FBL107: Nicholas Kardaras - Navigating Digital Addiction

There was a metaphor that really helped me in my sobriety, and I think it applies well here. Getting clean and sober doesn't make the ocean less turbulent, but it makes us better swimmers. And that, I think is an apt metaphor for today. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. We're going to have. We're going to be awash in digital, overwhelming, confusing, complex technologies, AI now driven and all of that. So isn't it even more imperative now that we fortify ourselves as the individual to be better equipped to swim better through some of this turbulence?

Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Parton and you are listening to the Feedback Loop by Singularity. This week, my guest is psychologist Nicholas Carderis, a leading expert in the study of addiction, especially as it relates to digital technologies. In addition to running recovery centers in both Maui and Austin, he is the author of Glow Kids, How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids and How to Break the Trance, as well as his recently published Digital How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis and How to Restore Our Sanity. In this episode, we begin with a short history of Nicholas's own experiences with addiction and how that shaped his understanding of the situation that we currently find ourselves in. From there, we explore the deeper details and impacts of digital addiction, as well as the ways in which we might be able to lessen its impact and treat this growing pathology. So everyone, please welcome to the Feedback Loop, Nicholas Carteris. All right, man, so I think the best place to start then is going to be with a little bit of your background. And specifically I'd like if you could tie it into how it relates to your two recent books, Glow Kids and Digital Madness. So could you maybe like, weave that thread for us and tell us the motivation for that, that arc of your story?

Yeah. So professionally, over the last 20 some odd years, I've been a psychologist working with mental health and specializing in addiction. I was a professor at Stony Brook Medicine and I was working with all sorts of, let's call it modern day distress and how people were struggling in their lives, everything from existential crises to the epidemic of depression and loneliness we were having. But prior to that, my background, how I got into the mental health field. I went back to graduate school midlife, but in my 30s, because I had my own struggles with addiction. I had a life prior to my career as a person who writes books and runs treatment programs. I had been. I grew up in Queens, New York and went to the Bronx High School of Science and was always interested in, well, science and what it could represent for humanity. And so I grew up as a huge Star Trek fan. I mean the original series, Kirk and Spock. And I write about this in my first book, Glow Kids, that I was a tech utopianist, like, like Ray Brad, like, like Gene Roddenberry. I was gonna say Ray Bradbury, like Gene Roddenberry. And so I grew up as a kid really optimistic about what the future would hold because that's what I was shaped as a 10 year old watching Star Trek and. But post, when I got out of Cornell University, I tripped and stumbled into a career in, well, I did some work in 19 nightclubs and nightlife and that led me to some bad habits. And so I developed a pretty bad addiction in my early to mid-20s, which almost killed me, which led me into a coma and for two weeks. And I had a near, not the classic near death experience, but I had a life changing awakening which led me to go back to graduate school to pursue a career of helping other people who were struggling. So that was my backstory in terms of how I went back to graduate school and got a master's in social work and a PhD in psychology and started teaching and working in a variety of settings helping people. And because I personally had wrestled with some addictive issues or demons in my own life, I became one of the first psychologists that was working with people that started seeing the telltale signs of, let's call it the dark side of our tech love affair. So I was one of the first people that started seeing it and writing about it and saying, hey, is anybody noticing that people are getting really into their tech, like really into their tech, like they're not leaving their house for days and weeks kind of into their tech. And at that point I was doing work, I had a private practice, I was running a program, but I was doing a lot of school district work with adolescents too. So in these adolescents, and now we're going back about 15 years, I saw the telltale signs of an addictive disorder, you know, all the diagnostic features. So that led me to write Glow Kids, which really compiled all the research that had been out there. There was some pretty good evidence based research that showed that not only can our habituation to devices be potentially habit forming, especially if you had underlying vulnerabilities. But then, so that book came out and I wrote a viral op ed called Digital Heroin that became very sort of widely debated because at that time, and it feels like a long time ago, but it was 2016 and the idea that we can be habituated to our Devices was kind of still like what. I think we, the adults in the room, were still so smitten by the, gee whiz, amazing qualities of our devices that we weren't really looking at the telltale signs of what's, what's this doing to maybe some of the more vulnerable folks in the population. So I was sort of like, hey, let's look around and see what's happening. And so when I wrote digital heroin, that 7 million views and shares in the New York Post, that, that got me on Good Morning America and CNN and then CBS Evening News, a lot of national media where I had to really defend, can this be like heroin? And the brain imaging research, the FMRI research was crystal clear that the effects on the brain and the reward centers and the prefrontal cortex exactly mirrored substance addiction in terms of what was happening with our devices. So that was sort of phase one. So that's 2016 on this Paul Revere saying that, hey, be careful that this stuff can, can be habit forming. And then over the next few years, it was beginning to see what is that habituation leading to? What is the societal price and also the ment. Health byproduct of that habituation. So now we started seeing, hey, is it a coincidence that depression rates are skyrocketing, suicide rates are skyrocketing? The loneliness epidemic is a thing. Deaths of despair has become a thing. You know, the CDC was terming this phrase deaths of despair, overdose suicides and chronic alcoholism. And, and the other phenomenon, generational phenomenon that I started, that I started connecting the dots with, was that if you looked at the generational cohorts, from baby Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials to Gen Z's, each progressively younger generation was getting more and more mentally unwell by the, by the psychiatric metrics. And so ironically, the more plugged in the generation, the more unwell they were psychiatrically, highest rates of depression, anxiety, self harm. All the metrics that we measure self harm were exploding, correlating to our digital age. And, and so the research started really showing that. So there were those aspects that started saying not only are we falling in love with our devices, but it, a phrase that I like to use is as we were getting mad for our devices, it seemed that our devices were driving us mad and, and so exploring that. And then there were larger societal aspects. You know, everything that we're seeing in terms of the, the, the schism in our society, the, the, the polarization that's happening and beginning to understand how algorithmically fueled content is baked in to be polarizing because we know that the most intense emotions, fear and anger, lead to increased engagement. And so I started understanding deeper political and societal dynamics. So, so then it seemed, and I also discovered this really wonderful interview with Aldous Huxley back in 1958 with Mike Wallace where he talked about loving our enslavement and that in this future dystopia we're going to learn, we're going to love our enslavement. And I started really viewing the, the process that had been unfolding either by design or by accident, but I would say probably more by design. Well, I think the initial design aspect was monetization right there was like, let's make these platforms more engaging. And I think the rest of it was Frankenstein monster ish, where we didn't quite realize or I think the folks designing big tech initially didn't realize what the Frankenstein would evolve into in terms of how that would have these deeply penetrating effects on society. So it was, it was get people hooked, engaged, because that's how we monetize. But then it was, oh, now we're doing these not only mind shaping, but ideologically altering platforms potentially either via bad actors or big tech themselves sometimes. And I'll conclude it by saying it looked to me like now we were suffering from a form of a societal Stockholm syndrome where not only had we been taken hostage by, you know, we've been taken hostage and our lives had been very reduced to sedentary screen staring beings which were not really genetically designed to be, but not only had we, but as Aldous Huxley had said, we'd not only fallen in love with our captivity, but we began to deify and idolize our captors. And so, you know, the Steve Jobs is of the world became rock stars and they became cultural icons. And so that's I think the cultural moment that we're in where we're, we're sort of trapped and enslaved, you know, byproducts of other people's tinkering algorithms. And the younger, more vulnerable don't even realize that they're swimming in this water and, and lives be getting smaller. And just even yesterday the study came out, University of Michigan's been doing 40 years of asking teenagers whether their lives have meaning or purpose. And after 2012, I guess that bar graph has been spiking and spiking. And I guess last year or this year's numbers that came out were, I forgot what their exact percentage was. But young people in particular are feeling the most hopeless and their lives have no meaning. And Purpose and here we are. To talk about.

Here we are. Yeah.

On that positive note, on that feel good message. Yeah.

Well, there's a lot in there that I want to unwind and unpack. I think specifically you mentioned your own past with addiction and that was something that obviously was pre this kind of digital paradigm that we find ourselves in. So we know addiction existed before technology. Right. But what is it about technology that maybe is particularly pernicious or that is, is different characteristically than your traditional addictions? You know, even if it lights up the same parts of the brain, are there aspects of, of you know, having it be to a device that has all these other things on it or you know, something about that relationship that is particularly unique in, in terms of addiction?

I think that's such a great question because even a lot of addiction psychologists in my field look at addiction. So I guess mechanistically or you know, from a, almost a, from a neuro, neuroscientific reductionism, where you're looking at addiction is just brain chemistry. And okay, so there's the mesolimbic dopamine reward loop. This activates your reward system, ergo addiction. And, and there was the great rat park addiction Studies by Dr. Alexander in Canada did these rat park addiction studies where you know, we were coming out of the 50s where we thought addiction was all about the brain and it was all about the addictive substance. Because to your point, because to your point, I think it's not so much about, well I'll get, I'm going to, I'm going to bring this home. And, and Bruce Alexander, Dr. Alexander said, because they used to take these rats and they used to put them in what were called Skinner cages and used to hang them by the carotid artery and they were given morphine, water or food. And, and here was this rat in isolation and the rat inevitably hit the morphine until 100% overdose. And Dr. Alexander said, well maybe it's not about how addictive the morphine is. Maybe it's about being over isolated. Maybe it's about. Because rats like social, like human beings are social animals. So maybe the larger dynamic with addiction isn't the substance. Let's turn the telescope around and let's not focus on the substance. Let's focus on what's going on with the rat. And if a social animal is feeling isolated, they're more prone to self medicate, to self destruction. And so let's create rat park heaven for rats where there was all sorts of gerbil wheels and there was all sorts of socialization. They had sex, they had, you know, everything they wanted and they had morphine water. And surprise, surprise, the rats didn't. There was. They went from 100% overdose to zero overdose. Some tried the morphine water. Nobody became addicted to it. And Alexandra's research showed that it wasn't so much the addictive substance, but the larger system that the being is occupying. And I could say from my own addictive experience, look, it started with, you know, the gateways of pot and alcohol. And eventually I wound up, you know, heroin addicted. And heroin, we know, is very physiologically habit forming. But I was going through an existential crisis. I was going through a crisis of meaning and purpose very early in my life for a variety of issues that I won't get into now. So I've come to understand that a lot of addiction is about emptiness and a lack of meaning or purpose and trying to find something or trying to self numb or escapism. Right. And so if, if a lot of addiction is about escapism. So in that context, if we look at this larger digital world, yeah, the devices are baked to be habit forming because they do like light up that dopamine reward center. But I think they've also created. We're also now the rats in the Skinner cage because we're more isolated, profoundly isolated, because, you know, we're in front of screens all the time staring at each other. We're not, as you know, we're evolutionarily designed to be face to face social beings. The tribe survived, you know, historically. And yet the digital age, more than just being addicting, has created the environment of loneliness, emptiness, what's my life mean? And in that environment, if I'm feeling lost and empty, especially if I'm a young person and then I'm doom scrolling and then I'm seeing how horrible the world is in this information overload of doom scrolling and I have a readily available escape button. And I can get lost in digital escapism. Whether it's gaming platforms for young men or social media or chat rooms, it's built in escapism in a way that was much more complex than my door. I had to find, you know, dealers and things and all those things that made it. There were more hurdles to access my numbing in my escapism, where today the escapism is a push button away. So I think more than just looking at the dopaminergic response of the devices, it's looking at the ecosystem that's created that makes people feel empty today. Because that's what people are talking about. They feel more alone than empty. Which was counter the narrative that we were all sold on social media. We were told, right, social species. Social media should be like chocolate and peanut butter. It should be wonderful for a species. And yet instead of our mental health going up, we spiral down after the advent of social media specifically.

Yeah. What are, what are some of the, I guess long term effects of that relationship then? And maybe specifically you can speak to the developmental aspects on kids. What's this doing to our brain? Are we seeing tangible long term rewirings even, maybe even physiological changes that go beyond kind of your, I guess more just like cortical, you know, approach to the world?

Again, another great question. Yeah, we are seeing longitudinal effects developmentally. And that's my biggest thing too. Like the one study in the 2019 JAMA Journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics Journal came out with brain imaging research of infants and, and what it was showing was that you, we were doing cognitive damage developmentally. I mean children, especially infants are so developmentally fragile. And you know, like we know that if, you know, with feral children who aren't exposed to language during key developmental windows, they're going to be lifelong compromised language with language acquisition. You know, feral kids can learn basic words if they aren't exposed to language during the key developmental window of ages 2 to, let's call it 8 or 9. But they'll never learn idioms or metaphor or more complex types of language because that part of their brain, the ship has had sailed. Similarly with what we're seeing developmentally, the largest impact with infants is cognitive and impulse. And so attention, our ability to attend and not be impulsive is also developmental window. And so the best thing you could do developmentally for an infant is to have them build things with blocks hand eye where they're actually doing things. But if you're overly stimulating a child, they become stimulation dependent. And so then you're, you're essentially what you're seeing that part of their brain that's devoted to not being impulsive. In the prefrontal cortex, we're priming infants for highly impulsive behavior. And the problem with impulsivity is it correlates with a lot of other, other issues lifelong down the road. Impulsivity is the cousin of addiction. Impulsivity is the cousin with a lot of other types of issues. We know from decades ago from the marshmallow test. You know, some of you might remember, right, you hairy little five year old, here's a marshmallow in your hand. If you don't eat it today, we'll give you two tomorrow. So the ability to delay gratification, which was something that almost no five year old could do, but as they got older, seven, eight, nine year olds oftentimes were able to say, oh you don't say two marshmallows tomorrow I'll, I'll delay my impulse to have this marshmallow. That was one of the best predictors of lifelong success. And, and now what we're doing is we're querying that process with infants. We're priming them for impulsivity, which is not going to serve them well. And that JAMA study also showed their cognition was being adversely impacted. So their language acquisition, their all aspects of cognition were being compromised. There were gaming studies, FMRI studies that also showed neurophysiological impacts. Now the one study that was at the Indiana University Medical School, he showed in just two weeks of excessive violent gaming, prefrontal cortex changes. The good news was at that age, these were 18 to 25 year old gamers, they did show some because there was neuroplasticity, they did show that some of those effects were seemingly reversible if the gaming stopped. But essentially we're not really sure because we don't have many multi decade longitudinal studies to show this. So this is a grand experiment. Again we know that we're impacting infants in ways that we're seeing. You know, I, we've been in the digital age long enough to see what the 2 year old raised with a tablet looks like now as a 20 year old. And is it any wonder that ADHD rates have exponentially spiked by some estimates 500%. Is it any coincidence that we're seeing all these other issues happening? So it's more than just hey, little Johnny's loves his video games and Susie is on social media too much. It's really, it's really mind shaping. And the other part that we're seeing now with social media is because of social learning theory and social contagion, we're also seeing, I write about this quite a bit in Digital Madness. The digital social contagion effects where people who are unwell and are performatively unwell are getting millions and billions of views and followers. Everything from the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon to dissociative identity disorder to borderline personality disorder all seems to now be exploding at the same time that we have influencers that are espousing these psychiatric issues. And then I've watched some of the influencers And I would question whether they authentically have the disorders or whether this is a way that they're, you know, their, their, their brain has associated that I'm getting more likes and followers the more performative. Performatively I may be acting. So we have that other as another dynamic that's also contemporaneously happening.

Do you see, do you see a negative consequences from that standardization that is taking place from those kind of contagions and trends? And for instance, I think of the opening of your most recent book where you talk about your, your father and his, his candor and specifically, you know, I believe you mentioned that he talks about how, um, it's all, it's a, this technology is very mundane and frivolous and it feels like in a sense we're all kind of converging towards that mundane and frivolous in a way. Because if, if that's what gets you likes or followers, you know, as you said before, we're social animals, we will go in that direction. But that feels like that starts to open that door towards the lack of meaning that you talked about before that leads to addiction. Is that kind of connection that all kind of comes together?

Yeah, I think so. I think we've the, the increasing frivolization, let's call that a new word, let's coin that. But there's a frivolity and there's a superficiality that's happening there where, where the coin of the realm is likes and followers. And you know, look, my, I've got 16 year old twin identical boys and you know, they'll like, you know, they're watching some YouTube inane video of you know, dropping a watermelon from the bridge and you know, let's watch it splatter and it's so, so we're losing sort of the depth and more innate meaning. So you know, you mentioned my father, My father, you know, survived Nazis and you know, real stuff, you know, like, like, you know, real trauma with a capital extra, capital T. You know, and so when you come from that world and you're looking at sort of the people that are, you know, constantly taking pictures of their meals to send and there's, there's sort of like this frivolity that's happening. I think by definition then you're creating an emptier existence. Right. And you know, because I'm a psychologist that, you know, I ran a program in East Hampton, New York for many years where I dealt with some very successful, well, you know, hedge fund billionaires and very successful people and they were suffering from a crisis of meaning in their lives because you know, they had climbed the monetary mountain and then said now what? You know, because they had made money their God and then realized, you know, it's the old cliche wound up being very true. I saw it in firsthand Technicolor that money doesn't buy happiness. And so when frivolity becomes king or, or likes and views and it's this very superficial thing by definition, you're stripping away our deeper, more innate human meaning. Deeper issues. That's why I talk about things like philosophy is being the antidote to some of that because philosophy digs deeper and tries to sort of peel back layers in more meaningful ways.

Can we dig into that a little bit? Because I think you actually put forth the idea of an ancient blueprint with these ideas of classical philosophy that encourage resilience, critical thinking and sanity sustaining purpose. What do those wonderful words mean in terms of giving us a solution?

Well, having run specifically our treatment program in Austin, we're one of the few treatment programs that specializes in treating digital distress or people that are struggling with and I don't like to compromise things because young people 25 and under right now are struggling with their mental health more than ever in the recorded metrics of mental health psychiatric history. But a lot of them are comorbid with their. There might be issues with their technology and there might be also self medicating with some cannabis and it might also be depressed and anxious. So. So in this, in this perfect storm of issues comes a young person who's not thriving and they're stuck in the proverbial basement or they're self injurious and and what I've noticed that young people that have been raised in this cauldron, this digital cauldron are coming out the other end. And I remember I was a professor in the graduate school for 10 years and I was seeing each increase in cohort was getting more let's for lack of may not be politically expedient but more fragile young people were getting less and less able to handle the slings and arrows of everyday life. Whether and those slings and arrows now started becoming not just capital T trauma now became little T trauma now became language became challenging and we know the stereotypical safe space cases trigger warnings phenomena which Jonathan Haidt has talked about. You know where university campuses started really viewing language now as harm and, and needing to protect people that now I come from a psychological model where I talk about a healthy psychological immune system and like we have a Healthy biological or viral immune system. You have to be exposed to germs to be able to have a healthy immune system. A person needs to be exposed to adversity and needs to be exposed to certain dissonant things to develop their psychological muscles or immune system. We've bubble wrapped and overly protected and helicoptered so many of our young people that have been going through this digital cauldron that by the time they land post college, like many of the clients are coming into my program, they're entirely ill equipped to handle life. They have so used the words resilience, grit and critical thinking are the three ingredients that I see lacking. And it looks like to me they're functioning on what we call an emotions economy because that's the economy that functions in social media. It's not a critically thinking, reasoned, informed economy. It's my emotions trump your emotions. And then our emotions are spiraling out of control and nobody has any ability to sort of take a step back and use our, our innate abilities. Well, I would say they're innate, but we have to develop critical thinking.

Right.

So as I saw the, that these were the areas of struggle because one of my academic pursuits have been, has been classical philosophy. I was like, oh, wait a second. These are these skill sets that were imbued by the study of classical philosophy. You learned the reason and critical thinking. So which is especially helpful in navigating through social media content, right? To ability to critically think and, and then think. Spartan warrior, when we talk about grit and resilience. You know, Angela Duckworth is the psychologist who wrote her book Grit and did a grit scale where she, she studied West Point cadets and she was able to, to predict on her grit scale which cadets would make it past their. Excuse me, they have not a hell week, but they have a six week period of real adversity that they have to go through. And her scale was able to essentially predict which cadets would be able to kind of, you know, lean into that problem experience rather than tap out. And, and so it felt like these are skill sets that if we can help young people embrace more, they might be able to handle this really complex modern world that we're in. It reminds me when I first got clean and sober, there was a metaphor that really helped me in my sobriety. And I think it applies well here. Getting clean and sober doesn't make the ocean less turbulent, but it makes us better swimmers. And that I think is an apt metaphor for today. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. We're going to have we're going to be awash in digital, overwhelming, confusing, complex technologies, AI now driven and all of that. So isn't it even more imperative now that we fortify ourselves as the individual to be better equipped to swim better through some of this turbulence?

Yeah. Can we get into some specifics about maybe what somebody might go through if they came to one of your retreats or I don't know if you do digital detoxes, but I guess can we kind of zoom down a little bit from the classical philosophy high level and maybe look at like what are some tangible things that seem to help people on at a real, you know, day to day level?

Right. So yeah, we do do. If you're coming in, even if you're not coming in for tech addiction is a primary issue. Even if you're coming in for substance or mental health primary. We do do a digital detox. We unplug everyone for six weeks. Because whether that's your primary issue or not, the, the, it's almost like a flammable, it's poured on. You know, if you're struggling with depression or anxiety, you don't want to pour any social media on that because that's going to make that fire worse. And there is an old saying that in the mental health field that you can't paint a house that's on fire. So first and foremost, you know, let's unplug people so that they go back to baseline so that then we're able to sort of work with them. So obviously we do a pretty complex biopsychosocial where we're assessing each person's individual needs. Does somebody have childhood trauma that they need to address? And everything else. But we're also baked into our program is a lot of group experiential activities done together like hikes and kayaking and rock climbing. Because these are things where, because a lot of our young folks who are struggling have not. First of all, they've been isolated. First of all, most of them have not been coming from a social context where they've been even used to interacting or having to make eye contact with other people. So putting them in the social context with other people and then having to collectively overcome certain, you know, it's not a, it's not an obstacle course, but, but, but it's things that they feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement, like, oh, I did this with a few mates and now I feel a sense of I can do this. And, and so of course there's, you know, there's individual cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. But then I do, because of the Greek background, we do do a hero's journey metaphor. And we start talking about how can you now reframe the challenges that you've been struggling with? And we start going to the, to both Carl Jungian hero and Joseph Campbell. The hero, the hero of the thousand faces. And you, you've been playing video games for 14 hours a day, living a vicarious hero's journey. Because the gaming industry give the devil their due. They're brilliant at co opting the hero's journey. Almost every video game, almost every action movie is a version of the hero's journey. A protagonist who has to overcome obstacles to become more empowered. Or what the Greeks say, apotheosis on the other side. And that feels very empowering, except it ain't real, right? So we try to tell our clients, wouldn't you like to be the hero in your own life's adventure and not do it through a digital avatar? And, and so here's what the hero's journey is. Let's deconstruct what that is and here's how we can give you some of the tools to lean into some of these experiences. And then that's exposing them. You know, I wrote a book also called Plato and Pythagoras can save your life. I expose them to some of those readings and exercises where really they, they help you look at the deeper aspects and purpose of. It's the old, you know, it's the old, who am I? What am I on the deeper level? Because if you could begin to skin that cat and begin to go through that process, that Socratic question and answering process of what really means something to your life, you're less going to be gravitationally pulled by, you know, Kylie Jenner and you know, gaming platforms and all that esoterica.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this feels, I'm gonna play up your idea a little bit here, but it feels like the idea of the Ulysses pack, you know, Odysseus sailing past the island of the Sirens. And it feels like, right, you're basically giving a goal that is almost like the wax in his ears that allows him to sail past the island or no way. He's tied to the mast and the waxes in the ears of the sailor, right? But he's able to hear the songs of the muse and not be distracted and pull onto the shore and wreck his ship. Because he's able to. He's tied to the mast. He has, he has a goal. He used his, he used his self Control before he got into the situation to give him the power to move through the challenge.

I borrow that because, you know, that's right. It's a perfect example of it then well done. That's exactly right.

I've borrowed it from elsewhere. So I mean it's a, it's an idea I think we can all benefit from. Right. And, and I guess to that point though, it feels like something that we can say here that's useful for anybody even in a non clinical, non retreat setting then is really focusing on maybe outdoor activities, being with other people, setting goals that help you focus and set aside distractions. Are these fair things that we can kind of prescribe for the average person?

Yeah. And let me add one other thing too, because part of what I'm working on too. I had testified for the state of Florida, passed the social media. It was a bill, now It's a law. Governor DeSantis signed that into law two weeks ago and I was one of their expert witnesses on. They're going to eliminate social media on law school computers K through 12. But the kids still have their phone. So you know how. It's well intentioned but whatever small ones.

Where you can get them.

But, but part of the other thing that they're advocating is or that that law mandates is digital citizenship curriculum for students K through 12. And I think this is critically important and I've been working on that as well because can forget the adolescence, but now, you know, the 12, 13 year old. Because two characteristics that we haven't talked about was ethics and compassion because you know, you know, every school does. I do a lot of school district work and all these schools want cyberbullying programs. You know, like how do we eliminate cyberbullying? And again turning the telescope around, stop focusing on the cyberbullying. But the cyberbullying is a byproduct of young people who are not acting either ethically or don't have enough compassion. And so how do we nurture that? How do we build forget a good digital citizen. How do we build a good citizen to be a more compassionate, ethically correct? Because you don't really often hear that taught. You don't even hear the word ethics in the public school arena K through 12. I mean people, you know, might have to study it as some obscure thing, but this is another thing. The ancients talked about things like honor and things like compassion and civics. You know, Richard Dreyfus, I'm reminded years ago Richard Dreyfus went on this all out campaign to try to have civics reinstituted back into public school curriculum. So I think if you, in addition to what we talked about, started adding ethics and civics and compassion and, and those concepts, and you started trying to bake those into the curriculum of younger kids, then they're going to be also better fortified and able to navigate this world as they grow up. They won't be cyber bullies, because they're going to be hopefully walking this walk of more appropriate human being hood, for lack of a better way of saying it.

Yeah, what a shame that we don't do that. It seems like such an obvious move in the right direction. And building on that, I guess. Would a, now that we're talking policy, would a fair policy suggestion for you be one that's going around right now limiting access to social media for people until they're like 16 or something? Do you think that legislative practices like this, where we keep kids off social media, are ones that we can and should do, or is that an overreach of power?

It's interesting because, you know, I'm, I'm with the work that I do, with the work that I do, I'm oftentimes embraced by both the left and the right and reviled by both the left and the right for, for different reasons. Because if we're talking about sort of defanging some of the more negative aspects of, let's call it big tech, so the right will accuse, you know, you. Well, you know, so you get attacked on the one side for. Because if you start talking about any kind of guardrails, then you start, you know, then the right's concerned about things like censorship. And then the left is, is concerned about, well, they're concerned about, you know, bad actors that are manipulating stuff. So we need more governmental guardrails. And, and I think one overall prescription that I, that I embrace that I've been. Because I have been working with some congressional legislators as well, because they are. Everybody's trying to find out legislative solutions right now too. And I've been working with a couple of congressmen staffs on this. You know, I think the adults should be the adults. Because the one thing that troubles me, and I'll be candid, I don't know where people stand politically, disinformation, misinformation. And I know you've had a couple of guests that are specialists in this, but growing up, I don't remember that being part of the popular parlance. I don't remember people being concerned. I, honest to God, I can't remember the word Disinformation being used more than five years ago. And I know that it's a 1950s Cold War era Soviet concept, but we've had the National Enquirer and, and weird sort, you know, obviously, you know, faulty media. But there was, I think there was a sense of like in the, in a free society, you trust the individual to discern whether, you know, I remember, you know, seeing Enquirer covers in the supermarket as a kid, you know, Bat boy, you whatever from planet whatever. And, and conversely, I'll say, like I grew up as an Art Bell fan. I don't know if you know who Art, you know, Art Bell. So I was a lifelong insomniac. So I'd stay up late at night and I would listen to Art Bell and Art Bell would have everybody from Michio Kaku legitimate quantum physics PhDs to Bigfoot hunters, right. And, and I remember, God bless him, he's passed away a few years now, but he would say, I'm going to put guests on my show and you, the audience, determine whether you find the merit in my guess I'm not gonna not have someone on as a guest. So Art Bell didn't have a disinformation police that said you can't have that guest on because he's spreading false rumors about right now. I get it, this was before the age of weaponized social media. But what concerns me is the overreach the other way because we always talk about bad actors manipulating social media. But you know, with all due respect, what if the bad actors are the big tech entities? What if they're the ones who are acting in ways that. So I've always felt that the adults over 18, that it shouldn't be a filtered process, that the guardrails should not be there, but we should guardrail the vulnerable. Kind of almost like a Covid strategy. Like I don't think we needed to maybe necessarily in hindsight of quarantine everybody, but maybe the more vulnerable needed to have some more attention. So the kids, the kids who are more influenced and shaped by some of this content, you know, let's guard roll them so exactly right. No social media before 16. But then once you get further into your humanhood, we trust you to figure things out and to be able to discern things and to be able to use things appropriately. Just in the same way that we, you know, don't let seven year olds drive cars, but once they get to a certain age appropriate level, they're able to drive cars and use technology appropriately. I think a similar model should be used? Yeah.

Are there other things then that you would recommend or ideas that you've been flirting with that you think could be helpful to navigate this, whether it's smaller scale or maybe something on a large scale, institutional, governmental policy level maybe.

I do think Section 230 should be repealed because that seems like a protection that's doesn't apply anymore. I do think that section 230 which was, you know, the Communications Decency act and really viewed sort of social media or big tech in general as the, the community bulletin board and not responsible for any of the content. You know, there weren't publishers. There were, but they've been acting as de facto publishers. So there should be some responsibility for the content that you put out. And I do think to some degree, you know, when we talk about monopolies and we talk about, you know, too big to fail kind of entities that do think, you know, the way of, you know, telecommunications from the Ma Bell to the Baby Bells, that there, there were certain companies that had monopolistic tendencies which certainly we've seen some of the companies have had. You know, I've written in Digital Madness where I've looked at some of the, the business strategies of everyone from Facebook now Meta to, to Microsoft. They've been, and to Amazon they have been. They, they put Rockefeller, J.D. rockefeller to shame. You know, he was notorious with Standard Oil for having gobbled up the American oil industry, controlled over 90 of it. And, and as I write in Digital Madness that was just a commodity. You know, now we have less than a handful of operators who are really controlling the gatekeepers of, of the information that shapes our world. And should that be held by such a small cadre of individuals? And so do we need to start looking at defanging that and sort of breaking up big tech in a way that I think is, makes them less monolithic. And I think, you know, and I talk a little bit about like Lena Khan who's currently the head of the ftc, but she had written this seminal work when she was at Yale Law about monopolies and how the evolution of, you know, she looks specifically at Amazon and it looked at how the antitrust law had evolved over the last several decades where it went from protecting an industry. Antitrust laws used to protect an industry from unfair, you know, the level playing field to now it's consumer based. And the consumer based aspect has, while it may be getting the Amazon buyer the best prices they possibly can, they've created the now environment for potential monopolies where Amazon has gobbled up all the competition and in the other consumer benefits, but entire industries have collapsed. So I would like to see perhaps, you know, revisiting antitrust legislation and seeing because, you know, what's happening now. You know, the big tech scions go in front of Congress every two or three years, say we're sorry, we'll do better. And not much happens, let's face it, because they have some very strong lobbying muscle as well.

Yeah, I'm going to push you a little harder here to come up with one more potential solution, I guess. But let's, I like with this problem because it's so complex to ask this question. If you had a magic wand, what are kind of the things that you would address that kind of get at the root of this, right. What are some of the things that, whether it's legislation or cultural zeitgeist, anything at all, if you could just wave a wand, what are some of the changes to our society, our culture, our laws, our policies, whatever that you think would help move us in a direction that would be beneficial?

Yeah, that's a great question. Again, you know, you can't legislate behavior, right? I mean, you know, we know that from Prohibition era times, people are going to do what they're going to do. You know, if I had a magic wand, I could change the cultural zeitgeist, you know, to make it less consumerist and less frivolous. And, you know, can, you know, because that's what I fear is happening. Like we're losing that I said before our, our humanity in the most profound way. And, and that's why I'm saying if we can infuse, if we can run an IV into the, not the body politic, but the body human of that ancient wisdom, I think that can help them create not only more resilient young people to manage this. But you know, before I was talking about ethics, you know, and I've talked about this in, in my book with, even with what's happening with, you know, with some of Ray Kurzweil's work with the singularity is near. And some of this there's sometimes. Because ethics haven't been often coupled enough with some of scientific innovation, right. From Oppenheimer on down, right. We've, we, we have really smart scientists playing around with stuff. And sometimes there's a shadow aspect to that. And too often we've allowed hubris or just even scientific myopic focus because let's face it, so many scientists, whether they're AI innovators or Virologists playing around in laboratories with gain of function type of things where there's not the ethical guardrails there to say, because I can. Should I just. Because I can. You know, in my book, I wrote the one that was the one anecdote from the CERN super collider where they were trying to simulate micro black holes in the CERN super collider. And the one journalist was asking one of the, the main people running the experiments, saying, well, there's some theoretical papers that have come out that have said that, you know, potentially we could lose containment of one of these micro black holes and it could, you know, rip a tear into the fabric of space and destroy the world as we know it. And I love the response, the, the sort of hubris written response of the, the researcher who said, yeah, we don't think that's going to happen, so, you know, we're going to keep moving forward anyway. It was like, not even confident about it, but he wanted to see his little Frankenstein project to completion, the world be damned. And I think, you know, if I could wave my wand and, and again put the IV of ethics and ancient wisdom into all of us, the folks who are now doing the AI work, the folks who are now trying to make black holes, the folks who are trying to find cures to viruses, all of it needs. I think the ethicists need a seat at the table, and I don't think they've had a seat at the table because they've been. It's been more of a corporate model that doesn't want to hear the ethicist squawking in the back. Shut up. Shut the ethicists up or get him out of the room. You know, put him in the straight jacket and tell him he's not invited.

Ethics don't scale well for gdp.

What about you? What about it?

I said ethics don't scale very well for gdp.

Right, yeah, right, right, right.

Well, Nicholas, we're coming to our, our time here, so I want to give you a chance to leave us with any closing thoughts. Maybe something I didn't touch, like to point towards or remind people of or, or maybe something you just would like to share, promote, that you're working on. Anything at all.

Yeah, well, well, I, I just wanted to close by saying I am hopeful because I know I do a lot of talks or public speaking or interviews and people. Oh, God, that was a bummer. Oh, God, that was. You know, it seems a little depressing and, and I will say what. It, what gives me hope. Is that what I'm seeing now? Because I'm on the front lines of a lot of this work. I'm seeing a younger generation that is saying here and no further.

Who.

I am seeing an awakening even from a societal acceptance because I think it took about four or five years. The, the World Health Organization acknowledged that there's the thing called gaming addiction now that took five years. But, but they accepted that people can be habituated. But I think there's an awakening that people need to own their humanity again. And, and, and I've, I'm seeing that in young people in ways that I've not seen before. There are young people who are now unplugging who are getting flip phones. I was reading that flip phones are making a big sort of counterculture re. Rebirth in, in younger people, which, you know, those that used to be the kiss of death if you had a flip phone. So I'm encouraged that young people are beginning to sort of see this in. Where they're not all drinking the Kool Aid. And that gives me hope. And, and if I think people like myself and some other colleagues keep sort of kind of, you know, raising awareness, raising awareness that eventually we can kind of like just the pendulum can shift back a little bit into a more balanced digital, mindful digital usage. When we talk about mindful digital usage, not drunk as sailors digital usage, drunk on our own power, drunk on our own technology and not really thinking seven generations ahead or what this is doing. So I'm hopeful.

Yeah. Perfect. Nicholas, thank you for taking us on that hero's journey from darkness to hope. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on and it's been a pleasure. Thank you.