What is digital madness, and why does it matter?
In March 2024, I spoke with Nicholas Kardaras, PhD, an addiction psychologist and the author of Glow Kids and Digital Madness. I introduced him as one of the leading experts on what he calls digital addiction.
We talked about what constant screen use is doing to children and adults, why he believes the habit was built on purpose, and what families can do without throwing their phones in the garbage. In his view, the question is no longer whether people can become hooked on their devices. The real question is where that habit is leading us.
How did he first recognize the problem?
At 2:00, he described looking around years earlier and seeing children, teenagers, and adults show the telltale signs of habituation he knew from his clinical work. He also spoke openly about his own long-term personal recovery from substance use.
When Glow Kids came out, he wrote an article for the New York Post called “Digital Heroin.” He based the comparison on brain imaging research that, as he described it, showed screen time affecting the brain much as chronic substance use does. Unfortunately, he got a lot of pushback at the time. Today, he said, that question has been asked and answered.
What does a life on screens cost us?
In the same answer, he pointed to anxiety, depression, attention problems, and overdose, which he said were already getting worse before COVID. In his words, the isolation of the pandemic and even more screen dependence were kerosene on that fire.
His larger point was about how human beings are built. We are meant, he said, to be physically active and to see each other face to face. Yet, screen life leaves people sedentary, isolated, and, in some of the young people he works with, strangely empty. Still, he believes we were like drunken sailors when smartphones first arrived, and we are only now seeing the downside.
Is all screen time the same?
At 5:54, I suggested that rather than throwing our phones away, we might start with harm reduction: notice the habit and make small improvements. At 6:11, he agreed and drew a distinction. Not all screen time is created equal. A video call with grandma is a healthier use of technology than gaming for days on end, and he has worked with young gamers who stopped eating and sleeping to keep playing.
He also described the rise of psychiatric influencers, whose followers, often adolescent girls, can begin to mimic the conditions they watch. Interestingly, his answer borrowed a metaphor from his own early recovery. Being in recovery does not make the ocean less turbulent, but we can learn to become better swimmers.
What can parents and families do?
In the same part of the conversation, he urged parents to delay individual screens, such as a phone or a laptop, until at least eighth grade, when the brain has developed a little more impulse control. He described a weekly digital fast in his own home, one day when nobody gets on a device.
He wants children to learn critical thinking, because in his view social media is an emotions economy that rewards whatever tickles the lizard brain. So, he pushed back on the fear that a toddler without a device will fall behind. He pointed out that the founders of Google and Jeff Bezos went to Montessori schools and had little technology until much later.
Were these products designed to be hard to put down?
At 11:11, I compared the trend to the history of drugs, from chewing the coca leaf to cocaine and then to crack, each step more refined and more dangerous.
At 12:54, he said this is not addiction by accident. He described his role as an expert witness and consultant in large class action lawsuits against the gaming industry and social media companies. In his account, their algorithms act like heat-seeking missiles. A teenage girl with body image concerns, for example, can be flooded with content that feeds an eating disorder, because it keeps her engaged.
What did the companies know about the harm to teenagers?
He described the testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who released internal research on Instagram. According to him, that research linked the platform to suicidal thoughts among teenage girls, and when staff discussed making the algorithm less toxic, the answer was no, because engagement would drop.
In fact, he said the lawsuits follow the playbook used against Purdue and Big Tobacco. They seek warning labels and legislative changes, not only settlements for families. He also recalled Mark Zuckerberg turning to apologize to families at a Senate hearing, parents holding pictures of children they had lost.
Should platforms answer for what their algorithms promote?
He explained the platforms’ defense with a bulletin board in a grocery store, where the store is not responsible for a hateful flyer that a stranger pins up. However, in his view, social media companies do not just host the flyer. They amplify it and deliver it to the people most vulnerable to it.
At 18:24, I said that algorithmic curation should be treated much like creating content, a kind of meta content. He agreed. Shaping and amplifying a message, he said, is a way of remaking it, whoever wrote it first.
Why did so many people trust big tech?
At 19:54, I noted that going after tech companies may be easier than going after cartels, since the dealers are sitting at a table in congressional hearings. At 21:11, he described a handful of tech leaders as perhaps the most powerful people who have ever lived. Unlike the oil barons, they control what we see and what we think.
Of course, part of their appeal, he said, was cultural. The young inventors tinkering in garages looked like counterculture heroes, not corporate overlords. That image lulled people into trusting them.
Where could this technology take us next?
From 24:58, he worried that many innovators lack ethical training and chase their own Frankenstein projects without asking what happens if the monster escapes. He wants ethicists, or at least some oversight, at the table.
At 28:08, he described a young gamer who came into his office shaking after a session and said he would never voluntarily leave that world. His phrase for it was honey-coated digital cages. At 29:56, he recalled The Cage, the pilot episode of Star Trek, in which an injured captain chooses a pleasant illusion over his real life. As an addiction psychologist, he understands escapism, and he fears virtual reality will become the easiest escape of all.
Who is Nicholas Kardaras?
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD, is an addiction psychologist and the author of Glow Kids, about children and screens, and Digital Madness, about social media and mental health. He has worked in treatment settings, taught at Stony Brook Medicine, and serves as an expert witness and consultant in lawsuits against gaming and social media companies.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
Screens are not going away, and Nicholas Kardaras is not asking anyone to give them up. His message is to notice which uses help and which ones hollow us out, to protect young brains by delaying personal devices, and to make room every week for time offline, outdoors, and face to face.
How do I approach this today?
Today my practice focuses on helping people come off benzodiazepines and other medications gradually, and on medication for alcohol and opioid dependence. Physical dependence is not addiction, and the safest way off is usually slow.
Call 911 or go to an emergency department if there is a seizure, confusion or hallucinations, or thoughts of self-harm. For thoughts of suicide or any mental health crisis, you can also call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (33 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:00] Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, welcome to the podcast.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [00:03] Good to be here, Mark. Thank you.
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:06] Thank you. So I see in the background digital madness 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 mean, I think everybody sees it. You know, you get on an airplane and the pilot is playing with his phone, scrolling through something in the front of the plane. And, you know, that’s a little bit scary. You know, you wonder what’s happening in the cockpit and, you know, surgeons and doctors and nurses. Like everybody has their phone out, you know, no matter who they are.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [00:40] A couple of years ago, by the way, there were two pilots that missed landing at O’Hare Airport in Chicago because they were on their laptops. And they missed their landing because they were distracted on their own laptops. And then they got disciplined. But just to chime in on your pilots on screens. Comment.
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:56] Well, yeah, and of course, every kid is glued to their phone, and I don’t think anyone knows what to do about it, and where does it end? […] 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 and right yeah please tell us a little bit more about what can how far this can go this digital addiction yeah
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [02:00] So and thank you by the way for the introduction yeah I mean people say I’m one of the foremost people on this 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 what we might call addictive behavior. And the problem, and you mentioned some of the extremes, which I’ve worked with, everything from gaming psychosis to indoctrination via social media. I’ve been an expert witness on the capital murder case where the teenage boy was YouTube indoctrinated into a political ideology where he committed horrific crimes. And so, yeah, this is 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 2016, 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 a new impactful phenomenon. And so first I had to raise the awareness that this is habit forming. 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 can become addicted or habituated to their devices. 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 here we have to look at our mental health metrics, our rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, overdose, ADHD. By all conceivable mental health metrics were 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. 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 antithetical to the way that we were all genetically designed to live as human beings. We’re meant to be physically active, face-to-face social interaction. And think about what screen time is. It’s a nuclear bomb. 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 young people that I work with, there’s an emptiness there that happens. So it’s not just addicting us, but it’s also changing us. I think it’s vacuuming out some of the core pieces of what make us human. 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.
Dr. Mark Leeds [05:54] So maybe to start out with it rather than suggesting that we all throw our phones in the garbage and don’t look back that you know maybe we start with harm reduction of like being aware of it and seeing what small improvements we can make you know I think that sounds seems like it would make sense
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [06:11] Yeah and one of the things 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 you Google World of Warcraft and adult diapers, you’re going to find entire chat rooms of 18 year olds discussing which type of depends to where, because they’ll be gaming for three or four 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, which are legion, 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 going to change the world. We’re not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube with social media or with technology. 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 and 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, you know, it’s exacerbating the depression and, you know, the world is ending in five years. If 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. So I talk about age appropriate technology usage. If you’re a parent, delay the onset of screen time for your kids, at least for individual screens, like an iPhone or a Chromebook, until at least eighth 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 face-to-face socialization, physical activity, hobbies that give us a sense of passion in our lives that 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. That helps kind of reset, you know, for those who have kind of moderate issues or want to be a little insulated. I talk about helping children develop 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 I’m a libertarian by by predilection 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 beginning to moderate is to not, as the adults, to not be so drunk on our devices that we lose sight of our five-year-olds who 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 going to be somehow behind if, because that’s narrative I hear a lot by parents that I’ve worked with is, well, little Johnny or Cesar are going to be behind if they don’t have an iPhone when they’re three, it’s like, no, no. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, the Google boys, they were Montessori students. They didn’t have tech until 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.
Dr. Mark Leeds [11:11] Yeah you know that makes sense and 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 grew up with a personal computer you know I think we got our first computer when I was yeah when I was 13 we got we had 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 I’m like you know can we get the modem now and it didn’t connect to the internet it connected to like local internet like bulletin board things and you know there was you know we all had our fun it was kind of the I guess similar but now it is kind of like how drugs like how 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 like 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 you know we’re going 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 and you know so it’s definitely I think following that evolution of refining more and more to you know to keep people more engaged 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 whatever pay more money you know so I guess oh go ahead
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [12:54] Well you know 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 2.0. I’m involved right now. There’s two massive class action lawsuits, one against the gaming industry and one against social media companies, multi-state, multi, you know, they’ve gotten a lot of news coverage. I’m an expert witness and consultant on these class action lawsuits, and 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, if you target an adolescent female and you send her content about her body, because they’re using algorithms, in a very predatory way, these algorithms act as heat-seeking missiles, finding people’s psychological vulnerability. So if a social media platform senses by a profile of a young female that she’s got body image issues, she’s going to get bombarded by toxic content about hashtag skull and bone, skin and bones, 100 calories or less, visual images of anorexia. These are all images that exacerbate their eating disorders, but also you can’t look away. You can’t stop the rubbernecking effect and 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 Meta on Instagram. And they had their own research three years ago showing that suicide rates were going up as a result of being, you know, if you were a teenage girl on Instagram, 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, because that’s going to 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 for me 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 guilty as charged we did these we made these intentionally habituating I don’t think they intended to kill people but we know that for some really vulnerable people this was a dangerous intersection and people have died, there’s been suicides just two 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 were holding the pictures up of their kids who had committed suicide as a result of some toxic content on Instagram and Facebook so a pox on their houses because it’s one thing, you know, I, you know, people ask, well, 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, And 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 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 1970s, which had nothing to do with social media. But essentially they’re saying we’re not publishers of our content. 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, one bedroom apartment, car for sale. Well, if somebody posts on that bulletin board, you know, Ku Klux Klan meeting tonight, the grocery store is going to 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 word messages like that Klan meeting, they’ll amplify the messaging, they’ll gatekeeper it, and they’ll send it to those folks who are vulnerable to going to a Klan 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.
Dr. Mark Leeds [18:24] Yeah, yeah, it does seem like algorithmic curation of content should be considered analogous to creating content. It is like a form of meta content. And so they really should be responsible.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [18:39] That’s a perfect way of saying it. It’s meta content 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.
Dr. Mark Leeds [18:52] Yeah. And of course, coincidentally, mark zuckerberg renamed his company meta so you know but that’s that’s great
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [18:59] Wanted that’s when he wanted us all living in the metaverse right living all in the virtual reality world controlled by bazaak 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 tech utopianist you know so I wish I was shaped as a kid believing that technology was going to be the panacea you know, because in Star Trek, there were no wars, there was peace, nobody, there was no more currency. 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’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 we weren’t fully aware of that price to pay until we started seeing some of the wreckage of our love affair with technology.
Dr. Mark Leeds [19:54] 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 maybe even recently. And but now the idea of going after these big companies like Big Tobacco and Purdue is intriguing because going after the top dealers with fentanyl and cocaine and methamphetamine, that’s not so easy because those are really scary people. You know, there’s, you know, people with armies and stuff that, you know, they’re like their own country. And so, you know, 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, you know, so and not that it’s easy to go after big tech because they’re wealthier than anybody. You know, they dwarf the entertainment industry. You know, people like to say, like, well, any big tech company could buy Disney easily. You know, they just, these 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. And, you know, 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 of, drug dealers of tech.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [21:11] Right. If you’re a DEA agent, you’d rather go after Zuckerberg than the cartels, you know, for personal reasons. But, you know, you’re right, because the cap valuation of, I mean, two trillion dollars. I mean, these are we shouldn’t make any mistake about this. These are the wealthiest, most powerful. The tech oligarchs, five or six 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. I wrote in Digital Madness, I was looking at J.D. Rockefeller, who had Standard Oil and who had corned the market on oil. He controlled 90% of U.S. Oil, and he became the wealthiest man in the world. But he controlled one commodity, oil. These folks control, they’re not ultra-wealthy, they’re not just monetarily flush, but they’re the gatekeepers of what we see, what we think. They shape our reality. So in a very real way, they’re the most powerful people that have ever lived. And what I wrote about in Digital Madness is we haven’t fully appreciated how ruthless they’ve been, not only in their – they’ve violated antitrust laws. Beyond a doubt, they’ve been in front of Senate antitrust committees. I mean, when you look at Jeff Bezos’ 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, right? They didn’t look like Gordon Gekko from Wall Street or J.D. Rockefeller, who looked like robber barons and these nefarious folks. 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 they were these monolithic corporate entities. And so the garage boys, the guys out of Stanford that were tinkering around with their circuit boards in the garage became counterculture heroes. So Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck became this, there’s that iconic Apple. I remember where 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 this woman Olympian throws the hammer at the big brother screen. And this was going to be what was going to make us all the democratization of information. And now it kind of, the worm has turned and now they’ve become the corporate overlords in ways that I think we were all lulled into thinking, you know, these guys are just the cool garage guys. They’re not going to, you know, hurt us in any way. Who’s afraid of the tech geeks? So I think that was part of it.
Dr. Mark Leeds [24:15] Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think, and it is still, there’s still some appeal to that. And there’s different parts of the tech movement. You know, there’s open source and the people that are, you know, fighting for access to free software that’s not controlled. And there’s, so there are good people out there. And, you know, like I kind of like things like WordPress and the Matt Mullenweg, the creative WordPress. And I don’t know if he’s a billionaire and if he has what his, you know, 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 like very much in favor of people having their own voice and their own agency and being able to be their own platform. And I think that’s a positive thing.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [24:58] What I think what’s missing though, in, you know, even OpenAI or ChatGPT, with a lot of, you know, I write about this also in 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 Dr. Frankenstein was in search of creating life. And 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 six generations ahead. They’re not thinking what happens if the monster escapes containment, what happens with artificial intelligence or artificial generalized intelligence, sentience awareness, which, you know, Elon Musk has warned people quite a bit about, you know, that 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 in his book, he writes about it, the singularity is near. 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 a cloud-like AI and humanity, that this is gonna be what’s coming next. And 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’d say, 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 let some viruses run loose because of research without enough oversight. So, you know, things like that kind of worries me as we go boldly into the future because the technology is getting exponentially more powerful. And will we lose containment?
Dr. Mark Leeds [27:12] Yeah, that would be good to bring ethics into it. And I know that there was some discussion with the AI people talking about holding back and slowing things down and looking at that. Now with gaming, I think some people were under the impression as this technology developed that it was like 3D gaming, being in a first-person shooter game, 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 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 3D world. But I guess the downside, kind of like how caffeine and sometimes they say it’s good, sometimes they say it’s bad. And we used to think cigarettes were healthy. But I guess maybe the downside is worse than the upside.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [28:08] Yeah. I mean, I wrote about it in Glow Kids. 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. And that’s really like your hand-eye coordination, right? So if you want to be a drone pilot, you know, good. It’s good for some of your hand-eye development. But the price to pay, the Faustian deal, is increased depression, anxiety, and the addictive factor, right? And, you know, I’ve worked with some games. They were gaming 24-7 escaping the real world in two-dimensional gaming platforms and that one of I still remember the day one of my gamers played league of legends in the virtual realm 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 are we in the cage where we formed a form of stockholm syndrome where we’ve you know rock starred our tech moguls 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
Dr. Mark Leeds [29:29] Yeah 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 a an analogy of what’s happening right where the mathematician guy and he said 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 yeah
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [29:56] It’s the peril there’s a name for it on I’m having a senior moment the peril something paradox peril rewards it basically means a peril reward paradox you know what’s and you’re exactly right just because you could doesn’t mean you should and that’s what we’re not seeing enough of 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 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 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, you know, a Vision Pro 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 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 dating green women versus being a nonverbal quadriplegic in a wheelchair. And he opts for the illusion. So I look, I’m an addiction psychologist. I get why people lean towards escapism and self-medicating. 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’re going to 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’s going to be a more seductive escape and the more available escape than the current ones that we have
Dr. Mark Leeds [32:04] Yeah yeah definitely so dr nicholas kardaras world’s foremost expert on digital addiction. And your book is Digital Madness. And people can find that on Amazon. Is that the best place to get your book?
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [32:22] Yeah, Amazon, unfortunately, got to dance with the devil. Yeah. So books, but yeah, Amazon, my book before that was Glow Kids that looked a little bit more at children and the mental health effects of kids in 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.
Dr. Mark Leeds [32:45] Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, for joining me today on the podcast.
Nicholas Kardaras, PhD [32:50] Thank you, Mark, for having me, and have a wonderful day.
