How ‘Brain Rot’ and the Escapist Virtual World Is Harming Our Youth | Adnan Alkhalili
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The generic Gen Z experience is you wake up probably in a dark room, you reach for your phone, |
| 0:05.0 | and you just start scrolling or texting your friends and communicating. |
| 0:08.0 | You don't leave your room, right? You don't go outside and take walks. It's bad. |
| 0:12.0 | For many young people, this is not an exception. It's the norm. |
| 0:15.0 | Today I sit down with Adnan Akalili, a 20-year-old founder and CEO of Touchgrass Collective, a national student-led |
| 0:23.1 | movement focused on tackling Gen Z's growing health challenges. |
| 0:27.6 | I would go to sleep late on my phone or on games. |
| 0:30.1 | I would eat really unhealthy. |
| 0:31.5 | All of these things caused my metabolic health to completely drain. |
| 0:34.4 | Ultimately, it led me to have a panic attack and anxiety and all of these things. |
| 0:38.3 | Al Khalili is pushing for a return to something simple, reconnecting with the real world, |
| 0:43.3 | sunlight, movement, connection, nourishment, what he calls touch grass. |
| 0:48.3 | It is actually probably one of the most famous Gen Z phrases, which is touch grass, |
| 0:53.3 | because there's only one phrase related to health. |
| 0:55.9 | Why don't we use that to be the way we get people offline? |
| 0:58.4 | But he's not arguing we should abandon technology altogether. |
| 1:01.4 | Instead, he's asking, what if we could redesign it? |
| 1:04.8 | With technology, we're able to seed into technology, healthy rituals, and healthy habits. |
| 1:09.4 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelluk. |
| 1:11.6 | Adnan al-Khalili, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:17.6 | Thank you for having me. |
| 1:19.6 | So a lot of people, I think, that are watching this show, including me, do not fully grasp because we didn't grow up in the virtual world. |
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