No, Not Everybody Needs a Therapist: Amy Morin on America's Epidemic of Mental Weakness

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's not exactly news that we live in strange times. There are always odd stories. And today, I was really struck by a couple of recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal, one about how singles are so burnt out. They're letting spreadsheets evaluate their dates, which is rather odd. And an even other [as spoken] piece about young adults are letting AI do their talking for them even in person. In other words, they're taking their phones with them and using Claude or OpenAI to prompt what they're saying. It suggests, I think, a lack of confidence in who or what we are and what we have to say. So I thought it'd be a good opportunity to talk to someone whose career as a psychotherapist is built on rebuilding or building confidence, on mental strength. Amy Morin is the author of a whole series of books on how to be mentally strong, including the most recent, The Mental Strength Playbook. She's also— the author, if that's the right word, or the— the creator of an incredibly popular TED speech [ed.: TEDx talk] on how to become mentally strong, The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong, which has garnered over 25 million views. And she's the host of the Mentally Stronger podcast. I'm thrilled that she's joining us from Maine. She normally lives in the Florida Keys, but she seems to be traveling a lot. Amy, welcome to Keen On America.

00:02:09 Amy Morin: Thank you so much for having me.

00:02:11 Andrew Keen: So I'm not sure if you saw either of these pieces in the journal on— about— singles using spreadsheets to evaluate their dates or taking their phones with them to speak for them on dates. But I'm guessing that it's not exactly news to you that people are lacking so much self-confidence that they rely on technology.

00:02:33 Amy Morin: It's not. As a therapist, that's exactly what I'm seeing in my therapy office. People are saying things like, you know, I need to set boundaries with my mother-in-law, but I don't know how to do it. So I turned to ChatGPT to say, how do I ask her to not give the kids too much sugar? How do I have this conversation with my friend who borrowed something and didn't return it? And they feel like by going to AI, they're somehow gonna get the perfect thing to say to somebody. And if they don't have that perfect thing to say, then somehow they're going to fall short or they're gonna mess it up, or they just wanna save some of their mental energy. They think if I outsource these decisions to AI, then I'll have more energy left over to do the things that are important. But, like, what's really more important than managing your own relationships?

00:03:19 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You said it. I don't wanna turn this into another bashing AI or tech conversation because if it wasn't the AI and tech, it would be something else. So my question is— and I know you deal with this all the time, and you address it in your podcast, in your speeches, and in your books. What is happening? Why is this generation, younger generation, it seems, although maybe it's more universal, why are we lacking so much self-confidence? Or is this something that's just in the news now but has always been the case?

00:03:50 Amy Morin: I think because we live in this world of information overload, we then believe that there's a scientific way to do everything. Like, well, there must be this scientific process of how I say no to somebody and reject them yet maintain the relationship, or there's some scientific way to manage this struggle I'm having with my friends. And we think that if we just look it up, we'll find the right answer. And that's true with a lot of things in life, right, in the digital age. If I don't know how to fix my sink, I can look that up and probably find a video that walks me through it. And we forget that a lot of our relationships that there's a nuance to it, that it's more of an art than it is a science. And there are all these factors that you can't just plug into a machine and have it spit back out at you, and that there's supposed to be some tension in relationships. Conflict isn't horrible, that having questions and uncertainty and real human conversations are essential. I think we just forget all of that because we live in this world where we're able to look up information for so many practical daily tasks that we just start applying it to all these other areas of our lives too.

00:04:57 Andrew Keen: I don't wanna sound like a contemptuous boomer, although I probably am one. But it seems to me when I was growing up in the seventies that a lot of this stuff was just taken for granted. If you wanted to talk to someone about a slightly uncomfortable subject, you had the conversation. Sometimes you didn't. But you didn't go to a book or a television program or anyone. You just went and did it. Am I wrong? What was the experience of these tricky, complicated conversations and interactions in previous generations? How did we do it? I mean, what generation are you from? I don't mean to be too rude and ask for your birthday, but you're clearly not a Gen Zer.

00:05:39 Amy Morin: No. So I'm on the line of the— millennial versus Gen X, depending on what you— which chart you look at.

00:05:46 Andrew Keen: So you and I are of different generations. I'm older than you, but at the same time, we're different from the Gen Zs. So is there a break generationally, Amy, and when all this began to change?

00:05:59 Amy Morin: I think so. I think that the younger generations that are digital natives, they grew up with an iPad and a phone in their hand, are just used to having that kind of contact. I'm grateful that I grew up in the last generation of people who still had playdates in person, and you couldn't call your friends on their cell phone. You had to call their landline and talk to their parents and ask if they could come outside and play. And we got together in person, and we didn't have to worry about social media. There's definitely some benefits to it. And I think that the younger people are just so used to having it, and they're so used to not having the face-to-face interactions that we had that they've grown up different. Right? When we were younger, if you rode your bike to the store, your mom had no way of checking on you. She wasn't following you on an app. She wasn't able to call you. And if you're— you had a flat tire on your bike, you had to figure it out. And I think that's one of the big differences. Today's generation has never had to have that struggle where they have to be on their own. They have to be independent. They don't have to solve problems necessarily. So just makes sense that they would use digital devices to say, okay. Now how do I deal with this relationship problem too?

00:07:11 Andrew Keen: It's so ironic. I was around in the nineties when we were all founding websites, and many of the people I was with in San Francisco were promising, particularly with social networks, that everyone would be more connected, everyone would be more social. And, of course, the reverse has happened. It's so odd. How much in parallel, how bound up is the crisis of loneliness, which we hear about on a daily basis, with this absence of self-confidence, this need, for example, to take your AI, to do the talking on a date?

00:07:48 Amy Morin: I think they're definitely intertwined. If you're gonna go to a dinner party and you spend half your time in the restroom trying to Google what to say to somebody or you're asking ChatGPT for conversation topics, like, you're not really able to reach inside and think, what's interesting about me? What curiosities do I have about other people? And that's how we connect with people is to talk about our struggles. Like, you're not gonna really form those connections that ward off loneliness if you're worried about impressing people. If you're always gonna have the right thing to say, if you're always gonna ask these eloquent questions, people aren't really gonna connect with you. It's when you can say, gosh, I really struggle with X, Y, and Z, or I'm really embarrassed. Listen to this story. Those are the things that make us connect with people, not the canned questions and not the really— perfect answers that we think that we need to have.

00:08:40 Andrew Keen: So are there really— I mean, you're on the front lines of this. You've got lots of clients. We obviously don't wanna know their names. But, are there really people now who go to dinner parties and take their phones to the bathroom and plot out the next conversational line?

00:08:55 Amy Morin: There are— and a lot of people assume this is gonna help me socially because I'm kinda awkward or I have some social anxiety and I don't wanna spend the whole time sitting there thinking, I don't have anything to say. So what do you do? That seems like a great solution to a lot of people in the moment. I'm just gonna ask ChatGPT what are five interesting questions I can ask at this dinner party. But then they come out and, you know, and they start asking these really canned questions. And obviously, they're not listening for the answers, they're just looking to think, what's the next question I should ask and what was on the list? And then I can't remember what was on the list, so now I'm panicking. And, unfortunately, they're missing out on those human-to-human connections where you get to say, hey. I can totally relate to that or listen to what happened to me. Instead, they're focused on, okay. What was the second question on the list?

00:09:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe the solution to this is to ban cell phones or bathroom breaks at dinner parties. Like, rather like taking an exam, you're not allowed to use the bathroom because everyone knows you go in and use your phone to cheat on Chat— cheat— ChatGPT. It's the same, really. It's a kind of cheating in life, isn't it?

00:10:03 Amy Morin: It is. I think we think, oh, this is gonna give me, like, the social edge. It's gonna help me to— it's really— fit in. It's gonna help me to feel better and to feel like I never have a lull in the conversation. But ultimately, when we rely on technology for something that we feel insecure about, it doesn't help us build confidence. The person doesn't leave the dinner party thinking, I really nailed it. My social skills are really coming along. Instead, it's quite the opposite where you think, okay, I really have to rely on AI and reach for it when I don't know what to do because you're not practicing it, you're not building those skills. And there's tons of research that will show with a lot of these things, if we're not practicing them in real time, our skills start to diminish pretty quickly. So if you aren't practicing social skills on a regular basis, you don't get better at it by using an app that tells you what to do. In fact, you'll probably get a lot worse.

00:10:56 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's rather like going on a dating site and presenting fake photographs of yourself because it's all very well having that clever interaction even if you manage to pull it off when you come out of the bathroom. But you can't continue it in life. If someone says, well, let's go and have a cup of coffee, or I'd like you to come to my dinner party next week, you can't keep on doing it.

00:11:17 Amy Morin: No. Absolutely not. It's not sustainable. And, again, it just makes you more reliant on a device instead of thinking, okay, maybe I do feel awkward, but how do I get through these awkward moments? How do I find something to say when there is a silence? How do I make sure that I have a story that I can tell without having to ask ChatGPT, what's an interesting story about me? And when we start to rely on that, again, it's the experiences and the action that builds confidence rather than the avoidance, which is what it's about when we're relying on technology to help us. We're really just avoiding— using our own skills.

00:11:57 Andrew Keen: So you use the A word, awkwardness. I think that's a good word to describe this whole generation or this obsession with awkwardness. They've always been awkward people. What did they do before the internet, before email, before social media, before ChatGPT? Did they just sit in the corner and keep quiet?

00:12:19 Amy Morin: You know, I think it depends. I know plenty of awkward people who said, you know, I don't really socialize that much because I don't fit in. But I know plenty of other people who are self-identified as being socially awkward, and they said, I just was able to spot the other socially awkward people in a room. And then we teamed up and we felt okay because we were forgiving of each other's blunders because I make them too. And I've also met people who say, you know, I'm incredibly socially awkward and I feel so uncomfortable, but the good news is I can empathize. I can spot that other person in the room and I focus on making them feel more comfortable. And when I do that, I kind of lose sight of my own discomfort. So I think it depends. I think there's a whole gamut of what people have done, but a lot of people have found a way to make it work for them so that they can get out of the house, still find friends, and do things that they wanted to do.

00:13:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Again, it's tragic. It's tragic and ironic that the internet was supposed to be the savior of awkward people and awkwardness, create communities of awkwardness. But if anything, it seems to have compounded it.

00:13:25 Amy Morin: Absolutely. When people are chatting via an app or they're on a social media site, sometimes they say, well, I feel really comfortable texting these things about myself. But as a therapist, I'll say one of the big things that I work on with people sometimes is their perception of themselves versus how other people perceive them. And sometimes those two things don't line up. So somebody might say, you know, my— I'm a really honest person. And then in the next breath, they're telling a story about how they cheated on their timesheet last week or they cheated on their taxes two years ago, but that didn't really count. So let me talk about, well, how does that line up? So maybe on a dating app, you present yourself as incredibly honest, but then we have these things that you've just told me where maybe you bend the rules a bit or stretch the truth. So how does that line up with how you see yourself versus your behavior? And when people present themselves online, sometimes they think they're being honest, but then when they meet somebody in person, the two things don't line up. And for a lot of awkward people, that's the struggle because they're like, well, I'm way cooler online or my online persona seems to be better than when you actually hang out with me or we go to a movie or we go to dinner. It's not the same.

00:14:35 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's sad, which means it only drives them more into their online persona.

00:14:39 Amy Morin: Correct.

00:14:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's very odd. You've— as I said, you built a brand, almost a media empire on this idea of mental strength from your very popular TED Talk to all these books to your podcast. How did you come on this, Amy? You're a trained therapist. Where did you discover this issue of mental strength? Was it something that suddenly came on you?

00:15:09 Amy Morin: Well, it was my own personal journey. My mom passed away when I was 23, and that was shortly after I had launched my career as a therapist. And it was a moment of, okay, a lot of the things I've learned in college seem to fall short. The things in the textbook didn't feel like they were helpful enough when I was in a place of pain. I was grieving her loss and I didn't feel like it was helpful enough. So I thought, well, here we go. I'm gonna embark on this journey to discover what mental strength is, what works, what doesn't, and how you get through tough times through my own research. And when I was 26, it was actually the three-year anniversary of the day my mom died. My 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack.

00:15:51 Andrew Keen: Oh my god.

00:15:52 Amy Morin: Yeah. So needless to say, I— my twenties were just awful. It was one thing after the next. And to feel like my entire world flipped upside down, I didn't have my mom, I didn't have my husband, and I'm supposed to go to work as a therapist and somehow help people deal with their problems. And through it all though, I learned so much from my personal experience about what mental strength is, what it isn't, the misconceptions society has about it, and what actually works. I didn't wanna just be, like, resilient when people are like, let's bounce back from tough times. Because I thought if I do that, I'm just gonna be, like, bracing myself for the next tragedy. I wanted to enjoy the good times in life, and that's what mental strength is. It's about getting the most out of life when you're on that emotional roller coaster, which we're all gonna be on. There's good times, there's bad times, and lots of things in between. And it took years to kinda rebuild a new life, figure out which way was up, which way was down. I got remarried. Life was looking pretty good, and my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I just remember thinking like this isn't fair. I just spent all these years grieving. I don't really have it in me to lose anybody else, but obviously I didn't have a choice. So on one of the worst days of my life, I wrote myself a letter about what mentally strong people don't do. And when I was done, there was 13 things on the list and I would just read that over and over and be like, okay, today, just don't do these things and you'll be okay. And then I published it online. I thought like five people would read it, but like 50 million people read it and I got a book deal and seven books. And thirteen years later, I'm still talking about mental strength. As long as people are asking, I'm willing to keep answering questions and putting as much content out there as I can.

00:17:32 Andrew Keen: Who reads your books, and who listened to that or read that first piece? Who watches your TED speech? Is it people who are lacking mental self-confidence? Is it people who want to self-medicate?

00:17:48 Amy Morin: It seems to be a variety of people who feel like they've experienced pain in life and aren't quite sure how to work through it, how to deal with it, how to cope with it, or how to get through it. And a lot of people will say, well, you know, I'm high functioning. Like, I'm an executive. My life looks good from the outside, but something's missing. And I just am struggling to figure out what that is. So I have a lot of people I think that have found my material based on that, like, okay. How do you manage your emotions? How do you deal with unhelpful thoughts? How do you take productive action in life, whether life is going well or you feel like you're at the bottom of the barrel? Those are kind of some basic skills that I feel like most of us missed. Our— in my generation, we didn't learn about feelings in school, or our parents weren't really particularly interested in a lot of our opinions. I grew up in the latchkey generation, where kids were often seen and not heard. We didn't have an equal vote, and I think the pendulum swung a little too far the other way where kids were having— were getting too much of a vote in the family. And so a lot of parents were saying, how do I teach my kids mental strength? So there's kids' books in there, a parenting book, a women's book. And as long as people keep asking how to apply it to different populations, I'll keep writing about it.

00:19:02 Andrew Keen: Yes. It's really intriguing. I mean, you're probably gonna say no to this, but do you think that we live in an overly therapeutic culture where everything is treated as some sort of mental illness or another? You mentioned your father-in-law dying, your mother dying, your husband dying. Of course, those are horrible tragedies, especially all at one time. But people do die. I mean, everyone experiences loss of one kind or another.

00:19:34 Amy Morin: Yep.

00:19:35 Andrew Keen: Are we treating all loss, all kinds of failure as some sort of mental crisis when we just have to deal with it as life itself?

00:19:44 Amy Morin: Yeah. I actually would agree with that. I think there's so many things right now that we treat as if it's a mental health problem or a mental illness when it's just a normal emotion. Take anxiety, for example. I hear so many people be like, yeah. I have anxiety. Well, we should all have anxiety. Right? If you didn't have any anxiety, you wouldn't look both ways before you cross the street, but that doesn't mean you have a mental illness. And especially during the pandemic, there's so many conversations, people coming out to say, you know, I struggle with this mental health issue, and they were applauded for it. And I think it's great that we talk more about mental illnesses, but at the same time, it kinda watered it down for the people who are really in pain. Somebody who has clinical depression, it's not the same as just being sad. Or somebody who has a social anxiety disorder, that's much different than somebody who feels slightly socially awkward. And I'll hear people say all the time, like, well, everybody needs therapy. No, they don't. I'm a therapist and I'll tell you first, like, not everybody needs therapy. In fact, for a lot of people, if they wanna, like, dig into their childhood in great detail all week long and sort of indulge themselves in just chitchatting about everything with a therapist. That's not really about what therapy is. Therapy is meant to treat mental illness. It's meant to treat mental health issues. It can be preventative, but I think just normalizing a lot of the feelings we have as feelings rather than making people think, yeah, if I'm kinda sad today, it must mean I have depression, and therefore, I have a mental illness and I should go get help for it.

00:21:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We did a show about this actually a few weeks ago with the American Enterprise Institute psychotherapist [ed.: Satel is a psychiatrist], Sally Satel — you probably know her work — who said the same thing. So how do we address this crisis? Is it by demedicalizing it? What's the best way to address this crisis, which seems to be universal, seems to be very troubling? And even when it isn't troubling, it cons— it— it's concerning when people are, as you say, treating what seems to others as normal anxiety as this endless crisis.

00:21:51 Amy Morin: I think it starts with a lot of the misinformation that's out there. If you spend five minutes on social media, you can easily find a quiz that will tell you you have ADHD. And it's created by some influencer who thinks that if you're distracted or you don't stay on task and you're not productive enough that you have ADHD. Or about trauma. There's so much information and misinformation out there about trauma and how the seven signs that you've experienced trauma, and it's like everyday stuff. Like, I get kinda nervous before I give a speech or something like that. Stuff that the everyday person would say, yeah, I struggle with that. It's not necessarily a sign of trauma. So I think it starts with educating ourselves on how to become more media savvy, not buying into a lot of the things that we read about and hear about just because it sounds good. I mean, this— a lot of this stuff that gets spread on the internet these days, it's stuff about— that we can relate to. So therefore, we think, well, this is me. Finally, this is me. When somebody's talking about my inability to stay on task, I feel like if I can chalk it up to ADHD, then it's not my fault. So I think that would be a good place to start. And then I think just educating young people about feelings, about having tough conversations, about relationships, and giving people life skills. I know when they ask college students, like, did you feel prepared for college? The vast majority of them, like 96% said, yeah. Academically, I was prepared. And yet the vast majority of them said, but emotionally, I wasn't prepared. I don't know how to deal with a roommate issue. I don't know how to ask my professor for help. I don't know how to deal with anxiety or sadness or loneliness. And I think we're doing people a real disservice because those are the young people that are then gonna go on TikTok and find some quiz and then diagnose themselves with something that they don't even have. And a lot of these things become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe I have an anxiety disorder, I could easily talk myself into it. I start saying, well, I can't do that because I have anxiety. And then when I stop doing stuff, I'll probably develop an anxiety disorder. I'll put myself at risk for one. So I think there's a lot of things we could do to make sure that the information we're putting out there is much more credible.

00:24:04 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So Satel and I talked about the responsibilities of the medical community. I mean, to what extent do conditions like autism now become so prevalent and universal that everyone thinks? I mean, you talked about h— ADHD, but is autism another, quote, unquote, condition being on the spectrum that has been so, I don't know what the right word is, so, so taken up by medical amateurs that everyone thinks they're autistic now, or everyone thinks their kids are autistic, and it's become a kind of passport of one kind or another.

00:24:42 Amy Morin: Absolutely. I think that's another one that, because it is a spectrum, obviously, autism isn't one-size-fits-all. There's a lot of symptoms of it or a lot of signs of it that can be attributed to lots of different things. And I hear a lot of people say that like, well, I'm kinda autistic. And they might mean I have some social anxiety or I feel kinda awkward in social situations. But when we use labels and we use them incorrectly, it does more harm than good, even right down to, like, the label of burnout. That's been the big one lately is everybody who comes into my therapy office says I'm burned out. But the medical definition of burnout is much different than what people are describing. If you're actually burned out, then it means you're gonna need, like, a sabbatical from work, and it would be a clinical issue where you're having health problems and mental health issues. It doesn't mean, gee, I'm kind of tired this week. But when we use the wrong label for things like ADHD, autism, even burnout, it's watering it down and causing people to think, well, I'm supposed to be— live up to this label or I'm supposed to act in a certain way.

00:25:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, how many of the people who come into your office— I mean, I don't want you to cannibalize your own business because you obviously make a good living on that front too. But how many of the people who come into your office or the offices of doctors like yourself, shouldn't be in those offices and should be just living their life and dealing with whatever issues that hit them as they always do in anyone who's alive.

00:26:16 Amy Morin: You know, it depends where I've worked over the years. I've worked in community mental health centers where I think most of the people who came into my office needed to be there. However, when I've gone into private practice and advertised on the internet, I get plenty of people who feel like, you know, I'm doing okay in life, but I'm a little stressed out sometimes and they don't really need therapy for that. They might need a self-help book or they might need some friends to talk to or a support group or something like that, but intensive therapy isn't the right level of care. So I think it depends on where your clients are coming from.

00:26:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And how much are you troubled or should we be troubled by this ubiquity of online therapy? It's hard to listen to a podcast these days without someone advertising affordable online therapy suggesting that we all need it.

00:27:05 Amy Morin: So, you know, I was the editor-in-chief of Verywell Mind, which is one of the biggest mental health websites in the world. And part of what I did there is I tested every major online therapy website. This was pre-COVID, so there were fewer online therapy sites, but they were still just starting up because I wanted to see for myself. I was a 100% in-person therapist at the time, and I thought this can't work. And it wasn't all created equal. There were some places that I visited where I had really good therapists. I was kind of undercover. But I had therapists that, like, really knew what they were doing and I thought, oh, this person is trained. I think [as spoken] somebody came in to see this person for treatment, it would be great. But then some of the other websites, I have no doubt that the person didn't actually read the emails. They wouldn't remember who they were talking to. They just kinda gave out canned generic advice and that frightens me.

00:27:56 Andrew Keen: Amy, I wonder— one of the other troubling consequences. As you know— earlier, there are many people, you can see them certainly on the streets of San Francisco where I live, who clearly need therapy, who clearly have very serious forms of mental illness. Is this— is the fact that everyone now, or so many people, think they— think they need some sort of mental therapy, does that undermine the communities who actually need it?

00:28:26 Amy Morin: Unfortunately, that can be a problem. There are really long wait lists for a lot of therapists. And so sometimes people are on the wait list for three months, six months. I've never met anybody who said, you know, I'd like to go to therapy in six months. Usually, by the time somebody makes that phone call and they need therapy, they need it like right away, not six months from now. So I do think that there are times when having more money, having more flexibility, being able to see the therapist of your choice, can become something that creates a bottleneck for other people.

00:28:58 Andrew Keen: So how do we, how do we become mentally stronger? There was an interesting piece in The Guardian, a recent piece, an op-ed by Emma Beddington that quoted you about cognitive resets, becoming more self-confident. Is it the equivalent, the mental equivalent, of going to the gym, of building up our self-confidence muscles?

00:29:22 Amy Morin: Yeah. Every day we have opportunities to say, am I gonna do something that keeps me stuck in the same old patterns, or am I gonna do something that helps me to grow stronger? So, like, in that article, they were— they took a play from The Mental Strength Playbook where I talked about a power phrase, just having a phrase—

00:29:39 Andrew Keen: A short positive sentence.

00:29:41 Amy Morin: Right. Just to change, just to change what you're thinking because—

00:29:45 Andrew Keen: Can it turn a spineless worm like me, and those are her words, Emma's words, into a go-getter?

00:29:52 Amy Morin: And so the answer is yes. Sometimes our thoughts affect how we feel. It affects how we— how we show up, our actions. If I walk into a room thinking nobody likes me, I'm gonna mess up and I'm incredibly socially awkward, I'm gonna walk into that room a lot differently than if I walked in saying, here I am. I'm gonna do my best. I'm gonna talk to people and hopefully I make some connections. Like, your body language is different. Your body believes what your brain tells it. So if I say, oh, I can't do this, suddenly I'm gonna struggle more, whether I'm talking about how many push-ups I can do or how I'm gonna do it at a networking event. So changing our thoughts can be powerful, and that's not the end-all, be-all. Like, nobody sits on the couch and thinks positive and then changes their life. You have to put it into action, but often it's the first step.

00:30:40 Andrew Keen: So, I mean, obviously, people listening to this conversation might go out and get one of your books. The latest one is The Mental Strength Playbook or watch your TED speech or sign up for your podcast. But what else can they do apart from listening to your wisdom? I—

00:30:57 Amy Morin: I think one of the most powerful things we can do at the end of every day is just ask yourself, what did I do today to grow mentally stronger? There's so much that you can't control every day. I can't control what somebody else does. I can't control if my patients get better. I can't control the weather, the economy. The list goes on and on. But every day is an opportunity to grow stronger. So it might be I had that tough conversation. I spoke up to somebody when it was uncomfortable or it's— I resisted online shopping when I was trying to stick to my budget. Whatever it is, just acknowledging that, I think helps us to have— be able to see our progress. Okay. I'm better today than I was yesterday. Awesome. And then what am I gonna do tomorrow? Because otherwise, there's things that all of us can do today that we probably couldn't have done five years ago, but we forget about that. We think, no. I'm kinda stuck. But when you do that every day and you just say, what did I do today to grow stronger? It helps you recognize how far you've come.

00:31:51 Andrew Keen: And I wonder— it obviously makes us into happier or more self-satisfied people, but I wonder if it also makes us better. There seems— along with this plague of anxiety, there's a plague of intolerance and anger. Do you think that these plagues are, again, connected, that people are angry politically, blaming others, hateful, because, in a sense, they're hating themselves?

00:32:16 Amy Morin: Absolutely. I think that the way people treat others is often a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves. If I think I'm horrible and awful or I don't feel good enough about myself, the best way to give myself a quick boost is to put you down. And that gives me a quick little moment of pleasure that I think, well, at least I'm above you if I'm pointing out your flaws or if I'm treating you poorly. So whether somebody's an online troll or they're mean in person, just says a lot about how they feel about themselves.

00:32:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I don't wanna turn this into just another conversation about Donald Trump, but he seems such a good example of this, someone clearly who was, if not abused by his father, certainly bullied in many ways. So he seems to be Exhibit A in all this.

00:33:03 Amy Morin: Yeah. I think we can look at a lot of people and say, like, what was it that happened to you when you were seven? Right? Like, something went wrong early in your life and we internalized the pain in some way, then how is it reflected? Not everybody turns out to be a bad person even if they are treated poorly. Sometimes people will say, I would never want anybody else to feel the way that I felt, so therefore, I'm gonna be incredibly kind person. But, unfortunately, that's not always the case.

00:33:31 Andrew Keen: Amy, let's end where we began with AI, classic Wall Street Journal piece about how AI is ruining the world. Maybe it is in terms of people carrying their phones into bathrooms or dates to figure out what they're gonna say. But can technology be the solution as much as the problem to this crisis of self-confidence?

00:33:52 Amy Morin: I think it can. I think on a positive note, never before have we had so much expert advice out there for free. Right? You can listen to a podcast, you can look something up, you can do online courses, you can access audiobooks. So it's kind of like you can have a lot of control over what you're putting into your mind on a daily basis, or you can feed it with junk. It's really up to you to decide. But if you choose to use technology as a tool, it can help you grow.

00:34:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You— it's all up to us. You can listen to Amy's show, Mentally Stronger. You can also listen to this show, or hopefully, we address these issues. Amy, thank you so much. It's really important to get this message. It's one that may not be entirely popular, certainly quite controversial, but I have to admit I agreed much more with you than disagree. Thank you so much.

00:34:42 Amy Morin: Thanks for having me.