America is facing an epidemic of loneliness, and it’s as bad for people’s health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, says U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy.

In the past two decades, there’s been a marked rise in suicides and “deaths of despair.”

What’s fueling these trends of social fragmentation, isolation, and atomization? And how are they linked to broader political and social trends?

In this episode, two of the world’s leading thinkers on bioethics and group psychology join together with me for the first time.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a former psychiatry professor and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California Irvine Medical School. He’s the author of “The New Abnormal.”

Mattias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

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