The Checkup with Doctor Mike - A Brutally Honest Conversation About Gen Z | Dr. Ali Mattu

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

I'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Huge thanks to  @drali  for joining me! Learn more about what he's working on here: https://oriscen.com/00:00 Intro2:10 Checking In With Teachers13:00 Gen Z Using TikTok As A Doctor26:00 Social Media Bans / Transgender Kids / Third Spaces45:40 Homosexuality / Loneliness1:03:59 Gen Z Is Suffering1:22:08 Dating Apps / Research1:29:15 Jonathan Haidt1:53:55 Safe Spaces2:04:00 Smoking vs. Social Media2:20:25 Anxiety2:32:40 Takeaways For Gen Z2:53:10 Future For Dr. Ali3:17:50 MasculinityHelp us continue the fight against medical misinformation and change the world through charity by becoming a Doctor Mike Resident on Patreon where every month I donate 100% of the proceeds to the charity, organization, or cause of your choice! Residents get access to bonus content, and many other perks for just $10 a month. Become a Resident today:https://www.patreon.com/doctormikeLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga* Select photos/videos provided by Getty Images *** The information in this video is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images, and information, contained in this video is for general information purposes only and does not replace a consultation with your own doctor/health professional **

Without a doubt, Genzi 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. 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, immediately solve most problems by tapping a button.

If you don't have a partner, you got a only fance for that. No one in liberal circles likes talking about masculinity. No one likes talking about that. What's happening here? Influencers are probably the main role models for boys and men. 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. Older 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 1990.

in 2012 doesn't stand out. They spent 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 Dr. Ali Matu,

a clinical psychologist from the Bay Area, who has been a loud defender of Gen Z, saying the criticism waged against them is unfair. In this episode, Dr. Ali and I discussed a new one 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. A very tough case I had here in New York, 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. It didn't feel like OCD. I met with the parents again. And I said, is there anything else you haven't told me? And the mother started crying and said, yeah, my aunt has schizophrenia. 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. is that 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. You can 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 care. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I, these are all the kids. I've worked with. It is... Because for physical health, getting a colonoscopy,

you know, heart disease screening, sugar checks, blood pressure, it's so standardized. Yeah. But outside of doing some IPV screening, I'm trying to think anything else, we do a PHQ2 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 want to say, I don't... And you don't mean like on a Vanderbilt or one of these? No, no. I am less interested. Sometimes there's some standard measures, especially for things like ADHD. There's some great standard measures, we can get some fast information. But 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? Because generational stuff changes. Right. 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 cultural,

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-curricular activities, so that means the child is having social interaction and creating friendships. Instead of actually seeing if the child is creating friendships. Are they? Yeah, exactly. Are they?

Or are they just doing like work? Yeah, is it just a checkbox for them? Is it just a checkbox? 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 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 the 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 interaction. And the more you become performative, the less nourishing it is for you. The more it feels like work, the more people are like, oh, I don't really want to do that. 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? Clovicular is going viral. What do you think about it? 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 irrelevant. 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 who he is, I have no idea. Well, this is one of the problems you and I have is ethics. We have. It would be a lot easier for us to make content if we didn't have an ethics code. 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. And it sounds like we're complaining, but I want people to read. This is a good thing. This is a good thing. Yeah. It's just that is why we will sometimes struggle to get virality as compared to those who don't care about those things. 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 too. They're like, oh, you can't be that hard on yourself. But what I mean by I am bad at. content is the 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. Because I do need to make sure, number one, in the psychologist's 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, okay, 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. So how do you balance that? How do you overcome that? What's the thought in your mind?

Because 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 think my role has changed in the last 10 years making content. And where I started from, I started from an idea of there is 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. And this knowledge that I have about mental 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. Which 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 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 health 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 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. That solution has to be available. Which, for most of America, it's not, and most of the world, it's not. And they have to also not fall victim to all of the false shortcuts that look very promising before the solution. Yeah. Because how easy is it to take all the steps you mentioned, finding out that they have a problem, being okay with them having a problem, beating the stigma of seeking help, and then online getting targeted by something that

pushes them away from seeing something that's evidence-based, that sounds way easier, way more attempting. They have to fight through that. Yes, yeah. So Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operator agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. 20 to 30%

of Gen Z tends to seek out medical health, mental health related content on TikTok. And what we also know is about 50 to 80% of the mental health content on TikTok is false.

Is wrong. Is misleading? It's putting it nicely. It's putting it nicely. Yeah. It might be more disinformation. It might be actually intentionally false information, right? So 50 to like 80% of the stuff on TikTok related to mental health is wrong, completely

wrong. Is charlatans is snake oil salesmen, you know, peddling their whatever solution, right? We were talking about the pit before this. One of my favorite storylines in Pitt from season one is the beauty influencer. Yeah. Right? Who bought all the stuff. stuff and got mercury poisoning from it.

I watched that episode and I turned to my wife. I'm like, this is what I complained about. This is the problem. Right? So it's very easy 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

in a way in the ivory tower. It's not been very accessible. You don't live in their pocket. No, no, I don't. I don't. All these influencers do. And so the problem... And they live there partially 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? Like discussing patient information online. Oh, sure. Like advertising yourself as a psychologist in ways where perhaps you're using patient

testimonials, which I know are against rules, Barry Goldwater rule, like all of these barriers is what's coming in my head. And then the final point is that our own societies, and that leaders in our fields have discouraged us from being in people's pockets. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, that is not what we are trained to do. Yeah. No, all of those things are there for the public trust. You know, 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 to protect the public. All of this stuff is there to protect the public. Influencers do not have to protect the public.

And so what happens on these platforms that I think is a huge problem, you know, early generation in social media, like 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 class. Oh, wow, I didn't know that. Oh, man, this is like 20. Well, because Facebook came out and I wasn't allowed to be on it because I think it was only for colleges.

Yeah, yeah, now you're making me feel old. I mean, I'm sure there's like, I was in fifth grade when Facebook came. It came out my last year of college. Okay. Yeah, YouTube and Facebook both came out. like around my last year of college. What year did Facebook come out? 20, 2003 or 2004?

Yeah, I got on around 2005, I think. Freshman year of high school. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was only colleges. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got on, and this feature was amazing. It actually really helped me one night,

because I think I had a neuropsych class, and I forgot my notes, or maybe, I hated this class. It was taught by Dr. Butcher. Is that the doctor's name? That was a professor. Fitz. Yeah, yeah.

I know. I know. And something he would do is he would get in front of a class. And for a good chunk of the class, this is 8 a.m. too. 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 8 a.m. neuropsych class?

It was a record. I had been put. Putting off this requirement, it was like my second to last semester. Got it. I had to. Glutton for punishment. Yes. Yes.

Yes. It's my own fault, Dr. Mike. So I needed, yeah, I needed notes. And I logged in a piece. He would read out of the textbook. Is that what you were to say? Yeah. He read out of his text.

I couldn't. Those professors that did that? Yeah. I just don't understand. Like, I could just read the book myself then. But yet they get a salary. Yes. Interesting.

Well, tenure is a funny thing. Yeah, yeah. So 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.

Ooh. Every day in that class whenever I showed up, which is not every day. And I asked her, I was like, Judy, do you, do you have, can I borrow your notes? And she's like, yeah, sure. And she just message 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 meta as a company. Because I think every time they have come up against some 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. Every time, yeah, 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 into the Metaverse? That is officially close.

It's officially close. 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. They 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 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 inshittified to this new place where most social media has actually been inshittified into this place where you are now less, you know, only 7% of the content you see on Instagram is from, you know, from people you know.

7%. I'm surprised it's even 7 these days. Yeah. How much do you scroll and you're like actually see somebody? It rarely happens. It's mostly, it's, it's really an ad platform with DMing features to share ads. 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 of health, mental health, all it takes is for you to be scrolling and just a one second pause on one video teaches the algorithm 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. So all you have to do is watch one video about how your problem is actually

because these people are trauma dumping on you. And now you're getting these videos about, well, you've got to protect your peace, and you've 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 Haidt, 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. At the same time, the people who are vulnerable to making comparisons,

the people 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 of teenagers? Or like, let's not even say teenage, underdeveloped or pre-developed frontal lobes?

Because like, to me, that's the definition of what 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. Like, it felt like you were talking about my teenage job.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, it's a great point. So, yes, it's developmentally normal for teenagers to be really wired, to be worried about what other people think about them. And it's also very normal for teenagers to make comparisons about themselves versus other people. all of that absolutely the other thing that's that's very common for teenagers is to be experimenting with their identities right so they're going to be trying out very different ways of carrying themselves of associating with different groups all that stuff is normal what 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. That's all you need. Not AI. Man, you're asking all the right questions today, Dr. Mike. Not AI. A real human being. Yeah, yeah.

A flawed human being. Yes, a flawed, friction-full human connection. You need one, right? You need a peer. 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, thinking 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 the warping prism of social media. Those are the people I worry about. Now, the problem with this is it's very hard to figure out who those people are. It's its Goldilocks problem. You know, here's another thing about social media that I have. been able to figure out a solution for. Australia is banning it for under 16.

Under 16? Yeah. Yeah? Something like that. Right. 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, we're going to push them into other corners of the internet that 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 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. Now, my nephew, who is in high school,

he's constantly getting Instagram DMs from drug dealers, like, asking him 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 4chan or 8chan,

equivalent where it's much more of a wild west frontier you know the dark web 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 don't talk about how hard it is for people to have casual consistent social interaction with other people, with peers. We don't talk about how all these third 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 20th century. People are calling the 21st century, the anti-social 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 just Gen Alpha,

but us, too. Millennials, Gen. Xers, poor Gen Xers, always ignored in all of this stuff, right? So the reason these social media bands 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 most? Over 50% of transgender kids have been... Over 50% Dr. Mike. Now, let me ask you, because I'm not super familiar with this research, has that been tied to their existence in the world and how they're treated?

Yes. Or, and perhaps it's a both situation, is it because inherently struggling with your identity creates those feelings? It's a great question, and it gets back to some of the history around homosexuals. sexuality and for a long time psychiatry mental health identified homosexuality as a mental illness that just being gay meant you had inherent problems and what that research cleared up one of my favorite favorite episodes of this american life is called 81 words and it's about the 81 words of the psychiatric definition of homosexual sexuality as a mental illness and how those 81 words were removed from the DSM, the diagnostic statistical manual of mental illness, how it was no longer considered a mental illness. And part of it was science that doing the actual research, what we found is there's no

inherent problem with being gay. It's not like having bipolar disorder inherently creates a set of problems that impair your ability to function in society. It's not like that. If you are gay, it doesn't mean you're going to have all of these problems. What tends to be the problem with being gay, going back to the 70s, 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. But it's primarily because of the isolation,

the stigma, the bullying that happens 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, half of them have been... We would be raising public health flags all over the place. 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. Now, social media is really an shittified place. It should not be that 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,

feel like we're not alone. You know, shame is so massive right now. I see this problem of shame with not 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, you're taking away the crutch of someone who's got a broken leg. But what are we giving them in return? You know, they still have, 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. But at what cost, you know, and what are we replacing it with? Well, 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 going to happen. A lot of homes and condos that are being built now, many of them are being built without a dedicated dining space. These homes are being built smaller. Structurally, there are less places to connect. For me, the big place I connected with my friends growing up was the mall. We'd go to the mall. spend like four hours there doing nothing, maybe one of us would like buy a pretzel. Sure. I'd send a button.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be me, Orange Julius. It was my stop. I'm going to get the oranges. I'm going to get the pretzel. It's going to be a rockin day. 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 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 we're recording. And what a beautiful place the city is where, you can live anywhere and in 30 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 at a great restaurant you got to hire you for jerk city tourism is a mayor hiring i want to come here right now come to new york um i don't I don't have his smile, but I would love to work with the mayor. I miss this place, man. I lived here a decade. This is the greatest place for third spaces.

It's funny because most people, at least in my demographic of me in my mid-30s now, people are having a lot of kids in my friend group from high school. And everyone's notion is, well, I'm going to have kids soon, so I'm going to leave the city. Yeah. which is kind of the opposite of what you're saying. Yeah. Why is that? You speak about it so positively for development and yet we're doing the opposite.

Yeah, I don't think. Where's the message not land- America does not support young families. America does not support it at all. 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 and backyard where they can play sports or in a tiny studio or one

bedroom apartment in New York City where there's a lot of activities to do. Neither. Because they're extremes. No. No, because we're focusing on the wrong thing there. What should we focus on? We should focus on the community. Better to raise a kid in a place where the...

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. right those are the important things i'll tell you why um my daughter got in trouble my my daughter was doing something at school secretly that she shouldn't have which makes it sound a lot worse you're blowing up her spot right she's catching a stray on the doctor mike pockets for no reason you just said

this is a patient encounter i should have said i should have said this page five years from now my daughter's going to look this up and get bad of me now now i've said this thing and it makes that thing sounds so much worse. It was pretty benign. Yeah, okay. Like what she was doing was pretty benign, but she was hiding it from us. This is called minimizing.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Doctor reacts to psychologists complaining about his daughter. 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 aftercare. And she goes to a very hippie-dippy, let's play in the dirt, climb trees, aftercare thing, which I love. Great, yeah.

I love it. I can't believe that's called hippie now. It just sounds like my normal, like. It's like throwback, nostalgic, old school, after school. Okay. Yeah, a lot of parents don't like it. Okay. Because to me, hippie means like hide the peanuts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hippie means hide the peanuts. Oh, they still hide the peanuts. Oh, they do. Okay. So they let them play in the dirt, but they hide the peanuts. There's a kid with a peanut allergy. Okay.

Which that's a whole other thing we can 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. And the other annoying thing about my daughter, she's, sorry, sweetie. She is like programmed by New York because we lived here until she was like three years old. Well, she got that much programming in three years? Food.

She can only eat good pizza She can only eat good hot dogs She can only have good Italian You should feed your child hot dogs Good hot dogs With your genetics Unbelievable That

Dipus Is not how you react To a patient She got so used to really Good High quality food And again Mr. Mayor, please hire me.

The greatest thing about New York is, is, well, good food at every price point. Oh, fair. Man, you can spend five bucks, get an amazing meal. You can also spend 500 and get an amazing meal, like farm to table, a giant plate with a little tiny carrot,

but it's like the best carrot. But the sauces are carefully placed. Yes, yes, all arrives at the exact same time, right? You can get whatever experience, whatever price point, 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, like, we go to kids' birthday parties. She eats the pizza. She's like, this is crap. This is, this is not. New York is better. And I'm like, sweetie, you lived there 30 years. Woman of good taste. Yeah, she's got good taste.

She gets that from her mom. It's not, not me. 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 school. And because of the social, emotional play that they all have, it's a much more of a casual relationship. So she brought up to 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's like, oh, 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 them. They're going to be so mad at me. And Ruthie says, I know your parents.

And I also know parents. And 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. And that's what my daughter did. The thing that helped her was this other adult that was not a parent, 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. I don't know. It depends on you. It depends on your social network that you have.

Not like Facebook, but like real life social network. 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. This exact same thing was happening. People got married, they had kids, they left the city. They left Brooklyn.

They left Manhattan. 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. One thing New York is, it is and it's not. is accessible.

And so I was carrying around a stroll, I was pushing around a stroller. That stroller became like my midi van. 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 big old thing. And taking the subway,

getting around was great until like an elevator wasn't working. And then what would happen, is I had to like carry this giant thing down the stairs and and hope that someone would help me, which usually people did. Like 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 directions. Someone's going to help you out. Yeah, we had this conversation with Arthur Brooks. The difference between kind and nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So New Yorkers are not kind.

They're not nice. They're not nice, but they're kind. Yeah, flip that for the Bay Area, for San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah, people are very nice, but are they kind? There's a great gulf between people. So 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. a leaf for it. And my doctor's like, you can't, this is not like a 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 community. And that is also what's increasingly different. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential were never meant to be boxed in. Nothing can contain us.

With the support of export development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities, discover new markets, and keep our nation front and center on the global stage. The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. difficult to get. To go back to something you were discussing earlier surrounding homosexuality and how he used to be viewed as a disease, I'm curious and I'm partially playing...

Well, not disease. Disorder. And this is actually my question surrounding this verbiage. Because partially I'm playing devil's advocate. And partially I'm trying to understand better for myself. For a physical condition that has no true pathology, I'm trying to think of a good example, dextracardia, where your heart is not on your left side. Oh, sure.

Yeah. 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, who? Yeah, who cares. So, like, medically, no impact. Yeah.

But it's a condition based on the ICD10. It's a disease, right? Because it's a disorder or 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 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 heart's on that side could 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 yeah 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. And bisexuality. And bisexuality.

And how do we discuss that in a way where we say, these are not the same? Yeah. And perhaps they're not diseases. But how do we discuss them as variations without creating stigma? because it feels like any time you say this is a variant, there's a chance at stigma forming.

It's a part of the natural human variation. And we really have a hard time talking about those things, don't we? Yeah. Skin color, there's a natural human variation to all of this. But what is also a part of our psychology, I was about to say a part of our operating system. But one of the things that bothers me. We're so tech focused.

Well, 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. 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. Well, the problem with all these mechanical explanations is they imply mechanical solutions.

When 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. That's it, man. That's it. We need a priest here to walk us through this, right?

That is exactly it. We need, without a frictionful experience, everything feels meaningless. it's the IKEA effect we like stuff that we make we like the crap furniture we get from my no knocked to IKEA I've got

I've got a bunch of IKEA I was just at IKEA this weekend because it was raining I had nothing else to do with my kids so I went to IKEA nice IKEA's good but we

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 too makes the IKEA furniture's a little bit at a slant,

there's a few extra pieces. You're like, I hope those pieces were critical to it, but it still feels like you accomplish something. What has happened over the last 10 to 15 years is a lot of tech companies have created this

loneliness economy where you can immediately solve most problems by tapping a button. If you need, 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 right if you are feeling a little alone and isolated don't worry too much about finding friends you can you can find your community on

YouTube on Twitch on all these other kind of platforms right and if you if you don't have a partner you got a holding fans for that. You know, it's just one tip away from having your penis rated. 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. Yeah, so removing 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 a good thing. When you apply it to human behavior, human relationships, absolutely. So last time you and I were talking, I kind of pitched you my idea for an app. It was like a Pokemon Go for mental health. Like 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, were trying to create that kind of experience, but for social connection. The tension we run into, or a company is called Oreson, and the tension we run into is this. How do you build the right friction and how do you solve for the wrong friction points?

And we haven't figured that out. Well, what you're basically seeking is flow. In order to experience fun playing basketball, basketball by yourself, you can't shoot full court shots because you'll make none. Your success rate so low that it's no longer fun. Yeah. At 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 60% and you can improve upon that number. And this intermittent

reward and intermittent experience with friction allows you to interflow. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Your experience needs to meet the challenge. Right. 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. Yeah. Your mental state, your emotional state, who you are as an individual, your physical characteristics does your back hurts, as your elbow hurts. So like all these factors play into it. And all of this has become complicated now. So if you, you're kind of talking about that a lot of your friends are starting to have kids. I live 10 minutes away from my best friends.

Loen and Jamie, these guys, I've known them. Loen I've known since fourth grade. Jamie, I've known since middle school. These are my best buds. They know all my dirty secrets. I know theirs too. So think twice, Loane and Jee. And they don't have a podcast to go.

And they don't have a podcast, but they could, they could be like the deep dish on Dr. Ali. the evil. 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? Oh, I know what you mean. Or a board or something.

Yeah. Or a. I was going to say human centipede, but you're going on. Oh, human centipede is even worse. Let's go with you encentipede. 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. Yeah. And they're not actually a doctor. Then someone will watch our reaction and react. And I'm like, this is Inception reaction.

What is, what are we? Where does this end? And then I need to react to that person's reaction of your, yeah, yeah. It's like, what are we doing here? So my best buddies live 10 minutes away from me. Ten minutes. It is so incredibly hard for us to see each other. Now, what's going on there?

One of them has a one-year-old. The other has a very busy job. I have two kids. It's 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 yeah like if my friends just dropped over it would be so weird

yeah you're like oh my God we have to clean we have to order something we have to get something we have to You make this 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... Are they? Dr. Mike, we could fall into that definition. I'm sure someone's commenting like that right now. But what do we do here? Like as influencers, when we're making content, is, okay, how's the lighting?

How's this? How's the space? Right? Or we're recording, like, in front of a window and you don't see that we have perfectly, lighting coming on us, right? Or 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 game

show that is now being known for its lighting. Oh, French talk show. Yeah. That is literally being known because they have like the best lighting and all the celebrities want to go on. Yeah. So like, look at that. A whole show is just special. Not because of the question. Just because of what people look. Yeah, yeah. So people want to highlight the best of themselves. That's what I was mentioning before about social experiences have all become performative. And this low-level casual hangout that defined my dad's social connections. All of it was not based on performance. It was very casual. These hangouts just happened without any type of planning. Yeah, I don't remember the 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 gets me excited. But doesn't get you happy? It does and it almost never works out. Because you say like I don't want to disappoint them with a subpar 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. And I just had a lot of meetings that day. I couldn't see him. It was a weekday. It wasn't a weekend. That might have been different with the weekend. But it's very hard to make those logistical things line up. And part of it is my dad never worked past 5 p.m. 5.15, my dad was home.

What did he do for work? He was an accountant. And so most of his work stayed at work. He came home. He was done. Every now and then. maybe a phone call. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

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, email was the first thing that extended the reach of work past work hours. But now anyone you work with has the ability to somehow reach you. Even patients can send messages any hours of the day. Doesn't mean every doctor responds to them

after hours. Sometimes they do. And I'm like, I'm like, Dr. Johnson, don't respond to my message. It's like 1130 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 that. but the reach of work now extends to all hours of our lives and so the 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 so 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 night. now and then, but it really nourished you, those have gone. 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, it captures 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 very interesting marriage. We balance each other out. But for a lot of people, if there's an imbalance between what you have and what you want, that's where loneliness lives. 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 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. and in most social interactions you get as much as you give the eye contact the 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 a book club or playing dungeons the 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 and 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 of sour patch kids. it's not going to nourish you, man.

Yeah. They'll buy you some time, temporarily, prevent you from starving, perhaps. So is that what is that what is leading the crisis surrounding mental health disorders in Gen Z? Yeah. So without a doubt, Gen Z 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 depression 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 in these types of psychiatric problems, we know those, those rates are all up. We also know that they're spending much, like,

us time socially. If you look at the early 2000s and you look at now, young people are spending 70% less time in person with each other. It used to be you spent about 30 hours a day, or not 30 hours a day.

There aren't that many hours in a day, Dr. Mike. Fun fact. Yeah, I'm a psychologist, not a physicist or astrophysicist or whoever deals with time. Ironic, my last guest, that we just published a podcast today is an astrophysicist. Should 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 of it all. Like maybe there is 30 hours. Space time is all very wibbly wobbly, timely, timey-wimmy. So yeah, they're spending less time in person together. Yeah, it used to be 30 hours a month. Oh, a month? just casually hanging out.

You also won't hear young people say hanging out. And 30 hours is, because to me 30 hours in a week made sense of like, oh, you're with your family or something. But this is casual peers. Yeah. 30 hours a month casually with peers was the early 2000s. Now it's down to 10. Right.

So that's a big change. So looking at anxiety, depression, social sleep, we also know. just in the last few years sleep scores have worsened so it used to be young people about 68% of them were experiencing some sleep problems

now it's like 76% of them also that's a high number Dr. Mike of young people of adolescents teenagers who are experiencing sleep problems that's bad pediatricians have been advocating for years about let's readjust school times yeah let's push it later

for high school no one wants to um i get it as a parent no one wants to drop off their kids later but sleep is so important to developing body and to developing brain well that's why the phone conversation comes in with blue light and i think blue light is probably a smaller part of that equation 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 later sleep times in most teenagers. You would think so. So there's brand new research, 2026 published that looked at about 500 people and factored in phone use and found 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, so that's my thing. So maybe they're so used to having their phones. They don't have it. That's the problem.

Yeah, man. The withdrawal. That's a great. That's a great point. So without a doubt, Gen Z is struggling with these things. Well, yeah. Let me break this down for the audience of how we think about it in science versus how they experience it.

Sure. So we see rates of self-reported anxiety depressions up. Average viewers thinking, well, especially out of Gen Z older, thinking, oh, 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 30 years ago to ask someone that was born in the 80s when they come in for their six-year-old visit, are you sad? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That wasn't a question. That wasn't happened. 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, we think in such either-or ways, and 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, this is a generation that, is unlike any other generation in their ability to express what's going on. Their ability to identify symptoms to identify with disorders, 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. Like, their, 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 is killing me, Dr. Mike. I hate it. I hate it. This is a vestibular leftover. I don't think I use the right word there. This is a legacy. Yeah, I was trying to like, I was like, what's the, yeah.

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 no more than me. It all comes back. Well, you don't need to worry about that in this conversation.

I'll tell you that. You're good there. You know, it's exposure therapy. I was so, so terrified of talking to you during our first one. Really? Yeah, nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with you.

Well, everything to do with you, actually. Well, because of the cameras? No, I'm used to the cameras. But I wanted, I want to do right by my field. 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 like I have to do something for a group, I get, 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 the people that I was trying to help. I felt this way, when I've spoken at San Diego Comic-Con, I do this panel with a friend of mine, Dr. Andrea Letimenti. We do psychology of Star Trek versus Star Wars. Whereas me and her, she's the more Star Wars person,

and I'm the Treki, 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. You know? So that's where my social anxiety really presents. I think it's a superpower.

I mean... Tell me more about my superpower. I mean, you have so much care of wanting to present the information accurately that 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 to get out 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, right? Like, that is the magic of, um, of friends, right?

And that is what, that is what really devastates me about the research here, about how low that time spent with friends has become. You know, one, and this is, it's really powerful for men, this loneliness. Really? Why? Yeah, specifically.

One in four young men, does not have a friend. They don't have friends. One and four. Wow. And that's even including social media friends. Or is that not considered a friend? It's self-identifying as someone that they feel close to. In real life.

In real life. 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 ask that because that's something I ask the people I work with. you know, like, 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, 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. Then there's friends online that you game with where you actually do talk quite a bit and interact and have teamwork and cooperation. And that's a very different online experience.

Absolutely. This is the problem with having these conversations is there's nuance there. And we don't do nuance well in a one second clip that's showing up on YouTube shorts on Instagram and TikTok. People want the answer is screen time good or bad? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, 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 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 as 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. do together. So playing basketball, walking around the mall, these shoulder to shoulder types of activities where you're just doing something together. And what happens through 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, my, um, a girlfriend dumped me 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 24 hours a day, but like I was at home. I didn't want 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, Ali, you look like crap. like 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 have 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 patients

I couldn't get the detail I couldn't tell if when was the last time they shaved when it was last time they showered all this is all when 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 they're able to pick out like stuff is wrong here right and they didn't necessarily say let's talk about all your feelings Right.

They knew my feelings were... That would be strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They knew the feelings were down in the dumps. Yeah. 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. Let's get him more activated in doing joyful things, 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, the easy 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. If that's the case, why when I had Jonathan Haidt in your seat, seat, he talked about the anxious generation and social media and how it was destroying teenage

girls more than voice. So teenage girls are more vulnerable to social, to physical comparisons. They're more vulnerable, especially, again, look at the criteria here. People who are very vulnerable to social comparison, people who are very isolated, the more isolated and chronically lone you are, it changes the way you see other people. It makes you starve 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. Trauma dumping is one of those very trendy TikTok things to talk about. What is that? It is where I see you 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've had. They often are talking about very difficult things. Now, the truth, I think that's incredibly overinflated, this idea. idea of trauma dumping. I think a lot of... Like 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. People define a lot of what is normal friendship and social support as trauma dumping. which is really just supporting a friend. Now, 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 is pretty crappy. 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 or both? I would say. Like 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? I think the way they, well, number one, they look at their user data. Right. And so they can in aggregate Deidentified ways actually look at what people are saying. Right. So that's number one. And I think their research aren't, 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. So 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. do stuff like that. A lot of tech companies do that. We have done that. I've done research on more than a thousand people on this 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 one reason. Aren't they in place and creating a friction that's valuable? Yeah. They are. are.

IRBs, absolutely. Is it better that it's easier or worse? It's both end? You know, if I'm, yeah, 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 this study. You can look at stuff like the somewhat discredited Stanford Prison Study,

where 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, but it was a quite distressing experience for people. IRBs are there to protect from that. The difference with user testing, it's 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 quite clear. And if that's the case, wouldn't the IRB then just be super-insupertive? 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. In psychology, we're often worried about manipulation and adverse effects of 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 physiological, biological change. So you need to have a hive bar for that kind of stuff, right? So if you, to answer your question with Dr. Haidt, 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 every woman and every girl. Like self-esteem about your body tends to plummet when puberty hits for girls. And we know puberty is hitting earlier, probably 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 people 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 Haidt 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. but 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 a bigger picture that is less focused just on social media, the effect of social media tends to decline how important it is relative to these other things. some of the research has shown as like less than 0.5%

or the equivalent of like wearing glasses on your well-being or eating a potato. Dr. Haidt really doesn't like that criticism of the potato. 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 court cases recently,

looking at meta, meta, YouTube, Snapchat, and there might have been, and TikTok were all named in this lawsuit. 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 Mehta were fighting it. And they lost. And the case was really revolved around this young woman, who said her life was very much ruined 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. Haidt and social media has changed our social landscape. So over the course of the 20th century, our opportunities for in-person, casual social interaction have gone down. That's happened far before social media and smartphones came around.

That's been going on. The other thing that's been happening is most of social interactions have become very performative in nature. 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, to text and performative videos. We are not natural writers and readers. It's a little fluke of our evolution that we see patterns and environment. 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 ask 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 too 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 who it's going to make things worse for. And we need to change a lot of how this stuff. operates. So these small intricacies that you're pointing out where you guys disagree. Yeah. This would be perfect for an APA meeting. Like dense discussion between experts, colleagues debating, discourse like this is so healthy. Yeah, 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, it is not helpful.

And that is the... Even though they are more anxious. Yes, yes. 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 the conversation. It immediately excludes them from the conversation. 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. Let's unpack that a little bit. why are they so anxious? When you talk to people who are Gen Z born 1997 through 2012, 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 anger. There is 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 20 years. That was

major legislation. Maybe I can also point to a lot of the Patriot Act stuff, which, you know, problematic. But there was that and there there was Obamacare and that's all I can identify from my lifetime, right? You go further back

and we've had Social Security, 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, 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. Even an interstate system is a wartime tank access system. Patriot Act is a 9-11 response. Social Security is a depression. Like all these things come from really bad scenarios. Yeah.

So are we just waiting for the next awful thing to happen for one of these? We don't have legislation that is forward thinking. We don't have futurists working in D.C. 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 binds us? American government is largely run by lawyers. You compare that to China. China has a government that's largely run by engineers.

And so big pros and cons, very different countries. China has no problem building things. We very much do have a problem of that. We've been trying to build high-speed rail in California to link up L.A. to San Francisco for 50 years. And all we have to show for is like a mile stretch of track with nothing happening on it. Right. So we are a country that is much more concerned about law, protection, regulation.

At least we used to be. Individualism. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That doesn't exist, right, in modern day China. Yeah, yeah, 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 that. Well, not too big of a family.

Right, right. And there's a lot of problems with both approaches. Well, that's exactly. The one child policy is so, such an engineer's approach to population control, right? Yeah. 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 infrastructure things I'm surprised that we're not stem 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 I had to do that

Man I would have never predicted where in this mess. This is the other thing, Dr. Mike, that I am really, really scares me, is the decline of intellectualism. It used to be that people were excited to find me on YouTube because they were like, cool, 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, someone who's just like me. Industry free. Industry free. Yeah. There was a vet that said that,

a veterinarian who said that she believes her degree works against her and talking about pets health. Oh, absolutely. Which is so wild. Yeah, yeah. I feel the same way. My best content recently has been stuff where I'm not leading in any way with,

I'm Dr. O.A. a psychologist, and it's not in my set. It's on my phone, like in my daughter's room and she's yelling something at me and this could be anyone. 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. And everything about, me is not relatable. You know, it's, everything about Dr. Ali is not relatable. Ali is, not Dr. Oli. So, I want to get back to the boys. Yeah, well, let's go back to the, no great monumental things have happened in the government

with the non-anxious generation. Right, right, right. So anxious generation is what we're talking about. Right. So I would never call Gen Z the anxious generation. And so they've never seen functional government. They've also inherited surveillance economy where all of their actions, everything they do on their phones, where they go, what they buy, 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, 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 that, and this, where I agree with Dr. Haight, most of the social opportunities

exist through the phone now. Correlation is not equal causation. Phone was there. Third spaces were in decline. Both 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 different 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 going to 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 for marginalized groups. They're seeing that being stripped away.

Then the other thing they saw is they saw Gen X, boomers, millennials, completely blotch COVID-19. Now, we can debate with what completely blotched. 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? Like, 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.

It's completely embarrassing. So, why? are they seeing all of these things that you listed? Social media. That's their social, I mean, so. Because you described all these things that they're seeing. Yeah. I don't know that they're necessarily experiencing any of these things without social media.

So I, because I'm sure when I was growing up, age 9, 10, 12, there was pretty awful stuff. I mean, September 11th happened. But because I didn't have a phone, I was like, I'm going to go play handball. Right. Right, right, right. You couldn't doomscroll. You couldn't zombie scroll. You couldn't just be like on it.

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. Yeah. They were designing it to keep you on the thing. So 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. Most Gen Z people get their news through TikTok. I would argue a lot of boomers do as well. If not TikTok, they're getting 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 was just going like this. That did not that that that wasn't ever a thing before. She was never on social media and so to see that you know this is why whenever people just take a big old dump on Gen Z I kind of want to say like have you looked at boomers lately they're also

struggling in a lot of different ways like loneliness is hitting them differently like TikTok 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. And people 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 very MAGA. or very anti-vaccine, all of these things that, you know, you talk about a lot. I talk about 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? Like it's very similar forces that are polarizing people and and leading people to adopt these identities, which actually very much limit who they are. That's a problem, right? So, but to get back to your question, this is where they're getting their news, but this is where most people are getting their news. most people are not just going to the New York Times. They're going to their... But there's a difference getting your news from TikTok

as someone who's 16 versus someone who's 50 because of the frontal lobe situation. So let's play that out. Frontal lobe still 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. Good thing about that, it helps teenagers to learn really fast. This is my belief of why race car drivers start so early, is because if you started driving a fast car in your 20s, 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 lobe finishes developing in your 20s. The brakes are a little bit faster and you're more hesitant to press that accelerator, right? You just described every insurance actuary's job. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. And it's why car insurance costs more to insure a teenager. And why rental companies don't rent under 25. Absolutely.

Absolutely. 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's that great. male influencer

Andrew Tate No I was thinking about What I like Oh I thought you said Great sarcastically No no no no There's a great male influencer

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 Kara Swisher Not Arthur Brooks

No No Scott Galloway. Thank you. Scott Galloway talks about how young people need to drink more. They need to have more sex. Get 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 decline of substance uses among young people. Over 90% of eighth graders don't use any substances. That is wild. But if we connect the dots here, when past generations were struggling, they were more likely to use substances, be outside, and get in trouble. And their anger 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 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 and 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? Controlled chaos. 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. You got to brush up against the boundaries to learn how far you can push things, right?

That's a good society. Now, 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. Can I ask how? Yeah. Well, it's my generation that move fast and broke things. No, no, no. I agree that our generations are to blame.

Yeah. Or partly 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 stigmatized language on a group of people, they immediately want to run away from it. And that shuts down communication. It shuts down conversations. And it creates as othering that they are like this.

and it makes it harder for you to understand the truth of the situation. Because 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, because we also grew up in an era where I was able to make friendships outside of tech. when I was a teenager, it was ICQ and instant 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. A Junebug? 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. The problem I've wanted so hard to buy these dumb phones. There's some that are like really beautiful. Oh really?

Yeah, they're like black. I think there's a, is it called the dumb phone? I've never heard that. Or it's like a simple phone or there. The nothing phone. I got all the references. Wow. Yes, yes, two for two.

I'm going to come with a third. So get ready. The nothing, I've wanted to buy it so much. I like, I watch Marquez's reviews, MKBHD, and I'm like, yeah, I could, I could be that guy. And he's like, 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, it 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?

Maybe I can be that guy. And what's stopping you from being that guy? Uh, parenthood. So, um, kids need to text. Well, my kids don't have phones. Um, but a lot of school stuff. A page right out of Jonathan Heights. Okay.

There too. So, um, 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 height in many ways in him and I've had these discussions. So now I'm kind of, uh, steal. manning his arguments here in order to just facilitate this discussion. These are all personal beliefs. And I mean, here's the thing is I grew up a Jonathan Haid fanboy when he was talking about

the five moral groups. Yeah, yeah, the politics and how we moralize political beliefs. His early stuff, I was a fan of Jonathan Haidt. before it was cool to be a fan of Jada the Night. So where did you guys go separate ways? A coddling of the American one? Coddling. Yeah, yeah.

So I 100% believe in safe spaces. I 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 and fight against chronic pain syndromes in 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 higher education, your syllabus, or has one of my old professors used to say, a syllibus. It was a Swedish that he always called his, a celibus. 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 know, 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, here's a counseling center that we have on, you know, boom, 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 depends. 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 that old school Jonathan Haidt, one 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 Haid, love it. Great stuff. I would love to just chat with him about that forever. The thing 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 the reverse is true as well, is it's hard to be a person of color. 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 have to be... Isn't that his argument? Yeah, I don't know. This is where... Yeah, it's difficult to talk about. Yeah, it's difficult to talk about... Because as I've experienced and have seen, if the safe spaces were truly serving their function,

those safe spaces would be for people who are 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. I don't even know what people, it probably means one thing to one person.

Absolutely. And it's like old school Jonathan Haidt 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, back when I was a kid, we didn't call them safe spaces. We called them like clubs. you know 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 student association my family's ancestry is pakistani and then i felt really out of place because i've never watched like any bollywood movie and i was like oh my god i'm like not pakistani um then i joined speech and debate and yeah that that That's a whole different story. But like you would find the people who are your people. Your commonality.

Commonality, right? And 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. Number two is you could have conversations that you knew would not be recorded or get back to you in some way.

That is critical, man. And that is very, very hard. This made me so sad to learn that a lot of Gen Z people are afraid of going to the club and dancing. Have you heard about this stuff? They're afraid of looking cringe. I mean, that's pretty standard. It's pretty standard, but did that...

That's where alcohol came in with social lubricants. Yes. and 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. So it's both and, right? What I think is super cool about Gen Z 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 tech. Low tech, high friction, pretty chill.

And bringing them to the web. Yes, yes. And so 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 because

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 inshidified. And like to get the real matches, you have to pay extra and you're locked in the the system and all that stuff, right? Do you want to be a feature profile? Yeah, 99.

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. Great business, bad for humans. I mean capitalism. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty descriptive.

People keep talking about how we're in late stage capitalism. I'm like, it keeps getting later. Yeah, like 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 a price is 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. Yes, yes. And the regulation seems so, duh.

Like, we have rules that you're not allowed to price gouge in the middle of a hurricane. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But suddenly, we're like, oh, well, the apps want to set prices based on demand. Yeah. No problem. Yeah. Oh, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies,

they want to all vertically merge. Yeah. And create a monopoly. No problem. Yep. Yep. This is the basics of which we need to regulate capitalism. And I feel like that's forgotten. The regulation part of what makes capitalism work has been forgotten. Yeah, that's what allows for a thriving economy.

So the biggest criticism I'll make 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 that Facebook had. Actually, let me back up. It's not the first real threat they had. Did 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. Where 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 Meadows Playbook, is find a competitor and purchase them.

Yeah. Yeah. 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. Because these days, even in my friend group, everyone's like, I'm excited to create something and sell it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? They're like, Mike, you're a 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 of people have. And so the fear is 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, yeah. Because then they will either eat us up or copy us.

And that is not how a thriving economy works. That is how we've ended up in the 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? Those first few months of shorts, I was like, these recommendations are terrible. It took them a while to figure out how to do it. But now they've copied in, it's pretty similar, man. There's no real choice over here.

But if you, the moment you give people choice, people like that. So the moment Apple allowed users to block really privacy hunting apps, which Facebook was doing, most people turned that feature on. and Facebook's value and 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 in tech to have choice because these big tech companies have been allowed to function in an unregulated way. So at the danger of sounding more like Jonathan Haidt, 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. Looking at these court cases, a lot of the comparison has been made to smoking, and smoking cigarettes in particular, if you look back a few decades, the strategy, like Marlboro, their,

their mascot, the camel, Joe Camel, which I don't even know if anyone watching this even knows with Joe Camel. We've referenced them on the show. Oh,

okay, awesome. Like, this character that was really made to appeal to kids. Kids have... I mean,

F1. Yeah. Michael Schumacher. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah,

my beloved F1. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The branding of cigarettes were everywhere. The culture around cigarettes is they were cool.

And Joe Camel. They're in all the movies everywhere you go. And Joe Camel was this mascot 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. but 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, and we keep having the same stupid conversations around addiction with 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, okay, these are all chemicals. Like where do you think it comes from? This is all, right? Like 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, Marlboro, all that stuff. Meta knew the dangers of their product for those vulnerable people. They did the research themselves.

They knew with what's come out with these cases and the congressional testimony and these court cases is Meda did their own research and they knew that certain groups of people, particularly these young girls, particularly around people, 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.

Marlboro, the cigarette industry, knew they had an addictive product and they intentionally advertised it to children. That is their sin and that is meta sin. 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.

You take away that 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? This is more gen Alpha. So now we're going even younger. These are people who are born after 2013. These are like my kids. The main difference for them is they've had, had tablets since there 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 8, 9, and 10, they become these Sephora kids by getting exposed to beauty influencers and now trying to anti-eastern. buy all this like anti-aging products at at the age of like 10. It hits me like the dermatologist that are like get preventative Botox. Because it's better then.

So you're 21, you're getting Botox. Yeah, what are we doing? Yeah. What are we doing? They're trying to Benjamin Button anything. And all of pediatrics, child development, child mental health is about bending the curve, right?

Someone's on this trajectory towards some negative outcomes. Can we bend that curve towards a better 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. We're putting it. the kid on a completely different path. And that's going to have ripple effects for their entire life, right? You give an eight-year-old access to beauty content. You're bending the curve in the completely wrong direction. You're setting them up for a very bad path.

And the same is true of this idea of like popcorn brain that you get, 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 bedtime. They're not going to go to bed. 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 dumb phones. it seems like just two weeks of having a dumb phone where you can dumbify 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... Results. It all results. Kind of similar to caffeine withdrawal.

Yeah. 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 a good outcome, to get a better outcome. But it disappears if you do it all the time, if you consume caffeine all the time, right? Because you build a tolerance. However, the research shows two, three days off of caffeine allows the reset to get some of the

benefit back. You know the other thing about that? You go a week without caffeine. that hit? No. No. Yeah, there's those. And then you order that beautiful

Americano. That first sip feels so good. It feels so good. That's a little hack I've got. If you're missing. I love coffee. And so sometimes

I'll do like a little abstaining from coffee. You don't get a headache? No, I don't. 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 on people in their 20s. Okay. 20s and 30s. It's like a digital detox of sorts. A digital detox. So that is also another thing.

Like people talk about these dopamine cleanses. Dopamine is so hot. It drives me crazy because it's not about... It's not the dopamine that you're targeting. Right, right, right. It's like the end results variable that is not... Dr. 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. Like, don't go digging around and all that stuff, right? But this research that was done very recently, people are in the 20s and 30s. 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 beyond four or five hours a day, right? Which is a lot of people. There's a lot of people. But 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, you're not locking in. That's the other thing.

Like, I talked to all these guys and they're like, I'm going to lock in this weekend. I'm like, whoa, what are you talking about locking in? I'm not talking to anyone. I'm turning off all social. All I'm going to 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 and the sauna, my video is worthless. I want your cold water protocol. Give me your like, you know... Well, now the protocol is 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 proper scrotum, vitamin D? Based on my research, 54 minutes, 38 seconds. If you go 34, sometimes you can squeeze a little more juice out of there. This is my mistake. I've been going for 34. Both sides?

I'll give you my thing afterwards. I have a really good sheet. I need that. I need that. I'm sorry to my neighbors, but it's like I got a boys got to do ways got to do. This is the thing, man, is so much. male influencer content is very lonely content. When is the last time you saw any of these guys talking to other guys in their like,

like optimizing, looks maxing content? And that's again, like so much of this language is mechanical, machine, computer, optimizing, and it's very lonely content. It's it really is very concerning to me. 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 ignored generation.

We don't talk with them. We talk at them. We dismiss them. They have massive anxiety about the world, about this direction. There's a challenge of meaning and hope, and they didn't cause any of that. Is your issue with the title of the book that, similarly to how when a patient comes in and they think they have an anxiety disorder, but 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. That is it in a nutshell. And the moment you do that, you're shutting off the 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, computer science, cannot find a job. Cannot find a job at all. It 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 one senior engineer who, along with AI, can do the coding work of like three to five people. That is overnight, 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 were called much more the narcissistic generation. I mean, Jonathan Hyde didn't write that book, but 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 on TikTok, and that's like a little bit different. That's a separate thing. Yeah. The critical difference, I do not.

Basically, if we're saying anxiety, this is a much simpler way to ask it. Sure. Is anxiety? if this anxiety in Generation Z is elevated appropriately, shouldn't that mean the world is more dangerous? Because that's what anxiety is. It's a response to a stimuli that is scary. The world is more dangerous.

So is it if, based on Jonathan Heights 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?

So the world is better and it's worse. It's 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. Again, my family is from Pakistan. I'm very concerned about access to water in that region. There's many reasons why Kashmir is a hot political zone, but one of the reasons is 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 120 degree days in the summer. That never 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 II was the EU. The EU feels less stable. I mean, what a brilliant idea we had as humans that two times we went to world war because of 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. And it has largely worked. It is also being deeply tested. So if you look at the 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 21stallity. years old, you don't have any friends, you don't know what you're going to 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 love.

of awareness. Love it. Love it. Let's up one. Yeah. Let's have a talk back. You know, let's build some great mental health, like TV shows and talk about these things. Like, let's build awareness. This is our like mental health day. We do not like investing in the resources that are actually going to help people. we have done nothing, nothing to have any large-scale federal investment.

And in fact, under the Trump administration, there's been a big scaling back at NIH on 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 prevention. specifically what he was doing is he was deciding which studies would get approved for federal funding for prevention research. And then as people got funded, he would work with them to make sure they're doing all the best stuff. So he's like a grant administrator. Totally.

Totally. And his whole background, all of his research, he's a psychologist that has specialized in prevention. as of January 2025, he was told he needs to go back into 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, because the way it was defined DEI was, were they, Using the words. Not even using the words.

Were they even like capturing racial data? Which is mandatory. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Right? And so he called me up and you 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 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 that we are in right now. He ended up leaving the job because he... That's the worst. All the good people. 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. 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 ooh, 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 health care, but to be in mental health care. The times my stomach drops is when the social worker shows up. And they're like,

can you do this, this, this with it, and the social worker's just like, I feel for her so much because that's what it feels like to be in mental health right now. That is where so much of the anger comes from. Yeah, okay, awareness,

great, but how are you going to actually help us cope? And 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 to ability to cope with those challenges. You can be aware of whatever attachment, whatever trauma trigger, you can try to manifest whatever

you want. But 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? What do we do? So number one is it's not hope. It is not I'm a I'm a deep science fiction fan and I love science fiction because I think it is the most hopeful form of art because it forces you to imagine different possibility and a lot this is these aren't my words. These are from Octavia Butler. 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 because it doesn't have to be this way we aren't stuck with 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.

I think it's going to come from Gen Z. 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 is game change. 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 about making stuff. And that's because of YouTube, that's because of TikTok. That is because of 3D printers and vibe coding. and all of this technology and knowledge that now exists.

You can make your own thing. Again, we move fast and broke things and what we ended up breaking is human connection. Now it's time to rebuild it. And Gen Z can do that. That's number one. Number two, you don't have to do some wild monk mode crazy you know, optimizing,

maxing thing. 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, it still worked for them. The benefits still persisted in time. So 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 on 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 open to change.

And that is a good thing. And we're not stuck with 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 going to 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 know, you go back 100 years, there were no gyms. Nobody talked about fitness. Why? They needed to do manual labor in their life. They needed to do manual labor. All of your 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 ancestors. self-care, which was more rest, nourish your body, get good food, good drink, spend 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 happened. 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 60s and 70s and 80s, and the exercise movement comes around, the jogging movement comes around. Gims are born out of a need to make ourselves stronger because we're not getting those experiences anymore. No one went to a gym because gyms didn't exist 100 years ago. They do now because of this need, because of how we've changed society. Now, 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 away. Not country clubs, but like, town halls or like, where do people hang out back a hundred years ago? Oh, you're talking about like the key club. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, these societies, right? Yeah. You know what, one 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's these secret societies that like had all these kind of like

there's one I'm thinking about like a moose. Maybe it's from a movie. The brick layers? The bricklayers or whatever. Coonis. Kiwanis. Yes. What about the one with the compass? Was it Freemasons? All of these. All of these organizations that excluded women, basically, right?

They have very declining membership. Even car clubs. Yeah. I go to car meets now. Yeah. I see children, I get excited because I'm like, finally a child who wants to play with a car, who wants to touch the inside of the steering wheel. Parents are like, oh, I'm not going to let him touch your car.

He's going to ruin it. Please ruin the car. Make a mess. Make a mess. They're like, no, he's going to press buttons. Press the buttons. 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 a not a teenager but like let's say late teens i would bring my broken down nissan or i was fortunate enough to get infinity later on to a g35 nyc club yeah that that's so hard to find now yeah yeah uh 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 because it's like, well, what's that for? How does it help them? How does that help them academically? Because there's so much 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. It has. have great meeting environments, but they have declining membership. And so there are some spaces where Gen Z people are taking over those organizations and reinventing them for their own purposes because a 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. D&D, whatever it is. Something that is on your schedule. You 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 going to fail. That's why private equity is ruining all these things. Like even trading cards. Yeah. It's a hobby that people used to gather around, play Magic the Gathering, do all this stuff. Now private equities involved. God forbid you get a Charzard.

So it's like, it all gets ruined. You get a Charzard. It's sad. Yeah, yeah, man. I had Generation 1, 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... Yu-Gi-O. No, that would have been good. Okay. I bought the Marvel customizable card game. I forget.

It was called, like, I don't even know what it was called. But about this like Marvel equivalent and it's worth nothing. Can I tell you something? It's super embarrassing. I bought Magic the Gathering cards, the whole starter set deck, whatever you call it. And I didn't know how to play it. So I just pretended. Same thing with Pokemon cards.

Yeah. Did you ever learn how to... No, I've never played. Oh, okay. So I'm not alone. Yeah, no, no, no, no, you're not alone. I thought I was alone. I, but...

Yes, manna. What? I didn't have the charisma to pretend. Oh, okay. So I had them and I held them and I watched people played. And they're like, do you want to play? And I'm like, now, now, you guys, you guys go. I just wanted to like watch.

I never learned how to play. It was so intimidating to me. Yeah. I never, Pokemon was like slightly after my time. But, yeah, I regret selling those.

So you played magic? No, I watched people play magic. Oh, okay. But I played, I played the Marvel game. There was a Star Wars equivalent.

There was a Star Trek equivalent. But talk about safe spaces. Mr. Davidson, love this man. I was not a very confident middle schooler. I don't think, I don't think anyone is.

Yeah. Right. That's tough. No one looks back at their life and they're like, You know when I peaked middle school. That was like, I was the bullies usually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I was, I was bullied for all sorts of stuff. And we know like the kids who are really suffering are the kids that are bullied. That's a huge risk factor for depression, for anxiety, for all sorts of stuff. Mr. Davidson would open up his classroom to, all the nerds every day at lunch and if you didn't want to go outside and have like your backpack thrown at you from the bullies

you could go to Mr. Davidson's class you could play magic you could just hang out you could eat your lunch there you could talk about comic books you can talk about the newest episode of sliders whatever it was which was this time traveling parallel universe show Jerry O'Connell was in a great show Then it went off-hill

Or yeah Then end up being not so good But he created a safe space man We would never call that a safe space But it was exactly that Don't you think not calling it a safe space is a good thing Well we even 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 Anxious Generation 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, yeah.

Yeah, so I wouldn't advocate for calling these things safe spaces Because that is politically loaded Yeah, yeah And that's gonna exclude people, especially conservatives But we need them Yeah, yeah, we do We need these places where you can connect

With your peers And in 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 Star Trek Pub Trivia Night called Trek Triv that 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.

Sometimes life gets in the way. But 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 create our own like a little after party. We hang out.

We catch up. It's the best. It's the best. We all need some version of that. And if you're Gen Z, if you're a parent of Gen 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. There's so many friction points to social interaction now. All you have to do, the beauty of finding some kind of social. routine is 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, feel 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 connection. It's the same as basketball. Good luck playing one-on-one. You're going to fatigue after one point. You're going to be exhausted.

That's such a great point. I never thought about it. Yeah. You know, despite my height, I'm a terrible basketball player. Whenever one friend would say, let's go 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. The low one is always on you. Yeah. In that situation, it's athletic, but in the situation of a conversation, it's cognitive. Can I steal this? Please. This is beautiful. 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 listening or talking is it too awkward did I say too much am I too much am I too cringes blah blah blah what tends to be better is about four people four or 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, they tend to be around four people. What's also interesting about restaurant reservations, Rezi 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 anti-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. The Gen Z stare, yeah, have you mentored your new hire?

Because if you actually talk to 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, Gen X, 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. Like how many people went through college and it was like almost all remote? when I was in college, I worked at this marriage and family lab, and I would show up wearing flip-flops,

shorts, and a t-shirt. I had 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. Like, yeah, we're in L.A. and the weather's nice, you can't show up to work looking like this. And I am so thankful she told me that. It's those little bits of mentorship that come only from in person. And it only comes from a period of trust. And it comes from these small little moments. This is what Gen Z's been deprived of. And 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. All of these things are happening. All of these things need work. None of this is hopeless. I 100% 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 Gen Alpha and it's what's going to help us to build a better future. Because 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 100% obsessed with helping people connect and making human connection more joyful, more fun. and helping people 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, a 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, de-shaming, and creates community with the way that content is working right now. The coolest thing about being a YouTuber is you have to reinvent every few years. The most annoying thing about being a YouTuber is you have to reinvent every few years. And fortunately, YouTube has never been the 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. That's all I want. That's my life's mission.

That's not going to change. 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 to screw all that. You want to know my secret plan? Yeah, what is it? Yeah.

World domination? No, no. I would be terrible at that. I would love to retire, open up a boba tea shop. Ali Boba and the 40 T's Pretty good name I already see the logo right now

It's a Boba T slash comic book Shop Community space For people to come together I won't call it a safe space But if you're looking To safely hang out in the space come to Aliboba.

An ephos. An epos? Oh, is that what that spells out? Your brain works faster than mine. I like that. I like that. In ephos. It's like a, what do we call

adverse childhood experiences, ACEs? Yeah, yeah. It's like the nice version of AISIS. Yeah. Well, that's cool. Can I come? You can come, dude. I'm not Star Trek-y, but I'm a good time.

You had magic cards. Yeah. magic. There's something there. There's some nerdyness. No Star Wars for me. No Star Trek. I've been deprived of all that. I grew up on Doug. Hey Arnold. Rugrats. But those aren't, there's no cult that's going to come and hang out with me to talk about Rugrats. I love Doug. I love Doug so much. But Doug there is no Doug community. Who did the, who had the theme song? Nah, nah, no, no, no. Oh, that was Colissa explains it all. Never mind. That's not Doug. Yeah. Love all the Nickelodeon stuff, man.

What an era we had. Right? What a great run. We had moral television or like semi-moral television? Yes. Sluge shorts. Yeah. Oh, man.

Snick. Did you watch Snick? Is that like Saturday night? Yeah. Yeah. That was good times. Good times. But look, man.

Wait, where is this Arabian and the 40s happening? I don't know. It's not, it's in my mind right now. No, but where would you? Where 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'd do it here. I would do it here, man. Like, look, the volume? In Manhattan? I don't know. Who knows where in 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 the time in Brooklyn. I miss Brooklyn

dearly. Maybe it would be happened over there. But you know, what's also interesting about Gen Z, they tend not to be moving to cities. they're not moving to California because it costs 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 for obvious reasons. So maybe I'll find out where all the cool Gen Z people are who at that point will be... I think that's Austin, Texas. Yeah, well... Austin, Texas.

Austin, Texas, outside of Washington, D.C., Those are the two hotspots for a lot of young people. But they're also going to like Boise. They're going to like 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 it would 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 hellhole. Yeah. I wish you were here for my previous guest. It was Jesse Eisenberg. Oh, you know what? You would have told him off. Why? Well, because he's Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, no, I like, I like Jesse. I was at Chelsea Market, were we? 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 got you. He's like, oh, thanks, man. This is like, you know, like, really, he was talking. It is very like Zuckerberg impression. But that's not his impression. No. 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 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 how technology has trapped us in other ways. I miss the bumping into humanity that happens here. Now, there's also also, also a lot of like

poop and smell and buzzing sounds. That's culture. That's that's, it's all part of it. That's culture. Yeah. A little mice and rats just intermingling. Yeah. Yeah. But what's next for our stuff? Well, no, here's what I want to ask you

given all of this. How are you going to approach your friendships? Because this is the conversation. I don't think people have? I think about this a lot, especially as my friends now have kids. We've 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 me.

How? Because 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 and get them. Don't do it! In order for us to be able to hang out. And I force this just stop by thing.

Yeah. As much as one can. Yeah. I don't do it because I'm bad at it, but at least I try to 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 by with your kid. Mm-hmm. And sometimes in the moment, I'm like, God damn it. In the middle of a crisis that we're having right now. But it's that friction that's valuable. It's that friction that is unavoidable and comes with the territory.

Have you, do you know the myth of King Midas? I'm familiar with the term of changing things to gold, right? Yeah, 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. And then he touched to gold and 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. It was like, no. 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, immediately 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 different 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, can you believe we haven't gotten this thing? That's such a valuable thing.

Totally. Otherwise, we're all living that Wally dystopian future, riding in our chairs. Wee. Yeah, Eva. It's not the, path we want to to go towards. But I've tried to structure my life in a way where I can't have easy success. Yeah, yeah.

So splitting the days of the week in the hospital and doing that, which sucks because there's rate limiting steps of 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 meeting 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 fine.

That decision to move from New York, to me, it was based on a 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 20 versus 35 and whatever age I am above 25 right now. But my values became my family, my friends, being able to be. 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 superpower. Creativity, I really want to be creative. I think that's the only, well, not the only reason, but one of the only reasons I make YouTube videos is 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. And 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. So you go and you think, okay, which one of these? Because I don't do it. Yeah. And I feel like I'm a bad person. You're not a bad person. Because I don't think about it like that. Well, you, I, I, 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 think about, all right, it's my 80th 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, you know, Dr. Mike was always on top of his chart. He was just, he never abbreviated patient as PT.

He wrote it out. All the stuff was there. None of his patients ever complained about, you know, any type of billing issues. Administratively, the best doc. No, 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 that people would share? I've never thought about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of food for thought there. Yeah. Because you could spend hours in this. You could spend hours. You could spend hours. Yeah.

Yeah. In my world, we got 50 minutes. So let's see. Before time runs out, we got to. But that is a good way to think about it. Does it ever veer into narcissism thinking too much about that? Yeah, you can get lost. So I want everyone I work with.

to live by what their 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. 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 100 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, that's clearly who I am right now. And if that part is hard, it's 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, Dr. 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 that taught us morals, ethics, how to 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, this example sucks. I hate sharing this example. When I was growing up, you know, I looked up to Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton. Like, I'm not kidding you. I already know what notes I'm getting for this podcast. And the other one was Zach Morris from Save By the Bell. Okay. Right. So why these three people? Bill Cosby grew up in the 80s watching the Cosby show, and he was a physician on that show. He had these really fly sweaters. He was a 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. And a good father.

is emotional and compassionate and listens. Every sitcom's 80s dad, for the most part, they were good listeners. They listened to their kids. This is why now, Gen Alpha, there's some evidence that these kids are more socially, emotionally intelligent and more patient than other generations. And I think it's because parents now actually care

about what their kids are feeling. So I think there's, you connect these dots. Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby, obviously, sex predator, completely, everything he stood for is completely disarrant. Well, I mean, you were talking about his character on the show, not him as an individual. No, but it's, it's, it's very hard to disconnect those things. Yeah, but for me. Your hero wasn't him as, you didn't know him. No, no, no, no, no. It wasn't him. It was his character. Of course. Right. What was his name on the show?

Dr. Huxdable? Yeah. I got my own thing, you guys. I picked it up. I don't think Bill Cosby is your hero. No. No, but parisocial 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? Like, that takes a lot of work for me because of the parasycial relationship. Because I see Patrick Stewart and I see Captain Picard. Like, they're the same, right? Same thing 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 Bill Cosby, as this actor, was another father figure. Did you start buying your dad cool sweaters?

I wanted my dad too. I had no money to buy him anything. And then when I got a job, I never bought my dad anything. So, no, I didn't. But it would been cool. And then Bill Cosby, we've seen a, not Bill Cosby,

Clinton we see in a completely different light now as well. And Zach Morris, this other guy, did you ever watch Say About that bell? Yeah. So Zach Morris was this cool guy, also cool sweaters. Apparently I got a thing for sweaters. He had that cool hair. This is my attempt to be Zach Morris.

This hair. Didn't you have longer hair? He had longer hair. Yeah, yeah. I got a haircut last week. So it's a little bit shorter right now. Do you walk in and you say, I'll have the Zach Morris? I want the Zach Morris.

I want to be Zach Morris. Because he was the empathetic cool kid? Yes. Is that the... Cool kid had the cool girlfriend. The big thing is always knew what to say and 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, we watched some saved by the bell and I was like, Zach Morris is a dick.

In fact, there's this great YouTube series, like Zach, I think it's Zach Morris is a dick or Zach Morris 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

influenced by these things. Yeah, you were impressionable. Yes, yes. And these were the men I looked up to. Who do kids have, who 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 athletes. Yeah, maybe some athletes. Yeah, yeah, that might be it.

But it's very hard to know how do I act if I want to be a good man? And 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 Cosby. No. This is the first time I've ever publicly mentioned this. The second thing is how we shit on Gen Z. And we should... Like, anytime I defend Gen Z, like,

all these people descend on me. And it was like, no, man, like, look, COVID was years ago. Stop using that excuse. Like, I had my own challenges. And 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 20 and what it was like for us to start in the workforce. we judge it based upon who we are now and the competencies we have right now.

That's how we judge. The other thing that people completely negate is the difference of development. Like going through struggles as a teenager is different than going through the exact same struggle in your 30s. COVID hit harder if you were in middle school then when social relationships because, 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're not going to learn those skills you're going to 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 Z. And then the other thing people hate is, I forgot, what are we talking about? What other things people hate? Oh, we were talking about Bill Cosby. We're talking about... Oh, you mean the first thing that you mentioned? Yeah.

I have false memories. False memories, this, and... There's a third one. There's a third one that I can't remember now, but it was something about... Think about you doom scrolling. And as your doom scrolling... What are people saying? I think it was something about like when I,

oh, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, I say it came back. It came back, guys. Boys of masculinity. What about? No one in liberal circles, which I am a part of, likes talking about masculinity. No one likes talking about that. is it's very hard to 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 societal advantages that are now being stripped away. And oh, no, boo-hoo, now your boys are struggling right now because, you know, they have to play the same game that girls have to do. Now it's even. Well, 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 suicide.

And yet 40% 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 we have to. haven't had, we've developed our, we've evolved our understanding of what it means to be a girl and a woman and, 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 role models for boys and men now. it's something that people like you and I and others need to talk about more like 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 job was, I worked at American Eagle. My very first job was AMC, movie theater. Best job I've ever had. Free popcorn.

Free popcorn, free drinks, free movies. I could hook up my friends for free. Like, I could legit, it's part of the benefits. But the main difference, Dr. 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, I'm 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, why do you want me to come in Saturday? He's like, well, I need a man. I need someone who's like big and more intimidating to work the fitting rooms.

Because what I've noticed is if we have an all-female presence, 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. I'm a larger guy. And back then I had longer hair and it, 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 5253. She can walk into her room, command it. and she's less likely to be remembered because she less sticks out and because there's this layer 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, say one dumb thing,

and everyone remembers me. I've learned that this is a thing that comes with being this, with who I am. 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? And what 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 traditional 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 shit. on them and I'm going to collect that shit and hopefully throw it right back at those boomers.

Nothing against boomers, but statistically boobers and Gen X are more likely to do the shitting and the millennials are more likely to kind of be like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. We're the middle ground. We're the middle ground. Yeah. Yeah. In so many ways and it's burning us out, but that's a whole other podcast. We're ready for round three. Round three.

How do you feel? Tired. How long? How long have we been going for? Well, you set their world record. Again. Again. You did it on your first time and now this is V2.

Usually I'm the one listening forever. So thank you for sparking this conversation for asking these questions, for making this space. A long time ago, I remember back on Twitter, rest in peace, I said something about the mental health community and I remember you being like, I don't know if I'm a part of this community, but like, I want to have this conversation too. And then I was like, dude, Dr. Mike, of course you're a part of it. You have always celebrated helping people to make smart decisions about their health, helping people to like think through, take smart action towards being more healthy, being

more connected. And that's what mental health is all about. So thanks for, um, Thanks for always making this a priority on your show. Of course. And thank you for being a valuable guest on it. And I'm hoping for more episodes. Five hours.

So keep the stories coming. Yeah. Two years from now, let's do a five hours. You're forcing our team to upgrade SD cards. We no longer can fit on the standard of SD card. We have to do expanders. You got the one mat two SD card, which is going to fit. That length is four hours.

Yeah. Right. So you should just count. them in like matu incommons oh that's pretty good sam what do you think three minutes left oh we're done dr ali was a bit critical of jonathan height who has also been on the show before so scroll on back to listen to my interview with him and then let me know down in the comment section whose side you're going to take i would also be very grateful if you could leave us a five-star review perhaps throw more comments in the comment section as it's the best way to help us find

new listeners and as always stay happy and healthy