[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.

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?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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

Adnan Alkhalili:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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…

Mr. Alkhalili:

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

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

What kind of sick are we talking about?

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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?

Mr. Alkhalili:

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...

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Alkhalili:

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…

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

You must have been doing a little more than keto.

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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,

Mr. Alkhalili:

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.

Think about what ancestral living really was. It was these rituals. The rituals were basically you'd wake up because the sun came out. So you would wake up. Everybody would wake up every single day because the sun came out. Everybody would go to bed because the sun went down, right? People would gather at night because, you know, there were community gatherings, right? They had communal gatherings at a set time every single day. All of these things that are rituals, these are things that we just do because that’s just how we are as humans. We don’t have those rituals anymore.

I wake up and it’s a dark room, so I’m not really waking up from the sun anymore. I wake up from an alarm. I go to bed at night and it’s not because of an alarm. It’s just because I closed my shades. I can’t even see the sun. That’s not why I’m going to sleep. So all of these things, all of these rituals don’t exist. So I’m creating artificial rituals now.

And so what does it look like to be a human? And you don’t even have those rituals anymore. You’re basically not living like a human anymore. You’re living completely out of what humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. There’s never been a time in history for hundreds of thousands of years, ever. I mean, we’ve had a big conversation people have had, like, every time, every century, people are like, oh, this is the scariest time to live, right? No, this is literally the scariest time to live because this is the first time we’re not being human and having rituals. Like, these rituals are just the core basis of what humans are.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, you’re making me think of, I don’t know how much Hannah Arendt you have read, but you’re making me think of an atomized society, which is the type of society that’s rife for a totalitarian rule, in fact. So you’re disturbing me more than you think by telling me what you’re telling me.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Well, I think people are aware of that. And I think that obviously those in control of the algorithms are aware of that. And I think that it’s being done on purpose as well. I mean, you can control society a lot better that way. I know you talk a lot about China, right? For example, think about, you know, ByteDance before, you know, they recently bought in America. And something that is really curious is what they actually have in China when it comes to algorithms.

What do they give the people in China? Do they give them what we have today, which is like brain rot, people scrolling and seeing AI videos of cats talking in America. Whereas, in China, they scroll and they see an airplane taking off or they see a physics problem. It’s very scary.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s very, it’s very different and very deliberate. Absolutely. So you lost weight, you got clear, you decided that in the real world, there’s something there after all. And you somehow got motivated to try to pull other people out. So this is, so this is your, your, do you remember the Matrix film? See, this is my generation, okay? I don’t know if everyone in this generation is watching the Matrix. But this is making me think of the Matrix. You’re wanting to unplug people, right, from the Matrix here.

Mr. Alkhalili:

The scary thing is that the Matrix, as a movie, has been out for a while now, and it’s been used as a metaphor all the time. I mean, they use Neo and the Matrix for literally any issue going on, where they’re like, this is the Matrix, right? Like, for example, the most famous one, Andrew Tate, is making a bunch of young people talk about the Matrix, right? Where it’s like, you know, the billionaires are forcing us to live in a fractured society. That’s the Matrix.

The reality is that’s not the Matrix. The Matrix we’re actually living in is that we are living basically what they were living in the Matrix where they were plugged in. They were plugged into alternate lives that were not even the real lives that the people who were plugged in were living. How are we different from that? Most young people, aren’t they also living the experience of being plugged into this virtual world with fake friends that they’ve never met, people that they think are real, but maybe aren’t even real, all of these different things? And they’re just meeting these people online. Isn’t that the same thing as the Matrix?

So I think ultimately, we’ve actually reached the actual Matrix where we’re all living on our devices with communities that we’ve never met. And we think that that’s the real world. And a lot of us, and the scary thing is, like you’re saying, yes, I figured that out, and I talked about it, but most young people don’t even care, right? Like they know that that’s an issue, but they don’t really care.

I’m very familiar with DC, and I’ve been in a lot of these rooms with a lot of important people. I’ve realized that there are literally no other young people in these rooms talking about this, and it scares me a lot. And it’s something that my co-founder Sam and I talk about. Because we have the same, you know, relationships in DC, and we talk to the people making the change. And we realized that even the people right now in Secretary Kennedy’s cabinet, for example, when it comes to screen time, we just really think that nobody’s really doing anything about this. And it’s terrifying. And so how can we be in these rooms and see so many people doing things, but no one’s doing anything for this, and how can we just sit there and be like, well, I mean, someone will figure it out? Who’s going to figure it out, right? That’s the scary thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

Just, I want to touch on that more, what you just said, but before we go there, I’m still thinking of another film as you’ve been talking, and that’s Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s, one of the more recent films of his. And I mean, it’s kind of exactly the world you’re describing, except that there’s one specific world that all those people are a part of. And their solution at the end of the film is to take a day off, if I remember the film well, right? But it’s actually great in there. Just take a day off, and that'll do it.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Yes, there’s also another movie, I think it was called Her, a movie about AI.

Mr. Jekielek:

I haven’t seen that one.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Both of these movies touch on a point where it’s like, I think, and these are like kind of sci-fi movies—not sci-fi, but I mean, like, you know, futuristic movies of what could end up happening. And it’s like we live in that world already; we do need to take a day to plug off. We certainly haven’t yet, and we'll talk about it, but we figure it out. I think we’ve created a way to do that. I think we’ve created a way to get people to plug out for a day. But it’s just scary that so many movies have kind of hit the nail on this. And at the time, I remember watching these movies and thinking, oh, this is stupid, and it’s never going to happen.

Mr. Jekielek:

Except you were in it.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Except I was in it at the same time already experiencing that. I never attached myself to the fact that we are literally living in that world, and it’s even scarier. Because that film about AI is literally about someone talking to an AI woman 24/7 and their entire relationship with this AI woman. Now, AI is an even additional thing to deal with. AI is even scarier.

It also came out when I was in high school. I saw how young people were interacting with it, and I see how people interact with it today. Now, we have a relationship with something that’s not even a real person. So when it comes to not even being human anymore, I think it was better when we had virtual worlds with only people. Now we have virtual worlds with non-people, and it’s getting worse. The movies are becoming real.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, okay, and it’s getting worse; the movies are becoming real. So, okay, how does Touch Grass Together fit into all this?

Mr. Alkhalili:

When I talk to people in politics or in DC and tell them about Touch Grass Together, they think that we’re like some niche organization, and they’re like, oh, you guys are just like, you have a funny name. It’s related to grass; like you’re some niche idea, right? And the crazy thing is it’s not niche at all. It is actually probably one of the most famous Gen Z phrases, which is touch grass.

Because everybody living in the virtual world, when it comes to health, they never talk about health, ever. It’s not something that’s communicated. They don’t talk about health because ultimately, if you bring up something related to real life in the virtual world, you kind of get crushed because they don’t want to talk about the real world.

But the one phrase that is used out of any phrase when it comes to health is only one phrase, and it’s touch grass. Because that’s basically people telling each other online, you’ve literally been online all day, and it’s usually an insult, but it’s like, you’ve been online all day; go touch the earth, right? Go touch grass. And so it’s become like the only phrase related to health online, and so ultimately we were realizing that, and we said, there’s only one phrase related to health; why don’t we use it? Why don’t we use that to be the way we get people offline?

Because if everybody’s already aware—maybe they’re not aware to the extent that we talk about right now, right?—but the fact that young people are telling each other every single day, go touch grass, doesn’t that inherently mean that somewhere within their mind, they know that they’re literally not touching the earth anymore? And so ultimately, we’re trying to use that now as a way to culturally create a solution to this problem.

Mr. Jekielek:

But except that you’re using leaf piles.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Oh, that’s an example, yes. So what basically we’ve come up with is a framework called the touch grass moment. And ultimately, we’re trying, like we talked about rituals, right? We’re trying to recreate human ritual. So instead of telling everybody on the podcast, go wake up with the sun and go to sleep at night, young people don’t care. They’re not going to talk about health. They’re not going to talk about physiology either. There are some people that will—I'll talk about it. For the most part, people will not talk about health in order to get them to go do healthy things. But they will talk about the really silly Gen Z trends.

And so, if you tell them, come to this specific place, let’s do something really silly and stupid because nobody likes serious things, let’s do something really silly and stupid. Ultimately, you’re resulting in them doing a touch grass moment, which is them coming out into the real world. And they’re doing one of four things. They’re getting in the light, right? So they’re regulating their circadian rhythm. They’re moving, right? Which is great and important for their health and a normal thing of being a human, right?

Because nowadays, everybody’s just staying sedentary all day, which has never existed before. No humans have just stayed inside all day, which is even scarier if you think about it. But we’re getting them moving, right? We’re getting them connecting. That’s another aspect.

So, there’s three, right? They’re connecting with each other, speaking to other human beings. And the fourth thing is we’re nourishing them. So, also including nutrition, like intermittent fasting, things like that. And so, all four of those things are used to create what we call a touch grass moment. And one of those things, like recently, like you mentioned, you know, we had an event where a bunch of kids came and just jumped in a pile of leaves, right?

Literally, two days ago, our Penn State University chapter just had a snowball fight. Then they dug a big hole and they touched grass in the snow. But I mean, that was a group of students that otherwise would have been inside, you know, with the heat on and not outside, right? And our students have found ways to get outside, even though it’s freezing outside; there’s no reason to go outside. Instead, it would be better for them to just stay inside in the escapist reality, right?

But now, we’re actually having people go outside again, right? Hanging out with each other. And the only way we’re able to do this is not by just putting up a poster saying, come do this funny funny thing. It’s the fact that we’re using the same mediums that they know how to use, so we’re using social media. All of our university chapters have pages where they create videos. They basically use the online virtual world as a way to recruit people back into the real world.

They’re using Discord, they’re using Instagram, they’re using social media in every way, and they’re basically using the same routing forms. They’re getting people to go outside and do healthy things. This is the kind of thing that, if we scale this right, if we make this something really big institutionally, that is the way we can get everybody to plug off.

Mr. Alkhalili:

You know, I can’t help but think you decided that you’re actually going to go, you’re studying metabolic health right now. So you’re kind of applying what you’re studying as part of this whole touch grass thing?

Mr. Alkhalili:

It came from that. When I was experiencing all of the health issues that I experienced, I had no motivation whatsoever to really do anything. There was no motivation for a career. I mean, my parents wanted me to do a bunch of things, like every parent does, but I had no motivation to do anything. I remember I used to feel like when I was in my senior year of high school or my junior year of high school, I felt like my life was over. I genuinely felt like I was so tired of life that I felt like I was in my 70s or 80s, and I had no motivation to continue. I felt like I was done. I was like, I lived a long life. What else is there to do, right?

When I solved my health issues, I had so much motivation and goals that I had so much interest in metabolic health. Metabolic health is, right now, I think, getting there. I think people are starting to talk about it, especially with the current administration. They’re talking about metabolic health, but I don’t think we realize how significant it is. How can you not consider the fact that if your cells are dead, you’re going to be dead? Like, literally, the energy of your cell—how is that not the most important? thing? Like, I can’t imagine studying anything else.

Right now, I think every doctor should be studying metabolic health. I think that should be the main thing you study in medical school, which is how do you keep people’s cells alive? And I think if young people get their metabolic health good as well, I mean, they’re gonna be perfect. That’s why Touch Grass Together, the four components I told you about: light, movement, nourishment, and connection, those are literally just the drivers of metabolic health. And we just basically took the word metabolic health off of it, and we put the touch grass moment on top of it, right?

So basically, make them do physiologically healthy things for their metabolic health, but don’t use the word metabolic health whatsoever. Don’t use the word physiology. And because ultimately, they’re going to fix their metabolic health. And that’s really what we want.

Mr. Jekielek:

We’re just going to keep it a secret for only the people that are watching this show, right? That’s what you’re saying.

Mr. Alkhalili:

If young people want to participate in the science aspect, they can. But I think it’s just so fun already as it is, like we know how young people are, and especially the people in Touch Grass Together. They love just the silly aspect of it. And as they get into the silly aspect of it, and they just start to integrate, and they start to feel how it feels to really be outside and do these things, then they actually gain the interest of like, okay, now I actually want to learn why am I feeling these things? Like what is the actual science behind it? And we’ve had that experience.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. You know, so one of the things you talk about, you were on with Dr. Phil a little while ago, and you, what this term brain rot is something that featured pretty heavily in there. And everything you’ve been describing, is this brain rot that you’re talking about?

Mr. Alkhalili:

Brain rot is, so there is the entire virtual world and escapist reality. I think brain rot is just one of the mediums of that. And it is probably the worst one. We’ve arrived at a point now where people are scrolling on their phones and looking at videos that have no meaning whatsoever. And it’s worse than anything I’ve talked about already. It’s just like a layer on top of the fact that people are sedentary indoors and just in online communities, and now add the fact that they’re consuming things that have no meaning whatsoever. That’s what brain rot is, and it’s also deliberate.

Dr. Phil mentioned that as well, that they literally fund entire companies to just produce mass brain rot for people. And scary, I mean, even for Touch Grass Together, we use brain rot; we employ brain rot into our own content because we know that brain rot reaches people. And I mean, if we can reach people, we can get them to do healthy things.

Mr. Jekielek:

So brain rot is a type of content, and it’s a state of being.

Mr. Alkhalili:

It’s a lot of things. Brain rot content is just content that rots your brain. Like, literally, like I mentioned earlier, imagine a video of an AI cat just talking to you. It’s not funny. I wouldn’t find it funny. You wouldn’t find it funny, but it’s funny.

Mr. Jekielek:

But it just looks intriguing, and then you scroll to the next one.

Mr. Alkhalili:

I don’t know. I actually showed Dr. Phil a whole page of brain rot, and he was so confused. But like, ultimately, that’s just how brain rot is; it’s like the most confusing thing ever. It’s like a bird that looks really weird, and you say, it’s intriguing. Yes, they find it really intriguing; in fact, they laugh when they see it. There’s something called Italian brain rot, which is even worse. It’s like a shark wearing Nikes.

It’s not funny, but it’s really funny to Gen Z, and it’s ultimately deteriorating. Gen Z doesn’t really see this as a real thing. We kind of just mess around with it, but Gen Alpha now, the younger kids who are like five, six, seven years old, right? These kids love brain rot. This is just normal for them; it’s not even a joke.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just, it’s reality. You’re describing a transformation of, you know, essentially how people think at a mass scale without us fully realizing what has happened.

Mr. Alkhalili:

It’s happening really, really quickly to the point where a lot of research institutions are just used to doing research the way they’ve always done, right? Where it’s like, you know, you survey a thousand people, and then you see what they’re feeling. And I think that’s why we haven’t caught up to how scary this is. With Touch Grass Together we have employed polls, but we’re really just talking to young people every single day. We hear the latest things every single day. I think that’s what everybody needs to do, but it’s hard to do.

The Trump administration recently had the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition with Catherine Granito. They also had the MAHA report come out. One of the most important things they talked about in it was screen time and establishing councils in each state to reach young people. It’s been months now, and they haven’t done that. I think it’s because they don’t know how to do that. I don’t think they realize how to reach young people and how to actually get to young people, and we’ve done that. We actually did it in a matter of one or two months, reaching so many young people and learning every single day what the actual experience on the ground is.

This is something that we can scale really big to so many institutions and also to communities to find out what young people are thinking. That’s because the internet moves so quickly, and things change every single day. Just how bad this is getting is changing every single day. Something that really scares me is I see all the research being done on nutrition and also the education on nutrition.

Ultimately, I think that no matter how much we do when it comes to research, when it comes to investigating what’s happening, I think that technology is going to get stronger anyway because we don’t have nutrition billionaires; we have technology billionaires, right? And trillionaires, actually. So we have trillions in technology, but we only have people investing in nutrition, and they’re not creating solutions and tools to really get healthy people living. There are no billionaires in the health world, right? There are billionaires in the tech world.

When it comes to the films you talked about, what it really looks like—and I don’t think this is far-fetched—in the next 20 years we’re going to have people walking in the street and they’re going to have AI everywhere. You’re going to be able to talk to the street itself. You’re going to have technology almost everywhere. I mean, we have the metaverse where Mark Zuckerberg really wanted that really badly, where you can literally interact with the virtual world while you’re in the real world. Or Apple came out with Apple Vision, where you just wear something and see the world around you, but you’re interacting with it.

I think that we’re going to live in that reality very soon, and I think it’s scary because we’re already suffering from this device on our phones. How is it going to be when we actually integrate the phones into everybody, and you can’t avoid it? It’s just there you walk in the street, you walk outside; the only places that we can escape these phones from are literally now infiltrated by technology. That’s why touch grass moments are so important because we’re not trying to get rid of technology.

In fact, we endorse technology use. It’s just how can we now make that AI bot that’s in the street ensure that I’m not just going to stare at the AI bot? I’m actually going to still spend time outside. I’m going to sit down. I’m going to touch grass. I’m going to live healthily. Something, a really long-term goal of ours is we want to basically create value points in technology. For example, I’ve talked about this before. Do you know Pokémon Go?

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, this is actually something I was thinking about as you’re describing the situation where you’re communicating with the street and so forth. Because you’re looking for these, I remember this from years ago, you’re looking for these tokens that are associated with a physical place, right?

Mr. Alkhalili:

I’ve asked a lot of young people this question, which is, when is the last time that you remember being outside and really enjoying it, but you were still on your phone? It was with Pokémon Go, which just did so well. It was a time when there were so many people outside, and they were still using their devices, but they were outside, and there was so much community happening in the real world.

They were barely using their phones; I mean, they were just using it for a map, right? That is ultimately the only solution we can ever have. There’s no other solution to this problem because technology is not going away; it’s going to stay. I mean, unless we have, like, a, I don’t know, nuclear fallout, and now we have nothing anymore.

Mr. Jekielek:

I imagine, you know, as this goes, they’re going to have more and more communities, you know, kind of like perhaps the Amish, some of these traditional living communities that we already have. I expect a lot of people will not want to have the level of integration and engagement with technology 24/7 that you’re describing because they will realize the damage of it, right?

Mr. Alkhalili:

I think the scary thing, though, with that idea is that that’s assuming that these technologies are not also addicting and also pulling in people at a faster pace than they can pull out, right? So, you know, the Amish, I mean, they never had it to begin with. But now if you take an average young person who’s addicted to their phone, I mean, they’re not going to go and live in an Amish community. They’re not going to live offline. I mean, they’re not even going to consider going outside right now. So it’s very hard to do that.

So I think technology is just going to move really fast and it’s going to create even better algorithms because, I mean, the algorithms today are advanced. I mean, you talk about something, and automatically it appears on your phone, right? So now imagine in 20 years from now, if we’re having AI outside, how are we not going to have even scarier, better science and psychology-driven algorithms that basically trump anything we’ve ever had? And again, that’s why I really feel that the only solution we can have is one where technology is not basically being thrown out the window because, again, I mean, maybe what you’re saying is true and it happens, but I don’t think that’s—I think that’s very optimistic. I want that to be the case, but I think that technology is staying.

So how can we make sure that while technology is here, people are still at least doing the bare minimum, which is they’re getting sunlight, right? They’re moving, they’re communicating with people, and they’re eating nourishing foods. And the only way to do that is if we can make a relationship with technology where the technology, like Pokémon Go, rewards us while we’re doing healthy habits. That’s ultimately where we’re going.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, that still is the technology kind of, you know, guide being your master, isn’t it?

Mr. Alkhalili:

Yes. I personally prefer technology being my master, but I’m alive and I have sunlight and I can breathe. The alternative to this is that we continue being sluggish, we continue being sleepy, we die really early, and we don’t really get to live our full lives. Maybe in the next few hundred years, we have a better solution. But I think that, like, ultimately, we can’t get rid of technology. I mean, this is something that’s here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.

It’s easy for somebody that’s not continuously online to just think you could just get off of it. And that’s why I think a lot of, like I said, policy rooms, they just say, like, let’s get the phones out of schools. And I just don’t think it’s going away. I think even if we get the phones out of schools, kids are not going to just let go of technology forever, though. Because ultimately, they can let go of it; it’s going to come back somewhere in their life. I mean, we’re spending billions on technology.

Mr. Jekielek:

And it’s incredibly difficult to imagine. I mean, this is something that I really appreciate in our conversation. It’s very difficult to imagine what it’s like to be one of these digital natives from the beginning. It’s really because, you know, for me, I’ve seen the progression all the way from the first PCs, right when I was very into them. But it’s a completely different world if that’s all you’ve ever seen.

Mr. Alkhalili:

Yes, I don’t know if there’s ever been something as esoteric in a way

Mr. Jekielek:

And, well, disruptive. I guess the Gutenberg press was, you know, suddenly…

Mr. Alkhalili:

I think it’s like imagining explaining an iPhone to someone in caveman times, right? You can’t explain it. It’s the same thing. Not that you guys are cavemen; I’m just saying a little bit. I mean, it’s like you can’t describe a technology or— I mean, it’s hard to understand. I mean, even this is a really scary thing with parents, where they don’t understand what their kids are doing. It’s complete, and you can’t think of the fact that you can live virtually online that often. It’s just sad.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s so much of your life and your identity and your thoughts and your preoccupations are in that virtual world, really, and not in the normal world. I think that’s the part that’s hard to conceive.

Mr. Alkhalili:

There are benefits as well, though. And the reason I say there are benefits is because when it comes to global communication, right? I mean, a kid in America now can talk to a kid in Germany, and they can have something to connect on, right? They have nothing. Politics doesn’t really divide them as much anymore. And maybe long term, that’s better because people can communicate devoid of politics and maybe find better solutions to problems we wouldn’t have been able to do in the past. But at the same time, when we’re not even alive to have that experience, I mean, I don’t think that matters.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’re giving me kind of two messages here. One is that this is here to stay. We’re stuck with it. And frankly, the highly manipulative environment that we touched on a bit that it engenders, right? With all these people vying for our attention, which probably was part of the OCD you experienced and so forth. So that’s just all a reality. On the other hand, you really think that there’s a way to mitigate this in a meaningful way. And I’m not convinced you can do it outside of, you know, just unplugging from the system entirely. So realistically, right, what are the realistic solutions here?

Mr. Alkhalili:

On a very small scale, it’s what we talked about, right? Like jumping into leaves. That’s a small community-based thing. When it comes to larger communities, right? Instead of, for example, telling people not to take phones out of schools, right now we’re investing most of our time into, you know, new legislation on this, trying to just solve it by basically axing it out. I think what we need to do is start investing in legislation and also just partnerships with technology where we’re able to seed into technology healthy rituals and healthy habits.

So this is, for example, what we’re doing with touch grass, where we can work with a technology company, and with that technology company, that’s otherwise, you know, they don’t want their users, their user base, to end up dying, right? They don’t want their user base to be so sick because otherwise, who’s going to use their devices when it comes to 30, 40 years from now, right?

So what we ultimately need is for these people to be using the technology, but we’re able to create rituals online that get them ultimately outside. So, like, I'll give an example of this. Imagine on Instagram, right? Something that people really enjoy are like badges, right? If they get a badge on Instagram that says, like, it’s very meaningless, but it’s just a badge, right?

Ultimately, they’re going to go outside. And at the end of the day, they’re going to be healthy. So instead of going into the schools, taking out the phones, and throwing them outside, what we actually need to do is invest in initiatives and projects that are getting people to use the technology, but use it in a way that the technology itself is also going outside. So we need to push partnership. And ultimately, that kind of partnership is required because if the technology companies don’t allow a partnership like that to happen, then we really have no solution. But I think the technology companies are kind of driven and incentivized to do that. Why?

Again, like I said, I mean, it’s the same with insurance companies, right? You know, insurance companies don’t want everybody to die. Otherwise, who’s going to pay their premiums, right? And it’s the same with technology companies. Right now, I think that we’ve reached a point where they’ve been able to just basically get everybody out doing the same thing 24/7, which is using their devices. But we’ve reached a point where if we don’t now create a way for them to still go outside.

And still live like a human being, they’re going to just now have no user base. They’re not going to have anybody to scroll. They’re not going to have anybody to use. It’s a lot better for technology companies to be part of that solution, instead of the technology company being axed and yelled at by legislators and having to limit social media in certain locations. So they’re kind of forced to by the environment. But this is important on the side of the government as well, where they’re not really putting emphasis on ideas and solutions that can get people to work with technology for the better. They’re really working on solutions that are just anti-technology.

So I think instead of, like what you’re saying, where it’s like, you know, you’re kind of hopeless about the fact that you’re kind of hopeful that people will just get off technology, I think we need to be in the opposite position where we need to actually now push more and more for pro-technology initiatives that still get people doing metabolically healthy things like touch grass moments. But ultimately, we really need to focus on the fact that technology is advancing really fast. And it is the new, it’s the new thing. It’s the way people communicate, it’s the way everything operates in society.

And so we might as well really invest in initiatives and projects. And I don’t think that people in policy rooms really appreciate that Gen Z knows this best. I think they’re really focusing on just what usually works, which is creating laws that limit the thing or creating laws that moderate the thing. And I think we should really focus on how we can use the thing itself. And that’s why very technology-native things like touch grass movements work.

Mr. Jekielek:

To foster the positive outcomes or the positive elements of the experience as well. Okay, we’re heading into a brave new world one way or the other. A final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Alkhalili:

I think that this is very imminent. I think if we don’t solve this, we really won’t have much more time. And this is why I think in 20, 30 years, if we reach the reality that we talked about, where AI is everywhere and people are walking the street and they’re communicating with technology 24/7, if we’ve reached that point and we’ve not created infrastructure today, especially when it comes to higher government, and we’ve not created infrastructure and we just focused on policies and legislation, I think if we reach that point, then we really have no other way of getting out of it.

But if we start today, we can avoid the point maybe in 20 or 30 years. We can already have that technology. We can already have the infrastructure so that when that comes, we’re prepared and we’re part of it already, right? We’re part of the technology that’s in the streets that gets people to still engage in healthy habits.

Mr. Jekielek:

Which is really, if I may paraphrase, maintaining our humanity is really what you’re talking about, right?

Mr. Alkhalili:

And we need to use technology to do that, though. I mean, that has to be part of the technology. And it’s very doable. I mean, it’s possible. We’ve seen it with hundreds of students.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Adnan Alkhalili, it has been such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Alkhalili:

It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.