Navigating the Digital Dilemma: Understanding Technology’s Grip on Mental Health
In a world where digital consumption is nearly as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, understanding the impact of our online habits on mental health has never been more critical. Today, we explore the profound insights of Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a leading expert in digital addiction, to shed light on the dark corners of our digital world and its effects on the younger generation.
The Unseen Epidemic
The allure of the digital landscape is undeniable. From the endless scroll of social media to the captivating worlds of online gaming, technology has transformed the way we live, learn, and connect. However, beneath the surface of these engaging platforms lies a more sinister reality: the potential for addiction and its ramifications on mental health, especially among adolescents.
Dr. Kardaras brings to the forefront the alarming parallels between tech companies and drug dealers. Both exploit the vulnerability of young minds, programming their products to be as addictive as possible. This comparison is not made lightly; the addictive design of online platforms, driven by algorithms that prioritize engagement over well-being, is contributing to a growing mental health crisis among the youth.
The Litigation Against Tech Giants
A significant aspect of today’s discussion revolves around the lawsuits targeting tech giants, accusing them of failing to protect users from toxic content. These legal battles aim to hold companies accountable, arguing that their algorithms, which push harmful content to increase user engagement, are complicit in the damage done to young users’ mental health.
Read more: 4 Easy Ways to Improve Your Mental Health Today
The Chilling Effects of Screen Time
Drawing from his extensive research and clinical experience, Dr. Kardaras shares chilling insights into how excessive screen time can lead to a range of physical, psychological, and social detriments. His book, “Digital Madness,” serves as a clarion call to recognize and address the dangers lurking behind screens.
The Path Forward
As daunting as the current landscape may seem, there is a path forward. The conversation with Dr. Kardaras illuminates the urgent need for age-appropriate tech use and outlines strategies for fostering a healthier relationship with technology. Building resilience in the next generation requires critical thinking, moderation, and a collective effort to redefine our digital habits.
A Call to Action
This discussion is more than a wake-up call; it’s a call to action. We are at a pivotal moment in history, where the decisions we make about our relationship with technology can shape the mental health and well-being of generations to come. It’s time to rethink our digital consumption, advocate for safer online environments, and prioritize the mental health of our children over the profit margins of tech companies.
Join the Conversation
The insights shared by Dr. Kardaras are not just food for thought; they are a blueprint for change. As we navigate the challenges and opportunities of the digital age, let’s commit to being part of the solution. By fostering open dialogues, advocating for policy change, and practicing digital moderation, we can pave the way for a healthier, more balanced relationship with technology.
The journey toward digital wellness starts with awareness and action. Let’s embrace the challenge, informed by the expertise of thought leaders like Dr. Kardaras, and work together to safeguard our mental health in the digital age.
Transcript
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:00:00]:
Doctor Nicholas Carderas, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:00:07]:
Good to be here, Mark. Thank you.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:00:09]:
Thank you. So I see in the background digital madness, on your right behind you. And you are, I believe, one of the world’s foremost, or maybe the world’s foremost expert on digital addictions. And digital addiction is definitely a thing. I think everybody sees it. You get on an airplane, and the pilot is playing with his phone, scrolling through something in the front of the plane, and that’s a little bit scary. You wonder what’s happening in the cockpit. And surgeons and doctors and nurses, everybody has their phone out, no matter who
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:00:42]:
they are. A couple of years ago, by the way, there were 2 pilots that missed landing at at O’Hare Airport in Chicago because they were on their laptops, and they missed their landing because of the they were distracted on their own laptops, and then they they got disciplined. But just just to chime in on your pilots on on screens Oh, wow. Comment.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:00:59]:
Well yeah. And and, of course, every kid every kid is glued to their phone, like and and I don’t think anyone knows what to do about it. And where does it end? And I’m probably one of the few people, you know, in the country, that doesn’t I don’t have my phone in the house with me, and this is kind of an accidental thing. Everybody who brings their phone into our house has to clean it. You know, we all have to wipe our phones off with alcohol and clean them. And I don’t like cleaning my phone. Not all the time. I do it occasionally.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:01:25]:
So I’ve opted to just leave mine out on a little table in the garage where it charges. So I’m the only person in the family that doesn’t have my phone with me everywhere I go in the house. And it’s definitely an interesting experience. You know? Like, they’re all scrolling nonstop while we’re watching TV, eating dinner, everything. And I’m looking around, and I’m like, you know, it just never stops. There’s never any separation. Where are we going with all this, with this digital addiction? I mean, I see it gets worse than that, though. Apparently, people can get psychosis and actually have a breakdown and believe they’re still in the middle of a game when the game is over.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:01:58]:
Yeah.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:01:59]:
Please tell us a little bit more about what can how far this can go, this digital addiction.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:02:03]:
Yeah. So and and thank you, by the way, for the introduction. Yeah. I mean, people say I’m I’m one of the foremost people on the subject because I discovered it. I was one of the first people that really began to look around the social landscape. And, as an addiction psychologist who, by the way, you know, I’m also in long term personal recovery from substance addiction for 24 years, I had been working in treatment centers and running programs, and I was a professor at Stony Brook Medicine. And, you know, about 10 years ago, I was looking around and seeing what you just mentioned, children, kids, adults, and they were beginning to show all the telltale signs of habituation or we what we might call addictive behavior. And the problem and and you mentioned some of the extremes, which I’ve worked with everything from gaming psychosis to indoctrination via social media.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:02:55]:
You know, I’ve been an expert witness on the capital murder case with a teenage boy who was YouTube indoctrinated into a political ideology where he committed horrific crimes. And so, yeah, this is this is the the land the the the water that we’re all swimming in now is this digital immersion that we’re all in and it’s affecting all of us. But some of us are more vulnerable to these effects than others. So, obviously, children and adolescents and young adults. But what I write a lot about, what I try to speak out about now is what’s the price that we’re paying for our love affair with our shiny devices? Because when I wrote my first book, Glow Kids, in 2,000 and 16, I wrote an article for the New York Post called Digital Heroin. And I was analogizing it to because the brain imaging research had just come out at that point and the brain imaging research was showing that the effects on the brain, of screen time was very similar, almost exactly the same as chronic substance addiction. And so I was one of the first Paul Revere, you know, kind of, hey, this is this is a a a new impactful phenomenon. And so first, I had to raise the awareness that that this is habit forming.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:03:57]:
And I got a lot of pushback at the time. You know? That digital heroin article went viral, and I was on Good Morning America and CNN, a lot of new shows, basically, having to defend that people could become addicted or habituated to their device. Is now that’s been asked and answered. It’s an official diagnosis. I think we’ve all seen it. The bigger question that I look at with digital madness is what is that addiction leading to? And and here we have to look at our mental health metrics, our rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, overdose, ADHD, by all conceivable mental health metrics, we’re on fire. We’re at the worst that we’ve ever been pre COVID. In 2019, we’re the highest rates of suicide and overdose, and depression.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:04:43]:
And then COVID was kerosene on that fire because the isolation quarantine and even more screen dependence led to these things. So what I try to talk about is it’s it’s antithetical to the way that we were all genetically designed to live as human beings. We’re meant to be physically active, social, face to face social interaction. And think about what screen time is. It’s a nuclear bomb to, so we’re more sedentary now. So you have all these childhood rates of obesity and diabetes, and we have more heart disease and cancers. So we weren’t meant to be sedentary, screen staring, isolated, atomized, meaning devoid, because screen time also sucks some of the humanity and some of the, you know, so many of the young people I work with, there there there’s an emptiness there that happens. So it’s not just addicting us, but it’s also changing us.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:05:35]:
I think it’s taking it’s it’s vacuuming out some of the core pieces of what make us human. And and I’m not saying let’s go Amish, but we were essentially like drunken sailors when all our iPhones first came out and we weren’t thoughtful enough about what might be some of the downsides of this. And now we’re beginning to see some of those impacts.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:05:56]:
And so so maybe, to start out with it, rather than suggesting that we all throw our phones in the garbage and and don’t look back, that, you know, maybe we start with harm reduction, but, like, being aware of it and and seeing what what small improvements we can make. You know, I think that sound seems like it would make sense.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:06:15]:
Yeah. And and one of the things I I like to talk about too is, you know, when we look at screen time, not all screen time is created is created equal. If you’re, you know, Zooming with grandma, that’s a healthier use of technology. If you’re gaming 18 hours a day, you know, I’ve worked with adolescent young adult gamers who, you know, if you if if you Google World of Warcraft and, adult diapers, you’re gonna find entire chat rooms of 18 year olds discussing which type of depends to wear because they’ll be gaming for 3 or 4 days in a row without eating or going to the bathroom, without sleeping. All the telltale signs, the hallmarks of addiction. So, what I talk about, there’s that, but then there’s also social media. And social media has swallowed up the world and, you know, when we look at the political polarization they’re experiencing, the spike in influencers and psychiatric influencers. So you don’t just have the Kardashians and the Kylie Jenner’s of the world, but now you have some psychiatric influencers that have dissociative identity disorder or borderline personality disorder and their followers are be their which are legion.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:07:19]:
These psychiatric influences are getting billions of views. Now these oftentimes adolescent girls are mimicking some of their psychiatric issues. So what I talk about is strengthening our psychological immune system. Right? Because we’re not gonna change the world. We’re not gonna be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube with social media or with technology. And and this is a metaphor, by the way, that I learned in my substance recovery early on is that being in recovery doesn’t make the ocean less turbulent, but we learn how to become better swimmers. And so part of my narrative is how can we help our children, our loved ones, and ourselves become better swimmers in this toxic stew of digital overload of, you know, there are people that are doom scrolling and and, you know, it’s exacerbating the depression and, you know, the world is ending in 5 years if you, you know, if you’re if you were to believe all the content that we’re seeing. And then we have children that just aren’t developmentally far enough in their brain development to moderate.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:08:21]:
So so I talk about age appropriate technology usage. If you’re a parent, delay the onset of screen time for your kids for at least for individual screens, like an iPhone or a Chromebook till at least 8th grade because at least the brain develops a little bit more at that point and there’s a little bit more impulse control as human beings, us, as adult human beings rather, leaning into, leaning into face to face socialization, physical activity, hobbies that give us a sense of passion in our lives that are aren’t based on being online. So, like, I do a once a week digital fast where, you know, my family and I, you know, there’s one day a week where we’re all unplugged. Nobody gets on the device. We do something outdoors or together, and that helps reset us a little bit at that helps kind of reset, you know, for those who have kind of moderate issues or wanna be a little insulated. I talk about, helping children develop a, the skill of critical thinking so they can discern what they read online because social media is if nothing else, but it’s an emotions economy. And what drives engagement is things that tickle our lizard brain. So fear and, you know, and I hate the words misinformation, disinformation because I’m an anti censor.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:09:40]:
I’m a libertarian by by predilection. But, but can we help our young people discern what they’re reading and use a critical lens to be able to can we teach them those basic skill sets? Can we teach them how to think rationally rather than emotionally? Because right now a lot of the clients have a treatment program in Austin, Texas where we treat young adult clients and it’s incredible to see, the fragility, the psychological fragility, of some of our young people who have been raised in this digital stew. It doesn’t engender resilience. It doesn’t engender a lot of things that really make for a healthy human being. So pumping the brakes and and beginning to moderate is is to not as the adults to not be so drunk on our devices that we lose sight of our 5 year olds who, you know, don’t drop the Chromebook into the crib essentially. Don’t drink the Kool Aid of big tech and think that your 18 month old is gonna be somehow behind if, because that’s narrative I hear a lot by parents that I’ve worked with is, well, little Johnny or Caesar are gonna be behind if they don’t have a, an iPhone when they’re 3. It’s like, no. No.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:10:51]:
Sergey Brin, Larry Page, the Google boys, they were Montessori students. They didn’t have tech till they were late teenagers. Jeff Bezos was a Montessori student. He didn’t have, any technology, so their brains were allowed to develop creatively, robustly, and then they were able to navigate into, science and IT and all the things that they did.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:11:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. That that makes sense. And, and none none of them I mean, this is all like, what we’re seeing now is unprecedented. All those guys had, you know, the early early technology. You know, like, I I grew up with a personal computer. You know, I think we got our first computer
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:11:29]:
when I was,
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:11:30]:
yeah, when I was 13. We got we got an Apple 2 plus, And I had wanted it for a long time because it had already been out for a while, and all my friends were talking about, you know, friends were getting computers. And we finally got it, and it was great. And we actually did get connected. You know, that was, like, after we got it, I’m like, you know, can we get the modem now? And it didn’t connect to the Internet. It connected to to, like, local, Internet, like, bulletin board things. And, you know, there there was we all had our fun. It was kind of, I guess, similar.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:11:57]:
But now, it is kind of like how drugs like, how you you know, one time in history, they had the cocoa leaf, and people would chew on it to get some energy. And then somebody figured out how to make cocaine, which was highly addictive. And then someone figured out how to make free base and crack, and it just kept getting more and more addictive and more dangerous. And, we’re definitely, I think, going that way. And I actually had a book. I ordered a book on Amazon. I read a little bit about it, but it was by a psychologist about, you know, instructing people on how to make games and things like games more addicting. Like, they actually have there’s a science of making these things more addicting.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:12:35]:
And, so it’s definitely, I think, following that evolution of refining more and more to, you know, to keep people more engaged and and do all the bad things that we’re worried about here, you know, of figuring out what do they want, how can we manipulate them, how can we keep them here longer and get them to pay more money?
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:12:58]:
No. It’s the same work. And that’s really the problem. There’s an intentionality behind this. This isn’t addiction by accident. Right? This isn’t like, oh, wow. We created these cool devices and people happen to, you know, you mentioned, you know, in Peru, chewing coca leaves and all of a sudden, there were, you know, a group of people figured out, well, if we process these coca leaves, we can make them, you know, coca leaves 2 point o. I’m involved right now.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:13:21]:
There’s 2 massive class action lawsuits. 1 against the gaming industry and one against social media companies, multistate, multi you know, they’ve gotten a lot of news coverage. I’m an expert witness and consultant on these class action lawsuits. And then what they’re targeting is exactly what you’re saying. There’s an intentionality to purposely, habituate us or addict us to these devices targeting the most vulnerable because we know, as I said before, you know, if you target a adolescent female and you send her content about her body, if if if the because they’re using, algorithms, private you know, in the very predatory way these algorithms act as heat seeking missiles, finding people’s psychological vulnerability. So if if a social media platform senses by a profile of a young female that she’s got body image issues, she’s gonna get bombarded by toxic content about, hashtag skull and bone, skin and bones, a 100 calories or less, visual images of, anorexia. These are all images that make their, exacerbate their eating disorders, but also you can’t look away. You can’t stop the rubbernecking effect.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:14:28]:
It increases engagement because it activates their emotional lizard brain. And so, you know, the Facebook whistleblower, a woman called Frances Haugen, who testified in front of Congress about a year and a half ago, she released and revealed the internal emails and research of made on Instagram. And they had their own research 3 years ago showing that suicide rates were going up as a result of being you know, if you were a teenage girl on Instagram, your the likelihood of having suicidal thoughts or actions went up 12%. They knew that, and in the internal emails, the conversation was, well, should we dampen down the algorithm and make it a little bit less toxic? And the answer was, hell no, cause that’s gonna decrease engagement. So the lawsuits that I’m involved with, are following the OxyContin Purdue pharmaceutical playbook and the big tobacco playbook saying, you harmed there’s a there’s hundreds of plaintiffs on this class action suit. People have been harmed by design intentionally. You knew that these products were harmful. You knew that they were habit forming because you made them habit forming because, you know, if you if you watch the documentary, the social dilemma, you know, they pull back the curtain, and these are the heads of the big tech companies who said, oh, yeah.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:15:40]:
Guilty as charged. We did these. We made these intentionally habituating. I don’t think they they intended to kill people, but we know that for some really vulnerable people, this was a dangerous intersection. And and, you know, people have died. There’s been suicides. You know, just 2 weeks ago, you had Mark Zuckerberg in front of the senate getting up. I don’t know if you saw it and turning around and apologizing to the families in the gallery who are holding the pictures up of their kids who had committed suicide as a result of some toxic content on on Instagram and Facebook.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:16:13]:
So, a pox on their houses because it’s one thing, you know, I I you know, people ask me, what’s the difference between our kids get obsessed with other toys or gadgets. What’s the difference between an iPhone and, you know, pick of any childhood toy? And, you know, what I typically say is, you know, while we’ve always had manufacturers that have targeted children with jingles and with all sorts of things to have kids buy stuff, they’re using, as you mentioned, behavior modification 2.0, really insidious manipulative techniques by design that are now proven to be harmful to kids. And they haven’t. So the lawsuits are looking for warning labels. They’re not just looking for the the families to get settlements, but they’re also looking for legislative changes in how these platforms operate. Like with social media in particular, they can’t be sued right now. There is a thing called section 230, which was the Americans Communications Decency Act from the 19 seventies, which had nothing to do with social media. But essentially, they’re saying we’re not publishers of our content.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:17:20]:
We’re we’re we’re just an independent third party, and if other people are posting toxic content, we shouldn’t be responsible or shouldn’t be sued for that. That argument, I don’t think holds water. The lawyers that I’m working with don’t think it holds water because, the analogy is like if, you go to your local grocery store and there’s a bulletin board in the vestibule, and that bulletin board will have you know, people will post ads on that bulletin board, you know, 1 bedroom apartment, car for sale. Well, Well, if somebody posts on a bulletin board, you know, Ku Klux Klan meeting tonight, the grocery store is gonna say, well, we’re not responsible for that Klan meeting. We didn’t post it. That was just put up on our bulletin board. We’re just the, neutral third party. The difference with social media companies is they will take those bulletin board messages like that clan meeting.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:18:07]:
They’ll amplify the messaging. They’ll gatekeeper it, and they’ll send it to those folks who are vulnerable to going to a clan meeting. And so there is a difference between them being, neutral third parties and gatekeepers of some of the toxic content, which I think gives them liability for some of the stuff that we’re seeing, happening.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:18:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like algorithmic curation of content should be considered analogous to to creating content. It it is, like, a form of meta content, and and so they they really should be responsible.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:18:42]:
That’s a perfect way of saying it. It’s meta content. So because you’re manipulating the messaging. Whether you wrote it or not. You’re shaping, manipulating, and recreating it in the meta way exactly as you said. That’s exactly right.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:18:55]:
Yeah. And and, of course, coincidentally, Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta. So but that’s that’s
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:19:02]:
what he wanted that’s when he wanted us all living in the metaverse. Right? Living all in the virtual reality world controlled by Bzuk. You know? It was, you know, I grew up a Star Trek fan. Full disclosure, I grew up a Trekkie. You know? The original series, Kirk, Spock. And so Gene Roddenberry was a a tech utopianist. You know? So I wish I was shaped as a kid believing that technology was gonna be the panacea. You know? Because in Star Trek, there were no wars, there was peace, nobody there was, you know, nobody there was no more currency.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:19:32]:
It was this Shangri La utopia. And, so that was how I was wired as I, you know, went to my adolescence and young adulthood. And then, you know, you begin to see that, oh, there there’s this is sort of a Faustian deal that, yeah, technology is wonderful in a lot of ways, but there’s a price to pay. And and we weren’t fully aware of that price to pay until we started seeing some of the the wreckage of our love affair with technology.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:19:58]:
Yeah. I mean, some technology is definitely good. I mean, plumbing, antibiotics. I mean, you know, there’s definitely technology in the last few centuries and and maybe even recently. And, but, now the idea of going after these these big companies, like Big Tobacco and and Purdue, is is intriguing because, going after the the top dealers with fentanyl and cocaine and methamphetamine, that’s not so easy because those are really scary people. There’s people with armies and stuff that that are like their own country. And so, if I were a federal agent in charge of going after drug dealers, I would not want to have to go after those people with a whole army behind them. And I probably would want to start with and not that it’s easy to go after big tech because they’re wealthier than anybody.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:20:47]:
They dwarf the entertainment industry. People like to say, well, any big tech company could buy Disney easily. People don’t, I don’t think, realize how much bigger they are financially as far as their value and their power compared to companies that we think are big. But at the same time, you know who the dealers are right there. They have them in congressional hearings sitting at a table. There’s our big dealers, the drug dealers of tech.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:21:14]:
Right. If you’re a DEA agent, you’d rather go after Zuckerberg than the cartels, you know, for for personally. But, you know, you’re right because the the cap valuation of I mean, $2,000,000,000,000 I mean, these are we shouldn’t make any mistake about this. These are the wealthiest, most powerful. The tech oligarchs, 5 or 6 people at the top of the food chain and big tech are the, not just wealthiest, but the most powerful people that have ever lived because they don’t just control a commodity. You know, I wrote in Digital Madness. I was looking at JD Rockefeller who had Standard Oil and who had, you know, cornered the market on oil. He controlled 90% of US oil, and he became the wealthiest man in the world.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:21:56]:
But he controls 1 commodity, oil. These folks control they’re not ultra wealthy. They’re not just monetarily flush, but they can they’re the gatekeepers of what we see, what we think, how they shape our reality. So in the very real way, they’re the most powerful people that have ever lived. And what I’ve heard about in Digital Madness is we haven’t fully appreciated how ruthless they’ve been, not only in their their they violated antitrust laws. Beyond the doubt, they’ve been in front of senate antitrust committees. I mean, when you look at Jeff Bezos’s playbook in terms of gobbling up Amazon’s competition, or same thing with Zuckerberg, you know, when he gobbled up WhatsApp and all his competitors, They use really ruthless, business principles, and they’ve skirted around monopoly antitrust laws. And people, I think, were sort of lulled because, hey, gee whiz, these were the tech nerds.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:22:47]:
Right? They didn’t look like Gordon Gekko from Wall Street or JD Rockefeller who looked like robber barons and these, like, nefarious folks. And so and and and from a cultural standpoint, when Bill Gates came out of Seattle and Steve Jobs came out of the Bay Area, they were part of a counterculture democratization movement. Right? Because before them, and I write about this in Digital Madness, big tech was Hewlett Packard and IBM. And and they were these monolithic corporate entities. And so the garage boys, you know, the the guys out of Stanford that were, you know, tinkering around with their, circuit boards in the garage were became counterculture heroes. So, So, you know, Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck was was, you know, became this, you know, there’s that that iconic Apple ad. Remember where they they had the it was kind of a 1984 ad where they showed the big brother and then that there’s, I don’t know if you remember, but the this woman, Olympian throws the hammer at the big brother screen, and this was gonna be what was gonna make us all the democratization of information. And now it kind of the worm has turned, and now they’ve become the the corporate overlords, in ways that I think we were all lulled into thinking, oh, these guys are just the cool garage guys.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:24:09]:
They’re not gonna, you know, hurt us in any way. Who who’s afraid of the the tech geeks? So I think that was part of it.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:24:18]:
Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. I think and it is still there’s still some appeal to that, and and there’s different parts of the tech movement. You know, there there’s open source and and and the the people that are, you know, fighting for for access to to free software that’s not controlled. And there’s so there are there are good people out there. And, you know, like, I I kinda like things like WordPress and the, oh, the the Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. And I I don’t know if he’s a billionaire, and if he has what his I don’t think he’s creating content or doing these algorithms, but it’s really I like to listen to his interviews where he’s very much in favor of people having their own voice and their own agency and being able to be their own platform.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:24:59]:
And I think that’s, like, a positive thing.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:25:02]:
What I think what’s what’s missing, though, in in, you know, even OpenAI or ChatGBT with a lot of, you know, I write about this also digital madness. You know, there’s a lot of scientific innovators currently in the last 50 years. They’re not getting the ethics training. They don’t have ethical discernment. So they get very myopic in their Frankenstein monster pursuits. Right? So doctor Frankenstein was in search of creating life. They didn’t really think about what would happen if the monster runs amok. And so when a lot of these myopic scientists or tech developers, they’ve got their eye on the prize, but they’re not thinking 6 generations ahead.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:25:40]:
They’re not thinking what happens if the monster escapes containment. What happens with with artificial intelligence or artificial generalized intelligence, sentience awareness, which, you know, Elon Musk has warned people quite a bit about. You know? Like, this is one of the most frightening things that can go sideways. But you have a lot of these innovators who are just so tunnel visioned. Ray Kurzweil is the high priest of the tech industry. You know, he’s a Google senior guy, Caltech, you know, genius. But he in this book, he writes about it. The the singularity is near.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:26:12]:
It’s almost a messianic vision of the future. They think that the next generation of human evolution is gonna be this merger of AI or the a cloud like AI and humanity. That we’re we’re that this is gonna be what’s coming next. And they’re not they’re not fully looking at what the unintended consequences of some of their innovations can be because they’re too drunk on their own innovation. That’s where I say, you know, there needs to be more ethicists at the table to say, wait a second. Or at least some oversight committee that at least is kind of reining in some of innovations. Because like you said, wonderful use of technology. We’ve invented antibiotics and cures to illnesses, but maybe we’ve also had some viruses who’ve run loose because of research without enough oversight.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:27:01]:
So, you know, things like that, that kinda worries me as we go in as we go boldly into the future, because the technology is getting exponentially more powerful, and will we lose containment?
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:27:14]:
Yeah. Yeah. That that’s, that would be good to have, you know, to bring ethics into it. And and and I know that there is some discussion with, you know, the AI people talking about holding back and slowing things down and and looking at at that. Now with gaming and and, you know, I think some people were under the impression, as this technology developed, that it was, you know, like 3 d gaming, you know, being in a first person shooter game, you know, like, which can be Apparently, if kids are wearing adult diapers and gaming 24 hours a day, that’s not good. But at one point, there were studies that were being published or in the news saying that it was good for people, that it was good for brain development, that you could actually get smarter by running around in a 3 day world. But, you know, I guess, like, the downside, kind of like how caffeine and, you know, sometimes they say it’s good, sometimes they say it’s bad. And we used to think cigarettes were healthy.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:28:07]:
But, you know, I guess maybe the the the downside is worse than the the upside.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:28:11]:
Yeah. I mean, I wrote about it in glow because the only research that they showed that was beneficial with gaming was that there was an improvement of what’s called the salience network of the brain. That’s really, like, your hand eye coordination. Right? So if you wanna be a drone pilot, you know, good. It’s good for your some of your hand eye development. But the the price to pay the Faustian deal is increased depression, anxiety, and the addictive factor. Right? And, you know, I’ve worked to some gay they were gaming 247, escaping the real world in two dimensional gaming platforms. And that one of my I still remember the day one of my gamers played League of Legends in the virtual, realm.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:28:49]:
And he came into my office shaking, saying, oh my god. That was such a powerful, amazing experience. I don’t think I will I would ever voluntarily leave that. And, I mean, you know, he was insightful enough to realize that this candy was really tasty. And that’s what I talk about. I talk about that we’ve created really honey coated digital cages. They really taste great, but we’re in a cage now at the end of the day. And not only we’re in a cage, but we formed a form of Stockholm Syndrome where we’ve, you know, rock starred our tech moguls.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:29:21]:
The guys who are habituating us, manipulating us, and imprisoning us in these digital cages, we’ve made them, you know, cultural icons. So, yeah, there’s that. Yeah.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:29:33]:
It, yeah, remind when you were talking about Frankenstein, it reminds me there was that line from Jurassic Park, which I guess is also kind of an analogy of what’s happening. Where the mathematician guy, he says, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. And That’s it. Yeah. I think that’s what you’re describing here.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:29:59]:
Yeah. It’s the, peril there’s a name for it, and I’m having a senior moment. The peril something, paradox. Peril rewards. It basically means a peril reward paradox. You know, what’s and and you’re exactly right. Just because you could doesn’t mean you should. And, and that’s what we’re not seeing enough of.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:30:19]:
We’re not seeing enough of pumping the brakes. And let’s face it, you know, big tech oligarchs, they’re driven by they’re not driven by our well-being or our good. They’re driven by, you know, there’s a profit agenda and there’s other, I think, other agendas as well. But, but so what can we do as people? I think we have to be aware. We have to have clarity of mind and vision to see what’s happening in the cultural landscape to be able to say, this seems appropriate for me and my family to do. This doesn’t. And and how can I lean into my humanity? Because it’ll be really easy 20 years from now to have us all sitting in easy boys with their own toilet seats and and, you know, a vision pro, a virtual reality headset on, living in escapist fantasy worlds. Going back to Star Trek, the pilot episode of Star Trek, the cage, Captain Pike, you know, is is a quadriplegic and a terrible burn victim, and he gets given the choice to go to essentially a virtual reality planet where he has the illusion of being young and healthy and, you know, dating green women, versus being, a nonverbal quadriplegic in a wheelchair, and he opts for the illusion.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:31:37]:
So I look. I’m an addiction psychologist. I get why people lean towards escapism and self medicating. You know, if your everyday life is untenable, if you’re suffering from mental health issues, depression, anxiety, you don’t feel vertical mobility in your life, You you’re gonna lean into the opioids or to alcohol or to other issues. The problem with virtual reality is it’s so ubiquitous and so easy to access that it it it’s gonna be a more seductive escape and a more available escape than the current ones that we have.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:32:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So, doctor Nicholas Carderas, world’s foremost expert on on digital addiction, and your your book is digital madness. And and people can find that on Amazon. Is that the best place to to get your book?
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:32:25]:
Yeah. Amazon, unfortunately. Gotta dance with the devil. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:32:30]:
It’s all books.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:32:30]:
But yeah. Amazon, my and the book before that was GLOW Kids. That looked a little bit more at, children and, the mental health effects of kids and screen time. So glow kids was 2016 Digital Madness is the book that came out this year. Looks at more social media and our mental health crisis.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:32:48]:
Oh, thank you. Yeah. Thank you, doctor Nicholas Carderas, for for joining me today on the podcast.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras [00:32:53]:
Thank you, Mark, for having me, and, have a wonderful day.
Mark Leeds, D.O. [00:32:56]:
Oh, you too. Thank you.
