Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Have Gen Z and Gen Alpha lost touch with the real world? Gen Z entrepreneur and founder of Touch Grass Together, Adnan Alkhalili, thinks so.

“I grew up very natively online, scarily so … I grew up on the Discord world. I grew up on the gaming world as well … and even the friends I had in real life, we would end up not even spending time together. We would spend all of our time online. So they’d be in their house, I’d be in my house,” Alkhalili says.

The online world traps Gen Z into an escapist reality that their parents do not comprehend. Even good parents, he said, have no idea what their kids are doing online and to what extent they live online: “If you talk to any Gen Z and have them explain it to somebody that’s not Gen Z, the person who’s not Gen Z—maybe a later millennial and older—will actually have no idea what they’re talking about. It sounds like another language.”

Gen Z and Gen Alpha, he said, spend most of their time indoors on their devices; they don’t move much. They eat addictive processed food and drink lots of addictive energy drinks to combat tiredness.

“My metabolic health was destroyed,” he told me in our interview. “I felt like my life was over. … I was so tired of life that I felt like I was in my 70s or 80s.”

Now he’s helping other young people exit this lifestyle with Touch Grass Together, a health and wellness initiative focused on metabolic health and real life community experiences: “We’ve come up with a framework called the touch grass moment. And ultimately, we’re trying to recreate human ritual.”

This framework, he explained, is based on four core components: light, movement, nourishment, and human connection. The goal? Getting Gen Z off their devices and out of their rooms, getting them to do things together outside such as touching grass or jumping into leaf piles and eating healthy food.

But how to achieve that? In our interview, Alkhalili talks about the constructive role technology can play in helping Gen Z to escape “brain rot” online. Is there also a constructive role for AI? What about social media? And should schools forbid smartphones?

<em>Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD. </em>
<h2>RUSH TRANSCRIPT</h2>
Jan Jekielek:

Adnan Alkhalili, it is such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

So a lot of people, I think, that are watching this show, including me, do not fully grasp what it’s like because we didn’t grow up in the virtual world. We grew up in a physical world that sort of transitioned over time into a somewhat virtual world. We don’t really understand what it’s like for a Gen Z or younger person to be growing up. So tell me about that.

Oh, I’d like to start off with a comparison, right? So I think what most people are used to is the first interactions you have when you are first born, right? You have interactions with a lot of people near you, right? So you have interactions with your family, you have interactions with your, you know, some people that come over to your house, right? The baby is exposed to so many different things and learns so many words, right?

For someone like me, when I grew up, and especially for Gen Alpha now growing up, what they first see is they learn all of the words that they know in their vocabulary from just an iPad, right? So they learn everything they know from a device; they learn that all of the communication skills they have come from the virtual world, right? From online content. So instead of learning from a parent teaching a child, right, a parent teaching their son or daughter some kind of new context and language, they’re learning that from the virtual world because language is forming in the virtual world.

Is it really that extreme, though? I mean, like you’re in a family, and you’re communicating with people, and so forth.

It sounds a little bit extreme, but it’s more extreme than that. Unfortunately, the reality is that a lot of people, although they’re used to obviously communicating with their parents and hearing some form of language from their parents, are consuming most of their content now from YouTube videos, right? Parents often now give their children just YouTube videos to watch. So, for example, Cocomelon, right? I’m sure you’ve heard of that, right? These are like these online songs. I mean, in the past, they had TV shows, right? They had, like, you know, I mean, this is even recent. We had SpongeBob, right?

Now, nobody really watches SpongeBob even. They watch just basically online influencers speaking directly to the child. And so this is when they’re a baby. As they grow up, though, I mean, they’re going to school, right? They’re spending time with their teachers, but their content is coming from a smart board, right? And then they’re having a phone at a really early age. And even the schools that avoid phones still give out iPads and Chromebooks, right?

So now the kids are communicating on iPads and Chromebooks. And so now they’re having all of their communication in the virtual world. In contrast to somebody who never had that, all of their communication skills and now their relationship skills are transforming and being created online, vs. when a person might be growing up and they might make their friends in the community, you know, sit on the sidewalk and play with the mud, right? This is like the typical non-Gen Z experience.

But nowadays we don’t really sit in the mud outside because we stay mostly indoors. And so the generic Gen Z experience is you wake up probably in a dark room, you wake up in a very, very closed environment, you reach for your phone, and you just start scrolling or texting your friends and communicating. You don’t leave your room, right? You don’t go outside and take walks. It’s bad.

And part of this story is also that these things are addictive. They’ve been designed to be addictive. So, you know, now your story is beginning to sound, me listening to you say all this, it feels almost unbelievable. But I kind of, I’m believing you as we add the kind of addiction aspect here.

Yes, these are addicting things. Obviously, we know that companies like Facebook and Meta are creating algorithms that are basically getting young people to continue scrolling, right? They’re made to appeal to the person’s For You page. And so obviously it makes sense that these people would be online. But the other thing is, beside the algorithms and the addiction aspect, the fact that these things are so readily available to young people is why they’re able to participate.

At this point, we’ve kind of reached past the stage where it’s like, yes, it’s addicting to young people, and now it’s just so widely available to them. This is the new medium of how people communicate, so we’re kind of past the addiction because that’s in the past. People are already addicted; that’s already the case, and we’ve reached so much addiction to the point where now all of the conversation is happening online.

And this is for good and for bad, right? You know, we obviously have people using X for good reasons. But young people are using Discord, which I’m not sure if you’re even aware of. Discord is like the most used platform for young people to communicate on, especially in the gaming world, where people literally just have friends they’ve never met in real life, friends they’ve only met online, and their entire community is online in these servers on Discord.

And I mean that’s just like audio communication while everyone watches the same game being played or something; that’s basically what it is, or…

It’s just people spending all day texting random people on that Discord server.

But it’s like just a way that a whole bunch of people can talk online.

It’s like a WhatsApp group chat, right? But just imagine a WhatsApp group chat that people spend all day on, 24/7, and instead of, you know, those people being people they know in real life, these are people they’ve never met before. In fact, they don’t even know their names. They don’t know where they live. And they basically just make a caricature of their best selves and then put them on that platform.

So you lived in this world, but you somehow pulled yourself out, and you felt the need to do so. Just tell me what happened.

Yes, so I grew up very natively online, scarily so as well. I mean, I grew up in the Discord world. I grew up in the gaming world as well. I played games when I was young; this is something I talk about often. I remember my youngest years, maybe when I was seven-years-old, I would wake up, open my computer, and I would play online platforms. This is like the oldest stuff. This is before we even had the current games.

There was a game called Vantage, and it was this online virtual world where people would talk to each other. They would have friends and families. It was really weird stuff, but that was a very famous game at the time, and I would just wake up and play that all day. Even the friends I had in real life, we would end up not even spending time together; we would spend all of our time online. So they’d be in their house, I’d be in my house, we would call each other, and we would just play.

It got worse over the years because I started to have entire relationships my parents never even knew about. My parents were very good parents, but they had no idea that I had access to so much online that they never were aware of, so even if they tried their best, like, you know, to make sure that my real world was maintained, the virtual world was not maintained. They had no idea who I was talking to, and there was always like the age-old adage, don’t talk to strangers, right? So don’t give the address to random people, don’t tell people where you live, etc., etc.

But even then, like, if you don’t give people your address and you’re staying safe online, you’re still living completely online. And I lived in that world where I was completely online all the time. However, I mean, the thing is, once you reach a stage where you realize how sick you feel, and this was, again, we can talk about this whenever you want, but when I started to feel really, really sick and unhealthy, I started to tear apart all of these layers. And that eventually made me realize that I don’t want to be online anymore.

A lot of variations. I think this is something that I’m happy I can describe, but most young people, I think, are living in this, and they’re not able to articulate it and describe it. It’s the feeling of waking up and you’re still tired, right? You wake up and you’ve had eight hours of sleep, and yet you still feel sluggish the entire day.

Now, the solution most people think of is to take energy drinks, right? I know all of my friends and everybody that I work with and anybody I talk to, they’re like, you know, energy drinks are the way to go, even though they’re always tired after taking the energy drinks. So, you know, you had a full night of sleep; why are you still tired?

And then after that, you know, obviously gaining weight, feeling sluggish all the time, not really wanting to play sports anymore, not wanting to go outside, and the worst symptom is like you don’t even want to participate in anything healthy because you’re just so used to being sluggish and tired. And that’s the feeling I had, and this is before I actually experienced mental health issues, which was the tipping point for me.

And this is, of course, all within the context of staying in this virtual world. Just before we…I want to get more details about what happened to you, but like what percentage of people do you think actually live this way? Because, again, it sounds like a kind of extreme life, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever met a young person in my life who has not been integrated into this world. When I say young, I mean people that I’ve grown up with in Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I would say that, I mean, I can’t give you an exact statistic on this because, again, even if we, like, I don’t even think that you can create an authentic statistic on this kind of thing. But I would say in my experience, where I work with hundreds of young people, right? Like our organization, we work with hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of young people on college campuses and in younger years. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who hasn’t experienced this, where they know what this virtual world is like.

A really good story about  this is I was in a policy room, and they were discussing getting phones out of schools, right? They were discussing getting phones out of schools. And I was the only person in the room that was Gen Z. I was the youngest person in the room. Everybody else was maybe 40 or 50-years-old and older.

And they were discussing, like, okay, we need to get the phones out of schools. One person said it was a national security issue, which I was very happy about. But for the most part, it was like, you know, phones are like tobacco. That was the main thing that they said. And I was really, really upset about this because I realized not a single person in the room even understood how it actually looks.

It’s not that phones are like tobacco or the virtual world is like tobacco because tobacco was something that was just addicting and cool. No, this is an entire world; like this is literally an entire planet that people live on, and it’s— I know you’re saying like it sounds extreme, and this is the problem that if you literally talk to any Gen Z and have them explain it to somebody that’s not Gen Z, the person who’s not Gen Z, maybe a later millennial and older, will actually have no idea what they’re talking about. It sounds like another language, and for us, it’s very hard because while we’re trying to create solutions, we have to talk to people that have never lived in that world. And they actually don’t recognize how scarily important it is that we do look at it because this is real. And it sounds to you like, oh, maybe that’s just some kids are online all the time.

No, even the most wellness-based kids are still online, right? Like, look at the best influencers that we know who are young, right? Those who are talking about health and all of these health initiatives, they’re still plugged in 24/7, right? And I know the best people who are working on stuff like I’m working on; I can still go on social media and find them anytime I want, right? And so this is something that…

It’s just a massive sea change in how society is constructed. I mean, this is what you’re talking about here.

It’s a different society than anyone has ever experienced. And this is completely different, I would say, from hundreds of thousands of years of how humans lived.

Okay, before we go further, you had a kind of transformation. You had an aha moment. Explain to me what happened.

Yes. So I was entering high school. For most young people going into high school, it’s a very scary time, right? You know, you’re meeting new people, meeting new friends. And for me, I was very happy. I was excited. I was running forward. Although I was always online, I was still excited for high school. This was also near the beginning of COVID as well, so it was a time when we were getting even more virtual. I was just sitting around and suddenly I had an anxiety attack.

Now, anxiety attacks are not an experience unique just to me. It’s not like I had something that nobody else had. It’s just at the time I was very insulated, so I thought I was the only one having it. Having an anxiety attack where you feel like nothing physically is wrong with you, right? I went to the doctor in the hospital, and they were like, you’re completely fine.

But my entire world was broken. I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe every single day of the week, and I was 14-years-old and feeling like I couldn’t even breathe every single day—I was constantly aware of my breath. Do you know when someone tells you to think of your breath? Then you start thinking of your breath, and now you have to control your own breath. Have you ever thought of that? I’ve done this, and realized that I can control it, right?

Now, imagine you think that every single hour of the day since you wake up until you sleep, it’s terrifying, right? Where you have to control your own breathing because, you know, you’ve turned off your body’s involuntary ability to do that just by being conscious of it 24/7. And so this was my experience where that was how I basically experienced anxiety. I had OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] as well, which is another experience. But I’m happy I had these experiences because I’m not the only one. If I go into a high school, I can guarantee you that the majority of the kids are experiencing some form of this, and the mental health epidemic in our country is just, it’s absolutely…

Where did this come from? Like, do you have a sense of that now?

100 percent, yes. I’m a big fan of the fact that metabolic health is one of the core drivers of mental illness. If you think about my metabolic health, it was destroyed, right? What was I doing? When it comes to my circadian rhythm, I was waking up in a dark room. I was not even wanting to, and I had a very big light sensitivity. I didn’t want lights on all the time because I was just not—I mean, the more unhealthy you are, the more you have light sensitivity, where you don’t even want to see light because it just, you know, it triggers your body.

And so I didn’t want light. So I would wake up in a dark room. I would go to sleep late on my phone or on games. I would eat really unhealthy food. All of these things caused my metabolic health to completely drain. And so, of course, my brain function was terrible.

Ultimately, it led me to have a panic attack and anxiety and all of these things. And I mean, also, just the fact of having negative health outcomes—having so many bad circumstances when it comes to my health—I was also extremely stressed all the time. My cortisol was a hundred percent up, and I was always stressed. So even though, again, I felt very happy, right? I’m not saying that I had anxiety because I was experiencing mental trauma in my life. I was very happy.

But even then, beneath the emotional surface, there were so many physical things happening, and all of those drained my metabolic health, which ultimately drained my mental health. It was just these kinds of things. I didn’t enter this from a scientific perspective. I just lived the experience. But then I luckily lost weight, right? And that was something big for me, right? I started a journey to lose weight.

This was unrelated to my mental health issues. I just decided, like, I don’t want to be overweight anymore. And so I just started to lose as much weight as I could, mostly through a keto diet, which I know you’re familiar with. This was like by chance; I wasn’t familiar with the science behind it. I kind of just fell into a loop. I think I had seen a Dr. Berg or Mark Hyman video and said, I might as well try it. I tried the calorie stuff before, you know, calorie restricting, all that never worked for me.

So I just tried something. And when I lost the weight, literally every single issue I ever had when it comes to being drained all the time, when it came to my health issues, when it came to any aspects of mental health issues, they disappeared. And this was maybe like a month’s transformation, right? I lost 60 pounds in one month, lost all my mental health issues.

You must have been doing a little more than keto.

No, I was doing keto. And now this is another thing, right? I remember in my school, my guidance counselor would come up to me and ask, are you okay? That was funny, because I was actually more than okay. I wasn’t okay before that, but when I lost so much weight in such a small amount of time, everybody was asking if I was okay. And that’s because it’s not healthy to lose weight in such a short amount of time, but for me, it was.

And this is an experience I’ve seen with a lot of young people and other people in general and a lot of people in the metabolic health world, which is, like, if you are living dysregulated and you fix the things that are causing you to be dysregulated, your body goes back into homeostasis. And so my body’s homeostasis was, you know, what it was. And the funny thing is people were like, oh, he just has a fast. But everyone else my entire life was telling me I had a really bad metabolism until this point.

So ultimately, fixing my metabolic health ended up fixing that. And it was from that same thing, where once I reached a point of feeling healthy is when I also started to look at my screen time. Before that, I didn’t care about my screen time. Before that, I didn’t even look at the virtual world as an issue. But because I started to understand how it feels to be human, I also was able to kind of feel the relationship between myself and just staring at a phone all day.

And the problem is, if you are a young person, you’re either really addicted to your phone or you’re eating really unhealthy food. And if you fix one of those, you can get out of the other. But if you don’t fix one of them, you can’t get out of the other.

I was reading that young people are actually even aware of the fact that they’re not eating well, but they somehow keep doing it. Explain this to me.

Yes, young people are aware that they’re not eating well. And they’re also aware that they’re, in colleges especially, where they’re aware that they’re not eating well, but they’re also aware that when they do eat well, they feel slightly better. And yet they’re still not eating well. And this comes from a really, really difficult aspect of the virtual world, right? Or at least what I call the escapist reality, right? Where they’re constantly on devices to escape from the real world, right?

They’re living online anyway. They grew up online anyway. And they grew up in this escapist world where anytime they wanted to feel, not feel anything, they could just eat something unhealthy or they could go online, right? And so if they’re doing that 24/7, why wouldn’t they, you know, just not want to be healthy, right? Why wouldn’t they, why would they care about being healthy?

Because ultimately, yes, it feels good to like all of the time to be doing something like, you know, walking. It feels good to run. It feels good to eat something healthy, and they know that. But at the same time, it feels even better when you’re really, really sad or you’re not feeling well to quickly feel this big spike of dopamine which comes from going on their phone. That feeling of being online is just such a beautiful, ethereal feeling that is completely unrelated to how you feel if you’re just sitting in your room twiddling your thumbs, thinking of the actual thoughts that you might have, because it’s a lot better to escape your thoughts.

What time in history have you been able to just avoid anything you want, anything that’s hard and difficult by just going online? This is like the biggest thing when it comes to the escapist reality when you are online or you’re in this virtual world—and it’s not even just a virtual world, right? I consider it like a third world, right? Where you’re in your thoughts and you’re kind of like over here, right? You’re not—you’re not necessarily, for example, when you’re online, right? You’re texting someone, you’re communicating with someone, you’re basically detached from your body, right? You’re not inside your own body.

And so it’s the same thing when you’re online, right? When you’re online, you’re texting somebody, you’re communicating with somebody, you’re in a community with somebody, you’re having conversations with them, you’re having jokes with them, you’re basically creating an entire identity with them that is not your normal world, right?

So when I wake up, I go to school, I eat lunch, and I talk to my mom, and I’m really annoyed and stressed from my mom. So I just go ahead and go to school, and I talk to my mom, and I’m really annoyed and stressed from my mom. So I just go ahead and, you know, I go to school, and I almost failed a test at school. All of these things are the real world, right? This is the typical young person’s experience.

But then I go online, and my friend from Connecticut, who I’ve never even met in real life, and doesn’t know anything about my real world. And so I can just escape with them, and I can act like none of the real stuff matters. I could do the same when it comes to my health, yes, I don’t feel great. I feel disgusting. But if I’m online and I’m talking to somebody else, they don’t know about how I’m feeling, so I can just dissociate basically from my body. It’s like a really scary dissociation.

And I mean, I’m really kind of getting a sense of what you’re talking about here, because this is just, this reality being able to exist in the kind of reality you’re just describing didn’t exist until very recently,

This is something we talk about a lot, right? I kind of want to talk about this. So think of what it really means to be a human, right? Like this is a very, very scary thing, but think about what it really means to be a human. We had rituals for most of humanity. Anytime you’ve heard of ancestral living, you see people talking about the keto diet. You hear someone talking about the carnivore diet. I know you guys had Shawn Baker.

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