 Well, welcome to the show, Nicholas. Great to have you. Thank you. Well, we'd love to start off just talking about what happened to social media usage during the pandemic and how has it impacted us? I feel like all of us coming out of the pandemic might be a little more addicted to social media than we were going in. Yeah. I think to a large degree, social media in general, pre-pandemic or otherwise, it was a bit of a Frankenstein monster that wasn't fully appreciated in terms of some of the unanticipated shaping influences that it would have on our whole society. We all thought, cool, connectivity, right? We were sold the promise of connectivity and it was going to be like chocolate and peanut butter, two wonderful things coming together, a social species with social connection. So a lot of things started going sideways that we started seeing from a mental health standpoint. And then COVID and quarantines and Zoom dependency just was kerosene to that fire. So you just started seeing all the trends that we were seeing before COVID just got turbocharged. It's just interesting there because while all that was happening, it's obvious that a lot of people who were involved recognized that there was a lot of money to be had. In fact, we've even interviewed some of those people on this show. And so in order to get some things passed and to move forward and to be able to make that money, I feel like a lot of the consequences that we're dealing with now were put aside. I think they knew possibly what was going to come down the road, but the amount of money that was in front of all of those folks was too great. And so they brushed all of this under the rug so that they can make the money and decided we'll deal with that rich when we get to it. And I feel certainly COVID expedited a lot of that addiction and the trajectory to us being here. But I can't help but think that, yeah, a lot of people knew there was going to be some issues, but there was a lot of money up at stake. Yeah. And I think we've had a couple of precedents, similar precedents to that, right? We had that with OxyContin and Purdue Pharmaceuticals where they had internal research that they knew that this was habit-forming. Their little happy pill was habituating. And they went ahead, anyway, denying that it was going to be habit-forming. Tobacco, big tobacco had internal research shown that it was a chrysindogen and they went ahead with camel ad campaigns to get the little ones hooked anyway. So it's not, in that sense, it's almost not shocking. And so similarly here, we have the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Hogan, and she's pulled back the curtain and said, yeah, there was internal research showing that this thing was increased suicidality and was toxic, and everybody was quiet. And the thing that got to me about her, the email disclosures that she had was they had internal dialogue saying, hey, should we dampen down the algorithms? Because this is pretty lethal to young teenage girls in there, they're being alive and all. And they said, full steam ahead, essentially. Yeah. I'd love to talk a little bit about the algorithms because I feel like we've heard that buzzword. But I don't think very many of us know what's actually going on under the hood with these algorithms and how they're really influencing us. I know we make fun of influencers and we laugh at this whole idea. But there is a very real influence by these algorithms and machine learning on our mental psyche that I don't think many in our audience are fully aware of. Yeah. The algorithm in and of itself, it's like anybody will make the argument, a gun is a tool, algorithms are essentially they don't have, they're not sentient entities, but they're programmed. And they're programming and I equate them to heat seeking missiles because they're heat seeking missiles that seek out oftentimes vulnerability because vulnerability is the red meat to engagement. And so if somebody is a psychiatrically vulnerable with eating disorders or with suicidality or anything like that. Now, the algorithm would also seek out engagement if you liked watching cat videos and they would send you increasingly increased content about kitty videos. So in that sense, it's not making a value judgment. It's just saying, okay, the heat seeking missile is looking for what your propensity is. And but if it's programmed to say, but we want a little, we want some extra sauce on psychiatric vulnerability because we know that that is really is high octane engagement because there is a phenomenon that the vulnerable can't stop rubber necking toxic content. And they know that. So they purposely have programmed these algorithms to provide an increasing torrent of toxic content to the people who can least afford to watch some of this toxic content because it's all about eyeballs. And so in that sense, they're, they've made a decision that we're going to program these solace algorithms to increase engagement irregardless of the collateral damage that it's doing. I think that's an important point that humans are the guardrails. So whether it's driving AI or whether it's the algorithms itself, we do have a role in programming the algorithm to say, hey, maybe don't highlight this content or maybe don't run over that child to save the shopping cart. We have to play a part in programming the algorithms. And I think a lot of times these social media companies just sort of abdicate all responsibility and say, well, it's the algorithm and it's what humans want. And the algorithms just following what our normal psyche wants. But here's the interesting debate, right? There's a currently bipartisan act, the online safety act that's been proposed by Blumenthal and the Republican from Tennessee that basically says we should be able to opt out of algorithms. Why do we need the algorithms, right? I mean, this internet highway of ours, why can't I just seek out what I seek? Why do I why does there have to be a baked in algorithmically fueled confirmation bias echo chamber, which is giving me what you think that I want, right? I mean, how many of us have like shopped for sneakers and then we see sneakers for the next three or four days? Why do we need that? So the online safety act is an act that was proposed in February of this year that would say a person should have the ability to opt out of algorithms and just be able to seek the content that they're seeking. Or at least plug into a preferred algorithm. And we've been in this experiment long enough now to see algorithms change, change due to our age. And so there'll be a shift in algorithms, but also certainly in 2017, there was a massive shift in the content that you were looking for and how you went to find it. I remember YouTube used to be a lot of fun to find new music where you could just go down ridiculous rabbit holes and find obscure, interesting, unique music from all over the place. And now it's you're just continually crammed with mainstream crap. You can't even find the stuff that YouTube used to be great for. And I'm sure that's a double sword as well, especially when it comes out of their creativity realm and into ideologies. But we've certainly been able to see these shifts. I certainly have an appreciation for algorithms that allow me to explore in the way that I want and algorithms that hinder me from that. And we've seen our clients unplug from algorithms. So many of our clients are no longer on Facebook because they're like, this algorithm isn't working for me anymore. The original algorithm of Facebook was show what your friends and family are doing. And then they realized, well, we kind of know what our friends and family are doing. So we're not going to spend that much time on an app, seeing what our friends and family ate for lunch or what our coworkers are doing on vacation. So then they started to amplify, okay, well, let's start pushing people you don't know, because there's a natural human curiosity, right? I want to see what someone in Australia is doing. I want to see what this house looks like that's massive. As these algorithms have changed and shifted to, again, make them more money, our clients are saying, well, I'm out of Facebook. I deleted the app. I'm done with that algorithm. Imagine a world where we actually could control the algorithm. And we could say, hey, Facebook, show me more of my friends and family and turn off all this political stuff that I don't want. And actually, I don't really care to be getting my news from Facebook. I'd like to actually see more uplifting stories and interesting facts. Didn't Kaczynski from the office try that? Didn't try to have the happy news at one point? But I think Johnny brings up an interesting point, right? And how many people, and that would be an interesting cultural experiment. What's the old axiom in the news world? If it bleeds, it leads. How many people would watch happy stories? I don't know. But Johnny brings up an interesting point about even music searching, right? If I wanted to find alternative sounds or music, that was my background before I became a psychologist. I had, well, that world. And now it just amplifies. The popular become more popular. And it's not this sort of egalitarian garage bands are being found on the internet. It's Taylor Swift becomes more monolithic. And the top 40 sound becomes more pervasive. There is no reason in the world that I should have Taylor Swift in my feet. There's absolutely no reason for me to getting fed Taylor Swift. They realize that, again, our natural curiosity doesn't make them money. So, you know, for us as business owners, we've gone through this on every single platform. The platform comes out and there's massive organic reach. They're sharing what you post, and all of a sudden you feel like you could reach a new audience and people are finding you. And then there becomes a tipping point where the algorithm and the social media platform says, well, we need to make money now. Now that we've got all this attention, we need to monetize this attention. And then where do they go? They start charging the businesses to reach their audience. Hey, you found all these great new people. Well, if you want them to see your post, you got to start paying us. So then what happens is only the biggest companies in the world, the record labels who have all the money to pay for the reach can push Taylor Swift. And Johnny, in his garage band who was getting reach on YouTube 10 years ago, well, you have to pay for that reach now. Sorry. He's stuck in the garage. The thing that I think was also underappreciated or unanticipated was when you create these polarity chasms, when you do these extremification loops as they're called, you know, I talk about in my book, Digital Madness, about how I think that's begun to shape people's, the architecture of people's brains in terms of how we do process things, especially, you know, we're, you're younger than I am, but you're of a certain age, you know, you're not, I don't think either of you are 18. Be careful there, Dr. Nicholas, you'd be surprised. You know, I'm pushing, I'm pushing 60. And, you know, it was interesting because when you saw, I work, you know, I have treatment programs where I treat 17 to 30 year olds. And it's interesting because, you know, you noticed a shift in the last five to 10 years in just this highly reactive, highly impulsive, highly unwell way of processing things. And there was a very, you know, the best way that I could describe it was very black and white thinking. And if you look at essentially what an extremification loop is, is the extreme content, you know, politically left or right, in any kind of content that you're looking at, because that's where the viewership lives. It lives on the extreme end. It doesn't live in the nuanced grain between. So if somebody grows up in this digital data sphere as a kid, as an adolescent, it now shapes, you know, like, like McLuhan's, the medium is the message, the medium now is polarizing and black and white. And so is that now shaping the way that people can even actually process information? Where all the stuff in between the nuance that we used to say was the real critical thinking lived, that's all, that doesn't even get absorbed anymore. And so you have a real toxic polarization. And then I think we see it in our society right now, where not only polarization, but an unwellness or reactivity, an anger level that we didn't used to see, you know, certainly on university campuses where I taught for 10 years, you didn't used to see blood sports, you know, when people used to debate things. Yeah, and I think it's interesting how it's influencing our personal relationships too. You know, we're starting to view friends and family members as the enemy, based on what side of the pole they're on. And this extremist content that you're talking about, you know, we're removing the middle ground removes your ability to actually connect with people who aren't like you. So the algorithms is pushing us to one side or the other. And in doing so, anyone who's in the middle has to get labeled on one of those sides. And if you get labeled on the wrong side, well, you're no longer friends, you can't hang out with Thanksgiving with that family member. And it's a really reactive state that we're all in. We don't realize because we're just consuming this content on our devices. Yeah, it's increasing tribalism rather than unifying. And it's interesting, like you said, you know, so now, you know, if grandpa's got a red MAGA hat on, you know, we got to like, where we used to kind of like, you know, okay, so maybe grandpa, get off my lawn, he's a little kooky. There's a real visceral, and, you know, I'll share a personal thing, you know, my father, I talked about this in my book, my father passed away right before COVID, when he was an old school Greek guy, and he had sort of some conservative views. My brother, you know, my father was dying of cancer, bone cancer, very painfully, with around the care staff. And there were a couple of times that I walked into the house, and my brother was screaming at the top of his lungs at him, because of his political views. My father was 90, right? And it was like telling my brother, and then my brother, I hate to say it, you know, kind of was a victim of one of these sort of extreme reactions that we're talking about, couldn't find the compassion in his heart to say, let the old timer be, you know, he is who he is at this point, he means no harm. But this visceral anger would come out. And that's relatively new, like you were saying, even amongst family members, right? We used to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner without 10 paces and turn and shoot. And on top of it, we're seeing this labeling and merchandising of these views. You know, I was taking my dog for a walk before this interview and just walking around the neighborhood here. I've never seen so many people wearing political statements and tribalism on their clothing. And we saw it on both sides at the Red Hat, as you talked about, but also on the left. And it's like, again, we're signaling whether or not we are part of this club, and anyone who's not a part of this club, don't approach me, don't talk to me, I'm going to dismiss you outright. And that is tearing apart at the social fabric and our ability to meet in the middle, to solve all of these massive issues that we're facing as a country and as a world. This is the high school cafeteria dynamic writ large on steroids, right? You know, a mentor of mine, the professor of mine used to say it all goes back to high school. You know, all the dynamics play out from high school. But in a certain way, you know, when you had those sort of the different cafeteria groups in high school, that's what we've become, except now we're not just starting spitballs at each other. It's just really gotten more and more intense in ways that it's, like you said, it's tearing the fabric of the society apart. I do think the people that originally sort of did the, oh, let's see what happens experiment, oftentimes a lot of the AI scientists and a lot of the coders are, you know, they have blinders on, right? They're very obsessed with their myopic little experiment. And they don't, and I write about this in the book, they haven't done the ethical discernment long view of what might go sideways in this social experiment that we've constructed on the globe. What could be an unanticipated consequence of this? And we're seeing it in real time. I want to dive into that a bit because there lies a complete shift. And you mentioned this in the book that remember in high school, the popular kids were the athletes and the good-looking kids, the prom queen, king and queen, and whatever that might be. And now in the driver's seat is the more tech-minded, analytical driven, who are able to manipulate and leverage technology to their favor. And they're in the driver's seat. And when you go to this part about, well, the people who were in charge of this, who were doing the tests, who pushed this stuff aside, well, let's be honest, they weren't the most social people to begin with, right? There's no social consequences to somebody who's not in the social realm. So they can all sit back and watch the social realm go haywire because they don't have to deal with it. They can sit back and watch the world burn while they have their fun, while all of us are trying to navigate our networks, our community, our society. And if we're participating, we are the people who are trying to move it forward in a manner that is healthy and productive for the majority of the folks who are participating. That's two completely different mindsets going to war. Let's take that to its conclusion. You now have those same people pushing a virtual world, right? The physical world is burning. So let's create a metaverse where everything's wall-papered over digitally. And we can all pretend that we like each other again. In essence, what we're talking about is this is the revenge of the nerds where they have now gobbled up the world. And I think Johnny brings up an excellent point. They'll never be accused of being the most socially adept people. I mean, if you look, and as a psychologist, I'm not supposed to diagnose or analyze people at a distance, but what the hell, if you're looking at some of these people, well, I did look at the personal biographies of some, you know, the five biggest tech titans or the tech oligarchs, the Zuckerbergs of the world, and, you know, everyone on down from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you're absolutely right. They Bill Gates would never be accused. They're all seeing potentially on the spectrum. So they have potential social limitations. And yet they're the people driving social media, right? The people that might have an impediment in their social connectivity. And when you think about it, let's face it, Facebook was hot or not at Harvard. It was a socially awkward young man who developed something that today would have gotten him de-platformed and canceled because of its misogyny. And this binary equation of hot or not became the Facebook, which became Facebook, which became the thing that ate everything. And if you read his biography, he's obsessed with world domination. He's obsessed with Augustus Caesar. He ends, he used on Facebook meeting screaming domination, which is really kind of weird in and of itself. And now, as you said, AJ, he wants to create the metaverse. So this socially awkward person who lives in the sort of non-social reality, or maybe not as lubricated social world as maybe we all do, wants to put all of us in the matrix and monetize it and control it. And wonders why, by the way, Meta has lost, I forgot how many billions in cap value, because we don't, excuse me, I don't want to be in your little matrix nightmare that you're controlling and monetizing. Who thought that that would be a good idea other than the socially awkward God complex egomaniac? Life's more fun and more rewarding when you're living in the gray because there is a certain amount of trust and vulnerability that you have to employ in order for that to work for you. In a world where things are black and white, it becomes very boring and very easy to manipulate if, if you understand how that is being built. And we know who's going to manipulate it. We see it already now. There's a reason why in the world, your communication skills and developing them are so important. And when I'm buying an iPhone charger, I don't need to know the person's political leanings behind the counter on whether or not I want to have this interaction. I need the iPhone charger. And I hope that this interaction is one that I exchanged you money and you give me the iPhone charger and we'll have some niceties and a conversation and I will leave that interaction. And even in that micro interaction, there is a delivery of good emotions and chemicals for the both of us having just that brief interaction that we're not going to have or it will be, we're not going to have virtually or it's going to go one way. For the influencers, they all know what it's like to have hundreds, if not thousands, millions of people adore them on a daily basis and watch their content, but it's a one way mirror. To kind of segue off the influencer comment, that's the other unintended consequence that I think we're seeing with really tragic and really global effects. I'll write about this in the book too. We always had influencers, right? We always had sports stars and celebrities. But think about how limited their influence was. When I looked up to Michael Jordan in college, I watched a Bulls game an hour a week maybe, it wasn't 24 seven pervasiveness Kardashian sort of immersion. And that's just one bucket. The one bucket is the toxic values of influencers with hundreds of millions of followers where you have somebody like Courtney Jenner and Kylie Jenner, whichever one of them, one of the multitude of that family who probably has more influence on young people today than I would say parents, school teachers, the Pope, anybody on the planet, because of the immersive ubiquity of their quote unquote influence. But then you had the coin of the realm in the influencing world is views and followers and what gets the views and followers, but it's really sort of performative behavior, right? It's sort of over the top. So you can curate a lifestyle of the rich and famous sort of vibe. But the other part of it is now we're getting these influencers who are psychiatrically unwell, but boy, they're entertaining. Boy, let me get my popcorn while I watch this multiple personality or dissociative identity to sort of switch, you know, a host switching alters and seeing the shaping effect that that's having on highly impressionable 16-year-olds who are now saying, well, this influencer's got 20 million followers and they have 100 alters. I think I've got five or six alters now too. And we're seeing that digital social contagion effect clearly happening now. Well, you talk about in the book this idea that, you know, in the US and in Western countries now, one of the top goals for children is to become a YouTube star. It's fame. You look at it and you're like, how warped is this landscape now where astronaut, doctor, you know, business person is no longer in vogue. What is in vogue is capturing those views and those likes and that massive following. And in Japan, it was still astronaut, you know, though their adolescence were still, so it's turned our value systems upside down, you know, the old war hall being famous for 15 minutes now. It's fame for the sake of fame, you know, I've worked with young people for a long time. You used to say, I want to be an actor or musician and the fame came cool. I want to be a rock star, but there was a talent chase or a passion quest. It wasn't just fame for the sake of validation. And that's that unhealthy, empty self, right, where you're getting validated by the likes, the views and the followers. But it has this really toxic effect where again, because the most unwell people are the most performative, and they're the ones that are getting the most views and followers, they're having the most impact. You don't have a thoughtful, discerning, critical thinker with 20 million followers because they're too boring for this platform. This platform is you got to get them and you got to get them hard. And if you don't, you're not going to be an influencer. To go along with that, and this will date this podcast, but I find it incredibly interesting. So last week, there was online, you have the biggest news story was Alex Jones, Kanye West or Yee, whatever his name is, Milo Yee and Opolis and Nick Fuentes. Now everybody who knows all those people knows that they're all incredibly narcissistic people who live on views, likes and shares, and will say whatever they need to to get the most eyeballs on that. For those of us, we're like, we're watching a room full of loonies, go at it to see who can get it. But as you mentioned, not all of us watching are watching a room full of loonies. We're also seeing young people watch people that they idolize, that they want to be, that they want the power that each one of those guys have, let alone collectively, the amount of attention that they are able to grasp. Because we're in an experimental phase with all this technology. We don't even know how it all pans out. This is relatively new in the last 15 years. So what does happen when you have this amount of people who are all that crazy, who are agreeing to get together, to create as much noise as possible, to get as much attention? What happens at this point? Does it continue collecting more and more the associative loony people to bring more eyeballs? Does it collapse in on itself? It's very interesting as the experiment rolls on. But as you were saying, we there are a lot of young people who don't even know what a world is like without the internet. And this is where all the traction and energy is, which is incredibly important. And young people are going to gravitate where that energy is. I mean, just go through history. When you think about the sixties of Woodstock and all of these cultural events, those cultural events happened because energy colliding and sort of pinpointed to these events that brought this attention that culminated in a cultural shift. But now with the internet and these personalities and the amount of attention they're getting, it's almost an endless stream of this stuff. And by the way, how funny was with that? Alex Jones, Kanye West interview that Alex Jones was the voice of reason that he was like, oh, Kanye, slow down in that Adolf Hitler talk. He's up on the crazy talk. It was surreal. Yeah, because he's actually felt some financial loss due to being so hyperbolic at this point. He flew too close to the sun and he got zapped. But this hyperbole that's perpetrated in all of this online stardom, why we're watching this, why the mainstream media is paying attention to this, that hyperbole, as Johnny said, is not actually seen by many in that audience. They're taking these views as sacrosanct. They're grabbing weapons, as you talk about in the book, and there's a violence tied to this social contagion that social media is propagating. Absolutely. There's going to be people influenced, obviously, thus the definition of the word. You're going to be influenced, especially if you're psychiatrically unstable to begin with, right? My concern being of an older age, and I do think of myself as a free speech purist, is what's the solution because it is a slippery slope, right? Because now I'm troubled by the words misinformation, disinformation, which never really existed before three or four years ago, except in the intelligence community. You never heard. There's a very Orwellian thing happening here where who are the gatekeepers and who's watching the gatekeepers. Now, we have this very fascinating Elon Musk thing happening where he's pulling back the curtain on the Twitter files. It is troubling. It is troubling. No matter what side of the political aisle you're on, no one wants to see politically charged censorship. I hate to say it because I'd like to think I fall down the middle, but things like the Hunter Biden New York. I grew up on the New York Post as a kid. To me, it was some yellow journalism there, but it was a pretty major newspaper and to deplatform it over a story that never got debunked. Now people use the word debunked when nothing's been debunked and they just use it because now language is so condemning and so imprecise. You don't like somebody's point of view and you could just say conspiracy theory debunked and all of a sudden you've neutralized and potentially deplatformed that person and take away the art of debate. I grew up when I was an insomniac going through college listening to Art Bell overnight. I don't know if you guys remember or know who Art Bell was, but he was the number one syndicated radio talk show host on overnight radio. Art Bell from 1985 to about 2014-15 when he died, he had millions of followers and he had this fascinating overnight show. He had everybody from Brian Green and legitimate quantum physicists to Bigfoot Hunters. It was a show that looked at the paranormal and interesting psychological and quantum phenomenon. So on any given night you had legitimate MIT PhDs and you had crackpots and I'll never forget what he would say. Art Bell would say, I trust my audience to discern who's nutty and who's not essentially. He didn't call guest a disinformation, misinformation, I'm going to deplatform you. He said, the airwaves are free, barring, putting on obviously violent inciting language, but somebody wants to have a wacky viewpoint. You're allowed to have a wacky viewpoint and it trusted the listener, trusted the individual. I'm concerned about taking that onus away from the individual, the discerning, trusting us to be able to make up our own opinions on the information as we can see it and having governmental gatekeepers. Now there's a role for government to play here. There's antitrust laws and we can certainly, Big Tech has to be broken down like Ma Bell was because they have gotten too big and too monolithic. And there is section 230 which provides liability, protection, which they don't deserve because they're not a neutral entity. They are essentially publishers. So there is a role for federal intervention. I'm just concerned about the censorship aspect of the vitriolic because one person's vitriol is another person's free speech. Well, you also look at the technocracy in the book and how these companies now, they're global. And the influence that they have is just now starting to be seen in the US. But if you look at what's happened in Southeast Asia, that's where people get their news, is these social media platforms effectively. And they've caused revolutions. They've caused uprisings and people don't realize it because they've pushed mobile phone usage and they've pushed the internet into these third world countries. We're now starting to see just the effects of this politically and wondering just like you said around free speech, freedom of the press, what is actually in control of their hands. But if you look at the version of Facebook in China, you look at the version of Google in China, you look at TikTok in China. They're clearly exerting control in these areas outside of any governmental constraint. And it seems like only communist nations have been able to bring them to heal, yet they were built here. And they were built on American values of these freedoms that we talk about. Yeah, it does seem to be like some of our values run wild in the way that's got on the way from us. Like I said, the Frankenstein monster that with good intentions, Dr. Frankenstein wanted to create life, what can go wrong? And then all of a sudden, the monster turns on us. And that's what we're seeing because I don't think there were the guardrails put up initially in the constraints with some of the... We just put this out there, right? The social experiment happened without really any of us saying, okay, I'm cool with this. In my book, I talk about other scientific God complexes gone sideways, like the CERN Super Collider, where they're trying to create micro black holes. And the reporter asks the lead researcher, is there a chance? Because there was a PhD's analysis of it that showed that there was a scenario where they could lose containment in the micro black hole. We become a macro black hole and swallow up this part of the galaxy. And the lead researcher, I loved his response. He said, we don't think that'll happen. So it didn't sound confident at all, but let's have at it. Because I've got to find out whether I can make a micro black hole. My need to prove my thesis correct is going to trump the survival of humanity. And I'm not going to ask the eight billion people on this planet, whether they're cool with me creating an experiment that could potentially destroy us. And it goes with everything from gain of function, viral research, and people that are doing things in dark corners under darkness that most people wouldn't give a thumbs up to. And I include this social experiment as part of that, that this has happened and this is affecting people. And now we're saying, how do we put the genie back in the bottle? And you don't. And I think you put this genie back in the bottle. Well, especially at the speed at which our political class moves. We're not solving any major problems. So by the time this genie's been out of the bottle, there's no way to recoup it with politics and with laws and regulations at this point. It's moving so fast from a technological standpoint. And part of this God complex I feel is fueled simply based on the velocity at which these people have become wealthy. Technology is generating billionaires faster than any other industry in human history. And it's in large part because human attention is no longer finite. We're growing as a species. This attention they've been able to monetize with no one going, hey, I don't think this data should be as valuable as it is. And I don't think we should be turning it over to them in droves just so we can get a free email client and we can share photos with our friends and family. And they've leveraged all of this data. And now we're seeing, of course, they think they're gods. I mean, to become a billionaire at the age of 30 or in your 20s, of course it's going to influence your psyche. Of course, you're going to feel unstoppable and any decision you make is the right decision at that point. And they control everything. When you think about, I talk about this, that J.D. Rockefeller controlled, when he was the richest man in the world, he controlled one commodity, oil. Standard oil was it. He didn't control how we thought, how we voted, how we process information, how we think. These gatekeepers, these handful of tech oligarchs are the most powerful, not just wealthy, but powerful people that have ever lived. Forget Alexander the Great. You never control people's minds. They're controlling how our minds are being shaped in ways that, as Johnny said, socially awkward nerds probably shouldn't be at the control panel of shaping the global consciousness, which they are. And it happened so rapidly. It happened essentially in the blink of an eye that we went from the steam engine to the search engine in evolutionary terms was such a quick process that I think we all got lubricated by the ease and axis and, oh, wow, look how cool my devices are. So as we got put in these digital cages, and I call it a former Stockholm syndrome, we fell in love with the people that have enslaved us because we've deified them. We've made Steve Jobs was a rock star with his black turtleneck, and he did his thing. And so the people that are keeping us playing Candy Crush while Rome is burning are our new overlords, and we idolize them. We put them up on pedestals. Like you said, it's cool. It's aspirational to be a nerd now. And they know the danger so much they're not using smartphones. Their children are not on social media. They're not touching these devices with a 10-foot pole. So that's the worst part. It's not like they've adopted the technology themselves. They know its powers. I'll go over one step further. It's not even their kids. So Sergey Brin and Larry Page were Montessori students. Jeff Bezos was a Montessori students. They themselves, the most powerful minds in the tech world, were pretty traditional non-tech childhoods. And what we've effectively done that I talk about from a mental health standpoint is we've softened up the psychological immune system of a young generation, the instant gratification, the curation, the influencers. We've softened the underbelly of resilience grip, because I work with these people on the front lines with these young kids. Boy, this generation is not what you would call the most resilient and gritty generation. This is not the greatest generation. And I'm not being, get off my lawn-ish about this. I'm just talking factually from working with young people, there's a fragility there that I'd not seen even 10 years ago, much less 20 years ago. And I think that's part of the playbook, right? Because it goes back to the old Marxist, if religion is the opiate of the people, if digital soma can be the opiate of the people, a sedated, seduced populace is not going to educate and organize and look up and say, hey, wait a second. I didn't agree to be monetized like this or for you to use my digital exhaust in whatever way you think or for you to control what I see and what my children see. I didn't sign up for this. But while I'm playing Candy Crush and look how cool my iPhone 14 is, and so they've seduced us by the candy-coated electronics while they've been essentially enslaving us. I hate to be polemic about it, but... Social media also works to feed and fuel our cognitive distortions. It understands how to manipulate our cognitive distortions in order to get us addicted. When you talk about the black and white thinking, that is a clear-cut sign of a cognitive distortion being manipulated in order to gain more of your attention into that economy. With our clients, there's certainly black and white thinking that we see because it doesn't allow you to work in the gray. But also, people's expectations now are through the roof because their compare and contrast to other people are their Instagram highlighting reels. The heat-seeking missile is to the cognitive distortion. If you have a cognitive distortion on dinosaurs are green and libertarians are blue, that heat-seeking missile is going to amplify that distortion because it's going to find content to align. It's going to be confirmation bias content that's going to amplify your cognitive distortions because that's what feeds the beast. Then the person who is getting increasingly ideologically brainwashed, he feeds the beast back because we feed the content back into the beast and it becomes a self-validating feedback loop. Johnny Extremist, now who has been radicalized by some of this content, feeds more toxic content back into the organism because I've grown to view social media as an organism. Whether it's sentient or not, it's an organism. It's like an ecosystem that thrives and feeds off of certain things and gets nourished by our ill-lizard brain. It feeds off of our extremes and it feeds us back those extremes. There's a military technology guy named John Robb who sees the social media as sort of a hive mind. As you mentioned, whether or not it's sentient, God is debatable but it certainly acts in that way as an organism. I want to talk a little bit more about this comparison and then talk about the proclivity towards depression because I think a lot of people don't realize this. You talk about some great research in the book about how the environment can create this depressive state. Many of us look at others as depressed and might not make the link between social media, but your earlier point was Michael Jordan, he was the star when we were growing up. Well, I didn't know what Michael Jordan ate for lunch. I didn't see him driving his Ferraris. I didn't see inside of his house, Kylie Jenner's being canceled for a 40-foot Christmas tree in her giant mansion. Why do we know she has a 40-foot Christmas tree? We didn't know this about Michael Jordan. I could compare myself to his basketball skills and sure, I might be a little down on myself. I can't jump as high. I can't shoot hoops, but now there's comparison on every single level of the human experience. This comparison can lead to an environment of disassociation, disconnection, as you talk about in the book. It's the seeds of this depression. We look at it as like, okay, we understand now. I think everyone listening understands that social media is addictive. We've all had those moments where we're reaching for our phone, mindlessly scrolling, and we're like, what am I doing here? We talked to numerous clients in our X Factor Accelerator program about disconnecting from social media, how to wall themselves off, how to create barriers to entry, black and white grayscale on your phone, and apps to time yourself. But I don't think they ultimately understand just how close to that depression they are going down this pathway. I'd love to talk about the seven types of human disconnection and this research around how this can lead to depression in our environment. I think I use the analogy of the frog in the increasingly warming and ultimately boiling water. If it happens gradually, you don't even realize that we're living in a toxic, depression-inducing way. This goes back to a paleo way of thinking. Evolutionarily, we weren't designed to be living the way that we live. We weren't designed to be cubicle-working, screen-staring, sedentary, isolated, meaning-devoid beings. We're hardwired for social face-to-face connection because the tribe survived because that's what kept us alive as a species. We're hardwired for physical activity because we were hunter-gatherer at our genetic roots and we're psychologically primed to seek meaning. Everybody from Carl Jung to Maslow talked about the importance of meaning. We're meaning-seeking organisms. If you think about what the digital age has done in all those three fundamental drives that we have, it's been the nuclear bomb. It's made us more sedentary, more isolated, more disconnected under the promise of connection, but it's not genuine connection. It's counterfeit connection. Then you mentioned the social comparison effect. Now we have this reflective mirror and that's what the social comparison effect is. We have increasingly more and more people to compare ourselves to. In the past, we might have had Michael Jordan or our three or four friends in school to say, okay, this is my little group and how do I measure? Now we've got 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 reflective mirrors. Let's face it, what do people post on their social media pages? They don't post there. I'm having a shitty day and I'm struggling. They're posting their idealized external selves. If you're going through a rough patch, it just amplifies your sense of, man, my life must really suck. Look at all these other happy, wonderful people. Now I'm sedentary and alone. All you have to look at is the depression research by generational cohort. When you look at boobers to millennials to Gen Z, each decreasingly younger generation is reporting higher rates of depression and more incidents of loneliness. There's a loneliness epidemic going on. Interestingly, the most plugged in cohorts, Gen Z and millennials, report being the loneliest group around. Now loneliness is the cousin or the sibling to depression because we need connection. We need genuine connection and that's what we're being robbed of. There's been a lot of research, everybody from Stephen Lardy was a depression researcher at the University of Kansas and he looked globally and interestingly the most psychologically well people were pre-industrial indigenous peoples, the people without iPhones who were living really difficult lives. The Kaluli in Papua New Guinea that they studied for 10 years with over 2,000 tribesmen. Now one of these guys was clinically depressed even though they had a daily survival was a struggle and yet they were happy. Dr. Lardy identified what he called depression immunizing factors and it's what we just talked about, it was they were much more cohesive as a community. They were much more physically active. They had a sense of purpose because survival imbues you with a sense of purpose. They were much more nature immersed. We've lost all those really important psychological dynamics and then we're wondering why we're depressed and by the way in the last 20 years we've quadrupled our antidepressant prescriptions. We're prescribing more and more antidepressants and yet depression is outpacing the pharmaceuticals. That tells us that this is not just an organic, this is not just a chemical imbalance. This is a lifestyle and a societal toxic soup that's making us depressed and so the narrative and the antidote that I talk about in my book is since we're not putting the genie back in the bottle and we can't change the world, how can I become and I love this metaphor, how can I become a better swimmer in turbulent water because the water is going to be turbulent and probably more so as we move forward but how can I swim better in that turbulence and so how do I fortify myself as the individual to critically think, to be resilient, to toughen up my psychological immune system so that I can navigate through this oftentimes toxic world. And you bring up a great example in the book of this mad Polish priest and his mission to help those who are addicted and I think a lot of times we look at addiction to chemical substances but we're not thinking about our addiction to our cell phone and I just see so many parallels between what you just said, what this Polish priest is doing with his chemically dependent addicts and what we can do and foster in our own life to remove this addiction that we're facing with our device. So I'd love for you to share this story with our audience. I thought it was just so amazing. Well, you really did go through the book to kudos to you. You know, as an addiction psychologist, I can tell you that one of the fundamental things that we learned over decades of my doing it is that for a lot of people, addiction is a disease of emptiness as well, right? So loneliness is a big one for depression but for a lot of addicts, there's a sense of existential emptiness and people fill that emptiness with sex, drugs and rock and roll or fill in the blank of whatever compulsive behavior floats your boat. So this Polish priest, and I read the story when I was traveling overseas, it has to be 10 or 12 years ago, he ran a homeless shelter. He was a young progressive hippie priest who used to be a musician and he had about 30 or 40 men that lived in the shelter and these were low-bottom, quote unquote, low-bottom alcoholics from various stages of life. Some of them had been professional, some of them not, but they all wound up as a result of their alcoholism, homeless and in the shelter and the priest asked them all one by one, what's your dream, your passion? And they all looked at him like he was crazy and you realize that they were suffering from an absence of meaning and purpose in their lives and perhaps maybe that's why they were self-destructively drinking and so the priest goes into the hospital for procedure, he's in the bed next to a guy that builds, was a boat builder and got this white light inspiration and goes back to the shelter and says, men, we're going to build a boat and we're going to sail it around the world and as you can imagine how that first went over to 40 homeless men living in the shelter, like what are you crazy? But he was charismatic enough to be able to sort of have them buy into this dream that he was trying to have as a shared dream, as a shared purpose and he did and they started building this Noah's Ark looking contraption that came up and when I read the story, it was three years into the project and the reporter at the International Herald was interviewing the men and not one of them had relapsed in three years and at that time I was teaching addiction treatment at a medical school and our success rates here, our rehab success rates are single digits, 8 to 10% optimistically and with all our fancy psychological insights and wisdom and meanwhile this priest, this ex musician, priest had a 100% success rate of essentially treating alcoholism because he found that it wasn't about the drink, it was about the emptiness and it was about filling people's lives in a meaningful way and I think that's true with the new addiction as well. If we're living meaningful and engaged lives, we're less vulnerable to be sucked down the digital rabbit hole of compulsive behavior if we feel truly connected and engaged in deeper meaning and there's not those opportunities as much anymore as there used to be. There used to be more opportunities for true, opportunities for giving back, for philanthropy, for connecting with human beings in a way that really means something in the digital age, all that's been neutered to a large degree so we have to lean into finding those opportunities to give our lives meaning. Well, if our attention is finite, then if we're putting it somewhere, it's being taken away from somewhere else. So if it's going into the virtual world, it's coming out of the world, there you're missing out on those interactions that allow you to feel good, you're disassociating yourself, you're disconnecting from people in the world so that you can feel better for having safe connections and face safe interactions virtually which we all know may be safe because they're make believe. Yeah. You're right. If I'm digitally masturbating, and I don't mean that in the pornographic sense, but if I'm just playing Candy Crush and I'm stuck in that world, I don't have any time to spend with my friends or my children or my partner because I'm in that world and that's where Zuckerberg wants us. Well, it's also easy. It's the easy option and we have so many clients join our X Factor Accelerator program and they're like, okay, help me with my online dating profile or help me find another virtual group to join. We're like, delete the apps, go to a meetup group, go engage in your hobbies or some activity that's outside of the phone and you will be amazed at how easy it is to find the social life and meaning that you're looking for in your life. But the easier option is to download the latest dating app, hop on the latest FAD virtually to connect with people in hopes that you're filling this void. But in actuality, as you said, you're just digitally masturbating. You're wasting your time. All that you mentioned takes effort and the less effort we've essentially now habituated people away from putting in the effort. So now the more you get habituated to swipe right, swipe left and the idea of having to get up and ask somebody out and go on a physical date and all those things become even more higher mountains to climb the less you do them because you don't have those social muscles developed anymore. Especially without community, right? So just like that mad Polish priest, when you see other members are showing up to build the boat, when maybe you don't want to be there building the boat, maybe you had a rough day, maybe a drink would be more in line with what you need. But everyone else in the group is showing up to build the boat, you're more likely to do that. That social pressure of being part of that community leads you to be more likely to do the hard action. That's the positive social pressure. That's why things like AA and 12 step programs work so well. You get positive social pressure to do things that might be difficult in isolation. Yeah. And our X factor members feel that they're like, oh, wow, I just saw this new member go out to a new meetup group. He just moved to a new city or she joined an entrepreneur mastermind to meet in person. Wow. Last week I was talking to them and they were feeling severe social anxiety. Why can't I go and do this? And that positive social pressure, you can find it. But we have to, as you said, learn to swim in turbulent waters. We have to recognize that that's actually what we need. That's nourishing. That's what we crave to find the meaning and happiness in our life and turn off the phone. So I'd love to sort of wrap this obviously many in our audience are probably feeling a bit addicted. I know I have battles with my device, all the science, all the research that you've done, what are some of the practical steps that you would recommend to those who might be struggling with this digital addiction, realizing that they need to do something, but not really knowing what that next step could be. Yeah. And by the way, I'm in the boat as well. I mean, I live in the society and I probably like my phone too much as my wife likes to remind me. My wife likes to use an old saying, barber who needs a haircut. You preach about all this stuff, but you're on your phone a lot. And what I try to do because I'm in there too, I'm in the struggle as well is, so one day a week doing a digital fast, one day a week just to kind of reset where we intentionally unplug and are doing something that's out of nature or the group of people or friends where we're actively not doing that. I talk about trying to develop critical thinking skills. So it goes back to even things like reading, setting time aside to read a book. We have, I have 15 year old twin boys and we very consciously, they have to read not off their iPads, but they have to read a book for an hour before each night. And then it has to be a book that helps you think, right? A book that maybe challenges your thinking, a book that maybe engages your critical thinking. So we have that because it's so easy right now to kind of start doom scrolling and kind of get lost and some of that stuff. In recovery, we talk about things like, you know, having just a daily gratitude list, you know, sometimes we get caught up in all the noise and there's so much that could be overwhelming. How do we ground ourselves and feel peaceful? You know, because I think the more distract, the more our brains are racing, the more distracted we feel, the more we will reach out for the digital sedation. And so, you know, developing a meditation practice, a physical exercise practice, a community activity like, you know, I'm involved in this weekly group that it's a book discussion group, it's philosophy books that we read and we discuss and that's a community, right? That's a community that we have a sense of purpose together with and it kind of opens up our brains a bit. And of course, you know, the first part of any problem is realizing the problem. So it's anything that opens up our awareness to all the dynamics that we just discussed in this last hour, right? So the more aware you are, because I find that really effective with young people that I treat, no young person likes to be told what to do or to feel that they're being controlled or manipulated. And the minute you pull back the curtain, like if they watch The Social Dilemma or if they read my book, you get 17-year-olds saying, what? Hell no, I don't want to be manipulated by, you know, by no one kind of thing. And if you could feed into people's, I like that, I like that anger, that reaction, because for the most part, you know, if you're preaching to people and saying, don't do this, because it's, you know, then you sound like, you know, wow, wow, wow, like the Charlie Brown teacher, but just, you know, giving people the information that we just talked about and encouraging them to lean into real life activities, you know, on a day-to-day basis, not like long, not building a boat and sailing around the world like the Polish priest necessarily, but like every Saturday I'm going to go to the park and I'm going to throw a Frisbee or walk my dog for a longer walk than I usually do and really be mindful of my environment and be present in my life. Full disclosure, I am a 12-stepper. We're big on helping other people, you know, so the more I make myself available to sponsor or to support or to help other people, the more I shift my lens outwards instead of narcissistic influencer and nonsense, now I'm trying to be of service and those opportunities are also part of the antidote, I believe. Beautifully put, we love asking each one of our guests what their X factor is. What do you believe makes you unique and extraordinary? By the way, I just really enjoyed this conversation with both of you. It was really thoughtful and a blast. It was a lot of fun as well, so I thank you for the opportunity to chat about some interesting stuff. Thank you. I only wish we had more time. Yeah, we could go on forever. I'm a pretty passionate humanist and so my X factor is leaning into my humanity and trying to help other people connect to their humanity. I'm not a trans humanist. I'm a humanist. Well, thank you for joining us and sharing not only all the insights and the research, but also some strategies that we can all use in our daily lives to battle this digital addiction that I think we're all feeling. By the way, if I could just clarify, I didn't mean trans in the non-binary sense, I mean transhumanism is the movement beyond evolution. We got that. Where can our audience find out more about the work you do? I've got a website, www.doctorcardaris.com, K-A-R-D-A-R-A-S. My books, Digital Madness are on Amazon as is Glow Kids, as is How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life. I run treatment programs around the country, though, so they're available for to help people 24-7, especially young people, as are the demographic that we serve. Thank you for joining us today. We enjoyed the conversation. It's a topic Johnny and I rail on about from time to time, so it's good to share it with an expert. Likewise. Thank you both.