Dan and Michael go to Therapy: AI therapists, broken psychology, and the long history of trying to fix ourselves

Topics🔹 Why men are turning to ChatGPT for emotional advice🔹 The death of partying — and what it says about American loneliness🔹 Can you separate baseball from capitalism?🔹 What shamans and therapists actually have in commonSound bites"Alcohol is a social lubricant.""Fandom is about shared suffering.""Psychology can't critique society."TakeawaysPsychology often prioritizes individual adjustment over societal critique.The decline of social gatherings among young Americans is alarming.Alcohol serves as a social lubricant, facilitating interactions.Chatbot therapy raises questions about the nature of self-reflection.Fandom is deeply tied to shared suffering and community.Therapy has historical roots in shamanistic practices.The politics of sports fandom can be complex and contradictory.Suffering is a common thread in both fandom and therapy.Psychology struggles with replicability and cultural specificity.Therapists can be seen as modern-day shamans.References In this episode, we mention and/or are influenced by the following:An article on the decline of partying: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the-usaand?Beastie Boys -- You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lkKaren V. Hansen -- "A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England." University of California Press, 1994.Claude Levi-Strauss "The Effectiveness of Symbols"  That’s it for this week’s People Stuff — the show where two anthropologists try (and sometimes fail) to make sense of people.If you’ve got a question, a dilemma, or just something deeply weird about humanity you’d like us to unpack, send it our way at people-stuff.com CreditsProduced by Gabe BullardMusic by The Endless BummerArt by Siobhan HeneganMarketing by Bryan HautLegal support by The Law Office of Matthew Shayefar, the one true business uncle.You can also sign up for our newsletter, drop us a voice memo, or become a Friend of People Stuff — which is our fancy way of saying you get to support the show and we get to keep talking about dust, dads, and late capitalism.So go to people-stuff.com