Our final storyteller tonight is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University and he
is also the host of The Psych Show a YouTube channel dedicated to making psychology fun
and easy to understand.
Please welcome to the stage Ali Mattu.
So I was born in San Jose, California.
But you probably know this place as Silicon Valley and I came of age right after the PC
revolution was ending a few years before the Internet revolution was beginning.
You think that being in this world of innovation and just so much technological advancement
some of that stuff would rub off on me but it didn't.
I was a kid who would play video games and then get hungry and ride my bike to Burger
King where I get a whopper because it was 99 cents for a limited time which ended up
lasting like a decade.
And that I would come home that was kind of my day.
That's what I did.
My dad was really worried about me and he knew that I had friends that were hopeful
of becoming an astronaut or a president or maybe the next software engineer CEO.
And I didn't really have those dreams.
He confessed to me years later that he was afraid I might never graduate high school.
My brother was the person who was going somewhere and he and I had a 10 year age gap so everything
he did was awesome.
He was the older brother.
He had it all together.
He was a computer scientist.
Very cool thing in Silicon Valley.
He spoke five languages.
He was he was a Street Fighter 2 champion.
Like literally it was a street fighter champion.
And what's so called My brother is not only do I always want to hang out with him but
he would always let me tag along in fact he invited me so we would do things like go to
the arcade which if you don't remember what that is you bring a sack of quarters with
you.
You walk up to these machines you put your quarter on and then you wait your turn and
then you play your game and it lasts like 30 seconds and then you to wait for like 15
minutes and like take out another quarter.
I know it sounds like it kind of sucks compared to your smartphone games but it was pretty
awesome back then.
And I would watch him kick butt always with you Ryu, never with Ken to the point where
to the point where he was getting recruited by Capcom to work on future Street Fighter
games and you take me to the playground and he taught me how to shoot a basket and make
sure your hand always goes into the cookie jar.
Stuff like that.
He would tutor me in science classes in math classes because I didn't really care about
school hence the dad worrying I wasn't going to graduate high school.
He would also take me to movies.
A lot of movies that I was probably not old enough to see but one movie in particular
that he took me to was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Now I had seen Star Wars at this point and I was a fan of those movies but they scared
the crap out of me.
Imagine this universe that has like the worst architectural design where you can easily
fall off into this like abyss and just like die.
And then like people just like lose their limbs.
I think someone loses an arm in every movie you've got Mos Eisley And then you've got
Cloud City and then of course the finale in Return Of The Jedi.
And that people are shooting lightning out of their hands.
It's like really scary if you think about it.
So I don't really want any part of that.
And I saw Star Trek and I was like This is different.
There's something different about this this is us projected into the future and we've
evolved we've become better.
That got me excited and my brother drove us back.
I was nine and he was 19 and he saw the gears turning in my head in a way they really hadn't
before.
we get home and he says you know Star Trek VI right there's like five other movies and
I was like whaaaaaat?
I had no idea of how Roman numerals work.
You know I thought it was like Star Track like v i.
The Undiscovered Country.
So we went to Blockbuster which if you don't remember it's a place where before Netflix
you brought a couple of bucks you would get a VHS if it's already taken out you're screwed
and then you have to go home it probably wasn't rewound which really pissed you off and why
didn't you watch it.
So we binge watch all the other Star Trek movies and I was like that's awesome.
And then one day we were flipping channels and he's like what's this.
And it was Star Trek The Next Generation.
It was airing.
So we start watching that.
And then what happens next is my brother and I would watch all these episodes of Star Trek
The Next Generation and stay up late talking about what it all meant.
Now again I'm nine.
I don't know what it all means but here's my brother and helping me think through all
this stuff and helping me to understand that science fiction is really about questions
of what if it's not about the future it's about now its about what would humanity do
in these situations about why we do these things.
And so I fell in love with science fiction for the first time I was really excited about
stuff.
So we started watching Planet Of The Apes and all of those movies we started watching
Seaquest DSV and then we started watching Terminator Terminator 1 and 2 we didn't really
have yeah.
Terminator we didn't have any rise of the machines or Terminator: Salvation or Terminator
Genisys or whatever it's called.
We only had Terminator 1 and 2 and it was awesome.
And those were the best memories I have of my childhood years.
Now I did graduate high school.
Yeah I did it!
I also got rejected from every college I applied to.
So again not really interested in much but science fiction and I was pretty devastated
when I got that last rejection letter.
Damn you UC Davis.
And.
So my brother took me aside and he said Hey remember that episode tapestry of next generation
where Picard could go back in time and you could undo something he regretted.
And he learned that if he did that he became this really crappy Ensign and all he did it
was like deliver these pads around and he never learned from that huge setback in his
life.
That can be you you can learn from this you can grow from this.
And I was like yeah I can be like Picard.
And so he said why didn't you go to community college take a few classes see what you're
interested in.
So I did that took a bunch of different classes and then one day I was sitting in introductory
psychology sat in the back of the classroom with my hoodie on because that's what you
did when you were a rebellious Silicon Valley kid.
And apparently that's what you do also if you're a Silicon Valley CEO you just take
the hoodie part off I think.
So I started to connect the dots and I was like this psychology stuff.
It's interesting it's the science that answers all the questions raised by science fiction.
What if Why how Who all that kind of stuff.
It's a science of us and then everything sort of clicked.
I started doing something I never did before reading my assigned reading and I started
to reading ahead.
I took more classes majored in psychology transferred to a pretty good university.
I spent a year working at NASA at a psychology lab applied to Ph.D. programs got into one.
And throughout all that time while my brother and I became geographically separated we remained
in contact and Science-Fiction was still the thing that kept us united.
We would every Saturday morning pick up the phone and call each other and talk about last
night's episode of Battlestar Galactica and we debated what it all meant about the war
in Iraq and the war on terror and all this kind of stuff.
It was awesome.
There's this thing in psychology called a flashbulb memory and a flashbulb memory is
when you remember every single detail about a critical moment in your life.
And I've got this flashbulb memory for this Monday morning where I was I woke up it was
about 7:30 in the morning and I looked over at my phone and it had about 10 missed calls.
They were all from my dad and I pick up the phone and I listened to the voicemail and
my dad says Ali your brother isn't on this earth anymore.
He's committed suicide.
And I don't remember much of what happened after that.
I remember going to a funeral I remember going through the motions but my head wasn't really
there.
My brother just a few years after that just a few years before he died was diagnosed with
bipolar depression and it really shocked all of us and including him and he really struggled
with that.
And in those few years after he was diagnosed before he died his life very quickly unraveled.
And I don't really remember the funeral I don't remember all that stuff but I do remember
flying back home and sitting in my chair.
It was one of those times where you know you like pray.
No one is sitting beside you because you have that middle seat and the flight was almost
full and someone sits right next to me.
And this guy wants to start talking.
The worst people in the world at that point.
And he seems nice enough but he's like where you come in from where you go and things like
that and eventually starts asking me what's your family like.
Do you have any brothers or sisters.
It was the first time I was asked that question after my brother died.
And I said No I'm an only child.
And we kept talking.
The flight took off and then I said excuse me I undid my seat belt left the seat went
to the lavatory and there at 40,000 feet in the air I had a panic attack.
And that's what I learned.
I learned that this was something I couldn't talk about.
My brother was now off limits.
I was an only child.
And the way I'm going to deal with this anxiety is by avoiding it.
That's what I did.
So when people would be around me and maybe they start saying something like Oh I'm so
pissed off my boss I just want to shoot myself.
I'd turn off my brain.
That's what I did or I'd leave the situation or if someone asked me about my family I say
Yeah I've got my parents are alive they're retired and I'm an only child.
That was my reality.
I remember being at Thanksgiving that year and sitting right across me was this really
nice guy named Karl and we were talking and then he eventually started telling you about
his brother and he said oh my brother yeah we have this really interesting relationship.
He's like 10 years older than me is kind of like having a dad that never disciplines you.
And inside my head I was thinking I know I want to talk to you about this but I was paralyzed.
I couldn't I couldn't share those those memories.
The only time I ever saw my brother was in my dreams every week at least once I would
go to sleep and start to dream.
And I was home.
The home I grew up in and the door would open and there walks my brother through the door
and we have these conversations and I say hey I finished my Ph.D. program.
Hey I I'm getting married.
Hey where were you at the wedding.
I missed you there.
And that was the parallel universe where my brother lived.
I took away all the photos of him.
I stopped watching science fiction and this was my reality.
And then Star Trek was everywhere.
There was photos there was interviews everyone was talking about it.
And I was like Damn it J.J.
Abrams So I went to see that movie and it was the first time I was watching a Star Trek
film first and I was watching Star Trek anything without my brother.
And it was painful.
And I also was afraid J.J.
Abrams was going to mess it up.
But I loved it.
I loved it so much.
I loved the lens flares.
I love how the bridge of the enterprise looks like an Apple store.
I love everything about this movie.
I especially love Spock.
This new Spock he's bicultural that spoke to me.
He's lost a loved one and he's struggling with that complicated grief that happens and
that resonated with me.
And after seeing that movie there was something about Spock that lingered on and he says in
one of those films I choose not to feel.
And at that moment I made a decision I don't want to go down that same path.
I'm going to do something about this.
So I wrote a story about how I discovered psychology the role my brother played in that.
And that story became a blog and the blog grew and became evolved into a podcast that
podcast transformed into a YouTube channel and eventually along the way I earned this
nickname nickname Science-Fiction psychologist which is pretty cool.
And I get invited to speak at Comic-Con about the psychology of science fiction and the
more I did all of that the more I started talking about psychology and how I discovered
it and what it means to me and science fiction and how the two interact it got easier for
me doing all of that that became my therapy and those dreams started to subside and as
I met people through comic con it started to remind me more of who my brother was and
pulled him out of that parallel universe and bought brought him back to this reality.
He never got to see any of this.
He never got to see the person I became.
He never got to see me being at Comic Con.
And the thing that really takes Well there's a lot of things that make me sad about this.
But one of the things that really makes me sad is he never got to see this golden age
of geekery that we're all living in right now.
Where are these things you have these things that I used to hide and keep to myself are
now like really awesome and cool.
And it really makes me sad that the last Star Trek my brother ever watched was Star Trek
Enterprise and Star Trek: Nemesis.
And then the last Star Wars he ever saw were the prequels.
And he thought that's it.
And here we are on the verge of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Trek Beyond is
coming out next year and the world is an awesome place.
He never got to see that.
But my hope is that by sharing my story hopefully I can do for others what my brother did for
me.
Thank you.
So I'm going to go home now and watch all the Star Trek. and cry a lot.