The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Male Addiction in the Digital Age — with Dr. K

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), a psychiatrist and co-founder of the mental health coaching company 'Healthy Gamer,’ joins Scott to discuss how tech addiction affects mental health, the science of relationships, and the challenges men face today. Follow Dr. K, @HealthyGamerGG. Scott opens with a conversation on what can be done.  Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa LaFlamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world-leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs. Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 336, 336 of the area covering North Carolina.

1936, the first superhero to wear a skin-tight costume and mask, the Phantom, appeared in newspaper comic strips. True story. My premature ejaculation problem started with my other half dressed up as a superhero. Before I knew it, I came in a flash. Oh god, it's all gonna end soon. Oh god, it's all gonna end soon. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 336th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? I'm back in London after a short stint. I went to... What did I go? I went to Disney World for a speaking gig

and then I went to New York. Had a good three or four nights there. Saw a bunch of friends, went out, probably drank a little too much. Oh well, daddy went deep in the paint one night. I've been trying to drink a lot less. I'm trying to cut my alcohol consumption by 40 to 60%. And I think I'm hovering somewhere between,

I think I've reduced it to somewhere between 20 and 30, but I'm on a roll now. And I have been feeling better. I have been, or less bad, I should say. I feel less bad. I was about to take a run in Regents Park before I did this pod. I'm starting to run a little bit and of course, I ran out of time.

There's one couple lessons I've taken away from previous podcasts. I did a podcast with Mel Robbins when I interviewed her for my pod. So she said something that struck me, and that is, I do away with the stall or the time or the gap between deciding or thinking you should do something and doing it. I used to do that. I used to be really good at this. I used to think, oh, I need to go work out.

And as soon as I thought that, I tried to force myself to get up and put on my clothes and go work out. Otherwise, I would start watching TV or eating and delaying. And I find a lot now I delay. And I need to get back to this notion of being a little less thoughtful. So I think around things like action, have a tendency to just move to action. Oh, I want to write something that I will just start writing, right? And around things that you think are good intention. When you think, I think a lot about, I want to write something that I will just start writing, right? Um, and around things that you think are good intention.

When you think, I think a lot about, I want to express to someone that they're an impressive person. Uh, I know someone who has a podcast. I don't know them very well, but I saw a clip of them and I thought that's so smart. So what I'm trying to do, I thought I should really tell them the next time I see them, that that was really interesting segment and how impressed I am by them. And instead I thought, no, just text them now,

move to now, move to now. Mind the gap between your emotions, your positive sentiments, action, and actually doing something. We also have been, or I also have been thinking a lot about strategy, and that is, I've had some discussions, and I wanna use what's going on in the government right now.

And what I would describe is a strange, if not illegal seizure, or I think it's trespassing and a hacking of our government systems to kind of stop payments and then negotiate where we should cut funding. I think the notion around cutting funding is a really valuable conversation. There's obviously wasting government. They don't have to face, put their feet to the flames of the private sector. They never effectively run out of money.

Companies can borrow money, but at some point they run out of money. Whereas the government, especially the US government, is blessed and to a certain extent, cursed a little bit, mostly blessed with the ability to keep printing money. So it likely doesn't have the same discipline around managing its house in a kind of prudent fiscal manner

as evidenced by the fact that we're spending $7 trillion a year on $5 trillion in tax revenue. So I'm down with that. I think we should have an open and honest conversation around the Department of Education. Like what value does it add? Should it be reformed? It sort of enhance it, don't eliminate it.

I think it's probably the right approach, but it's a worthwhile conversation. The question is, should we be having this conversation with a gun pointed to our heads, with a bunch of very talented young men who in my opinion are trespassing in federal buildings? So a lot of people would say, you're not trespassing if you're made a legitimate employee

by the full faith of the White House. And then going in and without any sort of congressional oversight or approval under the auspices of an individual who has absolutely not been vetted by the U.S. government to go in and make decisions around. They're not even decisions. They're like, we're cutting off payments. Now let's start the negotiation, which literally is holding a gun to someone's head and saying, okay, now let's have a negotiation. So the question is, how do you get leverage here

and how do you punch back when Republicans control all three houses of government? You're now the opposition party and what do you do? Because something I've struggled with my entire career is the difference between being right and being effective. And whether or not you think this is a good idea or a bad idea, and I can understand it sort of tickles the sensors of people to think,

government's just gotten so out of control that them going in and kind of breaking some eggs, if you will, I think that appeals to a lot of people. I can understand that. The question is, one, is it the right way to go about it? And are we setting a precedent where once the Democrats get in control of all three houses, they're going to start just randomly shutting shit off?

I mean, does this just enter into a downward spiral where the standard institutional processes of democracy just kind of go down the drain from both sides and both sides ignore each other. There used to be a certain level of mutual respect, that's gone. Now I'm of the mind that kind of needs to go to mutual destruction.

How I think you wanna think about negotiations is one, where you have leverage and two, where are the pressure points on the other party? Should you ever enter into this type of hostile negotiation? And the pressure points I think are the following. One, I think this is all about money. And that is, if you want to get leverage against Trump,

you're going to have to get leverage against Musk right now because he's kind of the heat shield doing all the dirty work here. Musk is about money. And I think if you want leverage against Musk, you have to go after the purse, just the way they're going after the purse at these government programs.

And it's already sort of happening in Europe. It is striking what's happening to Tesla sales. Get this, the annual year-on-year change of Tesla vehicles in France is off 63% in Germany, 60%, Sweden 44%, Norway 38%, in the UK 8%. I believe the EV market is actually down 6%. But this is essentially a meltdown. But if you wanted to send a message to Musk, or if they wanted to send a message to Democrats, because I they wanted to send a message to Democrats, because I think Democrats are just as obsessed with money as evidenced by the fact that our speaker

Emerita continues to engage in insider trading. Another talk show, another talk show. I think we'd be going after money. And instead of screaming into TikTok, or showing up at federal buildings and waving your cane at people and saying, we're members of Congress. It's like, well, what could you do? I would suggest that you go after the purse. And that is trying to figure out a way to communicate to people that they shouldn't

sign up for T-Mobile because they're doing a deal with Starlink, or they shouldn't be flying United Airlines, or they shouldn't be buying, obviously buying Teslas, or if they order an Uber and a Model Y comes up from Tesla that they cancel and say, I don't ride in Teslas. I think that is probably at this point the only way to get their attention. Now, if you were to really go gangster here, pull or do what the Republicans did,

and that is threaten to shut down the government. Essentially, when they were the opposition party, the Republicans said, all right, we're going to burn the village to save it. We're not going to raise the debt limit. We're going to let the US government default on its debts, which would create essentially the ripple effect would be the treasury auction would fail.

Interest rates would dramatically spike. You'd probably see a drawdown of anywhere between 10, 30, and 50% in the stock market. You would have kind of an economic, at least a pretty serious shock here. And I think unfortunately what we have is when you are engaged in a battle with an opposition party and the opposition party shows a willingness

to just go much further than you and you will back down, you create asymmetric advantage. The example I would use is if you have an army that's willing to put its own civilians in harm's way, and the opposing army is not willing to do that, what you're doing, which I think is the ethical thing to not, in fact, bomb a place with civilians, but what you create is incentive for other armies to begin putting people

in harm's way and using them as human shields. And I think right now, one party has essentially shown its willingness to shut down the government and the other has said, let's not do that. And I think the only way you're gonna restore any sense of mutually assured destruction and get any leverage at this point would be to say,

okay, we're willing to do this too. So where does this go? In the Trump administration, I think that you have effectively one adult in the room, I would argue, around restoring kind of institutional norms, if you will, and that is the bond market and the stock market. And I think the Democrats at this point have to say, all right, our only pressure point, our only leverage here is probably to force the president on his watch to default on the

government's debt and to give up or basically see a failed treasury auction. And this is going to happen on his watch. The Republicans threatened to do that in the last minute. They blinked, and it did not happen on Biden's watch. But my sense is the Republicans have been so aggressive and shown such a lack of respect for any kind of consolation, consideration, process, institutions,

whatever you want to call it, I think the Democrats need to also show that they're willing to shut down government. So when you're negotiating, there's really only two things you need to remember. Generally speaking, in your negotiations, you don't want to make it emotional. You just want it to be, this is what we're willing to do,

this is what we're not willing to do. And two, you have to show a willingness to walk away. And in this instance, it's a willingness, quite frankly, to go kind of nuclear and leverage a nuclear option and shut the government down and have a failed, have us fail on our debt and have a failed treasury auction. And again, I want you to stop and when you think about things, it might feel good.

I oftentimes pointed out in meetings, okay, this is wrong and felt really good about myself. But I thought, am all am I doing just antagonizing the other side and don't threaten to quit unless you're actually going to quit. Otherwise your threats become a little bit hollow. Already the president is developing a reputation for not living up to his threats.

I'm going to impose these 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. They turn around and commit to doing what they're already doing. I mean, even look at the language in Canada. We will implement the things we have committed to and he backs away. So don't make threats, make promises and make them very sparingly,

especially in a relationship with someone you care about. I remember, I just think you wanna be very careful when you're talking to people you care about, especially romantic partners, and especially your spouse around threats. I just think it one, it reduces your negotiating leverage if they're threats, not promises,

and two, it damages the relationship. In negotiations, you also have to remember, and we seem to be well beyond that in this instance, in negotiations, you wanna remember that at some point, you're probably gonna have to work with the other party. You're going to have to do deals with them, get along with them, share the same household with them, raise kids with them.

And it's worth, in my opinion, and this does not apply to this because it feels like the train has left the station on any level of mutual respect between our two parties. But when you're negotiating with people, you wanna remember, I think it's okay to leave a little bit on the table. Also recognize that in that specific negotiation,

you're not only negotiating around the terms in that moment, but you're also creating a context for the relationship moving forward. So showing up in threatening nations with tariffs when you are the much more powerful economic entity, that is probably going to work in the short run. You may get something. In this instance, President Trump, as far as I can tell,

got nothing, extracted nothing from Mexico and Canada. But we are the bigger economy. We could literally tank their economies. So if we want, we could extract our pound of flesh. The question is what happens after that with the relationship and the benefits we accrue from what is a very strong relationship. When these countries show up to help fight our fires,

they follow us into wars in the Gulf, these relationships long-term are an enormous asset. So what are you getting short-term in exchange for something or in exchange for giving up something perhaps more valuable and that is a strong relationship? Success is the following. Success, I would argue, is really just comes down

to two things. First, a series of small examples of discipline every day that add up to something huge. Take advantage of the flaw in the species and try and save five or 10 or 20 bucks a day. That is 150, 300, 600 bucks a month when you're young. Time will go a lot faster than you think. And that will add up to a great deal of money.

And by the time you're 30 or 35, you'll have the down payment on a house. And by the time you're my age, you're not gonna be worried about money. You're gonna feel some sense of security and be able to spend more time with your kids and hopefully your grandkids. Don't think about working out every day, try and do something.

And you're gonna wake up one day, three months, six months, nine months, and think, wow, I feel better. I feel more confident, I'm less depressed. I like the way I look naked. I feel more confident. I'm less depressed. I like the way I look naked. I feel more confident. I feel less angry. I feel more masculine.

I feel more feminine, whatever it might be. A series of small efforts made every day that is an expression of discipline. And then the second thing, the second key to success is putting yourself in a room of opportunities when you're not in the room, when you're not physically in a room of opportunities when you're not in the room, when you're not physically in the room. And how do you do that?

You create allies along the way. You don't look at relationships as a transaction. You help people when they're less powerful than you. Any opportunity to help someone, any opportunity to make them feel good about themselves is an opportunity for you at some point in the future to be put in a room of opportunity, even if you at some point in the future to be put in a room of opportunity, even if you're not physically in the room. Hey, we're looking for a new head of media

planning and the person thinks, I know this really wonderful woman or this really wonderful man, we should interview him or her. You know what? Matt is a really good guy and really good at what he does. I'm going to personally vouch for him and I hope he is hired. Having an evangelist internally, and how do you create evangelists? A series of small investments every day in relationships. A small expression of discipline every day around money, around fitness, around kindness, such that you put yourself in a room of opportunities even when

you're not physically there. Okay, anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Dr. Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the mental health coaching company Healthy Gamer. We discussed with Dr. K how tech addiction affects mental health, the science of relationships, and the challenges men face today. So with that, we'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. K. Support for the show comes from Vanta. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded.

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on this podcast. Indeed.com slash voxca. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Get groceries delivered across the DTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. K, a psychiatrist and a co-founder of

the mental health coaching company, Healthy Gamer. Dr. K, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Houston, Texas. Dr. K, how do you describe what you do? I support the mental health of the digital generation. I love that. And tell us about your journey. You went from being a video game addict

to studying to be a monk, to later becoming a doctor. Give us a little bit, give us some color on your origin story. So my parents are both doctors. They're first generation immigrants from India. I was born in Texas and grew up here. And then basically like I was genetically pre-med. So I'm one of these like South Asian diaspora kids that, you know, was told like when I was nine years old, like my dad told me and my brother, he was like,

one of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all is going to be a lawyer. And so grew up kind of genetically pre-med, really had no interest in it. And so was like pre-med as a freshman in college and then just completely started like spiraling. So like I had freedom for the first time in my life, like was playing video games a lot, joined a fraternity, failed out of like college basically was on academic probation,

had a bunch of Fs. And then my parents tried everything. So they tried to like, you know, they tried tough love, they tried being supportive. They were like really good parents. They just didn't know what they were dealing with. So they didn't understand what was going on. So after two years of second year in college, I was barely able to like pass my classes. Where were you in school, Dr. J?

The University of Texas at Austin. And then after that, I, my dad like was like, look, we got to do something. This is not working. So he's like, I think you need to go to India. And this is one of the rare times that I chose to listen. So I was like, why do I need to go? And he was like, I don't know. It's just nothing else is working.

So I boarded a flight about one week later and went to an ashram, which I had never been to before. And then really, the first two weeks were, like, some of the worst, probably the lowest point of my life. And then after that, discovered something amazing, which was, like, when I was in college, I remember being frustrated with myself. Like, I knew I needed to, like, go to class.

All I needed to do was show up, because I had missed so many days of class that each subsequent day of class I missed, I dropped a whole letter grade. So it was like, if I miss one more day of class, the highest grade I can possibly get is a B. And then one more day was a C and one more, so like over the course of five days,

I went from A to F and I just couldn't get myself to go. Like I couldn't understand why I would play games when I know I shouldn't. I had no control over myself. So what I found in India was a system that teaches you how human beings work. Where do desires come from? What really is the nature of willpower? What's the nature of attachment?

And I absolutely fell in love with it. So I felt like it was kind of like an owner's manual for myself. So decided to become a monk, spent seven years, sort of focused on that goal, would spend my summers in India, and then my teachers would give me a set of practices. But they also said, I tried to become a monk at 21. And they said, you need to go back, finish your school,

go get a doctoral degree of any kind, doesn't matter how, what kind. And then when you're 30 years old, if you still want to become a monk, then you can take your v kind. And then when you're 30 years old, if you still want to become a monk, then you can take your vows. So I was like, okay, fine. So they're like, go participate in the world for a little while. And then if you want to, you can come back. So I would travel back and forth, study more advanced meditation, and then ended up meeting my wife, which I'm pretty sure my teachers understood that I wasn't ready to give up my life yet, and then ultimately decided to try to go to medical school.

And that was because one of my teachers said, anything you try to do in the spiritual world is going to be way harder than anything you can accomplish in the material world. So try to do something very difficult in the material world, and that'll be training for a spiritual path. So I had set my target on becoming a doctor, also because I wanted to understand humans from the other side, right? So I learned this owner's manual of the self,

but then what does medicine teach us? So went to medical school at Tufts, and then realized I loved psychiatry towards the end. I loved sitting with people. the end. I loved like sitting with people. The mind is my favorite organ. And then to the chagrin of my family, decided to become a psychiatrist, ended up training at Mass General McLean in Harvard, was faculty there for a couple of years. So I want to go back, there was a point, to a certain point, you and I have a very similar

origin story. I went to UCLA, I think UT Austin, they're kind of similar, big land grant public schools. I also joined a fraternity. I was 17 when I showed up to UCLA. I had a lack of self-discipline. I like you was getting a lot of Fs. I was on academic probation. I didn't have video games like you did.

I wonder if I really, and I didn't have porn. If I'd had video games and porn, I'm not sure I would have. I mean, I went on academic probation and all I needed to get was a C average to get another two semesters before they would kick me out. So I kept doing that over and over. But I decided while it was a kind of, I don't know, a fairly superficial life void of meaning,

as far as superficial lives void of meaning go, it was pretty good. And I was enjoying myself. You decided to get on a plane for India. Like what, what happened or what was your thought process? I'm at UT Austin in a fraternity. You know, that's, that to me sounds like a pretty good life. Even if you're not doing well academically, what inspired you to get on a plane and go to India?

Like, did you hit, was there a moment where you hit sort of rock bottom or did your parents force you? Like, what happened there? Yeah, so I remember I had a conversation with my dad in our living room at like two in the morning. It was like one of these conversations where he was kind of like done,

like not in a bad way, but he's like, look, I've tried everything. You know, I've tried being supportive. I've tried tough love, like nothing is working. So he's like, and he was like, look, your life is not moving in a good direction. I knew that, like, I mean, sure, in some ways it was a lot of fun. So I loved my first two years of college

from a dopaminergic standpoint, but from like a meaning, a purpose, I was just sort of existing. So there's a really interesting conception from existential depression, which is that so existential depression is kind of like when we struggle to like look into the future. And so we can't move forward in life. So instead, what we start doing is we start moving laterally. So there's no point

in moving towards something. So I'm just going to spend all of my energy in the lateral direction. So this is like partying, like partying never leads to anywhere. Video games never lead to anywhere. So I was spending all of my time engaging in actions that don't lead to anything. So I knew that something was horribly wrong. Like I was out of control. Like I didn't, I mean, I enjoyed, let's say a four hour brick of my life, but I did not enjoy a four week period. Like I was, I wasn't going anywhere. I understood that he understood that. I now understand that this is all karmic too. So, so there was just like, there were just no other options. And I asked my dad, I was like,

what am I gonna learn there, why? And he's like, I don't know. And it was really interesting because I think oftentimes when we give guidance to lost young men, we never say you should do this and then they ask why. And then you say, I don't know, right? We always like give them the answer at the very beginning. But I think in retrospect,

something about that like really appealed to me that, look, you don't know what's going on with your life. We don't know how to fix it, but you gotta try something. How do you discern, I drank a shit ton of alcohol, I smoked a lot of pot, but I never felt like I was an addict. And at some point they were probably, they were definitely inhibiting my academic progress.

They were probably, I would argue that it was worth it. I, it created a lot of friendships, a lot of figuring out my limits. I've, you know, I've often said I got more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me, but it also had it gotten just a touch more frequent. I could have easily gone down a very dark path. If you're someone listening to this right now and you're at college or not in college and you think, I'm playing a lot of video games,

I'm drinking a lot, I'm smoking a lot of pot, I'm watching a lot of porn, what are in your mind the signals that discern between what I'll call youthful if a bit reckless behavior or irresponsible behavior and when you are an addict and you need to do something. So I've got kind of two answers. So one is like a psychiatric answer, right? So we say that impairment of function is what caused it. Where's the dividing line for addiction? Well, if it impairs your function, you have an addiction.

So if it's interfering with your academic performance, if it's interfering with your job, if it's interfering with your physical health, your mental health, your relationships, that's the threshold of addiction. Now, in your question, I hear two things. I'm not, I have a psychiatric answer, but then I also have like a life answer,

which is that sometimes addictions, and I do a lot of addiction psychiatry, sometimes addictions are part of our journey. So there's this concept of something called post-traumatic growth, which is like, you know, you kind of say that you got more out of alcohol than alcohol did of you. So I was addicted to video games, but I started a company called Healthy Gamer

because it's a part of my journey. Just because I had an addiction doesn't mean that, I'm addicted to video games, but I started a company called Healthy Gamer because it's a part of my journey. Just because I had an addiction doesn't mean that, and people will ask me, if you could go back and change something about your life, what would you change? I say, honestly, absolutely nothing, because I'm pretty happy with where I am now, and that even addictions, where without my video game addiction, I would not have

walked the journey of self-discovery that I did. See, we talk about addiction as an impairment of function, but I think that mental illness is oftentimes a sign that who we are does not fit with our circumstances. So one of the biggest challenges that I see as a psychiatrist is that when we kind of medicate problems away, we can maintain an unhealthy way of like living life, right?

So if I have like back pain and I start taking opiates, I may continue to engage in the behaviors that are creating back pain. So you were kind of asking how do you know, you know, when an addiction is part of your journey and that's kind of the way that I see it is that, yeah, it's causing a problem now, but it is also a signal for you to fundamentally make a change in your life so that there's something within you that is not gelling with the society around you. And that's kind of really like the way that I see some of these issues like addiction. It's like addiction is a sign that something in your life is not going well.

You require some sort of external crutch to cope with all of the negativity in your life. The real solution to addiction is not just sobriety, it's fixing all of the sources of those negativities that you need the substance to deal with. Yeah, I like that. And one of the issues I have with the industrial medical complex is like, okay, you know, doctors Atia and Huberman, who I think are fantastic,

I've had them both on the podcast, have basically declared war on alcohol. And where they see drunkenness for most people, most young people, I see togetherness. I think there's an upside to alcohol. And I find it's very binary. The people, my guess is my son plays, and I'm gonna speak specifically, I have a 14 year old boy, and he plays probably about 30 to 60 minutes

of video games a day. That sounds about right. And I hear him upstairs and he'll let out this battle cry. He'll go, I'll literally hear from the upstairs, and then I hear all his friends laughing and him laughing and them talking and it's group dynamics and teams and learning how to lose. And I actually think video games are additive to his life. And it's as a parent at the same time, there's been periods in his life where he'll hide his phone and go into the bathroom and pretend he's not well.

And in the bathroom, it won't come out. And I know he's on TikTok. And it is really, this is a long-winded way of saying with kids or with adults, I'm addicted to my phone. I just am. If I'm anywhere bored, sometimes I make excuses to go to the bathroom at dinner so I can check my phone. And I'm not proud of that, but at least I'm old enough

to recognize it and modulate it. I really worry about the young male brain and screen time and video games and social and porn. What do you think as a young man or as a parent, you can, you know, what are some practices or best practices for ensuring you are trying to use these things in a positive way is your view, put time limits on it with kids, not under a certain age with your kids, what will be your approach, put time limits on it with kids, not under a certain age, with your kids, what will be your approach to screen time?

I think one of the biggest challenges with raising kids with technology nowadays is that I think most of the advice is geared towards mothers. I think we don't talk enough from a dad's perspective. If we look at single parent households, more likely to be single parent moms. And I think, first of all, if you're a dad out there, the most important thing,

because some of these problems like pornography are problems that are gonna be foreign to moms and foreign to daughters. So age of first exposure to pornography is usually on average nine. So kids are first exposure to pornography is usually on average nine. So kids are getting exposed to pornography at a very young age. And, you know, a lot of times, like, we don't really know what to do about it. So I'd say the first thing to do is like, talk to your kids, try to explain to them,

try to explain to them that they're growing up in a world where all of these apps like TikTok and pornography and all this kind of stuff, all of these people have a goal to try to addict you. That's their goal. That's their monetization model. So I think sort of sitting down with your kids and really talking to them about what impact is this having on your brain? What attracts you to it?

Trying to really help your child exercise some like meta awareness about if you're sitting in your bathroom and you're scrolling TikTok, like what's up with that? Why are you doing that? Like what's driving that? And over the course of let's say one or two months, really sitting down with your kid and asking them,

okay, let's take a look at your like screen app usage. So you've spent 32 hours over the last two months on TikTok. How do you feel about that? Is this the kind of life that you want to live? Two months, last two weeks. Yeah, right? So average cell phone use is four to six hours a day. Average TikTok usage in 14-year-old males in the US is 17 hours a week.

Yeah, so this is like, and really sitting down, I think the biggest mistake that parents make is that we try to regulate our technology, regulate the technology used for our kids. So we try to do things like limit screen time. But instead, what I think is way, way, way more effective is having your child understand why it's important from their perspective. Do you want to spend 17 hours a week on TikTok? Is this really the kind of life that you wanna live? And once you start to get to those kinds of questions and conversations, and I find that like, you know, dads having these kinds of conversations with their son, you know, how much pornography do you watch?

Like you shouldn't ask, do you watch pornography? I think you start with how much do you watch? How do you feel about that? Is this the kind of life that you wanna live? Like, and oftentimes what we'll find is when you have these kinds of conversations with your kids, what you'll discover is that your kids are being drawn to the technology

because something is missing in their life. The reason I watch porn is because I have a crush on a girl, I'm 15 years old and I don't know how to talk to her. And so then what a beautiful thing happens when you start talking to your kids about why they use technology, what's going on there, you'll start to uncover things

that you can actually start to address. And so then, you know, hopefully if you're, you know, you're a good dad and you've got a kid, you can be like, okay, let's have a conversation about how to talk to girls. And so I think this is something that's really missing. We're all about regulation and taking things away instead of understanding what is driving the teenage mind

to technology and offering it a healthier alternative. I think I'm gonna follow your dad's lead and put him on a plane for India. I like that. I thought that was a gangster move. And not only that, I appreciate that you actually agreed. I think that's such an interesting pivotal moment in your life. What have you found, especially with young men,

is the most common demon they're fighting that they need to address? Where the addiction itself is just their attempt to medicate it, what is the most common shape and manifestation that that demon is when they get to the real problem? Young men are being blamed no matter what they do. The basic problem is that there's no way for a young man to win in this world. That's the most common thing.

Manifest is all kinds of things. I'll give you a simple example, okay? So nowadays we're all saying, oh, like, men should be in touch with their emotions, right? Like, emotional expression is healthy, correct? And like, there's no such thing as like good emotion and bad emotion, right? Like, these are all things we hear we say to young men. So if I'm a man and I get angry and I raise my tone of voice, is this considered an acceptable emotional expression?

No, it's abusive. Absolutely. I don't feel safe around you. And now this is the other thing that I see so much in society today, which I think is very, very unhealthy. Your feelings of safety become my responsibility. So I saw this all the time when I was doing working in the emergency room at Mass General,

we would get kids from Harvard and MIT and University Health Services and stuff all the time. One day I was talking to one of the chiefs of security at MIT, and I was like, a lot of students feel unsafe. He said something to me that stuck with me so well. He said, my job is not to make students feel unsafe. And he said something to me that stuck with me so well. He said, my job is not to make students feel safe. My job is to keep students safe. And there's a very big difference.

So now what started to happen is that if someone feels unsafe around a man, that isn't their own unprocessed trauma. That's not their lack of emotional regulation. This now becomes the man's fault. So men are now put in basically unwinnable situations. So women, you can look at global kind of survey data about dating preferences and things like that.

More than 50% of people who graduate from college are now women, but the average woman wants the male that she dates to make more money than they do, that's just becoming an untenable situation. So we teach kids, men, boys, it's okay to express your emotions, but we punish them anytime they express their emotions. We don't teach, we say, oh, men need,

like boys need to do this and they need to do this. No one is accepting responsibility for teaching men how to express emotions. No one is accepting responsibility for holding the space for that kind of thing. So we're setting a lot of fundamentally unachievable societal standards for men. And then we do one other thing. Young men and men in general are the only class in society that does not deserve help. So there's such a systemic bias that if it's a man, like so we say, oh, like it's not our job to help you.

So I do think that young men are getting a lot of mixed messages. At the same time, well, I'll put forth some, I think about this a lot, and I'll put forth some other theses and you respond to them. I think an even, perhaps an even bigger issue is male involvement or lack of male involvement.

You had, you're blessed, you had a male role model that tried really hard, showed you that he loved you, was president in your life, noticed, gave witness to your life, and then ultimately helped you kind of get back on track. And there's a lot of young men who don't have the blessings you had. And without the presence of a male role model,

whether it's a coach, whether it's an uncle that gets involved in your life, hopefully your dad, brothers that care about you. For me, it was my fraternity brothers at UCLA. They took an interest in my life. I remember my, I don't know if you had an interest, my big brother, like four weeks into my freshman year, he's like, dude, you gotta smoke less pot, man.

You're gonna fail out your first semester. Stop smoking, stop getting high every night. And because he noticed my life and I didn't have a present father, but the absence of men being involved in young men's lives for a lot of reasons, whether it's family court, whether it's male abandonment, whatever it might be, a lot of single family homes

and we can go into the reasons or that's a longer conversation. And also a lack of economic opportunity for young men because so many jobs now require the skills that women are showing at a greater propensity and they've earned it ends up when we leveled the playing field, they blew by us academically and they've earned it. Don't want to do anything to get in the way of that. But it

used to be one-third of jobs required a college degree. Now it's two-thirds. Women, it ends up, are better suited for college than most men. So there's just a lack of economic opportunity. Do you see, I see those two as maybe even being bigger causes for men trying to medicate than the mixed messages they might be getting from society and women. Your thoughts? So here's why I think men medicate. So men are taught to be something called external problem solvers. So this is the way we're conditioned. So if the world is unhappy with us and we're a man, we should step up and fix it, right? So if I'm married to someone who is unhappy with the amount of money that I make,

I should earn a promotion. If I get a bad performance review, I need to do better next time. So what we're taught is, man, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but anytime there's a negative event in life, this creates an emotion within me. There's this external thing

that creates an emotional response within me. And the way that we're taught to deal with that emotion is not internally, but we have to correct the external circumstance, right? So if I can get my boss to give me a good performance review, if I can prove to myself that this person is an idiot, then the negative emotion goes away. Does that kind of make sense?

If someone disapproves of me and I feel shame, the way to resolve my shame is to earn their approval. And if I can earn their approval, then the shame goes away. So this is a huge problem. This is why men, I think, turn to substances, because we are not taught when you feel shame, we are actually conditioned to be, to live up to the expectations of others.

We use an external tool from the outside. It can be a promotion, a drink of alcohol, marijuana, video games, pornography. We use things outside of us to manage and control our internal emotional state. That's why I think men are three to four times more likely to become addicted to anything than women are. Yeah, it's really back to your point about a lack of empathy. I mean, to a certain extent, we don't have an opiate or homeless crisis. We have a male opiate, a male homeless crisis. You know, like as you said, three out of four, four out of five suicides. When someone comes in with an addiction issue, what I'd like you to do if you can is stack rank the addictions, the addictions.

The addictions, when they walk in the door, you think, okay, we can handle this, or an addiction walks through the door and you think, oh no. Stack rank house, from what you think are most serious, generally speaking, to least serious, or most addressable, I should say, addictions. So my first answer is that I think all addictions

are addressable because their root is the same. This cycle of addiction, which is I'm going to use this external thing to manage my internal emotional state, that's common for all addictions. So Norah Volkow, I don't know how to pronounce her last name, who's the head of NIMH or maybe the head of addictions in the US, you know, she talks about, illustrates this beautifully. There are just a lot of common pathways to addiction. And addictions, for anything to be addictive, it needs two requirements.

One is to give pleasure, and the second is to take away pain. So in that sense, there's a very common route and common solution to addiction. As long as we can help people manage their pain in other healthier ways, then we can conquer any addiction. That's my belief.

That being said, I think probably the hardest addiction to treat is probably body dysmorphia. So when people get addicted to a version of themselves, this is the hardest addiction to treat. So anytime, I'll give you examples of this. So like, what does that mean, addiction to aversion of yourself? When someone comes in and says, I love marijuana, not because it makes me high,

but it allows me to be normal. I like the normal me. The hardest addictions I've had to treat are when marijuana allows someone to participate in a normal life the way that all of the other humans do. I've worked with people who have addictions to things like stimulant medication, like people with ADHD. So they exist in the world, they can't focus,

they have difficulty regulating their emotions because that's a feature of ADHD. They struggle with issues of confidence. And if they take Adderall, they feel normal. They feel like confident. I love this version of myself. And I also see that in body dysmorphia, where it's like, I don't want to be grotesque,

I don't want to be ugly, I don't want to be pathetic, I want to achieve, I want to be good, I want to be proud of myself, I want to be happy when I look to achieve. I want to be good. I want to be proud of myself. I want to be happy when I look in the mirror and I see myself. This is what they strive for. And what we know about genetics is like, you know, when you have an addictive, let's say, personality, you may just have a drug of choice.

So you know, your opioid receptors, your mu receptors may just be genetically a little bit different. In some people, GABA receptors, which are for alcohol, may be a little bit different. So you may have just a genetic vulnerability to a particular drug of choice, and that's why human beings have drugs of choice. But the underlying mechanism of addiction is pretty shared, and the hardest ones to treat

are when the substance allows you to be a version of yourself that you like, and you don't like the sober you. We'll be right back. Over the last few weeks, America's health and science agencies have been shaken. There's been funding freezes, communications gag orders, censorship of research.

It's really a chaotic picture. I'm really scared. The United States was the best place in the world to do science, and that has never felt more threatened in my career than it does right now. This week on Unexplainable, what does all this mean for the future of science in America? Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday.

The Republicans have been saying lots of things. Just yesterday, their leader said he wants to own Gaza? The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. On Monday, the Secretary of State said an entire federal agency was insubordinate. USAID in particular, they refuse to tell us anything. We won't tell you what the money's going to, where the money's for, who has it. Over the weekend, Vice President Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, tweeted about the

same agency that, you know, gives money to the poorest people on earth. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead. But what have the Democrats been saying? People are aroused. I haven't seen people so aroused in a very, very long time. Huh. That's a weird way to put it, Senator.

We're going to ask what exactly is the Democrats' strategy to push back on Republicans on Today Explained? I want to go somewhere a little bit more positive here. One of the things you talk about that is really super interesting is what science can tell us about the formation of relationships and falling in love. What does the latest research reveal about how we form de-connections and how is technology reshaping this process or put more, more basely, how can someone today

in this digital age find love? Oh, it's so hard. So, so first thing to understand is that, you know, we have birth rate crises in parts of East Asia. I don't know if you're familiar with like the 4B movement in South Korea. And so there's like, you know, people are getting engaging in fewer long-term relationships. We're seeing a lot of like situationships and friends with benefits. People are there's a loneliness crisis. There's a mental health crisis. There's a dating crisis.

And all three of these things are correlated with an increase in technology use across society. So how do these two things actually interface? So this is what a lot of people, you know, don't understand. So falling in love, if you really think about it, is an addiction. So what we know is that falling in love is governed by our dopaminergic circuitry. And let's just think about this, right? So if you're lucky enough to have fallen in love,

you are obsessed with this person. So if we look at dopamine in the mesocortical circuit, this is the nucleus accumbens, this is our addictive part of the brain, dopamine does three things, gives us pleasure, gives us craving, and reinforces behavior. So when you're in love with someone, you crave them, you

think about them all the time. Like literally, like what happens in your brain, these can best be described as cravings. They're preoccupations with this person. And then when you're in this person's presence, the presence alone creates dopamine in your brain. So just like sitting there and being with them feels like the most amazing thing in the world. So and there's also other things that we know about addiction. So addictions also suppress the risk assessment parts of your brain. So once you fall in love or your best friend falls in love, they start to change who they are.

They start making stupid decisions and all of your friends get worried about you when you fall in love because you don't realize you're missing all of these red flags. That's not a bug, that's a feature. So thousands of years ago, millions of years ago when our brains were evolving, they realized there were two humans. One human who was able to accurately assess risk and one human whose dopaminergic circuitry was suppressing risk, which one of them ended up mating? The person who suppresses risk. So dopamine creates impulsivity, creates craving, creates pleasure, suppresses our ability to gauge risk.

And this is what falling in love is. Falling in love is stupid, it's beautiful, it's idiotic. I mean, I jokingly say that young people should go out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions. Doesn't that mean we should be a little bit more reckless with our emotions? Yes and no.

So I think the way that we should correct this is by fixing what causes the root problem. So the root problem is that when we use social media, when we use technology, it alters our dopaminergic circuitry. And those alterations, once your brain changes from social media use or video game use or pornography use, that same brain becomes more incapable of falling in love.

And so what I'll tell people like who are, you know, struggling to fall in love is before you go on a date, walk for one hour and do not touch a device. What I find is that people who do that, the quality of their dates improves. There's another really fascinating mechanism. So remember that all social media and the technology and all this kind of stuff suppresses our negative emotional circuitry and evokes emotional circuitry. And one of the key factors for falling in love is shared emotional experience. So there's a beautiful study that illustrated this.

So they had two groups of couples go on dates where they met on a bridge. But there are two bridges. One is a stone bridge that's stable. One is a wood bridge that's rickety. And what they found is that when you meet in the middle of like a stone bridge that's stable. One is a wood bridge that's rickety. And what they found is that when you meet in the middle of like a wood bridge that's rickety, we're both a little bit scared. And so since there is a shared emotional experience

between these, I think we're heteronormative dates. When you have two human beings that are both share the same emotion and we're both scared on the bridge, we actually bind together a little bit. The empathic connection becomes strong. And when we meet in a stable place where there is not a shared emotional state,

then those people feel less connected. I wanna bring it down to kind of a ground level. And that is, I think that probably, I mean, in addition to a good job and supportive parents and a male role model, if I could wish anything more of on young men right now, it'd be relationships. Not only friendships for romantic relationships, only one in three men under the age of 30 is in a relationship. Two in three women under the age of 30. And you think, well,

that's mathematically impossible. It's not, because women want more economically and emotionally viable men, so they're dating older. And I find without the joy and probably more importantly, the guardrails of a relationship, men just come off the tracks. That women reinvest that energy in work and friends and men reinvest it in video games and conspiracy theory. Your thoughts on limiting the amount of porn such that a young man, quite frankly,

builds up more desire and is willing to take more risks in terms of meeting women or putting himself in a context or another man where he can take that leap of faith and endure the rejection, take the risks, thoughts? This is the biggest problem that I see right now. We are coping with our negative emotions instead of harnessing them. So this is something that I want you to really think about.

Why do human beings have negative emotions? Right, so negative emotions are first of all, much more powerful motivators of behavior than positive emotions. Curiosity will get you interested in something for a little emotions. Curiosity will get you interested in something for a little while, joy will get you interested in something in a little while. Shame, sadness, and anger are incredibly powerful motivators.

Now, why are they such powerful motivators? Because these are the signals that our brain sends us to tell us we need to make a change. If I'm ashamed of my body, the solution to that in the way that our brain sends us to tell us we need to make a change. If I'm ashamed of my body, the solution to that in the way that our brain evolved because we couldn't avoid people. We were in like tribes of 300. So I had to see these people every single day.

That shame is a powerful motivator to change the way that I look, change the way that I act. And even this hunger for companionship, this sexual drive, which is one of the strongest drives in the human being overall, is what causes us to reach out and overcome our shame. And now what's happening with things like pornography and technology, social media, video games, is we are taking all of these negative emotions, which normally are the most powerful fuel to allow us to fix our lives,

and we're wiping them away with things like porn or video games. And now what we're doing is we're disabling our primary motivational fuel, which is negative emotion. And you'll see this all the time, like even if you look at movies, right? When the hero becomes a hero, it's not curiosity that makes them a hero,

it's a powerful negative emotion. A sense of betrayal, a sense of anger, a sense of shame. I'm never gonna be this way again, never again. I'm never gonna be weak again. And that's what drives them to change. And so what we're actually doing is short-circuiting our most potent motivational drives through things like pornography. If you could give, and this is a difficult

question to answer, but advice to younger men in terms of, you know, they're starting out, maybe their first job or college as it relates to addiction, as it relates to establishing healthy relationship, any practices you recommend that are more likely to set them on a strong path? What advice do you have to young men as it relates to recognizing addiction, screen time activities, behavior modification in a digital age where obviously addiction

is kind of sort of one click away everywhere. So I'd probably say that, see, the reason we rely so much on these technological devices and addictions is because we cannot tolerate life without them, right? So if we think about, if I told you to take your phone away from a day, for a day, it would be really hard for people to exist.

So one thing that we do in our community is a beautiful meditation practice that we tell people to do, which is stare at a wall for an hour and just look at what comes up. So at the beginning, you'll be bored. And then like the basic problem is that dudes today are trying to always move away from themselves and towards something. I need to be sexier. I need to be healthier. I need to be more fit. I need to have more friends. I need to join a fraternity. I need to be like these guys. One of the weirdest things I've always heard is the men that I work with long for rock bottom. They want nothing more than rock bottom. I want to hit rock bottom because that's when I know

I'm going to die or I will be reborn. They long for that more than anything else. They just want anything except for this numb existence. They would rather break it or make it, one of the two, but just no more of this limbo. They hate limbo. The way to get out of that limbo is to first of all, stop paying attention and stop caring about the world thinks,

because you're getting all of this contrary advice. So be a more masculine man so that you can attract women, or be more emotionally available so that you can attract women. Make more money, assert yourself, or be more passive. There's just no way that you can make anyone else happy. Like you've tried and it doesn't work. So instead what you need to do is sit your ass in front of a wall and look at what comes up for one hour. And what you really need to do for your compass in life is listen to what comes up. Because you've tried to make the rest of the world happy,

it ain't working. So stop trying and start trying to make yourself happy. Listen to the signals on the inside and try to make those signals happy, irrespective of how painful it feels. Because you will get better at managing the pain. Whatever you do, you will get better at. The problem is that we end up trying to make everybody else happy, avoiding all of our emotions, and so then we become puppets to the world around us. Dr. Alok Kanogia, known as Dr. K, is a psychiatrist and co-founder of the mental health coaching company Healthy Gamer, which aims to help with modern stressors, including social media, video games, and online dating. He joins us from his home in Houston. And also we should note

that Dr. K is also a popular Twitch streamer who engages with audiences by discussing mental health, addressing issues including addiction, motivation and depression. The Good Doctor has a book out, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer and Power Struggles Break Bad Screen Habits and Transfer Your Relationships with Your Kids. it was published last year. I really enjoyed this conversation. Uh, Dr. If any, I find your story inspiring. I mean, what I just would want to, I wish what has happened to you for more people.

I think what w it's such a neat story and such a nice, just so nice to hear about a young man who kind of comes off the rails and then ends up, you know, on the fucking Concord somehow. I just think it's such a nice story. Congratulations on all your blessings and your success This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the ProffG Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our ProffG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.