an amazing meal, like farm to table, a giant plate with a little tiny carrot, but it's like the best the sauces are carefully placed. Yes, yes, all arrives at the exact same time. right? You can get whatever experience, whatever price point, you' can gonna have the best meal best meal of your life in New York City My daughter got used to that And now we live in the San Francisco Bay Area And and We go to kids' birthday party. she eats the pizza. She's like, this is crap This is this is not. New York is better. and I'm like, swweetie, you lived there thirty years. W woman of good taste? Yeah, she's got good taste. She gets that from her mom. It's not me. Um anyways My daughter was doing this thing. felt guilty, didn't feel like she could tell anyone else this, but she goes to this after school and she feels very close. to the teachers at this after schoolool And because of the social emotional play that they all have It's a much more of a casual relationship. So she brought up T her teacher, to Ruthie, her teacher who she's really close with What would you do if you were feeling this way And Ruthie Fantastic. God bless Ruthie She she's like, o wow, that sounds like a really tough situation. She validated her concern. And she said, I think you should talk to your parents about this And my daughter was like, no, no, I can't tell them. I can't tell if they're be so mad at me. And Ruthie says, I know your parents And I also know parents. If you share these things Before it becomes a bigger problem parents are usually very happy about it and they want to help you through it That's what my daughter did The thing that helped her was this other adult. That was not apparent. was not in the family that she had a relationship with that she trusted That is critical for kids development. So to get back to your question, I would look at Where to live, if I have young kids, it's where do my kids have the best chance of forming a community Maybe that's New York Maybe that's a suburbs. Maybe that's like Rural Wyoming We don't know. It depends on you. it depends on your social network that you have, not not like But like real life social networks depends on the community. and that was ultimately what booted us out of New York City. It was really sad to me in like the last five years I was in New York I saw this increasing atrophy of all of my friends the exact same thing was happening peopleeople got married kids they left the city They left Brooklyn and they left Manhatt U there was this flight out And one day I kind of woke up and I looked around and I'm like, we have no one to hang out with this weekend. What happened The other thing is a health thing. Uh One thing New York is It is and it's not is accessible And so I was carrying around a stroll carrying. I was pushing around a stroller That stroller became like my MIDivan You know, we do our Trader Joe's run put a bunch of food in the stroller. The stroller also had my daughter's stuff And it just became this like big o thing and taking the subway, getting around was great until like elevator wasn't working. And then what would happen is I had to like carry this giant thing down the stairs and hope that someone would help me, which usually people did The thing that people don't understand about New York City is New Yorkers are very helpful Now we do it efficiently We don't always do it with a smile But we do it. Yeah. You need direction, someone's gonna to help you out. Yeah, we had this conversation with Arthur Brooks. The difference between kind and nice. Yeah. ye yeah ye. So New Yorkers are not kind or they're not nice. They're not kind, but they're kind. Yeah. Yeah, flip that for the Bay Area for San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah. peopleeople are very nice Are they kind? There's there's a great Gulf between people. So, um I develop I started developing back pain the last six months I was here And I was taking a leave for it And then I started taking more and more relief for it. And my doctor was like, you can't This is not chronic treatment. You can't be on this One month to moving to California It was all gone All gone.. Now what was also gone? was all my steps that I got in every day because now I'm living in a car So, you know, pros and cons. but community man It's it's community. And that is also what's increasingly This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm not worth it, okay? Try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshherers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours icult to get. To go back to something you were discussing earlier surrounding homosexuality and how you used to be viewed as a disease, curious and I'm partially playing. Well, not disease disorder disorder and ye this is actually my question surrounding this verbiage because partially I'm playing Dvil'sdvocate, partially I'm trying to understand better for myself For a physical condition that has no pathology. I'm trying to think of a good example. Dextrocardia. whereere your heart is not on your left side. It' doesn't impact your life. You might go your whole life and not even know until your autopsy or some kind of weird scan that incidentally you found out. And at that point,? Yeah, who cares So like medically No impact ye. But it's a condition basased on the ICD tent, it's a disease right? Be it's a disorder, disease, what have you? Socially, it can have an impact because if you go into the doctor's office, And they're trying to listen to your heart and they don't hear it, they might get worried when you're going for a procedure to reinflate your lung, and they don't know that your hearts on that Right couldould be a really big problem. Right. So medically on its own, if everything's okay, it's not a problem. Yeah. But no one has any social stigma attached to having a heart on the right side. So they're not viewed in any way as less than to another person Why when homosexuality comes into play I understand the social stigma that comes with it But there is some sort of differentiating factor between someone who has homosexuality versus heterosexuality So bisexuality and bisexuality. And how do we discuss that in a way where we say, these are not the same Yeah. And perhaps are' not diseases. But how do we discuss them as variations without creating stigma Be it feels like anytime You say this is a variant There's a chance at stigma forform It's a part of the natural human variation And we really have a hard time talking about those things, don't we You know a skin color is a there's a natural human variation all of this, but what is also a part of our our psychology U about to say like a part of our operating system One of the things that both other pch focused this is what bothers me is how much of our language around mental health has become mechanical. You know, brain rot crashing out social batteries The more mechanical we get in our explanations of human psychology, I think it's a huge problem. because Really? Yeah, yeah, because so low social battery, what does that mean? It means I need to charge it up So I need to go at home, plug in and give myself a long time to recharge the battery The problem with all these mechanical explanations is they imply mechanical solutions. when For humans, our solutions are much more frictionful Like if you have a low social battery, what often will charge it up is a good social experience It's like, you ask God for patience. you don't get patience. you get a struggle that teaches you Yeah, That's it, man.. That's it. We need a priest here to walk us through this, right? That is exactly it. We need out a friction full experience, everything feels meaningless It's the IKA effect. We like stuff that we make. We like the crap furniture we get from No knock IKEA. I've got a bunch of IKEAas. I was at IKEA this weekend because it was raining, I had nothing else to do with my kids. so I went to IKEA. Nice IKkea is good. But we like IKEA furniture more because we have to make it It takes time and effort and after you do it, you're like, I accomplish that. Now if Alima two makes the IKF F interest a little bit at of slant, there's a few extra pieces. You're like, I hope those pieces weren't critical to it, but it still feels like you accomplish something What has happened over The last ten to fifteen years is a lot of tech companies have created this loneliness economy where you can immediately solve most problems by tapping a button You know, if you need something, if you're out of sugar Don't go ask your neighbor for it and deal with the friction of that social experience, just buy now on Amazon R? If you are feeling a little alone and isolated, don't worry too much about finding friends. You can find your community on YouTube. on all these other kind of platforms, right?? And if you if you don't have partner I got a oldlding fans for that You know, it's just one tip away from having your penis raated. Like is that an issue where UI becomes too good Because we always want to make UI smoother, cleaner, simpler, but then when it's so simple and clean, it becomes sterile. Yeahes, so rememoving Friction is the DNA of Silicon Valley This is how engineers think. Right. And usually that's a good thing. Usually that's a good thing Usually that's a good thing and what we are running into now too much of it When you apply it to human behavior human relationships, absolutely. Last time you and I were talking I kind of pitched you my idea for for an app It was Pokemon go. four. mental health. likeike pull it out of your pocket If you're in a difficult situation, kind of like Pokemon Go, you can play anywhere. you'll get the support you need for that, right It was pretty prophetic In some ways because I've now co founded this startup company with a former Googler and a former TikTok person Jackson and Mabel, my co founders tryrying to create that kind of experience, but for social connection Um tension we run into are companies called OrSon and tension we run into is this How do you build The right friction And how do you solve for the wrong friction points We haven't figured that out what you' basically seeking is In order to experience fun playing basketball by yourself You can't shoot full court shots because you'll make none. Your success r so low R, right that it's no longer fun. Yeah A the same time, you don't stand under the rim and make a hundred out of a hundred layups because now that friction is just so low and so easy You find that mid range foul shot, perhaps that you're shooting where you're shooting sixty percent and you can improve upon that number And this intermittent reward and intermittent experience of friction allows you to enter fllow.bsly Yeah, ye,ah your experience needs to meet the challenge And that's always a moving target And it's going to be a moving target based on the time of day you're doing it. your mental state, your emotional state, who you are as an individual, your physical characteristics as your back hurts as your elbow hurts. So like all these factors play into into that. And all of this has become complicated now So If you're kind of talking about a lot of your friends are starting to have kids Um I live ten minutes away from my best friends. Loan and Jamie, Th these guys, I've known them. Lhan and I've known since fourth grade. Jamie, I've known since middle school U These are my best buds. They know all my dirty secrets. I know theirs too. So I think twice alone in JV And they don't have a podcast to go. And They don't have a podcast. but they they could they could be like the deep dish on doctor Eite. E That would be the most stupid thing is they have this podcast and then I like react to their podcast. That would be just like What's that snake that eats itself that I know what you mean Or in the cn or something? Yeah or you' I was gonna say human centipede, but you're going. humuman centipede is even worse. Let's go with human centipede. That's better than the snake It would be like that. I feel like sometimes content is that Well, I mean, I'll Watch a show and react to it. Yeah One of the cast members will come on who's reacting to the thing that they're given lines to say and they're not actually a doctor. then someone will watch our reaction and reaction. And I'm like, Yeah, this is inception realaction. What is what are we? Where does this end? And then I need to react to that person's reaction of you Yeah, yeah, it's like what are we doing here So my best buddies live ten minutes away from me ten minutes. It is so incredibly hard for us to see each other Now what's going on there? Yeah One of them has a one year old. the other is a very busy job I have two kids. Um, Logistically, it's very hard for us to see each other It's very We've increased the difficulty of just Having these casual hangouts. You know, this when my dad was my age His friends would just drop over for the weekend That is so bizarre now. Like, if my friends just dropped over, It would be so weird. Yeah you be like, Oh my go, we have to clean. We have to order something. We have to get something. We have to make this. It a memorable experience. Yes. And I blame social media largely for that is this expectation of what do other people's homes look like? what is normal Well, social media or Martha Stewart, let's be honest Martha Stewart was never my like This is normal That was more ideal. Okay, got it. okay. What social media has warped is our sense of normality And we get these views into people's lives, but they're not people, they're influencers. And so influencers are people too You know, we could. Dctor Mike, we could fall into that definition. I'm sure someone's commenting like that right now Um But what do we do here? like as influencers when we're making content is, okay, how's the lighting? How' this? how's the space, right? Or we're recording like in front of a window and you don't see that we have perfect lighting coming on us, right? O these beautiful lights that you have right now? Sometimes my friends are like, wow, you looked so good in that video. I'm like, it's lighting, man. If I just put that lighting on you You know, your pores are going to look amazing too, right. There's a British Tame show that is now being known for its lighting Oh, French talk show. Yeah. That is literally being known they have like the best lighting all the celebrities want to go on. Yeah. So like look at that. Yeah. a whole show It's just special not because of the question. Just because look. Yeah, yeah. so Oh want to highlight best of themselves.. That's what I was mentioning before about Social experiences have all become performative and this low level casual hangout that defines My dad's social connections All of it was not based on performance. It was very casual. These hangouts just without any type of planning Yeah, I don't remember last time someone texted me and they're like, Hey, I'm in the area. driving by. what are you doing? Yeah. My friend did that two weeks ago. It me out. But doesn't get you happy? like It does and it almost never works out Could you say like, I don't wantan to disappoint them with a subp meal or something? No, no, it was more like, I am so busy I had, you know, I work from home most of the time Um And I just had a lot of meetings that day couldn't I couldn't see him. It was a weekday. It wasn't a weekend. That might have been different with a weekend But it's very hard to make those logistical things line up And part of it is my It had never worked past five PM Five, fifteen, my dad was home. What What did he do for work He he was an accountant and so Most of this work stayed at work He came home, he was done every now and then Maybe a Yeah, Yeahah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally Um busy he would have busy seasons where he brought his briefcase actually had like work in it But it was very rare for me to see that. Now what's changed for us Um email was the first thing that extended the reach of work past work hours Um But now anyyone you work with has the ability to somehow reach you Even patients can send messages any number, any hours of the day, doesn't mean every doctor responds to them after hours, sometometimes they do. and I'm like And like Dr. Johnson, don't respond to my m it's like eleven thirty P. I know you've been up writing notes probably. Please go to bed. Don't respond to me right now about how I need a refill on my vitamin D. like please, don't worry about U But the reach of work now extends to all hours of our lives And so the ability to have these casual interactions that has gone down. People live further away from each other. We're more disconnected from our families. We tend to move away from where our families are. People are far less religious than they used to be. There's far less community connection. And so neighbors don't really talk to each other anymore All of these middle level connections. I'm not talking about your family and your very close friends And I'm also not talking about all the casual connections you have that are more like work and colleagues, although remote work is kind of destroying a lot of that as well These like middle connections you had with your neighbors, with your acquaintances, people you saw every now and then, but it really nourished you Those of God. And so what social media can do for the people that are most vulnerable, which is the people who are most alone and isolated and at risk captures that That desire you have for connection. We call it loneliness You know, what is loneliness A yearning for connection? It's yearning for connection Some people might be okay with just one friend. Some people might be okay. I have one friend and I see them once a month. You know, That's like my wife My wife, her social need is way small My social need is massive. I am an aggressive extrovert I need all the social And so that makes for an interesting marriage. We balance each other out Um for a lot of people If there's the imbalance between what you have and what you want, that's where loneliness Lves And what social media can do is it takes that signal And it gives you this false sense of connection, which is all the performance It's watching all this high performing content As you're seeing it, you're judging yourself as it As you compare to this ideal example, I say ideal because it's high performing content that you see, which is really well optimized and well engineered to be successful. That creates your new sense of norm. You are never as good as that In most social interactions, you get as much as you give. I contact the the the Joy, the support, the feeling less alone, the getting out of your own head is so much of the value of social interaction, whether it's basketball whether it is u Club or playing Dungeons and Dragons or just like Fishing, standing shoulder to shoulder with your buddy and just fishing The big value of it is getting out of your head doing something with someone else For the most part, that's what you get We don't get that from social All you get is the performance, the judgment without really the nourishing. It's like you're starving. And what you get are a bag sour patch kids You know, you It's not gonna to nourish you, man. Yeah. It'll buy you some time to temporarily prevent you from starving, perhaps. So that's what is that what is leading Prices surrounding mental health disorders in Chen Z So without a doubt. JenzZie is suffering And without a doubt, they're suffering more than other generations We know that they are more likely to be anxious than all the generations that have come prior to them We know that Deppression has gone up And we also know that this isn't just self report This isn't just what like young people are complaining But if you look at ER visits related to and self harm and depression and these types of psychiatric problems, we know those rates are all up. We also know that They're spending much less time socially Um If you look at the early two thousands and you look at now Young people are spending seventy percent less time in person with each other It used to be you spent about thirty hours a day thirty hours a day There aren't that many hours in a day, Dr. Mike. O fact ye, I'm a psychologist, not a physicist or astrophysicist or whoever whoever deals with time. Ironically, my last guest that we just published a podcast today is an astrophysicist. shouldhould have had that person back on here to fact check. They're not going to make the reaction video to me talking about this And they'll talk about the Quantum time mechanics. There we go it all. Yeah. L M maybe there is thirty hours Spaceetime is all very wibbly, wobbly, timy whimy So yeah they were spend less time in person together too It used to spe be thirty hours a month. Oh mon a month just casually hanging out You also won won't hear young people say hanging out. And thirty hours is because to me, thirty hours in a week made sense of like, oh, you're with your family or something. This is casual peers Yeah. Thty thirty hours a month. Casually with peers was the early two thousands. now it's down to ten So that's a big change. So looking at anxiety, depression, social sleep, we also know Um J in the last few years U Sleep scores have worsened So it used to be Young people, about sixty eight percent of them were experiencing some sleep problems. Now it's like seventy six percent of them. Also that's a high number to make young people of adolescence, teenagers who are experiencing sleep problems Yeah Pediatricians have been advocating for years about Let's readjust S times. School times. Yeah, let's push it later for high school. No one wants to. I get it as a parent. No one wants to drop off their kids later, but Sleep is so important to developing body and a developing brain. Well, that's why the phone conversation comes in with Blue light ye I think Blue light is probably a smaller part of that exi Orated. Yeah, I think it's more so the Fomo anxiety of seeing your ex partner with someone, comparing yourself and feeling crappy before going to sleep, that's driving the latest sleep times in most teenagers. You would think so. So in there's brand new research twenty twenty six published that looked at about five hundred people. and factored in phone use and sound irrespective of phone use that young people were experiencing these sleep problems. So what's going on there Well, I think anxiety is a big part of it. Was that like controlled for? It was controlled for. Well, that's my thing. So maybe they're so used to having their phones.. They don't have it. Yeah exactly. That's the problem. Yeah, man. That's the withithdrawal. G. That's a great that's a great point So Without a doubt, Gen Z is struggling with these things. Well, yes, let me brereak this down for the audience of how we think about it in science versus how they experience. We see rates of self reported anxiety depressionions up Average viewers thinking, well, especially out of Gen Z, older. thinking, uh, they're just self reporting this. We say, no, there's hospitalization data. They're actually harming themselves. It's not just words.. They're leading through with their actions Yes The next level of that is saying, is this because of societal awareness that they're raised on where We didn't have the clear diagnostic screening criteria. thirty years ago to ask someone that was born in the eighties When they come in for their six year old visit, are you sad? Yeah Yeah, yeah ye that wasn't a question. That wasn't happen. So now are we just capturing more of that feeling And because kids are also more aware of this feeling They're spending a lot more time thinking about it leading to these hospitalizations You're not going to like my answer Whenever we talk about Gen Z think in such either or Ways Every single thing about Gen Z. can be answered in a both and way So to answer your question It's Both This is a generation that unlike any other generation in their ability to express what's going on theirir ability to identify syymptoms to identify with disorders with with health, with not just like mental illness, but also mental health You know, not just with these physical problems but also with physical health. they're Their vocabulary and awareness is so high I never imagined. When I was in school studying to become a psychologist that Young people. would be able to express themselves in this way. would be able to openly talk about depression, openly talk about anxiety. I mean, research is research I was a massively socially anxious kid There's still traces of that right now. My awareness of my sweat right now Hill at me, doctor Mike. I hate it I hate it. This is this is a vestibular leftover I don't think I use the right word there. This is a a brain. Yeah, I was trying to like I was like, what what's the This is a leftover of my social anxiety. It's still there. And it most presents when I'm talking in front of a group of colleagues who I feel like know more than me Well you don't need to worry about that conversation. I'll tell you that. You're good then. You know, you know, it's exposure therapy. I was so So terrified of talking to you during our first one. Really? Yeah, notothing to do with you. Okay. Nothing to do with you Well, everything to do with you actually. because of the cameras and no I'm used to cameras But u I wanted I want to do right by My field Im to I want My colleagues to be proud of me And I want to do right by my patients, my audience and community. Whenever I feel I have to do something for a group my social anxiety comes roaring back. So one of the scariest things for me in my career was teaching. like whenever I taught introductory psychology, because I always wanted to do right for my students. I never wanted to let them down And so that was the fear here I didn't want to let down people that I was trying to help I felt this way when I've spoken at San Diego Comicon I do this panel with a friend of mine, doct. Andrea Eedimenti. We do psychology of Star Trek versus Star Wars. whereereass me and her, She's the more Star Wars person, I'm the Treky. and we get talent from both franchises and we debate these topics, right I get so terrified because I don't want to let down the Star Trek fans. Yeah. No. So that's where my social anxiety really presents. I think it's a superpower tellell me more about my superpowers. I mean You have so much care. of wanting to present the information accurately You're experiencing a quicker thought process, this physiologic response in order to prepare you to say things as accurately as possible. and you're increasing the speed of your fact checking. So like to me, like you're getting ready for the challenge. So this is this is the beauty of human connection Right? Like if I can find a way of my shame and be able to share that with you, someone who I trust and who I respect And you can share that honest reflection, it completely changes the way I see things That is the magic of, um A friends, right Um And that is what That is what really devastates me about the research here But how low? that time spent with friends has become know, one and this is it's really powerful for men This loneliness, reallyally Why specifically One in four young men does not have a friend Don't have friends One in four. And that's even including social media friends Or is that not considered It's self identifying as someone that they feel close real life, in real life. Okay. Now how you define real life? I think like online and offline those definitions have sort of blurred is friendships exist in all these places. I'm glad you asked that because that's something I ask the people I work with, you know, How many friends do you have? How do you see those friends? Like how much of it is time spent online? How much is it offline? Some people will say like I have three friends and they're all online. Like have you seen each other face to face? What is that like? Sometimes people say no, right? So you need to understand those things. And even with online friends. Yeah. There's a Big distribution variation there where you could have someone that you're friends with, you friended each other, you like each other's posts, maybe you exchange a DM. and then there's friends online that you game with where you actually do talk quite a bit and interact and teamwork and cooperation. That's a very different online experience. Absolutely. This is the problem with having these conversations is there's nuance there. And then we don't do nuance well in a one second clip that's showing up on YouTube shorts on Instagram TikTok. People want the answer S screenime good or bad. Yeah, yeah,ah. and it's So my answer to that one is look at the thing that COVID taught us is screen time is a stupid word. It is a completely stupid word because what matters is how you're experiencing that, what the medium is, what is the connection? what is the relationship? So many of us During COVID, We only had screens as a way of having social connection, right So with with boys and young men, They are more affected by these structural changes that have happened than girls and young women The reason for that, and I know I'm looking at this in binary and gender is also a spectrum. There's a variation here,'s a continuum, right. But if you look at things in a very binary way Boys tend to form friendships over experiences and things they do together playing basketball, walking around the mall, these shoulder to shoulder types of activities where you're just doing something together And what happens throughrough those moments is you talk is you bond over an experience You get to see your buddy's face And you see if they're having a bad time or not you know might Um A girlfriend dumped me Junior right right before junior year of high school, right before finals. And as soon as that school year was over, I just locked myself in my room Not like twenty four hours a day, but like I was at home. I didn't wantan to see my friends. My friends were calling, didn't respond, calling, I didn't respond, right And so They knew something was wrong, they knew I was dumped, they knew I wasn't taking it well. And they knew this because they hadn't seen me. And then when they did see me, they're like Holy shit, I'll you look like crap ake Let's get you out of here. let's get your mind off things. Let's do that. You need to see people, you need to hear their voice. You need to smell people Like have they showered? H they been like, this was one of the hardest things about doing doing therapy during COVID is I didn't have all my senses All I had was vision I couldn't see my patience. I couldn't get the detail. I couldn't tell if when was the last time they shaved. When was last time they showered? all this is all When a patient comes to you, you use all of your senses, everything that's available to you to try to understand What situation are they in? right? I didn't have all that available detail And so What my friends were able to do is they were able to pick out like stuff is wrong here And they didn't necessarily say, let's talk about all your feelings. R. They knew my feelings stranger. Yeah ye ye. They knew the feelings were down in the dumps. What they knew I needed in that moment. was what we call behavioral activation. Let's get Ali moving in the kinds of activities that feel good to him get him more activated and doing joyful things, left lift his spirits, get him out of the home, get his mind off of stuff, all of those things. That's largely how traditional masculine Friendships work Now if you restrict the opportunities easasy ways in which we collide with each other outside of our homes that most affects boys Because most of boy friendships are based around getting outside of the home, doing something side to side That's the case Why when I had Jonathan Hite in your seat He talked about the anxious generation and social media and how it was destroying teenage girls more than boys Teenage girls are more vulnerable to social to physical comparisons. They're more vulnerable especially Look at the criteria here. People who are very vulnerable to social comparison, people who are very isolated more isolated and chronically lone you are, it changes the way you see other people It makes you st for starved for social connection and it makes other people seem much more scary So The tragedy here of people who are very lonely is they're desperate for social connection and they're terrified of it And so when they try to connect, They end up doing all of these things that push people away Tuma dumping is one of those very trendy TikTok things to talk about. What is that? It is where ICU. And I tell you about all the crap that's going on in my life.? People call it trauma dumping. They're not necessarily talking about real traumatic experiences I' had, they often are talking about very difficult things Now the truth, I think that's Incredibly over inflated. this idea of trauma dumping. I think a lot of you're saying that it's inflated the definition of it or the actual real life experience of having it happen the discussions around it So I think people Maybe the answer is both both and Um, Right deffine A lot of what is normal friendship and social support as trauma dimping which is really just supportpping a friend The reason why I think it's happening so much and the reason why these conversations, I think have spiraled is people are struggling and the infrastructure and support we have to support people And so People are going to get help the best way they can, which is through the friends that they have, but every friendship seems pretty strained right now. So that's this whole other thing. So is the trauma dumping definition being overused by the receiving party or the giving party U I would say L are people feeling that their friends are trauma dumping when they're just being friends Or are people being self conscious of not trauma dumping because they feel like that's all they're doing. Both are happening So Hinge came out with some very interesting data this past year. That's a statement I never thought. They have a branch that publishes research based upon all their user data.. And one of the things that they came out with in this last year's report is How much people are afraid of being too much A lot of people. How do they know this Uh I think the way they well, number one, they look at their user data And so they can in aggregate identified ways actually look at what people are saying So that's number one. And I think their research I've never consulted with them. I haven't done any of this research. But what I think they probably do is they probably do some user interviews. They probably reach out to a few people and do some key follow ups Like I've noticed you've had this many dates. We're trying to understand like what's going on here. Would you be available for a one hour interview? Interesting. They do stuff like that. A lot of tech companies do that. We've done that. Research done research on like more than a thousand people on this like issue of loneliness is something I'm super obsessed with. But it's pretty common on these tech platforms to do this kind of stuff It's so much easier To do research outside of academia? Why? Because of institutional review boards that's that's is. Aren't they in place and creating a friction that's valuable Uh, yeah IRBs? Absolutely. Is it Better Is that it's easier or worse?s both hands. You know, if I'm it's both end There's an idea around manipulation, at least in psychological research. A lot of these IRBs are there to protect participants in research from manipulation, from adverse effects of what might happen going through the study you can look at stuff like somewhat discredited Stanford Prison study people were put into these different roles. They're asked to act as a police officer or as a prisoner and people ended up acting out those roles. Now we know that there was some experimental manipulation there that might have fudged these results. it was a quite distressing experience for people. IRBs are there to protect from that. The difference with user testing V pretty transparent what is happening When we recruit people for studying any type of product will say like, we are trying to understand people's experiences using dating apps Would you like to participate? We will pay this much And during the hour, we're going to ask you these questions. So the social contract is quitear you're contacted. And if that's the case, wouldn't the IRB then just be super in support of it? So why would it be difficult to do that same study in academia? There's a higher bar. There's a higher standard. Much higher bar. The other thing about IRBs is IRBs are also there for medical research, right In psychology, we're often worried about manipulation and adverse effects that manipulation on participants. on the medical biology side, it's much more about health concerns about these new experimental treatments. like there's This might actually lead to some type of phhysiological, biological change. So you need to have a hive bar that kind of stuff, right? So if you to answer your question with Dr. Ht Girls are more vulnerable. again, looking at these things in general, girls are more vulnerable to comparing their appearance with what they're seeing in culture It used to be that that was much more about magazines and TV and that kind of stuff Now it's much more about what you see on social media And so if you look at and that's just everyvery woman and every girl. like self esteem about your body tends to plummet when puberty hits for girls. And we know puberty is hitting eararlier probablyably because of our diet and weight and puberty is getting triggered earlier for girls. And as soon as the puberty hits, they tend to feel very terrible about themselves. That happens much less with boys. and that's more of a cultural concern. But if you look at People who are vulnerable to comparisons peopleeople who are more isolated and alone and also people who have more difficulties with their sleep These people And these girls are going to have a very difficult time around that onset of puberty. So Jonathan Hight is absolutely right about that what he's wrong about is it's not a universally bad thing. social media Especially for marginalized people, it is their lifeline. We need to demand better tech A lot of the research that has reanalyzed the data that he points to in his studies, If you incorporate more variables And if you incorporate bigigger picture. that is less focused just on social media, the effffective social media tends to decline how important it is relative to these other things. Some of the research has shown it like less than five percent or the equivalent of wearing glasses on your well being or eating a potato Dr. Ht really doesn't like that criticism of the potato, but Well, it's the difference between statistically significant and clinically significant? Absolutely, absolutely. And we are biased by the clinical significance. We see more people who are struggling with this. There's been some pretty notable cases recently, looking at meta, meta, YouTube, Snapchat, and there might have been and TikTok. We're all named in this lawsuit Um, I think there was a case in Arizona and there was a case in California. and the California one was just everyone but YouTube and Meta settled out of court. YouTube and Meta were fighting it and they lost And the case really revolved around this young woman who said her life was very much ruined. by by social media And from what I've read, she seems to fit this profile of someone who's really vulnerable to these things and was negatively impacted by these things. So yes, social media can have these major problems And yes, the area that I absolutely agree with Dr. Hight. and social media has changed our social landscape Over the course of the twentieth century, our opportunities for in person casual social interaction have gone down Thats That's happened far beyond far before social media and smartphones came around That's been going on The other thing that's been happening is most of the social interactions have become very performative in nature Um The other thing that's happened with them is most social interactions have moved from Face to face. voice to voice, which is easy natural and automatic for us T Nxt but in performative videos. We are not natural writers and readers It's a little fluke of our evolution that we see patterns in environments probably It really helped our ancestors notice like, oh, this is a footprint of a predator This is a footprint of a friend. let's go this way. we don't need to worry about that. That ability to see patterns led to our ability to read and write, But it's not natural Kids don't naturally learn how to read and write. It's hard We naturally learn how to speak and understand It takes far less cognitive effort for us to have a conversation I have no idea what I've been talking about for half an hour. It just flows. But if you asked me to kind of write this and if we had this text exchange, no, game over. It's going to be brutal to try to like have any level of conversation at this depth over text, it just does not happen. But that's where we've moved most of our social interactions to is this text based space So There are a lot of problems with social media One of them is They are the primary default social option that people have now And for some people It is absolutely going to make those things worse. It's very hard to know Wh it's going to make things worse for We need to change a lot of how the stuff So these small intricacies You're pointing out where you guys disagree? Yeah This would be Perfect for an APA meeting Like Dense discussion between experts, colleagues debating. disiscourse like this is so healthy. Yeah from his general stance surrounding social media What do you disagree with Well, number one, I would never call them the anxious generation. I think that's incredibly pejorative. dismissive Um, is not helpful and That is the even though they are more anxious. Yes Yes, even though they're the even though They have much higher likelihood of experiencing and struggling with anxiety than any other generation I would never call them the anxious generation. because that that immediately shuts down conversation It immediately excludes them from the conversation No no one in Gen Z has ever been like, yes I am the anxious generation That is I've never had any conversation like that And it pushes them away from really being in the conversation What let's let's unpack that a little bit Why are they so anxious When you talk Oh Wh R Gen ie born nineteen ninety seven through twenty twelve, I think Yeah, there's plus minuses on these. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no agreed upon definition of that But when you talk to them, There's a lot of anchor There was a lot of anger of being born into a world where They largely have never seen functional government They largely have never seen any major monumental positive thing that's come out of government It just hasn't happened. Healthcare reform, Obamacare would be the one thing I can point to in the last twenty years that was major legislation. Maybe I can also point to a lot of the Patriot Act stuff, which, you know, problematic There was that And there there was Obamacare and that's all I can identify for my lifetime Right? You go further back And we've had social seecurity, we've had civil rights, we've had Medicare, Medicaid, We've had all these other big things that the interstate highway system You know, the government can do big massive things, but Gen Z has never seen that Interestingly, all those things you're talking about were built as a result of something terrible happening. Yeah. Even interstate system is a wartime tank access system Patriot Act is a nine hundred and eleven response, Social security is a depression. like all these things come from really bad scenarios. Yeah. So we just waiting for the next awful thing to happen for one of these. We don't have legislation that is forward thinking.'t We don't have futurists working in DC. But is that because it's hard to get the general public to buy into one of these things unless there's some kind of universal thing that. American government is largely run by lawyers Um You compare that to China, China has a government that's largely run by engineers And so pros and cons. very different countries. China has no problem Buing things U We very much do have a problem of that. We've been trying to build high speed rail in California to link up LA to San Francisco for years and all we have to show for it is like a mile stretch of track with nothing happening on it, right? So we are a country that is much more concerned about W? protection regulation at least individualism. Iividualism. Yeah yeah. that doesn't exist right in modern day China. Yeah Yeah, ye it's very different. Like it's much more what's best for the country and what's best for the country are these things and having family and Well, not too big of a family. Right, right in They have there's a lot of problems with both ab. Well that's exactly the one child policy is so Such an engineer's approach to population control And it's led to some very big problems that they have, right? So no system is perfect But we are not We are not science engineer forward in America So we're not really thinking about these types of I'm surprised that we're not stemed forward given the high bar that we've set for people to take charge of HHS. I mean, we have the top scientists in these Positions Oh my God. Sorry, God. Man I would have never predicted where' in this this mess Yeah, this is this is the other thing dor. Mike that I am really really scares me is the The decline of Uh intntellectualism It used to be that people were Ecited to find me on YouTube because they were like ool a psychologist talking about this stuff. Now me being a psychologist talking about this stuff is more of a liability because what they want is more casual someomeone who's just like me industry free Industry free. Yeah. And so there was a vet that said that a veterinarian who said that she believes her degree works against her in talking about pet health. Oh absolutely. It just a while. Yeah. ye. I feel the same way. My best content Recently has been stuff where I'm not leading in any way with I'm Dr. Ellie, a psychologist. and it's not in my set It's on my phone in my daughter's room and she's yelling something at me and this could be anyone You know, and I'll drop yeah, as a psychologist somewhere in the middle But I'm not leading with it. The hook has to be relatable. interestnteresting. And everything about Me is not relatable. You know, it's everything about dor. Ali is not relatable, Alias Not doctor Oi So I want to get back to the boys. Yeah going No Well, let's go back to the No great monumental things have happened in the government with a non anxious generation Right, right, right. So anxious generation is what we're talking about. Right. So I would never call G Z, the anxious generation. And so they've never seen functional government. They've also inherited sururveillance economy. where all of their actions, everything they do on their phones, where they go, what they buy, what they look what they look at, it's being watched and commodified and their data is being sold. So that's just the baseline. is You have no privacy. Everyone is like buying all of your data They've been living in this loneliness economy sold to us by Amazon U only fans, all of these different things that sell you exactly what you want right now. they are also seeing this decline in opportunities to see each other outside of their phone Most of the social interactions at that this and this where I agree with Dr. Hight, most of the social opportunities exist through the phone Correlation does not equal causation, phon is there Third spaces were in decline, bothoth of these things were happening in real time. But the other thing that they've seen Climate change is not this like myth to them. Many young people have seen the effects of climate change. They've seen more Turbulent, intense weather They're seeing how it's destabilizing parts of the world, they're seeing polarization, political polarization happening not over here but around the world. They're seeing the rise of I was gonna say the rise of xenomorphs, but no xenophobia, this fear of others. They're seeing legal protections that we've had for a long time four marginalized groups. they're seeing that being stripped away. Then the other thing they saw Is Is saah Jenx Boomers, millennials completely blotch COVID nineteen Now we can debate with what completely blch. We had these amazing vaccines that came out. I mean, that's On one hand, it's this scientific achievement the equivalent of the Apollo Moon missions, right? an amazing achievement that we were able to create these vaccines And at the same time the deployment response coordination of that It's an embarrassment. what happened in America 's completely embarrassing So why are they seeing all of these things that you listed That's there's social I mean so because you describe all these things that they're seeing. Yeah I don't know they's necessarily experiencing any of these things without social media So because I'm sure when I was growing up Aed nine, ten, twelve There was Pretty awful stuff I mean seepptember eventh happened Yeah becausecause I didn't have a phone I was like I'm gonna go play him R. ight, right, right You couldn't doom Sroll, you couldn't zombie sckroll You couldn't just be like, And the companies were trying to create the algorithm in a way where it would encourage you to do this. Yeah. They weren't just offering this thing They were designing it to keep you on the thing. One difference is So one thing I reject is this idea that If they didn't have phones, they wouldn't get exposed to this kind of thing Phones have become And we should get more specific about it Um Most Genie People get their news through TikTok I would argue a lot of booomers do as well if not TikTok, they get into it through Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is the wildest thing to me Visiting my mom just a few months ago was seeing how she's on TikTok all the time She just going like this. that did not That wasn't ever a thing before. She was never on social media And so to see that You know, the This is why whenever people just Take a big old dump on Gen Z kind of want to say like Have you looked at boomers lately They're also struggling in a lot of different ways Loneliness is hitting them differently talk and polarization and all of that. I actually think a lot of the forces behind political polarization in America are also some of the forces of the mental health crisis. peopleople easily identifying with villains behind their social challenges, their economic challenges, the easy villains, the tribalism, all that stuff that's driven some people to V MAGA or very anti vaccine, all of these things that you know you talk about a lot I talk about it a little less because I'm a little bit more scared than you Those forces are also happening with mental health someone very briefly hesitates on this video about attachment problems. and now all of a sudden they identify as having insecure attachment, right? It's very similar forces that are polarizing people leading people to adopt these identities, which actually very much limit who they are That's a problem, right So To get back to your question, Um This is where they're getting their news But this is where most people are getting their news Most people are not going to the New York Times. They're going to their There's a difference getting your news from TikTok as someone who's sixteen versus someone who's fifty because of the frontal lobe situation So let's play that out frontal lobe still of developing What that means is the part of your brain that does A lot of executive decision making, planning for the future, controlling your emotions is not fully cooked Absolutely goodood thing about that It helps teenagers to learn really fast This is my belief Why Uh, race car drivers start so early is because you if you started driving fast car in your twenties, I think you would be too conservative And so you need to be more risk prone When you're more risk prone, you actually learn faster. The accelerator, not to overuse a car analogy, but the accelerator for teenagers is fast, the brake is slow And as you get older, the frontal load finishes developing in your twenties, the brakes are a little bit faster and you are more hesitant to press that accelerator You just described every insurance actuary's job. Yes, Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And it's why car insurance costs more to insure twenty rental companies don't rent under twenty five. Absolutely, abbsolutely, right Sometimes we make dumb decisions as a kid And I think society's job. is to limit How risky those decisions can be We need kids to take risk We need who'zem Who's that great male Influencer. Andrew Tate? Nope Thinking about someone I like Oh, I thought you said great sarcastically. No, no, no, no, no. There's a great influence.s He's a finance He made all his money in tech. He just came out with a book. on men and masculinity. He's on the podcast with Carish Schwisher. Not Arthur Brooks? No Osa Galloway. Thank you.. Thank you. Scott Gallaay talks about how Young people need to drink more, they need to take more they need to have more sex, drink their driver's licenses. Yeah. Yeah, get in more trouble. And it's fascinating that like among all of these negative things that we've talked about, anxiety, depression sleep problems. The one area that is so interesting and amazing is the decline of substance uses among young people Over ninety percent of Eh graders don't use any substances That is wild But if we connect the dots here past generations were struggling, they were more likely to use substances Be outside and get in trouble and they're Angger at society was way more visible With Gen Z, they're less likely to use substances. They have less opportunities to go out there. They're much less likely to get in trouble. So all that anger and Distrust and frustrations with society gets internalized. And that's why I think we're having a lot of these problems And Scott Galloway talks about people need to get into more trouble. and in some ways, I agree, society's job is to minimize The most of the the the lethal ways in which that trouble can happen And I think a driver's license is a great example of that. You need to reach certain benchmarks to get your license, that's a privilege. You get your license. you don't have complete opportunity to drive late at night in all these hours, We need to wait as a brain continues to develop and your abilities continue to improve. We need to do all that sort of stuff, right Control c Yeah yeah. yeah, we need to control. we do need to control the chaos. but not remove chaos but not remove because that's how people learn. Yeah. You got to brush up against the boundaries to learn how how far you can push things, right? That's a good society. Now the thing with The thing with the Gen Z and what is driving so much of that anxiety is this world that they've inherited So you call them the anxious generation And it really dismisses so much of the blame that we have for creating that world You know can I ask how Yeah, well, it's my generation that moveved fast and broke.. I agree that our generations are to blame. Yeah or Hly to blame or what have you Why is that implied when you call them the anxious generation? No one wants to be, that is not a label that they sought out and One of the things that I've come to realize is when you place Stigmatize language on a group of people immediately want to run away from it And that shuts down communication. It shuts down conversations And it it creates this othering They are like this in it makes it harder for you to understand the truth of the situation becausecause if you actually talk to people Who are Gen Z They have a complicated relationship with technology I would say as complicated a relationship as you and I have, probably more becausecause we also grew up in an era where I was able to make friendships outside of tech Yeah When I was a teenager, it was ICQ an inststant Messenger And that was it, and I didn't have a phone in my pocket There's some very cool recent research that has come out that has shown if you Turn your phone to a dumb phone which basically means allow for calls Juneb A Junebg? Oh, that's the crappy phone that they sell for old people, but you could give it to kids as well. Oh I didn't I should get that. So should The problem I've wanted so hard to buy these dumb phones. Yeah. There's some that are like really beautiful. Oh really. Okay. Yeah, they're like black I think there's a Is it called the dump phone Is it I never heard that It's like a simple phone or The nothing phone. re. Yes, yes, two for two. I'm gonna to come with a third, so get ready. The nothing ph I've wanted to buy it so much. I watch Marquez's reviews MKBHD and I'm like Yeah, I could be that guy and And he's like review the phone Yeah, he'll review the phone. Yeah. He'll be like, you know, it doesn't really do everything, but you know, if you're that guy I wants to like have two phones, your primary phone and then like the nothing phone you carry on. I'm like, could I be that guy And what's sep for you for me Uh, parenthood So kids need to txt. Well, My kids don't have phones Um, A lot of school page right out of Jonathan Kights, but there too. So I mean the other thing I disagree with him on is there's no magical age. which I want to set this up really clearly because I disagree with Jonathan Hight in many ways and him and I've had these discussions. So now I'm kind of still manning his arguments here. Yeah in order to just facilitate those whole discussions. these are all personal beliefs. And I mean, here's the thing is I grew up a Jonathan Hte fanboy when he was talking about the five morals Yeah Yeah, the politics and how we moralize political beliefs. his early stuff I was a fan of Jonathan H before it was cool to be a fan of Jonathan. So where did you guys go separate ways? Coddling of the America? Coddling. Yeah, yeah. So I one hundred percent believe in safe spaces don't believe in trigger warnings. The research on trigger warnings is they don't work. and a lot of times you give a trigger warning, it actually increases distress among the people that you're trying to help. It's how we try fight against chronic pain syndromes patients. Yeah That's a great Great metaphor Absolutely great What you need in those settings is informed consent And if we're talking about highigher education, your syllabus O as one of my old professors used to say, a Silibus is a Swedish that he always called this a Silibus. I can't stop thinking about that Yeah Your syllabus is your contract with your students Here's what we're going to be covering I'm not going to go into detail about like everything that might possibly be difficult for you, but these are the themes that are going to be covered. You this is going to happen in this class. This is what this class is like, right you on board for that? Cool. let's go. If stuff comes up that's difficult for you, hereere's a counseling center that we have on, you know We're good. But we do need safe places and safe places are the environments where you connect with a community like you that gets it and you can be real and talk about this stuff. Do you think that's what safe spaces are these days? It pan. I've seen some of them. this is anecdotally speaking. I'm not doing research here. Yeah And sometimes I feel that it's more exclusionary than it is inclusionary Yeah, it's hard to do right Yeah. And the other part of safe spaces is it's very liberal coded. So people who are not liberal need safe spaces as well people who are I'm saying this because again, if you look at old school Jonathan Hight. O of my favorite things he ever wrote was this Washington Post article about why we're so polarized And one of the ways in which he framed it is it's really become If you have any set of beliefs or identities, it immediately sorts you into these categories. So if you're religious, you're immediately now sorted into the conservative category and the only political body for you are the Republicans. If you in any way care about LGBT plus Q people, you're immediately sorted into liberal, progressive, Democratic. There's no room in the middle, right? That old school Jonathan H Ma, loveve it. Great stuff. love to just chat with him about that forever to think about This like anti safe space stuff is People who are conservative, People like it is very hard to be conservative or religious in a highly liberal environment And and the reverse is true as well. is it's hard to be a person of colored. It's hard to be gay. It's hard to be trans in these environments where you don't feel welcome and included. And so Those people, it's a lifeline It is a lifeline to find someone like you. and be able to have those conversations that you can only have with someone else who gets it. So then using your own explanation here The current environment, especially in higher education is liberal shifted Safe spaces And safe spaces are necessary, as you said, for even conservative folks and liberal folks If It's harder to be a conservative in a liberal area, and it's harder to be a liberal in a conservative area. Why are we creating liberally focused safe spaces in liberal institutions they don't Isn't that Isn't that his argument? Yeah I don't know. This is where so yeah, it's difficult to talk about Yeah, it's difficult to talk about because As I've experienced and have seen. Yeah If the safe spaces were truly serving their function Yeah Those safe spaces would be for people who not the majority in an area So I think we should back up and say I think safe spaces as a term is now as loaded as DEI is. Yeah, of course, right? Like Diversity, equity and inclusion. It' I don't even know what people it probably means one thing to one person and abbsolutely. And it's it's like old school Jonathan Hite would talk about this is now this term is sorted into these different categories. and how you see that term is completely based upon your identity So we can't really have a rational conversation about it. So let's like back up and when I was in college. backack when I was a kid We didn't call them saf spaces. We call them like clubs You know, you you join a club you could join the like international student club. You can, you know, black students, you could join, um I briefly joined The Pakistani stududent Association, my family's ancestry is Pakistani. and then I felt really out of place because I've never watched like a Bllywood movie. And I was like, oh my God, I'm like not Pakistani. Then I joined speech and debate and yeah That's a whole different story. But like you would find people who are your people, your commonality. commommonality, right That could be based on identity, it could be based on interest whatever it is. But the point is Find these places where two things could happen that are now very difficult. Number one, you find your people face to face. That is harder now two is You could have conversations that you knew not be recorded or get back to you in some way. That is critical, man And that is very veryer hard. this This made me so sad to learn that a lot of Gen Z people are afraid of going to the club And dancing, haveave you heard about this stuff They're afraid of looking cringe. pretty standard. It's pretty standard, but did that that's where alcohol came in with social lubricants? Yes. Every young person, I think should have the opportunity to be cringe and have fun without fear that this is going to be recorded and come back on social media and haunt you Man, you're sounding more like height with every statement of this conversation. How social media is destroying this Lgo, it's both and, right U What I think is super cool about GenzZie is They're trying to use their phones to get off their phones So there's this resurgence in like grandma hobbies. where it's like doing like knitting and yeah, pottery doing these kind of things that are low U Low tech High friction. Pretty chill and bringing them to the web. Yes, yes And so using using your phone to find other people or to find experiences where you can get together on a regular basis, have this routine bond over an experience, that is the default way that Gen Z wants to hang out. That's how they want to find people. I think that's awesome. They also are really interested in dating through this way So Hinge and all of these other dating apps, Tinder and all that, they're in trouble Be people young people don't like using them as much as millennials did I don't know if millennials ever liked using dating apps. There was a period of time, I think early before that also became ins shitified and like To get the real match is you have to pay extra and you're locked in this system and all that stuff, right? Do you want to be a feature profile Yeah ninety nine. Yes, yes. I mean, it's a great business plan, right? It's bad for human psychology. I think that can describe a lot of tech right now greatreat business, bad for humans. I mean capitalism. Yeah, yeah, descriptive. People keep talking about how we're in late stage capitalism. I'm like it keeps getting later. Yeah like L there's the depths that we can fall and like AI based real time pricing, I think, is such a dystopian thing. where you can get a price on a product at a store that is different based on my price because the priceices now can be optimized to just what's outside of your willingness to pay. Well, that's why like for me Capitalism is great When properly regulated. Y. Y. And the regulations seems so Dah like We have rules that you're not allowed to price gouge in the middle of a hurricane. Yeah right Yeah But suddenly we're like, oh, well, the apps want to set prices based on demand.. No problem. Oh hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, they want to all vertically merge and create a monopoly. No problem This is the basics of which we need to regulate capitalism and that's like that's forgotten The regulation part of what makesal capitalism work has been forgotten. Yeah, that's what allows for a thriving economy So Biggest Criticism all make of of this, as it relates to social media, as it relates to tech and regulation, is the purchase of Instagram by Facebook. They should have that cleared the Obama administration's oversight. It should have never have happened because that was the first real threat Facebook had. actuallyctually, let me back up, it's not the first real threat they had. This didid you know that Facebook purchased a VPN company? They purchased Israeli VPN company a long time ago And so you might be wondering, what interests do they have in an Israeli VPN company? The reason why they purchased this company is they wanted to look at global internet traffic. Wh are the spots where people are using Facebook less? And what instead are they using That's how they found WhatsApp. They found that there were in certain parts, I think in Asia, that WhatsApp was being used more than Facebook and then they bought WhatsApp. That is now Meta's playbook is find a competitor and purchase them. absorb them, eat them, make them part of the thing. This is what I'm struggling with so much as That's probably crushing you as a person who's trying to create their own business becausecause these days Even in my friend group, everyone's like, I'm excited to create something and sell it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah What They're like, Mike, you're business you make great money, but you can't sell it for a multiple. Yeah. I'm like, why do you want to sell it for a multiple? Yeah, it's sort of the clear exit strategy a lot have. And so the fear is what What my team talks about a lot is We have to create a successful product And it needs to be successful enough that we have people coming in and we have business, but we're not so successful that meta notices us. Yeah ye, because then they will either eat us up Or Copy us. That is not how a thriving economy works. R. That is how we've ended up in this situation where there's no real choice. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are very similar It took YouTube and Instagram a little while to figure out how to copy shorts right. Th first few months of shorts, I was like, these recommendations are terrible They it took them a while to figure out how to do it, but now they've copied it. it's pretty similar, man. There's is not There's no real choice over here But if you the moment you give people choice Um People like that. So the moment Apple Aloud users to block really privacy hunting apps which Facebook was was doing Yeah Most people turn that feuture on Facebook's value went so far down just like overnight because of that. If you give people some choice They will choose the options that are best for them. But it is very difficult right now Tech. choice becausecause these big tech companies have been allowed to function in an unregulated way. At the danger of sounding more like Jonathan Hite Uh, we do need regulation, and I think we need to have a conversation around What kind of human experiences do we want? on these platforms Um Looking at these court cases, a lot of the comparison has been made to smoking. and smoking cigarettes in particular If you if you look back a few decades, the strategy was like Marborough They're u The mascot, the camel, Joe Camel, which I don't even know if anyone watching this even knows what Joe Camel. We've referenced the on the show.. Okay, awwesome. Like this this character that was really made to appeal to kids And Kids have I mean, F one Michael Schumacer. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, my beloved if one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, The branding of cigarettes were everywhere. The culture around cigarettes is they were cool And Jokeam movies They're in all the movies, everywhere you go. and Joe Camel was this mascot Uh, in much the same way as like any video game TV show sports like have these characters. It was very identifiable. Like my kids can identify Mickey Mouse even though they've never seen any Mickey Mouse think? Yeah. They're more bluey kids. Okay. They know this mascot. and Joe Camel was the same way, right So people say social media is addictive Social media is a problem just like cigarettes The conversation around that focuses much more on addiction keep having the same stupid conversations around addiction. W one camp saying it's addictive, look at these problems Other people saying, it's not addictive. There's no chemical change in your body And I think that's pretty stupid Because behavior Implicitly changes chemicals in your body. Yes. Yes, you know This is I'm having a flashback to your episode on Jubilee, where someone was asking about fluoride. and you're asking about like water and like what is water? It's like, o these are all chemicals.. Like where do you think it comes from? This is all right.ike So dopamine is you know a neurotransmitter And dopamine is released for a ton of different stuff, right? The thing that the thing about addiction We're wired for connection. And if we don't get enough connection from people, we will get it from things or objects or experiences That's addiction Anything can be addictive, whether you put it in your body or not. anything can become addictive under the right circumstances. So I think that addiction conversation is pretty stupid. but what I think is Very true of the comparison between social media and cigarettes Mar All that stuff. Meta newew. dangers of their product for those vulnerable people did the research themselves They knew with what's come out with these cases and the congressional testimony in these court cases is Meta did their own research And they knew that certain groups of people, particularly these young girls, particularly around puberty, particularly around body image and comparisons, they were vulnerable for very, very negative things around eating disorders, around. They knew this And then they still sent emails about what's our growth strategy with this population. That's where I think the comparison is absolutely true Marborl, the cigarette industry knew they had an addictive product. and they intentionally advertised it to children. That is their sin. And that is metedicine What we need to talk about now is What kind of experiences do we want to have should Every app have an infinite scroll Most people Stop When the scroll stops. It's a signal to your brain, this task is complete take away Stop And people keep scrolling. That's what I saw with my mom. My mom never scrolled And my dad had to be like Your son is visiting Do you want to stay on TikTok or do you want to talk to him I don't blame my mom for that I don't at all. I blame what we have allowed to flourish without any type of regulation. at all. Maybe we don't need an infinite scroll. Maybe we don't need this type this level of algorithmic recommendation. Maybe when someone is briefly hovering around this video from a beauty influencer, maybe we shouldn't serve them more of that content Have you heard of Sephora kids ese are this is more gen alpha. So now we're going even younger These are people who are born like after twenty thirteen. These are like my kids The bain the main difference for them is they've been they've had tablets since they were like two Maybe some of them are watching Bluey, Maybe some of them are watching YouTube Kids. There's a big range in what people are doing on these tablets, but they've had access to technology longer than any other generation. Some of these particularly girls around ages eight, nine, and ten They become these Sephoric kids by getting exposed to beauty influencers and now trying to anti buy all this like anti aging products At the age of like ten, it hits me like the dermatologists that are like, get preventive Botox. because it's better than So you're twenty one, you're getting Botox Yeah, what are we doing? Yeah. What are we doing? I trying a Benjamin button, I think Yeah we All of Pediatrics. Ch development Child mental health is about bending the curve Someone's on this trajectory towards some negative outcomes. Can we bend that curve towards Bet path of development. A kid has lazy eye. We patch that lazy eye because there's this critical period where we can strengthen the weaker eye. so it doesn't go blind Right? That's bending the curve Pting the kid on a completely different path. And that's going to have ripple effects. for their entire life, right Give eight year old access to beauty content bending the curve in the completely wrong direction. You are setting them up for A very bad And the same is true of this idea of like popcorn brain. that give kids exposure to a lot of short form content, which is hyper edited, hyper emotional. It gets them hyper aroused. You expose them to that kind of stuff right before bedtime, they're not going to go to bedtime They're not going to go to bedtim. They're not going go to b It's going to be much more difficult. You're wiring them for the expectation of much faster, more intense content Now the good news here is this is what I was getting towards with the with the dumbph phones It seems like just two weeks of having a dumb phone where you can dumify your phone where you only are getting text messages and voice calls on it If you do that for two weeks All of this negative mental health stuff It all resolves that is similar to caffeine withdrawal Yeah. So they say to get a benefit in athletic performance, you need to take X number of amount of caffeine in order per pound of body weight or per kilogram of body weight. to get good outcome to get a better outcome. But it disappears if you do it all the time If you consume caffeine all the time, rightight? Be you build a tolerance. However, The research shows two, three days off of caffeine. allows the reset to get some of the benefit back. Kn the other thing about that? You go a week without caffeine That I had to hit No No yeah, there's those. And then you order that beautiful Americano. Yeah, that first sip feels so good. It feels so good. That's a that's a little hack I've got if you Um, If you're missing, I love coffee. And so Sometimes sometimes I'll do like a little abstaining from coffee. You don't get a headache No, I don't, um I'm not I'm not that bad. So I will do two cups a day at most. I never go beyond that. And I'm not as sensitive to caffeine. My best friend is super sensitive to caffeine. You can't do that, right? So about now this is research that's been done. I think this was done in people in their twenties ies and thirties. It's like a digital detx of s. Digital detox. So that is also another thing, like people talk about these dopamine cleanses. Dpamine is so hot. It drives me crazy because it's not about It's not the dopamine that you're targeting.ight That's end result variable that is not doctor Mike, this is all that stuff about like imaging. We need imaging, we need to test, we need to scan everything. We need to look at our dopamine receptors and sensitivity. we don't need to do all that. Lt donon't go digging around and all that stuff, right this research that was done very recently People are in the twenties and thirties. You go two weeks without it. And it really helps. It really helps. So there's a lot of the mental health effects, but we haven't really talked about this, but there's cognitive decline too that can come from heavy smartphone use We're talking like beyond four or five hours a day, right, which is a lot of people There's a lot of people If you decline that by getting a dumb phone, what tends to happen is you get less interruptions in your day to day life People can still use the internet on their laptops and their computers and stuff like that. You're not becoming a monk, No no no. you're not locking it. Yeah ye. That's the other thing I talk to all of these guys and they're like, I'm gonna lock in this weekend I'm like, who, what are you talking about locking in? I'm not talking to anyone. I'm turning off all social. All I'm going do is like full on like hardcore monk mode. No monk lives Disconnected from their community This is the thing I hate about a lot of Especially male influencer content. Well, it sells. It sells, man. and it's all about like if I don't give you the exact time that you need to spend in the Cold water immersion, sauna. My video is worthless. I want your cold water protocol. giveive me your like, you know Well, now the protocol sauna with an ice pack on your testicles. Don't forget about sunning those boys too. Your balls need how much an hour of sunlight to get the properqu vitamin fifty four minutes, thirty eight seconds. If you go thirty four, sometimes you can squeeze a little more juice out it This is my mistake. I've been going for thirty four both sides I'll give you my thing afterwards. Okay. I have a really good. I need that, I need that. I'm sorry to my neighbors, but ye like it's like I gota I gott a booyys gotta do' gota do. This is the thing, man is so much male influencer content is veryer lonely content When is the last time you saw any of these guys Talking to other guys in their like optimizing looks maxing content. And that's again, like So much of this language is mechanical Machine, computer, optimizing Uh, and it's very lonely cont it really is very concerning to me. Um So the anxious generation of it all Yeah, the anxious generation of it all I think they're not the anxious generation. They're the ignore generation. We don't we don't them we talk at them, we dismiss them. They have massive anxiety about The world This direction There's there's a A challenge of meaning And they didn't cause any of that Is your issue with the title of the book that in Similarly to how when a patient comes in and they think they have an anxiety disorder they're feeling anxiety appropriately given their current situation, they're pathologizing Do you feel he's pathologizing people who are appropriately reacting to their environment Bingo in a nutshell And the moment you do that, you're shutting off conversation We push people further into the shadows And we create more of this tribal problem that we have in our politics right now It's a little bit like what we talked about with homosexuality before. that the problem was more the cultural response not the experience itself This is why so many young people are having a problem with sleep It's this massive anxiety about the future, about the world. Now we throw AI into it. One of my wife's cousin's kid just graduated with an engineering degree compomputer science cannot find a job cannot find a job at all used to be such a reliable major And he was so excited to get out And it turns out that One of the things that AI is exceptionally good at is generating computer code So We've had these conversations in our own team. that we can hire O senior engineer who along with AI can do the coding work. of like three to five people. That is Onight That has completely changed the market, the economic opportunity for an entire generation. The anxiety that they feel that you describe as appropriate anxiety for this ever changing world, the political divide, the disaster of not seeing a political success play out like we have in the past, Was that there for millennials But perhaps we weren't as aware because social media wasn't putting in front of us. Oh, we recall much more the narcissistic generation. I mean, Jonathan Hyde didn't write that book. It was definitely the mentality is they want to blog They want to tweet, they want to vlog They're incredibly narcissistic and into themselves. Now of course, there's been no large scale societal increase in narcissism as a result of millennials. like that did not happen, right? There's a lot of language around narcissism talk and That that's like a little bit different. That's a separate thing. Yeah Um, critical difference Basically, if we're saying anxiety, this is a much simpler way to ask it. Sure is anxiety If this anxiety in generenation Z is elevated appropriately, Shouldn't that mean the world is more dangerous? Because that's what anxiety is it's a resonse to a stimuli that is scary. The world is more dangerous is it if Based on Jonathan Hightt's book, he talks about crime rates being lower. Threats to bodily harm are lower, obviously dependent on certain groups. If that's all the case and the world is better because you can order things quicker, you can get what you need. Why is the anxiety appropriate th? So the world is better and it's wor worse. both and No one is going to sit here and say that the climate of the world is better. We aren't going to talk about how there's more stability in the world, whether it is related to climate or it is related to politics, and those things are intertwined. There are a lot of climate refugees. you know, again, my family' from Pakistan I' very concerned about access to water in that region. The There's many reasons why Kashmir is a hot political zone, but one of the reasons is like access to water. And what's going to happen to India and Pakistan when there are less resources for water. And the climate and temperature in those countries has been climbing higher and higher and higher. I have family telling me that they're having one hundred twenty degree days in the summer N happened before, right? So the climate is less stable. The political economies of the world feel less stable. One of the most stabilizing forces in the world post World War two was the EU. The E feels less stable. I mean, what a brilliant idea we had as humans, that Two times we went to World War because of Uh these problems in Europe and this idea that if we link our economies together If we are forced to work together, maybe we can prevent another war has largely worked. It is also being deeply tested. So if you look at Yeah large scale state of the world It feels unstable If you look at the micro day to day rates of violence, rates of safety, your chance of mortality. Yeah, all that stuff is better. in many parts of the world, especially in America. That doesn't mean anything when you are twenty oneess years old You don't have any friends. you donon't know what you're going do with your life. You feel like a loser and you look around and it feels like no adult has done anything to help you out that there are No resources available to help you move forward. and the economic opportunity and the prospect of the world looks like shit Why are adults not helping out We Wow. awareness loveove it Okay, let's have one Yeah Let's Let's have a talk back. You know, let's let's build some great mental health TV shows and talk about these things. like let's build awareness. This is our like mental health day Do not. like investing in the resources that are actually going to help We have done Nothing notothing to have any large scale federal investment. And in fact Under the Trump administration, there's been a big scaling back at NIH prevention One of my friends was He was pretty high up in NIH. He spent his entire career getting to a place at NIH where he was working on vention And specifically what he was doing is he was deciding which studies would get approved for federal funding foride prevention research. I What And then as people got funded, he would work with them to make sure they're doing all the best stuff. So was like a grant administrator. Totally ye. Totally. And his whole background, all of his research, he's a psychologist that has specialized in vention As of January twenty, twenty five. He was told he needs to go back to every single piece of research that has been funded over the last few years and anything that was doing DEI needs to be eliminated. Their funding needs to be eliminated right now. And so That's like every study becausecause the way it was defined DEIs was Were they using the words? N even using the words. Were they even like capturing racial data Which is mandatory. Yes, exxactly Exactly, right And so He called me up and he said, I don't know what to do I've been here now three, four months and every day has become the worst day at this job And I am what I am desperately trying to do is call the people doing this research and helping them find a way to continue doing it. under the limits we are in right now He ended up leaving the job Be he that's the worst All the good people Yeah yeah. yeah, all the good people have left. There's a big brain drain now of all of our federal agencies and This is not to say that We haven't invested in mental health because of the Trump administration But this is a historical thing for decades now, we haven't built up the infrastructures, the community level infrastructures that are really needed to help people to identify who's at risk pair them with the right resources and make sure those resources don't look like the pit Like a lot of mental health resources, I watch that show I love your commentaries on the show And it's very hard for me because it feels so real. the limitations, the pressures and o those conversations with the administrator God, they feel real. Like you need to bring your numbers up, you need to see more patients, you need to see this. That is what it feels like not only to be in healthcare, but to be in mental health care. The things the times my stomach drops is when the social worker shows up. And they're like, can you do this, this, this with and the social workers just like I feel for her Yeah so much because that's what it feels like to be in mental health right now Um, That is where so much of the anger comes from. is yet, okay, awareness, great. But how are you going to actually help us cope? That is that is one of the great paradoxes here of Gen Z An incredible awareness and ability to understand their pain, but awareness of Mental health challenges does not translate ility to cope with those challenges You can be aware of whatever attachment, whatever Tuma trigger.. You can try to manifest whatever you want You might know so much about that stuff It does not necessarily mean you're going to be able to cope what you need to cope is you need the right people You need the right opportunities And you need the right help when you need it When it rises to that level We have not solved those things. So we've talked a bit abstract about the problem and what's going on defining it What are some reasonable takeaways if you're part of Gen Z or you're a parent to someone who's of Gen Z Yeah, what do we do So number one is it's not hopeless. It is not I a Deep science fiction And I love science fiction because I think it is the most hopeful form of art because it forces you to imagine a different possibities And a lot this is these aren myd. These are from Octavia Butler. Uh, It's It's a forcing you to imagine that life could be different. which means it doesn't have to be the way it is right now Most of science fiction is cautionary But some of it is optimistic and it forces you to think like Where do we want to take things It doesn't have to be this way We we aren't stuck This really Crappy social media We aren't stuck with this. We can move in a different direction. We can make something else And I really think The next great product, as much as I hope it comes from me. and our team and what we're making Um I think it's going to come from Genie It's going to come from the people who are so tired of just tapping on this thing and just swiping But they're going to look around and be like, look, we have the ability now. The cool thing about AI, about generative AI is Anyone can vibe code Anyone can have an idea and in a weekend create a product out of it for very little money. That That is game changing because that means now anyone can try and make something. So if you're unhappy with this situation, which is probably most people You can try making a thing You can try solving it. And that's also something that inspires me about Gen Z. No other generation has been so armed with knowledge That's because of YouTube That's because of TikTok That is because of three D printers and vibe coding and all of this teechnology and knowledge that now exists. Like you can make your own thing Again We moved fast and broke things and we ended up breaking is human connection Now it's time to rebuild it. and Genzie can do that That's number one. Number two, you don't have to do some wild monk mode crazy you know, optimizing, maxing things There are ways to take short breaks that bring back your cognitive capacity, your attention, your memory, all of these things, short breaks work. What was really cool about that study I quoted earlier Some people did it for two weeks. They turned their phone into a dumb phone for two weeks. Some people cheated And they still, you know, found a way to turn on their social media and stuff like that. its still worked for them The benefits still persisted in time Short breaks help I wonder What is going to happen with Gen Alpha And if you have more chronic exposure to this stuff, that's an open question, we'll see. But short breaks seem to be helpful for at least for adults. I would assume that short breaks help for kids too and teenagers. If you go to summer camp And you don't have a phone Man, the attention span of teenagers not a summer camp that's like a no phone summer camp. It's really impressive what they can do, their ability to connect all of these things, right? So your brain is very plastic. It is very It's been to change. And that is a good thing and we're not stuck these with these things The other thing that everyone needs Everyone needs to find a hobby and everyone needs to find a social ritual. This is true for us It's true for older generations. It's especially true for young people. There is no hanging out anymore. There's no low level just dropping by that is not gonna happen. There are too many structural forces in place that make it very difficult to see your friends and to see your loved ones. What we need are these social rituals And this is where You go back a hundred years, there were no gyms. Nobody talked about fitness. They needed to do manual labor. They needed to do manual labor All of your all the questions about health kind of weren't as important back then because people were they would walk a lot They would do a lot of manual labor. they would come home and they did ancestral self care, which was more Rest Nourish your body, get good food, good drink spepend time with your local community and go to sleep That was their self care and their daily life was a lot of physical work right Industrial revolution happits Now suddenly a lot of that stuff was becoming, a lot of that hard physical labor was becoming more automatic Now, people's lives started changing They had less physical activity. You flash forward to the sixties and seventies and eighties and the exercise movement comes around. The jogging movement comes around. Gyms are born of a need to make ourselves stronger becausecause we're not getting those experiences anymore No one went to a gym because gyms didn't exist one hundred years ago They do now because of this need because of how we've changed society. The same thing has to happen. So you think country clubs are going to make a comeback I think clubs I don't think country clubs ever went way. Not country clubs, but like u Town halls or like where do did people hang out back one hundred years ago. Oh, you're talking about like the Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. these societies. Yeah, right? Yeah Yeah. You know what onene of the cool things I found is these societies have a very declining membership. I forget what the moose one was. Here's a third reference. you got it There was like a moose there was these secret societies that like had all these kind of like u Uh, there's one I'm thinking about like a moose maybe from movie The brick layer? The brrick Masons or whatever. uanis Yes What about the one with the compass Was it Freemasons All of these.. All of these organizations that excluded women basically. Yeahight. They have very declining membership. Even car clubs. Yeah. I go to car meets now. Yeah. I see children. I get excited becausecause I'm like finally a child who wants to play with a car Yeah, who wants to Touch the inside of the steering wheel Parents are like, Ohh I' not gonna to touch your car.' to like ruin it. Please ruin the car. Make a mess. Make a mess. Yeah. They're like, no, he's gonna to press buttons. press the butt That's what they're for. I feel like I'm a hundred years old saying it, but it's It's sad that to see that people don't come out as When I was not a teenager, but like let's say late teens, I would bring my broken down Nissan or I was fortunate enough to get an infinity later on to a G thirty five NYC club. Yeah That's so hard to find now Yeah I That is exactly it and a lot of parents are reluctant Not only to let their kids make a mess, but to join something like that because it's like, well, what's that for? How does that help them How does it help them academically? because there's so muchressure pressure around performance. And that was what I was talking about before is all social interactions have become performative in nature Even as a parent, like how does this help my kid? How does it give them that advantage, right? So we all need that car club. We need the Lions Club, We need these things. and one of the coolest things I've seen is there are some of these organizations have really great real estate have great meeting environments. But they have declining membership And so there are some spaces where The Gen Z people are taking over those organizations and reinventing them for their own purposes because the space exists and the opportunity is there. So we all need a social ritual, a social club, a social activity that we do on a regular basis. whether it's like kickball, whether it's a run club, whether it is trading cards, trading cards DN D, whatever it is, something that is on your schedule Don't have to think about it. And what's critical is It works even if not everyone shows up That's what community is about And the moment it starts becoming something that you have to plan and coordinate, it's gonna fail. Well, that's why private equity is ruining all these things. likeike even trading cards.. It's a hobby that people used to gather around, play magic, to gather and do all this stuff. Now private equity is involved.'t God forbid, you get a charizard So it's like Itate all gets ruined, you get a j It's sad. Yeah, yeah, Vad. I had Gation one Magic The Gathering cards. I was in sixth grade when that came out and I bought a bunch. and I was like, I don't think this is ever going to become a thing. I sold them all and instead I bought No, that would have been Good. Okaykay. I bought The Marvel customizable card game I forget. it was called like I don I don't even know what it was called but about all this like Marvel equivalent is worth nothing Can I tell you something that's super embarrassing I bought Magic the Gathering cards, the whole starter set deck, whatever you call it And I didn't a to play, so I just pretended Same thing with Pokemon cards. Yeah Did you ever learn how to? No, I've never played. Oh, okay, so yeah. I'm not alone. Yeah. No, no, no no alone. I got yes, Amana I didn't have the charisma to pretend.. So I had them and I held them and I watched people played. And they're like, Do you want to play Oie? And I'm like, no, no you guys, you guys go I just wanted to like watch. I never learned how to play. It was so intimidating to me. Yeah, never Pokemon was like slightly after my time, but ye I regret So you played magic. No, I watch people play magic. But I played I played the Marvel game. I play there was a Star Wars equivalent. There was a Star Trek equivalent. But talk about safe spaces, mister Davidson. Love this man I was not a very confident middle schooler. don' I don't think anyone is. Yeah, right? That's tough. No one looks back at their life and they're like, you know what I pushed it middle school That was that was like I bullies usually. Yeah, yeah, ye. And so I was I was bullied for all sorts of stuff. And and We know like Kids who were really suffering are the kids that are bullied. That's a huge risk factor for for depression for anxiety for all sorts of stuff Mr. Davidson enough his classroom. to All the nerds every day at lunch And if you don't want to go outside and have like your backpack, grown at you. bullies go to Mr. Davison's class, you could play magic. You could just hang out. you could eat your lunch there You could talk about comic books, you could talk about the newest episode of Sliders, whatever it was, which was a timeime traveling parallel universe show. Jerry O'Connell was in it. Great show. then it went Alphill third Yeah, then end to be not so good. But We created a safe space, man. We would never call that a safe space It was exactly that. Don't you think not calling it a safe space is a good thing we don't have that term. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So I think like calling it a safe space is almost as bad as calling a generation exition. Yeah Yeah, it's almost like saying you need safety Yeah. no this is also yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah it's fair. and I don't I don't Yeah. So I wouldn't advocate for calling these things safe spaces because that is politically loaded. Yeah ye. And that's going to exclude people, especially conservatives. We need them. Yeah We need these places where you can connect with your peers. and and getting back to like what we should do, what all of us need is that thing on your calendar once a week, once a month that you go to. that you don't have to plan. You just show up and you're able to connect with other people. The thing I found for me is There's a um a Star Trek ub trivia night called track Triv as happens in the Bay Area. These are my people, man. I go with my best friend We don't go every month. I wish we could. sometometimes life gets in the way. Man, do I love it? It's an opportunity for me to see my friend We hang out, we meet some new people afterwards, we go walking, we go some We create our own like little after party, we hang out, we catch up It's the best Yeah. It's the best We all need some version Of that And if you're if you're Gen Z, if you're a parent of G Z How can you Find your people and find your place where All you have to do is show up So you might be someone who wants to meet more people You might be someone who's incredibly scared of meeting people. You might be someone who's burnt out. Like there's so many friction points to social interaction now. All you have to do, the beauty of finding some kind of social routine All you have to do is show up. Even if you show up and you're like me with the magic cards and you're just looking That's fine because some people It takes them time to show up comfortable in that space, become comfortable with eye contact. you become a familiar person to other people, we like people who are familiar. We're wired to find familiar people as less threatening. And then maybe after a long time, you open up and you have a conversation. People tend to think that One on one conversation is a good place to start and it's not For someone who has a hard time with social connections. the same as basketball. Good luck playing one on one. You get fatigue after one point. you going to be exhausted. That's such a great point. I never thought about it. Yeah. You know, despite my height U I terrible No but it's horrible. Whenever when one friend would say, let's play basketball. We would never play one on one because we'd play for five minutes and be done Because there's no break There's no break and you have to be always on. Either offense or defense offense or defense off the low is always on you. Yeah. in that situation, it's athletic, but in the situation for a conversation, it's cognitive Can I canan I steal this? Please This is beautiful. Yeah. I love it I love this example so much because that is exactly what it feels like when you When you're talking to someone you're not deeply close to, a one on one conversation is incredibly taxing because you're always listening or talking. listening or talking, listen or talking is it too awkward? Do I say too much? Am I too much? A I too cringe? is blah bl What tends to be better is about four people, four, five people. There's some research that shows that like that's our That's the natural limit of our brain in holding different people in our head. It's about four people Personalities, values, ideas, conversations, it usually is better to have that size group. If you look at most of the restaurant reservations in America, there tend to be around four people. What's also interesting about restaurant reservations, Reszi published this data Gen Z. love sitting at the communal tables. They love sitting in these groups with other people and meeting new people. Interesting. you know, they're not They're not the antis social generation. They want social connection. They also Don't want remote work They were deprived of mentorship during COVID. They've lived so much of their lives on screens. Yeah the Gen Z stare. Yeahah, have you mentored? You're new hire Be if you If you actually people new employees who are Gen Z They want to learn, they want to grow, they want to get better and they're struggling to. I think one of the Things that's happening with like my generation, GenX, these people who are more in managerial roles, they don't have a lot of time and opportunity to do the real mentorship that these people need that they've been deprived of L how many people went through college and it was like Almost All remote. I was in college at this Marriage and F family lab and I would show up wearing flip flops shorts and a t shirt. this Ninja Turtle t shirt that I wore And I showed up late And the postdoc who was there, this is someone who just finished getting their PhD, who was responsible for me. She took me aside and she said, Oh yeah, I need to tell you something. No one's going to take you seriously like this Yeah, we're in LA and the weather's nice. You can't show up to work looking like this I am so thankful she told me that It's those little bits of mentorship come only from in person Yeah only comes from a period of trust It comes from these small little moments This is what Gen Z hass been deprived of They're deprived of it because people like me are so overworked and burnt out because work has expanded to all hours of the day or it's remote work And you don't actually get to see the people that are on your team. So all of these things are happening All of these things need work None of this is hopeless I one hundred percent am inspired by Gen Z because they are trying to figure out a way through this. And what they are doing now, we are going to be doing in five years They're experiencing all of the challenges of technology at a more intense way at a faster pace than we are And We had the benefit of forming relationships and friendships before a lot of this technology came online. They never had that. They're learning how to navigate it right now And what we learn through them is what's going to help Jen Alpha. And it's going to help us to build a better future. because this This tech we have now The way we have engineered social connection right now is Pretty crappy And there's nowhere we can go but up Yeah You leave me hopeful. for the future of Gen Z. Where is the future of Dr. Ali? We are one hundred percent obsessed with helping people connect and making human connection more joyful, more fun and to find the moments of connection that they're so craving All we want is to make it very simple for people to hang out in real life Now I hope we're able to make that We've got You know, certain amount of funding and runway left to make this work I hope we're able to make it If we don't I'm still obsessed with this problem I think the greatest thing in mental health. The skill is connection is friendship is social support I think the greatest thing under threat right now is connection is social support. I think AI is incredibly going to challenge all of this and AI companions are going to completely mess with all of this. So even if things don't work at the startup, this is still what I'm focused on. And I am trying very hard to figure out how do I show up for my audience in a way that is honest, authentic, des shaming, and creates community with the way that content is working right now. Coolest thing about being a YouTuber is you have to reinvent E few years, The most annoying thing about being a YouTuber is you have to reinvent every few years And um, Fortunately, YouTube has never been primary source of income for me So I can experiment and see and see what happens, but All I want is to show up for people, to give away what I know and help people to connect U That's all I want. That's my life's mission That's not going to change. That that'll never change. If it does I need to retire and get into a different line of work. And then I'm going into AI and I'm going gonna to screwll. Yeah. You want to know my secret plan? Yeah, what is it? Yeah. W domination? No No, no. I wouldd be terrible at that Um I would love to retire. open up Boba tea shop U Aliboba and the forty Ts Pretty good name I already see the logo right now Um It's a Boba T slash comic book. shop U a community space people to come together. callall it a safe space But if you're looking to safely hang out in the space Come to Aliboba. in Ephas An Epos? Oh, is that what that spes out Your brain works faster than mine like that in EFOS. It's like a What do we call adver childhood experience Ais? A. Yeah, yeah. It's like it's like the nice version of Ais. Yeah Oh, that's cool. canan I come? You could up dude. you I'm not Star Treky, but I'm a good t. had magic cards. Yeah. You have magic cards. There' something there. There's some nerdyiness. No star works for me, No star Trek. I've been deprived of all that. I know up on Doug, Hey Arnold rug rats, but those aren't there's no cult that's gonna come hang out with me to talk about ru rats Yeah, but dogs. But dog There is no dog community. Who did who had the theme song? N, no, no, no. Oh, that was Clarissa explains it all. neverever mind. That's not. Yeah Love all the Nickelodeon stuff, man. What an era we had. Right? What a great r. We had moral television or semioral Yeah. Luter shorts. Yeah. Oh man. Snick. didid you watch Snick Saturday night Nick Yeah. Yeah, that was good time. It hard time Wait, whereere is this Arabian and the forty Ts happening I don't know. it's not it's in by mind But where would whereere in the world? Yeah you have to place it I would love for my kids to graduate high school. So my wife and I can move back to New York Oh, so you do it here. I do it here, man Like look the volume in Manhattan I don't know, who knows where New York like is it what's the hot new spot? I mean Brooklyn, we lived in I spent half my time in Manhattan, half of time in Brooklyn. I miss Brooklyn dearly Um Maybe it would happen over there. But you know what's also interesting about Gen Z, they tend not to be moving to cities They're they're not They're not moving to California because cost of living. New York City is the only place where they are moving because New York's special, but they tend to be moving to places that have a lower cost of living obvious reasons. So maybe I'll find out where all the cool Gin Z people are who at that point I think that Austin, Texas. Yeah. Well they're going Austin, Texas, Austin, Texas oututside of Washington, DC, Th those are the two hotspots for a lot of young people, but they're also going to like Bise. They're going to like a lot of a lot of places that was not on the millennial radar. Interesting. What I know they're not doing is they're not moving to California. There's this massive California to Texas Exodus So I don't know where to be, but I hope it's in meat space. I hope it's in real life and not in some kind of Mark Zuckerberg meta hell hole. Yeah I wish you were here for my previous guest. It was Jesse Eisen. Oh, you know what? You would have told him off. Why? Wellcause he's Mark Zuckerberg Oh I no, I like I like Jesse I was at Chelsea Market, were we U And my wife This is like six years ago and she like elbowed me And she's like That's Jesse Eisenberg. He's having a hard time carrying his stroller over those stairs. You go help him right now And so I went up to him. I'm like, Hey, I gota. He's like, o, thanks, man. This is like, you know, like like really he was talking at his very like Zuckerberg impression. But that's not his impression This is his natural predisposition. I got that. I learned that And so that is one of my other favorite things about New York is U, you run into people and It's very easy to have a human to human connection here. It is much harder in the San Francisco Bay Area We are all trapped in our cars. and when we're not trapped in our cars, We are all talking about technology has trapped us in other ways I miss I miss the bumping into humanity that happens here Now there's also a lot of like and smell And buzzing sounds. That's culture. That' that's it's all about culture. Yeah. little mice and rats Just intermingling Yeah But u What's next for stuff? Well, no, here's what I want to ask you Given all of this How were you gonna approach your friendships? Be this is the conversation I don't think people have I think about this a lot, especially as my friends now have kids. We talked about this in our moving places My strategy And so far it's been Rather unsuccessful, but I'm working on it is I'm trying to forcefully manipulate my friends to move close to him How 'a they're all planning to move out of the city any given moment. Yeah. And I'm trying to hire lobbyists real estate agents to try do in order for us to be able to hang out. Yeah. And I force this J stop Iing. Yeah, as much as one can. Yeah. I don't do it because I'm bad at it, but at least try create a fostering, welcoming environment. And that just that doesn't hold true just for my near and dear friends that I've been friends with for years, but also for like I don't know. the contractor that works on my basement Stop bye with your kid. And sometimes in the moment, I'm like, in the middle of a crisis that we're having right now But it's that friction that's all. It's that friction that is unavoidable and comes with the territory Have you do you know the myth of King Midas A familiar with the term of changing things to gold, right? whole Yeah. That's it, you know this guy I love gold, this guy who that was his one wish. And so the wish was granted. And so everything he touched to gold, which at first was like, amazing. this chair now gold, I love gold. this is gold, but then it was like, oh, I'm thirsty and he went for his wine I touch gold became gold and he couldn't drink his wine. And then his daughter came, his beloved daughter and said, Dad, what's wrong? and touched him. She turned to gold and it was like, Yeah, that's it's this myth that has this moral which I think is being reimagined now. The moral now, the way I see this now is that immediate Gratification, the immediate solution. immmediately getting what you want is completely hollow And it's going to lead you to a bad place Humans like making meaning. We like doing the work From the friction comes the dopamine I think it's even differentiff than that I think We would lose the most amazing thing ever if things were easy We'd lose our ability to complain How fun is it to be with your friends or your coworkers and be like boond. Can you believe we haven't gotten this thing? Yeah Like that's that's such a valuable thing. Totally. Otherwise we're all living that wallally Dystopian future riding in our chairs, everything is ye, yeah Eva Um It's not the path we want to go towards So But I've tried to structure my life in a way where I can't have Ey success. Yeah. ye. So splitting the days of the week in the hospital And doing that, which sucks because there's rate limiting steps of Yeah a resident that didn't finish their notes or I didn't finish my notes or the billing people are yelling at me So like I've purposefully created friction in ways that I think make me less successful as a business owner, but perhaps long term creates a meaning and happiness You will never lose As long as you make decisions that are based on your values So as long as You know who you are what is important to you And you are making decisions consistent with that You will be That decision to move from New York. To me, it was based on values decision What's important to me in my life right now and your values will change. You're not going to be the same person at twenty versus thirty five and whatever age I am above twenty five right now. But my values became my family My friends being able to show up consistently to the people I care about It gets back to my social anxiety and my fear and as you said, my superp Creativity I really want to be I think that's the only well, not the only reason, but one of the only reasons I make YouTube videos is I I got an itch that needs to be scratched and I want to learn and improve and share and I love stories and I want to share my story. And the last value was being of service And that's the other reason I make YouTube content. I want to be of service to people The decision to move from New York was based on that. Every decision I struggle with, I go back to my values family Friends showing up Creativity service How can I maximize these things Do you actually do this Oh yeah, man. Yeah. So you go and you think, okay, which one of these? 'cause I don't do it. and I feel like I'm a bad person. You're not a bad person Because I don't think about it Well I would argue that someone And afterwards, I have like this press release in my head of like Oh, well, you did this to be in service and all these great things It's very easy to get clarity on this So you can you can think about All right, it's my eightieth birthday. All my close friends and family are there. What are the stories I want them to share about my life and what pops up You know, it's not going to be No Dr. Mike was Always on top of his chart He was just He never abbreviated patient as PT You wrote it out All the stuff was there None of his patients ever complained about you know, any type of billing issues, administratively B dock. No one's going to say that What are the stories that are going to come up? Like what would be some of the things you hope I've never thought about it. Yeah Um Yeah, there's a lot of food for thought there. Yeah. Beuse you could spend hours in this. You could spend hours reflective people. Yeah. Yeah, in my world, we got fifty minutes. So let's ye, before time runs out. we got we got But that is a good way to think about it. Does it ever Vveer into narcissism thinking too much about that. Uh yeah, you can get lot so I want everyone I work with to live by what they're Eyes and ears and senses reveal to them about the world I don't want them to live in their thoughts and what their mind imagines about the world So the moment you get too lost here, that's a problem. We need to turn that attention back towards the present moment, right? And if that happens, if you're getting too lost in all of this There's a lot of cool value sorting cards. You can just download this off the internet. There's if you look up value sort cards People have released this stuff for free and you print out these cards and then you just sort them in categories. You go through like hundred values, you put them in categories of like super important, not important. and then you end up having a smaller pile and then you look at that pile and then you do the same thing until you get to like three to five And it's like, okay, thats that's clearly who I am. right now And if that part is hard probably because you haven't thought about it And if you haven't thought about it before, you're probably making a lot of decisions that are all over the place and you're feeling pretty burnt out and you're having a very hard time prioritizing, what do I do because you're making decisions that are inconsistent with your values and you don't have clarity around what your values are. And this is the thing, Dror Mike These things used to come easier because we tended to be more religious. We tended to be more aligned with community. We tended to have more affiliations with clubs, we tended to have A larger connection to social forces taught us Morals Ethhics be a good citizen How to be a good man I don't think boys and men have many good role models right now When I was growing up You This example sucks I hate sharing this example When I was growing up I looked up to Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton I'm not kidding you. I know what notes I'm getting for this podcast. And the other one is Zach Morris from Stay by the Bell. Okay. rightight. Why these three people Bill Cosby grew up in the eighties Wing the Cosby show And he was he was a physician on that show He had these really fly sweaters. he was good dad And so me, I was Looking at that, I'm like So a good man takes care of his family Does good work is of service to his community and a good father is emotional and compassionate and listens. Every sitcom's eighties dad For the most part, they were good listeners. They listened to their kids. This is why Now, Jen Alpha There's some evidence that these kids are more socially, emotionally intelligent and more patient other generations, and I think it's because parents now actually care about what their kids are feeling. right? So I think there's you connect these dots. Bill obviously, Bill Cosby Bill Cosby obviously sex predator. completely Everything he stood for. I mean, you were talking about his character on the show, not him as an individual. No, but it's very hard to disconnect those things. Yeah, but for me My hero wasn't It wasn't him. No, no, no, no, it wasn't him. It was his character, of course, right W What was his name on the show Dr. Huxtable I've got my own thing, you guys. I picked it up. I don't think this I don't think Bill Cosby is your hero No's No, but parasocial relationships, right? It's very hard for people to disconnect their feelings with a fictional character versus the actor who embodies it. I've had the chance to meet many members of the Star Trek family of the actors involved. And Boy, do I have to bury my feelings real deep and play it cool Mike. that takes a lot of work for me because of the parasocial relationship. because I see Patrick Stewart And I see Captain Picard Like it's they're the same Right? Same thing with with Bill Cosby. like he was this dad figure I had a great dad, my dad's still alive, but he's not like my day to day a part of my life like it was as a kid, but but Bill Cosby as this actor was another father figure. Did you start buying your dad cool sweaters? I wanted my dad to I had no money to buy him anything. And then when I got a job, I did ever bought my dad anything So no, I didn't. But it would been cool. And then Bill Cuseme we see in a not Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, we see in a completely different light now as well. And Zack Morris, this other guy, did you ever watch say by the Bell that might Yeah. So Zack Morris was this cool guy. also cool sweaters. Apparently I got a thing for sweaters. He had that cool hair. this is my attempt Zach M. Did't you have longer hair? He had longer hair. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I got a haircut last week. So it's a little bit shorter right now Um Do you walk in and say, Ill have this ? I want the Zack Morris. I want to be Zack Morris because he was the empathetic cool kid L is that the cool kid had the cool girlfriend Al the big thing is, always knew what to say always had friends that cared about him I so desperately wanted that I was not the cool kid. I didn't look like Zach Morris. I didn't have his sweaters. I didn't have the giant phone. I didn't have any of that sort of stuff, but that's what I aspired to. And then as an adult, I rewatched some Save by the Bell and I was like, Zach Morris is adult. Dick In fact there's this great YouTube series, like Zach I think it's Zack Moris is a dig or Z Moris is an asshole, but it just like highlights, it's just these video essays about how he's a horrible person. That's funny, right? But my morals and ethics were Influence Of course, of course by these things. Yeah, you were impressionable. Yes, yes. And these were the men I looked up to Who do kids have? Wh do boys have now to look up to? There's very few celebrities that they have to look up to, very few politicians that they have to look up to And especially if you don't have a father figure in your own life It is very hard to know And wait Yeah, maybe some athletes. Yeah. yeah, that might be it Um, But it's very hard to know How do I act if I want to be a good man The thing there's There's like three things that always get me in trouble. One is when I talk about how inaccurate memories are and how all of us have some false memories. No one likes talking about that. I've learned that. The second thing is your love for Bill Cosmay Oh. This is the first time I've ever publicly of this. The second thing is How how we shit on Gen Z. and we should like anytime I defend Gen Z, like all these people descend on me and it's like, no, man, like look, COVID was years ago, stop using that excuse. like I had my own challenges. and people People discount Gen Z for two reasons. Number one, we judge their abilities based on our current abilities. We don't judge their abilities based on who we were when we were twenty. and what it was like for us to start in the workforce. We judge it based upon who we are now and the comp competencies we have right now. that's how we judge. The other thing that people completely negate is the Difference of development going through struggles as a teenager different than going through the exact same struggle in your thirties COVID hit harder if you were in middle school then when social relationships become so much more complicated and kids need that face to time face to face real world awkwardness to learn how to deal with that. If you don't have that, You are not going learn those skills. You're going be completely at a disadvantage. And that's different from you and I when we had COVID isolation shelter in place We weren't developing. We had relationships. We didn't need to learn social skills. It's just a different experience, right? People hate when I defend Gen Zie. And then the other thing people hate is, um I forgot. what are we talking about? What other things people hate? Oh, we were talking about Bill Cosby. we werere talking about Oh, you mean the first thing that you mentioned? Yeah. false memories False memories, this and here's a third third one that I can't remember now, but it was something of. Think about you, doom scrolling And as you're doom scrolling What are people saying I think it was something about like when I u Oh, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes say, it came back. It came back guys. Boys and masculinity What about? No one in liberal circles, which I am a part of likes talking about masculinity No one likes talking about that It's very hard have a conversation about how girls are struggling and how girls are very much struggling with anxiety and depression It's almost like if I bring up boys and masculinity, it's like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. like You've had a good run Boys are doing this to themselves. That's the thing that pops up on social media all the time Whenever I talk about boys and masculinity is Look, you are only struggling because you had all these adv societal advantages. that are now being stripped away. and oh no, boohoo. now your boys are struggling right now because, you know, they have to play the same game that that girls have to do. Now' now it's even No, there's still a lot of ways in which sexism exists. There's a lot of ways in which boys have an advantage and yet One fourth of them Do not have a friend And yet Boys and men are four times more likely to die by st And yet forty percent. of young men who need help for depression Do not get it. and they're less likely to go to college. and they're less likely now to graduate high school. What's happening here I think what's happening is wheat We haven't had We've developed our We've evolved our understanding. of what it means to be a girl and a woman and what gender means. We haven't elevated our understanding of what it means to be a boy, what it means to be a man Who are our role models? How should we act? What should we do Influencers are probably the main the main role models for boys anden models It's something that like you and I and Others need to talk about more How am I trying to be a good man I try to show up for the people in my community I know When I speak People listen to me differently It's been a very hard lesson for me to learn One of my first jobs was I worked at American Eagle. My very first job was AMC. movie theater bestest job I've ever had. Iree popcorn. Free popcorn, free drinks, free movies. I could hook up my friends for free, like a good legit, it's part of the benefits But the main difference, doror Mike, is people came to the movie theaters to have fun. Now people come to see me when they're very much struggling You know, I'm not not in primary care. I'm very much in tertiary care. So if people are coming to see me, there's probably been a few failures that have happened in treatment and they're very much struggling. So it's a very different mental model for what my work is. But my second job, I worked at American Eagle and I remember my boss said Ali, can you come in this Saturday? and do an extra shift I'm like, whyy do you want me to come in Saturday? He's like, well Uh, I need a man I need someone who's like big and more intimidating to work the fitting rooms What I've noticed is if we have an all female Pence We're more likely to have theft We need I'm a six foot If you ask my mom Six three. I think it's more six two Um I'm a larger guy and back then I had longer hair and I spiked it all up. So I looked even taller And so I took the shift. and One of the other employees was really pissed off. She was pissed off to find out I got an extra shift when she was asking for more shifts And what I learned in that moment is there are certain things that I just get because of my size My wife is five, two, five, three She can walk into her room Commanded. And she's less likely to be remembered because she less sticks out and because they're just layir of sexism and because There's a racial layer. She's Asian American and All the stuff factors into it. I can go in a room, show up late. sayay one dumb thing Everyone remembers me I've learned that this is a thing that comes with being this with who I am I just The downside is I could never be late to a class. I could never get away with being late to a class. I always stick out, right So for me This is a gift I have been given with my size, with my appearance, with my gender. So the question becomes, what do I do with this I try to do as a man is to show up protect and support other people who do not have this That's what being a man means to me is protecting, showing up, not protecting in some kind of like trraditional like women need to be protected But there are people who don't have a voice. So how can I show up for those people How can I show up for Gen Z I think you're doing it right now? I'm trying, man, and people will keep shitting on them and I'm gonna collect that shit and hopefully throw it right back at those boomers. Nothing against boomers, but statistically boomers and GenX are more likely to do the shitting and the millennials are more likely to to kind of be like, Hey hey hey We're the middle ground. We're the middg ground. Yeah. ye in so many ways and it's burning this out, but that's a whole other podcast. We're ready for round three. Round three. How do you feel ired How do we've been going for Well, you set the world record. This is not the longest podcast. I did. You did it on your first time Yeah. And now this is V two. Yeah. Usually I'm the one listening forever So thank you