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Speaker 1: On this episode of the News World, the advancements in

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Speaker 1: technology in just the last twenty years are astonishing. We

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Speaker 1: went from football size mobile phones in the early nineteen

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Speaker 1: nineties to the Apple iPhone fourteen and the Sampson Galaxy

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Speaker 1: Z fold four, both supercomputers in our pockets. But what

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Speaker 1: impact has smartphones and social media ahead on society. We're

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Speaker 1: struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses, and suicide.

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Speaker 1: And while the COVID pandemic exacerbated the crisis, we were

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Speaker 1: at record levels of psychiatric distress before them. Our guest

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Speaker 1: today is here to discuss the impact of our tech

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Speaker 1: obsession and social media, especially on teenagers and young adults.

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Speaker 1: I'm really pleased to welcome doctor Nicholas Cardaris. He is

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Speaker 1: the best selling author of Glow Kids, and he's here

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Speaker 1: to talk about his new book Digital Madness, how social

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Speaker 1: media is driving our mental health crisis, and how to

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Speaker 1: restore our sanity. I have to say, Nicholas, I can't imagine,

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Speaker 1: at a personal human level, a more important topic, and

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Speaker 1: I'm so glad to have you here on News World.

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Speaker 1: Thank It's a pleasure to be here. Let me start

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Speaker 1: and ask how did you get interested in all of this?

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Speaker 1: It's very important. I'm thrilled you're doing it, but I'm

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Speaker 1: curious what personally got you into it. I would say

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Speaker 1: it was about twelve or thirteen years ago. I was

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Speaker 1: a professor at Stonybrook University at the medical school, and

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Speaker 1: I was also in private practice, and I was working

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Speaker 1: with a lot of adolescents, doing work with teenagers various

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Speaker 1: school districts, and I was one of the first people

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Speaker 1: in my profession in the clinical world that started seeing

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Speaker 1: all the telltale signs of habituation or what we might

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Speaker 1: call addiction. It started looking like our young people started

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Speaker 1: getting an unhealthy attachment to their devices, and no one

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Speaker 1: else really seemed to be talking about it that way.

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Speaker 1: And I think part of the problem was that we,

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Speaker 1: as the adults in the room, we two were smitten

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Speaker 1: by our devices while we were staring at our screens.

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Speaker 1: We didn't realize that little Johnny and Susy were also

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Speaker 1: obsessively and compulsively staring at their screens. And the tipping

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Speaker 1: point for me was thirteen or so years ago, I

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Speaker 1: had a young man sent to my office that had

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Speaker 1: a full blown episode of video game psychosis. Where he

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Speaker 1: couldn't discern whether he was in the real world or

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Speaker 1: the matrix of the video game that he was in.

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Speaker 1: And this was a young man that had no psychiatric history,

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Speaker 1: didn't have any other mental health issues, but had been

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Speaker 1: playing a game World of Warcraft for twelve to thirteen

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Speaker 1: hours a day and lost himself in that world and

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Speaker 1: how to be a psychiatrically hospital And that's when I said, Houston,

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Speaker 1: we have a problem. There's something seriously wrong happening here.

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Speaker 1: Had you always had an interest in psychiatry, Yeah, I've

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Speaker 1: been a psychologist for almost twenty five years and my

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Speaker 1: specialization had been addictive disorders, comorbid mental health issues, depression, anxiety,

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Speaker 1: and addiction, And so I had been trained and was

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Speaker 1: a professor of substance addiction. You know, I was one

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Speaker 1: of the first people that started calling this digital heroine.

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Speaker 1: I wrote an op ed that was called digital Heroine

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Speaker 1: that went viral about seven years ago, and at the

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Speaker 1: time people weren't seeing it. I got a lot of

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Speaker 1: pushback from making some of my peers. Now it's an

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Speaker 1: official clinical diagnosis. But that was just step one. Identifying

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Speaker 1: that these devices can be habituating was just step one.

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Speaker 1: In the Big Tech playbook. Now what we're seeing is

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Speaker 1: habituation was the price of admission to a larger problem

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Speaker 1: of everything from behavior modification to mental health issues, to

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Speaker 1: polarization that we're seeing in our politics, to our psychiatric distress.

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Speaker 1: So addiction was step one and all these other issues

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Speaker 1: were step two. It's interesting because recently we did a

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Speaker 1: podcast with John Clifton, who is the CEO of Gallop.

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Speaker 1: They've been doing the Gallop World Poll over one hundred

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Speaker 1: and fifty countries and they plan to do it for

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Speaker 1: the next hundred years. It's an amazing long term project.

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Speaker 1: He talked about the trends emerging literally around the world

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Speaker 1: with unhappiness. In fact, his latest book, blind Spot, The

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Speaker 1: Rise of Global and Happiness and how leaders missed it,

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Speaker 1: really goes into detail about these trends starting to emerge

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Speaker 1: all around the world. Is it your sense that this

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Speaker 1: is a worldwide human problem and not just an American problem? Absolutely?

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Speaker 1: Of course, like many things worth the tip of the spear,

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Speaker 1: but that's absolutely a global epidemic. And how this leads

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Speaker 1: to loneliness and then happiness is you know, that's the

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Speaker 1: irony of it. This all we're a hard wired social species.

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Speaker 1: The tribe survived evolutionarily. We were meant to be in community,

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Speaker 1: we were meant to support each other because, let's face it,

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Speaker 1: we weren't the strongest species, we weren't the fastest species.

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Speaker 1: But our sense of banding together in prehistoric times is

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Speaker 1: really what allowed us to survive. And so we're hardwired

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Speaker 1: to need face to face community, and we're also hardwired

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Speaker 1: to need physical activity. And when you think about what

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Speaker 1: the digital age has done, it's made us more sedentary

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Speaker 1: and more face to face isolated. And so that's been

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Speaker 1: the nuclear bomb to those two psychological needs. And social

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Speaker 1: media in particular, I think has been really a nuclear

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Speaker 1: bomb on our species because the promise of social media

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Speaker 1: it was going to connect us, all right, remember back

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Speaker 1: when social media in the early days, it was going

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Speaker 1: to be connectivity people all over the world. We're going

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Speaker 1: to have a greater sense of connection. And what we've

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Speaker 1: seen is as social media has swallowed up the world,

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Speaker 1: people are feeling more isolated, more alone, more pressed because

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Speaker 1: they're not connected in the meaningful way. They're connected in

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Speaker 1: this faux digital way that isn't really meaningful connection. And

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Speaker 1: in that context, did the whole isolation of the COVID response,

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Speaker 1: just deepen and accelerate that impact. It was kerosene to

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Speaker 1: the flame. And it's no coincidence that when you look

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Speaker 1: at loneliness metrics as you go from baby boomer to

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Speaker 1: Gen X to millennial to Gen Z, each younger generation

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Speaker 1: progressively has higher and higher metrics of loneliness. So the

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Speaker 1: most wired generation Gen Z and millennials are the loneliest.

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Speaker 1: In fact, of millennials, one out of four claimed to

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Speaker 1: have no friends, zero friends. So here you have the

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Speaker 1: most socially social media connected generation and they're the most

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Speaker 1: profoundly alone. Wasn't that sort of the opposite of the promise, Well,

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Speaker 1: that's exactly right. The people thought originally right, We were

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Speaker 1: all seld that it was going to be chocolate and

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Speaker 1: peanut butter, that this was going to be such a

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Speaker 1: wonderful mixture of humanity and social media, and it was

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Speaker 1: the exact opposite. So it was the false promise. In

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Speaker 1: that context, we may have seemed to me, as a

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Speaker 1: non expert, we may have done more damage by isolating

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Speaker 1: kids than the risk they would have run if we

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Speaker 1: just kept them in school. Horrific damage. I've been an

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Speaker 1: expert witness. I wrote affidavits for several lawsuits to put

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Speaker 1: our kids back in the classroom, to unmask our kids.

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Speaker 1: By the way, the harms that were done by isolating kids,

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Speaker 1: putting them in masks where they couldn't read facial cues.

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Speaker 1: So you have kids that were raised in the COVID

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Speaker 1: era who didn't get the developmental cues that they needed,

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Speaker 1: didn't get the socialization that they'd needed. So you saw

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Speaker 1: during COVID screen time doubled and depression tripled, suicide rates spiked,

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Speaker 1: overdoses spiked. COVID was a beta test of accelerating our

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Speaker 1: screen dependency. It was already a mess in two and

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Speaker 1: nineteen and two and nineteen, we have forty two thousand suicides,

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Speaker 1: over seventy overdoses, highest rates of anxiety and depression, and

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Speaker 1: now we've seen that those have gone up fifty percent

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Speaker 1: since COVID, which just amplified everything. We have over one

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Speaker 1: hundred thousand deaths from overdoses here now, which is in

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Speaker 1: one year twice the total deaths of the Vietnam War,

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Speaker 1: and the country seems numb to it. It's like it's

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Speaker 1: a tragedy for individuals. I have several friends who've lost children,

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Speaker 1: for example, to suicide. But somehow that hasn't turned itself

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Speaker 1: into a national conversation about what has to be profoundly

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Speaker 1: changed if we're going to break out of this. I

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Speaker 1: think we still suffer a little bit from blaming the victim,

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Speaker 1: you know, when people overdose. I think we're still somewhat

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Speaker 1: of a judgmental society where, well, the addict is making

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Speaker 1: a choice, the person who commits a suicide is making

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Speaker 1: a choice. We're not coming at it from a mental

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Speaker 1: health perspective. We're looking at it from a volitional piece.

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Speaker 1: And there is still I think a little bit of

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Speaker 1: that add And you know, let's face it, it doesn't

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Speaker 1: translate into a visual on the evening news, or forget

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Speaker 1: the evening there's no such thing as the evening news anymore,

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Speaker 1: but the twenty four seven news cycles. How do you

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Speaker 1: make that a visceral experience for viewers to understand? I mean,

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Speaker 1: we've all know people that have struggled with addiction or

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Speaker 1: overdose or suicides. But yet, for some reason, You're right,

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Speaker 1: it hasn't become as much of the national discussion because

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Speaker 1: we're distracted, quite honestly, by other things. What I write

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Speaker 1: about in my new book Digital mathis I think one

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Speaker 1: of the more subtle and yet powerful impacts of our

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Speaker 1: love affair with social media. I think it's changed the

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Speaker 1: architecture of our brains to only be able to process

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Speaker 1: information in black and white polarity because social media, algorithm fueled,

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Speaker 1: social media thrives off of the most extreme content. Nuanced

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Speaker 1: debate or discussion doesn't resonate, doesn't get views and likes

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Speaker 1: on social media. So the social media organism thrives off

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Speaker 1: of what we call an extremification loop. So young person

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Speaker 1: feeds social media their most vitriolic content, and then social

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Speaker 1: media amplifies that back to them in an extremification loop.

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Speaker 1: So you have this black and white thinking, which is

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Speaker 1: a symptom of pathology. Borderline personality disorder is symptomatic of people.

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Speaker 1: And a lot of the young people that I treat

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Speaker 1: cannot see nuance. They can't see the gray area. It's

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Speaker 1: either black or white, red or blue. Highly emotionally reactive.

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Speaker 1: So I think we've created a generation of young people

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Speaker 1: primed via social media, which has made people so reactive

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Speaker 1: and polarized that they can handle debate, conversation, nuance everything

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Speaker 1: is just nuclear reactions. Are we seeing sort of a

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Speaker 1: trend towards kind of retribalization almost where people are getting

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Speaker 1: down to simple cues us not us? Absolutely? And then

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Speaker 1: again this goes contrary to the promise of social media,

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Speaker 1: sort of this great social lubricant that it was supposed

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Speaker 1: to be to unify everyone. That it's increased tribalism and separatism,

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Speaker 1: and it's been horrific in that sense. I was intrigued

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Speaker 1: with your work from the standpoint that apparently, and you

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Speaker 1: might expand on this and explain it, but apparently both

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Speaker 1: China and South Korea have taken much more aggressive society

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Speaker 1: wide responses and accepting that this was a real crisis.

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Speaker 1: All the Asian countries have been ahead of the curve

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Speaker 1: and identifying it as a problem. I don't agree with

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Speaker 1: how they've been treating it. They've been treating it in

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Speaker 1: the fairly draconian, punitive, militarized fashion. But South Korea has

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Speaker 1: over four hundred tech addiction rehabs that tend to be

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Speaker 1: more like quality SI military boot camps. China had identified

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Speaker 1: it as its number one crisis for young people, so

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Speaker 1: they were ahead of the curve ten to fifteen years ago.

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Speaker 1: They were treating it and identifying it while we were

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Speaker 1: still playing candy Crush. They were identifying that this was

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Speaker 1: a problem in their society, a significant problem in their society.

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Speaker 1: From our perspective, given there were a different kind of culture,

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Speaker 1: if we've really took this seriously, how would we respond

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Speaker 1: to it. It's a complicated question because you know, now

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Speaker 1: we get into legislation and politics, and you know, personally,

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Speaker 1: I'm a free speech purist. No one likes to see censorship.

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Speaker 1: And of course, what we've seen in a lot of

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Speaker 1: the big tech Senate hearings, we've seen a lack of

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Speaker 1: responsibility and ownership from the big tech companies themselves regulating

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Speaker 1: their own product. What we saw with the Facebook whistleblower,

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Speaker 1: Francis Hogan, who essentially showed us the playbooks, she showed

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Speaker 1: us the internal emails where Facebook had internal research via

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Speaker 1: Instagram that showed that their algorithms were increasing suicidality and

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Speaker 1: young teenage girls were increasing eating disorders by seventeen percent,

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Speaker 1: and having internal discussions, they refused to adjust the algorithm

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Speaker 1: to make it less toxic. These algorithms work like heat

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Speaker 1: seeking missiles that find psychological vulnerability because they know that

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Speaker 1: if you're psychologically vulnerable, if you're an at risk kid

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Speaker 1: or teenager or young adult, you can't help but rubberneck

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Speaker 1: content that's not good for you, even though it's harmful

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Speaker 1: to you. And so the adults in the room, the

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Speaker 1: big tech oligarchs, refuse to and they were able to.

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Speaker 1: They could have changed the algorithm to make it less damaging,

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Speaker 1: but it would also been equal to less engagement, thus

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Speaker 1: less monetization. So there's been calls to repeal Section two thirty,

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Speaker 1: where we take away their immunity from liability, you know,

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Speaker 1: where they're essentially publishers and they're not just this public

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Speaker 1: square that they get protection from. But censorship is difficult

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Speaker 1: because we've seen I write about this and I laugh

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Speaker 1: about this because I'm fifty eight years old. I'd never

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Speaker 1: heard the phrase misinformation or disinformation before five years ago,

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Speaker 1: and now all of a sudden, that's used as reasonings

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Speaker 1: to de platform people who have dissonant views. We've seen

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Speaker 1: this with everything from Wuhan viology leaks in the early days,

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Speaker 1: saying because I caught COVID in the first month, and

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Speaker 1: I had read about this viology lab in Wuhan, and

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Speaker 1: I said, well, wait a minute, I'm no a virologists,

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Speaker 1: but this sounds like it might have been a reasonable

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Speaker 1: consideration for where the virus comes from. And yet anybody

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Speaker 1: who suggested anything like that on social media was the platformed.

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Speaker 1: We've seen it in the Hunter Biden case where potentially

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Speaker 1: it's affected an election, that anybody who said anything that

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Speaker 1: was related to that was Russian disinformation. So I worry

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Speaker 1: that if we empower big tech to be censors, who's

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Speaker 1: censoring the censors? Who's going to be Is there going

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Speaker 1: to be a version of the FCC to oversee them,

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Speaker 1: because I don't think they've shown to be good stewards

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Speaker 1: of monitoring their own platforms. Hi, this is newt. We

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Speaker 1: have serious decisions to make about the future of our country.

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Speaker 1: sixty dot com slash book. Do you look at a

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Speaker 1: distinction between the impact of social media in a direct sense,

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Speaker 1: you and I communicating and the emergence of these extraordinarily

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Speaker 1: vivid games that you can immerse yourself in and that

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Speaker 1: give you all sorts of queuing signals that may or

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Speaker 1: may not be healthy. I mean, if you looked at

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Speaker 1: the impact of gaming as distinct from the Internet itself.

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Speaker 1: If we look at the Internet as sort of spectrum

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Speaker 1: of platforms, or like we would let's say, if we

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Speaker 1: were looking at any kind of addictive substances. At one

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Speaker 1: of the spectrum you might have crack cocaine, and at

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Speaker 1: the other end you might have cannabis. So at the Internet,

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Speaker 1: if you viewed it as a spectrum of harms Obviously,

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Speaker 1: skyping with Grandma is at the potentially beneficial end of

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Speaker 1: the Internet spectrum. But immersive, hyper realistic hyper arousing designed

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Speaker 1: to be addicting video games are at the crack cocaine

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Speaker 1: end of the spectrum. And so what we have as

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Speaker 1: many young people, and I've worked with over two thousand

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Speaker 1: young people, we have a generational crisis of emptiness. We

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Speaker 1: have young people who have at a loss for meaning

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Speaker 1: and purpose in their lives, and if they enter these

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Speaker 1: gaming platforms, they find built in meaning because there's a mission,

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Speaker 1: there's a goal. You know that. Sometimes there's camaraderie because

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Speaker 1: they're playing on these team platforms, and it's the ultimate escapism,

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Speaker 1: but it's not real. So essentially, if you have a

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Speaker 1: person who doesn't love their life, if you feel this

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Speaker 1: empowered or despond that you're not a good student, you

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Speaker 1: don't feel you have economic opportunities in your life. The

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Speaker 1: old fashioned escape used to be drugs and alcohol, but

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Speaker 1: drugs and alcohol took money and effort and certain things

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Speaker 1: to procure. Now we have pushbutton escapism too much more

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Speaker 1: effective forms of escape. Drugs and alcohol were just numbing agents.

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Speaker 1: Now these immersive realities are alternate realities where you can

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Speaker 1: live out a world that's meaningful for you because your

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Speaker 1: real life isn't. So in that context, does that tend

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Speaker 1: to affect males more than females? So gaming, there's definitely,

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Speaker 1: mister speaker or gender divide. Males are much more impacted

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Speaker 1: by gaming because of their adrenaline seeking tendencies. You know,

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Speaker 1: I think in this platform you and I can talk

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Speaker 1: about there are gender differences, and there are men and women.

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Speaker 1: And by the way, that's part of the blurring the lines,

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Speaker 1: a part of the pronoun and gender dysphoria issues that

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Speaker 1: are going on, I believe are social contagions, but that's

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Speaker 1: part of this conversation as well. And then you have

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Speaker 1: young women more disproportionately impacted by social media, so young

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Speaker 1: men gaming young women social media because of their tendencies

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Speaker 1: for community and proclivity towards connecting with other women, and

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Speaker 1: also their sense of body image and needing that sort

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Speaker 1: of validation. That there is definitely a gender divide in

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Speaker 1: the impacts. There's also a very substantial decline in male

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Speaker 1: engagement and life at large, and that the gaming gives

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Speaker 1: them a way to opt out and feel pretty good

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Speaker 1: about themselves. While in fact not learning how to participate,

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Speaker 1: whether it's in earning a living or whatever. But they're

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Speaker 1: able to sit in that room and feel like they're

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Speaker 1: really engaged in life, even if the life they're engaged

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Speaker 1: is entirely digital. I've worked with thirty five to forty

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Speaker 1: year old adolescents, essentially adolescents sitting in mom and Dad's

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Speaker 1: basement where their backwards baseball cap stuck in that pre

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Speaker 1: manhood stage. Because you're right, their adulthood has been stunted

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Speaker 1: and they've been pursuing this escapist behavior. So they never

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Speaker 1: developed the resilience to skill set, the critical thinking, the intellect,

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Speaker 1: and the sticktuitivism because they've been doing this digital masturbation,

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Speaker 1: for lack of a better way of saying it, which

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Speaker 1: is now stunted their adulthood. And so we have these

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Speaker 1: pre pubescent forty year olds in thirty five year olds,

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Speaker 1: five year olds, and failure to launch twenty five year olds.

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Speaker 1: A large number of the clients that I treated my

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Speaker 1: clinics are college aged men who did okay through high

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Speaker 1: school because their parents were helicopter parents who essentially enabled

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Speaker 1: them through high school and the moment they went off

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Speaker 1: to college and were unsupervised, were stuck in their dorm

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Speaker 1: room playing games, smoking too much pot, and wound up

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Speaker 1: back in mom and Dad's basement within the semester. And

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Speaker 1: that species is growing exponentially. You know, you look at

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Speaker 1: the TikTok Tourette's syndrome epidemic. You know, fascinatingly, there was

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Speaker 1: a twitching epidemic in Leroy, New York in twenty twelve,

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Speaker 1: and all of these girls began twitching, and it became

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Speaker 1: sort of a national study of whether this was the

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Speaker 1: beginning of something. And then after a few weeks they

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Speaker 1: quit twitching. It's kind of amazing, but it was very

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Speaker 1: temporarily there as just a collective sort of group behavior,

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Speaker 1: almost a group site cases. I have to confess I

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Speaker 1: haven't done TikTok, so I'm sort of ignorant about this,

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Speaker 1: But could you talk to us a little bit about

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Speaker 1: the TikTok Tourette's syndrome epidemic? Right? And it's interesting, I'd

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Speaker 1: not heard of the Upstate New York. I went to

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Speaker 1: college Upstate New York, and I had not heard of that.

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Speaker 1: But you know, there was the infamous dancing plague of

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Speaker 1: fifteen eighteen where a young woman started just dancing in

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Speaker 1: the town square, and within four weeks, four hundred people

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Speaker 1: were feverishly dancing to the point of exhaustion. And it

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Speaker 1: looked like a group well what we call a social contagion.

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Speaker 1: It was a social contagion that seemed to have really

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Speaker 1: manic effects. So we know that social contagions have existed

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Speaker 1: throughout human history, any kind of sociogenic and when I

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Speaker 1: say sociogenic, it's a behavior that's impacted by the group

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Speaker 1: of group effects. So smoking cigarettes is a social contagion.

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Speaker 1: Skinny dipping is a social contagion. But we're seeing now

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Speaker 1: with the viral spread of social media via social content

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Speaker 1: agents spread a much wider and much more impactful in

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Speaker 1: shaping net And so it's not just TikTok turettes, but

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Speaker 1: we're seeing TikTok dissociative disorder, which we used to call

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Speaker 1: multiple personality disorder, and we're seeing borderline personality disorder spread

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Speaker 1: via these platforms. So this is a morphing of the

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Speaker 1: influencer effect. So we've all, I guess regrettably accepted that

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Speaker 1: the Kim Kardashian influencer effect. Right, we know that there

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Speaker 1: are influencers on social media that have a huge shaping

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Speaker 1: effect on young people, both their values and their shopping habits.

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Speaker 1: We've accepted that right that Kylie Jenner became a billionaire

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Speaker 1: because she has, you know whatever, twenty million followers. And

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Speaker 1: we've always had influencers. We always had sports stars and

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Speaker 1: celebrities that influenced the culture, but their influence was limited.

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Speaker 1: You know, when Babe Ruth did a beer commercial, you

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Speaker 1: saw it once a month on TV. When I wanted

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Speaker 1: to be like Mike Michael Jordan, I would see a

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Speaker 1: Bull's game twice a week for a couple of hours.

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Speaker 1: Now these influencers are in our young people's reality, in

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Speaker 1: their digital landscape twenty four seven, so the shaping effect

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Speaker 1: is much more pronounced. I thought fascinating example was the

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Speaker 1: TikTok Tourette. So you had these three or four TikTok

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Speaker 1: Tourette's influencers, these young women who, by the way, having

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Speaker 1: watched their videos, I don't think they have Tourette syndrome.

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Speaker 1: I think this is performative because at the end of

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Speaker 1: the day, the coin of the realm for social media

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Speaker 1: is over the top behavior gets the most views. So

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Speaker 1: these very performative young women were getting over two billion

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Speaker 1: Mister Speaker over two billion views by young women, and

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Speaker 1: so Pediatrician started seeing several thousand teenage girls in the

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Speaker 1: United States started having the same exaggerated hand gestures or

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Speaker 1: hand ticks that these influencers started having. And in fact,

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Speaker 1: the funny one was one of the influencers British, and

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Speaker 1: some of these American teenage girls started barking out the

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Speaker 1: same war with a British accent. So this was obviously

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Speaker 1: mimicking social effect that was happening consciously or unconsciously. They

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Speaker 1: were mimicking this behavior. And again, the same thing is

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Speaker 1: happening with dissociative disorder, where you have these performative and

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Speaker 1: I think these aren't real because you multiple personality disorder.

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Speaker 1: Folks don't have over one hundred alter identities, and these

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Speaker 1: folks on social media have over a hundred identities across

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Speaker 1: the whole LGBTQ spectrum. And I think gender dysphoria quite honestly,

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Speaker 1: there's some very popular transgender influencers who are also now

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Speaker 1: creating the statistically unexplainable spike in gender dysphoria. A thousand

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Speaker 1: percent increase in gender dysphoria is not explainable by any

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Speaker 1: normal means. As a parent, how can you tell if

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Speaker 1: your child has a screen addiction problem? The symptoms tend

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Speaker 1: to parallel some of the substance addiction issues, and the

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Speaker 1: main symptom is the behavior. And this instance, your screen

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Speaker 1: time as opposed to substances is the substance negatively impacting

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Speaker 1: their functioning across several domains. So is your child's academics

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Speaker 1: beginning to suffer. Is the formerly a student now a

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Speaker 1: d student. The main thing is they're no longer participating

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Speaker 1: in the events and the things that they used to.

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Speaker 1: So now if my kid used to play baseball, which

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Speaker 1: my son's used to or still do, by the way,

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Speaker 1: and now if they don't want to play baseball anymore

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Speaker 1: and they want to just be in their rooms, So

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Speaker 1: loss of face to face friendships, changing in behavior is

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Speaker 1: their academic suffering. So their worlds begin to get smaller

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Speaker 1: and smaller. These are the telltale signs of there may

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Speaker 1: be a problem. The propensity now not to find somebody

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Speaker 1: else by human interaction, but to find somebody else online.

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Speaker 1: You assume the person you're getting to know is actually

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Speaker 1: the person you're getting to know. But because it's all online.

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Speaker 1: You really have no idea whether that's really who they

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Speaker 1: really are. To what I said, is this whole notion

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Speaker 1: of online connectivity and online introduction radically different and filled

427
00:26:21,760 --> 00:26:26,280
Speaker 1: with its own challenges. Yeah, Essentially, we've changed our societal

428
00:26:26,359 --> 00:26:30,359
Speaker 1: norms in the way that really our evolution hasn't kept

429
00:26:30,440 --> 00:26:33,600
Speaker 1: up with. We're a slow evolving species, and there is

430
00:26:33,600 --> 00:26:38,080
Speaker 1: a reason why we interact face to face. We have courtships.

431
00:26:38,600 --> 00:26:42,520
Speaker 1: These were hardwired over millions of years into our psychological

432
00:26:42,600 --> 00:26:45,640
Speaker 1: DNA and our biological DNA, and so now you have

433
00:26:45,760 --> 00:26:49,080
Speaker 1: digital courtships, and especially developmentally, when you get to the

434
00:26:49,200 --> 00:26:54,280
Speaker 1: high school or even middle school arena, you're queering what

435
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:58,760
Speaker 1: had been historical processes of traditional courtship in terms of

436
00:26:58,800 --> 00:27:02,560
Speaker 1: a boy's date girl or vice versa God forbid, or

437
00:27:02,600 --> 00:27:04,720
Speaker 1: we even allowed to say boys and girls anymore. That's

438
00:27:04,760 --> 00:27:07,480
Speaker 1: the whole other confusion. By the way, that's confusing so

439
00:27:07,520 --> 00:27:10,680
Speaker 1: many young people is the whole pronoun thing. But that aside,

440
00:27:11,160 --> 00:27:16,200
Speaker 1: So now when you're interacting via snapchat or text or

441
00:27:16,240 --> 00:27:19,920
Speaker 1: digital means, you're losing certain basic social skills. And so

442
00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:23,199
Speaker 1: now you have young men who are not used to

443
00:27:23,359 --> 00:27:26,760
Speaker 1: face to face interaction. And not to get too graphic here,

444
00:27:26,760 --> 00:27:30,119
Speaker 1: but you also have young boys, teenagers who have been

445
00:27:30,119 --> 00:27:32,919
Speaker 1: exposed to a lot of aerographic sexual content. There's been

446
00:27:32,960 --> 00:27:35,920
Speaker 1: a big porn spike in our young people. So now

447
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:39,639
Speaker 1: you have young Johnny who's trying to have a relationship

448
00:27:39,680 --> 00:27:46,399
Speaker 1: with SUSI. His visual reference point is usually something pretty extreme.

449
00:27:46,960 --> 00:27:50,119
Speaker 1: And so now my pediatrician friends are telling me, and

450
00:27:50,160 --> 00:27:53,080
Speaker 1: I've been to a couple of conferences, medical conferences where

451
00:27:53,119 --> 00:27:57,040
Speaker 1: there's a phenomenon now called adolescent erectile dysfunction. Not to

452
00:27:57,080 --> 00:28:00,240
Speaker 1: be too graphic on your podcast and mister speaker, but

453
00:28:00,600 --> 00:28:03,360
Speaker 1: we've never seen that before. But this is because young

454
00:28:03,560 --> 00:28:07,919
Speaker 1: boys are now good luck dating the cheerleader if you

455
00:28:08,119 --> 00:28:13,280
Speaker 1: have this other digital world as your experience perspective. And

456
00:28:13,359 --> 00:28:16,800
Speaker 1: so it's changing things, and it's changing the way our

457
00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:21,280
Speaker 1: young people are dating. It's much more sexualized, it's less

458
00:28:21,359 --> 00:28:23,760
Speaker 1: dating in the way that maybe some of us remember it,

459
00:28:23,800 --> 00:28:27,080
Speaker 1: and it's much more objectified. And it also puts pressure

460
00:28:27,160 --> 00:28:29,600
Speaker 1: on both the female and the male. Now the male

461
00:28:29,680 --> 00:28:32,639
Speaker 1: has a certain idealized expectation, which leads to the issues

462
00:28:32,640 --> 00:28:35,760
Speaker 1: that I just mentioned of adolescent need because they're also

463
00:28:35,840 --> 00:28:40,560
Speaker 1: having these unrealistic expectations of what a relationship is or

464
00:28:40,560 --> 00:28:45,080
Speaker 1: a sexual relationship is. So it's really distorted the whole

465
00:28:45,120 --> 00:28:49,840
Speaker 1: arena of adolescent dating courtship in ways that are really

466
00:28:49,840 --> 00:28:52,640
Speaker 1: not healthy. Right now. It strikes me as I look

467
00:28:52,680 --> 00:28:56,960
Speaker 1: at some of my friends who have children, say between

468
00:28:57,840 --> 00:29:02,200
Speaker 1: ten and twenty, it's a much more frightening world. I

469
00:29:02,200 --> 00:29:04,959
Speaker 1: would hate to be a teenager in today's world because

470
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:09,000
Speaker 1: our youth are exposed to things, have seen things that

471
00:29:09,120 --> 00:29:11,760
Speaker 1: you and I in our childhoods could never have dreamed of.

472
00:29:12,240 --> 00:29:15,800
Speaker 1: I have twelve year olds who have seen sexual content,

473
00:29:16,040 --> 00:29:20,280
Speaker 1: violent content, deviancy that you and I couldn't even when

474
00:29:20,280 --> 00:29:22,520
Speaker 1: you and I may have snuck a playboy back in

475
00:29:22,600 --> 00:29:26,280
Speaker 1: the golden era of media. Some of these kids have

476
00:29:26,360 --> 00:29:29,840
Speaker 1: been exposed, and not just exposed, but a constant torrent

477
00:29:30,320 --> 00:29:33,719
Speaker 1: of shaping content. Here we can have an example of

478
00:29:33,760 --> 00:29:37,560
Speaker 1: even how someone can be ideologically brainwashed, because I was

479
00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 1: an expert witness on the Capitol murder case earlier this

480
00:29:40,760 --> 00:29:44,480
Speaker 1: year of a young Palm Beach County used to be

481
00:29:44,480 --> 00:29:48,080
Speaker 1: a typical normal adolescent, blonde haired, blue eyed, surfer looking

482
00:29:48,160 --> 00:29:51,840
Speaker 1: kid who was a YouTube fanatic. You just used to

483
00:29:51,880 --> 00:29:54,680
Speaker 1: watch YouTube videos twenty four to seven. And because the

484
00:29:54,720 --> 00:29:58,200
Speaker 1: algorithm sends the viewer what they think they're interested in.

485
00:29:58,320 --> 00:30:01,680
Speaker 1: This was a politically interested young man. He was an

486
00:30:01,720 --> 00:30:03,560
Speaker 1: outlier from his peers. He was a little bit of

487
00:30:03,560 --> 00:30:06,600
Speaker 1: a loner, so he kind of became reclusive with YouTube.

488
00:30:06,880 --> 00:30:09,440
Speaker 1: And because he was interested in politics. When he was sixteen,

489
00:30:09,480 --> 00:30:12,720
Speaker 1: he started as a liberal progressive and he happened to

490
00:30:12,760 --> 00:30:15,640
Speaker 1: watch a video about the Holocaust, and because he watched

491
00:30:15,680 --> 00:30:20,000
Speaker 1: that video, the YouTube algorithm started sending him Holocaust content,

492
00:30:20,080 --> 00:30:24,080
Speaker 1: then Holocaust denying content, and he became a white supremacist

493
00:30:24,200 --> 00:30:27,800
Speaker 1: within about four or five months of constant white supremacy videos.

494
00:30:27,800 --> 00:30:29,880
Speaker 1: But that's not the end of the story. At a

495
00:30:29,960 --> 00:30:33,360
Speaker 1: certain point, he watched a short video on YouTube about

496
00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:38,080
Speaker 1: Syria and Nasad and that really intrigued him. And because

497
00:30:38,120 --> 00:30:42,000
Speaker 1: he watched that video, now Isis started sending him recruitment videos.

498
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:44,760
Speaker 1: And I was showed by the investigators some of these

499
00:30:44,800 --> 00:30:49,040
Speaker 1: recruitment videos by Isis they are so sophisticated and the

500
00:30:49,080 --> 00:30:53,720
Speaker 1: production values and then multiple languages they made Isis seem

501
00:30:53,960 --> 00:30:57,080
Speaker 1: like shangri la, like they were about community empowerment in

502
00:30:57,200 --> 00:31:00,200
Speaker 1: building wells. And if I was a lost and the

503
00:31:00,400 --> 00:31:03,120
Speaker 1: sixteen year old looking for a team to join. It

504
00:31:03,200 --> 00:31:06,080
Speaker 1: was attractive the way these ISIS recruitment videos looked. I

505
00:31:06,080 --> 00:31:08,520
Speaker 1: could see how I lost empty kid was on YouTube

506
00:31:08,560 --> 00:31:11,560
Speaker 1: fourteen hours a day, fell down that rabbit hole. But

507
00:31:11,600 --> 00:31:14,840
Speaker 1: then they started sending him decapitation videos, and he committed

508
00:31:14,840 --> 00:31:18,320
Speaker 1: one of the most terrific, horrific murders. I was an

509
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:21,000
Speaker 1: ex witness in his insanity defense that it was essentially

510
00:31:21,040 --> 00:31:25,960
Speaker 1: an insanity defense, that he was ideologically brainwashed and turned

511
00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:30,080
Speaker 1: insane by his immersion and these constant videos that essentially

512
00:31:30,240 --> 00:31:33,440
Speaker 1: distorted his whole perception of reality. And when I interviewed

513
00:31:33,520 --> 00:31:36,320
Speaker 1: him in maximum security, it had been about nine or

514
00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:40,080
Speaker 1: ten months because COVID had delayed his murder trial, and

515
00:31:40,120 --> 00:31:43,200
Speaker 1: so he had not been online and exposed to this

516
00:31:43,320 --> 00:31:46,239
Speaker 1: video content for almost a year at that point, and

517
00:31:46,320 --> 00:31:49,680
Speaker 1: he landed back to a nice, sweet, gentle kid. In fact,

518
00:31:49,760 --> 00:31:51,479
Speaker 1: it was so unsettling for me because when I went

519
00:31:51,520 --> 00:31:53,520
Speaker 1: back and I told my wife, knew that I was

520
00:31:53,560 --> 00:31:57,480
Speaker 1: going to go and interview this murderous young man who

521
00:31:57,480 --> 00:32:01,200
Speaker 1: committed one of the most graphically brutal crime. I expected

522
00:32:01,240 --> 00:32:04,480
Speaker 1: to meet a Manson like sociopath, and I was more

523
00:32:04,600 --> 00:32:08,000
Speaker 1: unnerved that this was just a typical teenage kid that

524
00:32:08,160 --> 00:32:10,000
Speaker 1: I told my wife we would have hired him to

525
00:32:10,080 --> 00:32:13,240
Speaker 1: babysit our kids had he applied for a position, because

526
00:32:13,240 --> 00:32:15,640
Speaker 1: he seemed so normal and sweet, and yet he committed

527
00:32:15,640 --> 00:32:19,440
Speaker 1: this horrific crime. I mean, this is an extreme exemplar,

528
00:32:20,560 --> 00:32:23,280
Speaker 1: but this was a typical kid, and his mother thought

529
00:32:23,280 --> 00:32:26,000
Speaker 1: he's just up in this room, in this computer, and

530
00:32:26,320 --> 00:32:29,240
Speaker 1: didn't realize what was happening up in that room. You know,

531
00:32:29,280 --> 00:32:31,680
Speaker 1: the apparent narrative that our kids are safe because they're

532
00:32:31,680 --> 00:32:35,640
Speaker 1: in their bedroom is no longer accurate. That's right, because

533
00:32:35,640 --> 00:32:38,760
Speaker 1: the world comes with them, ran through the portal to

534
00:32:38,880 --> 00:32:45,240
Speaker 1: what extent, in your judgment, has the decline in religious

535
00:32:45,280 --> 00:32:50,080
Speaker 1: belief created a vacuum that these things can fill. You've

536
00:32:50,080 --> 00:32:52,960
Speaker 1: said it perfectly. It's created a vacuum that's a void

537
00:32:52,960 --> 00:32:56,200
Speaker 1: that's being filled by popular culture, or, as I like

538
00:32:56,240 --> 00:32:58,320
Speaker 1: to say, looking for love in all the wrong places,

539
00:32:58,320 --> 00:33:01,200
Speaker 1: looking for meaning in all the wrong place. So where

540
00:33:01,520 --> 00:33:04,640
Speaker 1: faith used to give people their sense of mooring, tethering,

541
00:33:04,920 --> 00:33:08,600
Speaker 1: a sense of connection and meaning, you've vacuumed that out.

542
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:11,360
Speaker 1: You've created the void, and now the void is being

543
00:33:11,600 --> 00:33:17,960
Speaker 1: monetized and exploited by various players with either financial incentives

544
00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:21,480
Speaker 1: or more nefarious incentives, and that's the issue. We have

545
00:33:21,560 --> 00:33:25,840
Speaker 1: a lost, empty generation and they're the low hanging fruit

546
00:33:26,080 --> 00:33:30,840
Speaker 1: for both big tech and other hate groups. When I

547
00:33:30,880 --> 00:33:34,760
Speaker 1: worked on my PhD in history, I spent a fair

548
00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:38,640
Speaker 1: amount of time looking at the wesley Brothers and the

549
00:33:38,680 --> 00:33:42,880
Speaker 1: Great Revivals of the early eighteenth century which literally dramatically

550
00:33:42,920 --> 00:33:47,120
Speaker 1: reduced the consumption of gin in Great Britain, change the

551
00:33:47,160 --> 00:33:51,440
Speaker 1: whole attitude of the working class revision. The argument by

552
00:33:51,480 --> 00:33:54,280
Speaker 1: a French history in Olive was that it was in

553
00:33:54,320 --> 00:33:58,200
Speaker 1: fact Wesleyanism which made sure that Britain would not have

554
00:33:58,280 --> 00:34:02,080
Speaker 1: a French Revolution because it diverted the energy and the

555
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:05,800
Speaker 1: sense of hope into a religious pursuit rather than a

556
00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:09,080
Speaker 1: secular political pursuit. And of course it was the Enism

557
00:34:09,200 --> 00:34:13,560
Speaker 1: or Methodism which led Wilberforce to lead the antislavery movement

558
00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:17,560
Speaker 1: which changed the world. And then about eighteen forty or

559
00:34:17,600 --> 00:34:21,479
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty five you have a second Great Awakening which

560
00:34:21,520 --> 00:34:25,720
Speaker 1: actually provides the energy for abolitionism and for the forces

561
00:34:25,719 --> 00:34:28,560
Speaker 1: that lead to the Civil War. But in both cases

562
00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:31,920
Speaker 1: you have a society which is a drift and where

563
00:34:31,960 --> 00:34:36,880
Speaker 1: the institutional structures of the church had failed to fill

564
00:34:36,920 --> 00:34:41,080
Speaker 1: the spiritual needs, and people come along and suddenly there's

565
00:34:41,080 --> 00:34:45,400
Speaker 1: a revival that literally changes the behavior of an entire

566
00:34:45,800 --> 00:34:48,799
Speaker 1: two or three generations. I look at things like the

567
00:34:48,880 --> 00:34:53,080
Speaker 1: fetinal disaster than suicide rate, which is in some ways,

568
00:34:53,719 --> 00:34:56,200
Speaker 1: although it's not as great a number, but it's more frightening.

569
00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:00,800
Speaker 1: I mean, to have young people have lives of much despair,

570
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,719
Speaker 1: the death seems the only acceptable alternative. I think there

571
00:35:05,719 --> 00:35:10,200
Speaker 1: should be a much larger national dialogue about what has

572
00:35:10,239 --> 00:35:12,920
Speaker 1: gone wrong with the culture and what's gone wrong with

573
00:35:12,960 --> 00:35:17,200
Speaker 1: the society at large. It's really far beyond politics. You

574
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:19,960
Speaker 1: study this and you're a professional. I'm just kind of

575
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:23,000
Speaker 1: an observer. I think you've hit on some really great

576
00:35:23,040 --> 00:35:26,880
Speaker 1: points about the important role of faith structures being so

577
00:35:26,920 --> 00:35:30,200
Speaker 1: important for the society, and the deaths of despair that

578
00:35:30,239 --> 00:35:32,560
Speaker 1: we're experiencing in the so called deaths of despair, which

579
00:35:32,600 --> 00:35:37,359
Speaker 1: is suicide, chronic alcoholism, and overdose. Interestingly, when you look

580
00:35:37,360 --> 00:35:41,280
Speaker 1: at China, China's also gone through a really horrific suicide epidemic,

581
00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:44,160
Speaker 1: one that's statistically more impactful than ours. They have a

582
00:35:44,200 --> 00:35:47,120
Speaker 1: higher suicide rate than ours. And what you see in

583
00:35:47,760 --> 00:35:51,680
Speaker 1: China is, as you know, you have a historically agrarian

584
00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:55,080
Speaker 1: society that's gone through a seismic shift in a post

585
00:35:55,160 --> 00:35:59,920
Speaker 1: industrial hyper urbanization. And so now you have what used

586
00:36:00,000 --> 00:36:01,799
Speaker 1: to be poor serfs to at a plot of land

587
00:36:01,800 --> 00:36:03,480
Speaker 1: to call their own. There was some tethering, there was

588
00:36:03,520 --> 00:36:07,839
Speaker 1: some sense of village community. Now they're living in well,

589
00:36:07,880 --> 00:36:12,160
Speaker 1: you know the Foxcon story, right, the Apple subcontractor. That's

590
00:36:12,160 --> 00:36:15,840
Speaker 1: a megacity of four hundred thousand people living in the

591
00:36:15,920 --> 00:36:19,680
Speaker 1: factory city, working eighteen hours a day. That's the place

592
00:36:19,760 --> 00:36:21,440
Speaker 1: that they had to put the suicide. And that's up

593
00:36:21,480 --> 00:36:25,360
Speaker 1: because seven people a week were committing suicide at Foxcon.

594
00:36:25,400 --> 00:36:27,520
Speaker 1: They were going up to the roof because they were

595
00:36:27,560 --> 00:36:30,880
Speaker 1: so despairing of a hopeless life. There was no chance

596
00:36:30,920 --> 00:36:34,479
Speaker 1: of vertical improvement in their lives. And what I thought

597
00:36:34,520 --> 00:36:41,160
Speaker 1: was ironic, these poor, hapless Chinese factory workers were essentially

598
00:36:41,320 --> 00:36:46,879
Speaker 1: enslaved to build the mechanisms of our digital enslavement. So

599
00:36:47,719 --> 00:36:52,120
Speaker 1: while we essentially colonialized some of these poor Chinese workers

600
00:36:52,360 --> 00:36:54,840
Speaker 1: to build our digital cages so that our young people

601
00:36:54,880 --> 00:36:58,239
Speaker 1: can become enslaved in a different way, because I think

602
00:36:58,280 --> 00:37:00,360
Speaker 1: the opposite of what you said is also true. Right,

603
00:37:00,400 --> 00:37:04,840
Speaker 1: if you don't have a religious foundation or spiritual DNA,

604
00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:07,799
Speaker 1: you're going to get lost and find other things. But

605
00:37:07,920 --> 00:37:10,680
Speaker 1: I think the opposite is true that if you're addicted,

606
00:37:11,200 --> 00:37:13,719
Speaker 1: you're also much more malleable as a society. I mean,

607
00:37:13,800 --> 00:37:16,640
Speaker 1: as an addiction psychologist. We know that during American slavery,

608
00:37:16,680 --> 00:37:19,240
Speaker 1: they used to give the plantation unders gave the adult

609
00:37:19,280 --> 00:37:22,400
Speaker 1: male slaves a bottle of moonshine every Saturday, because the

610
00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:25,720
Speaker 1: idea was that a drunken, addicted slave was less likely

611
00:37:25,760 --> 00:37:28,879
Speaker 1: to get educated or organizer to rebel. And I think

612
00:37:28,880 --> 00:37:32,160
Speaker 1: what we're seeing now is a digital enslavement where a

613
00:37:32,160 --> 00:37:36,120
Speaker 1: lot of our young people are not advancing educating themselves

614
00:37:36,200 --> 00:37:40,000
Speaker 1: because they're trapped in their devices. Neil Postman, the NYU

615
00:37:40,040 --> 00:37:43,439
Speaker 1: professor from nineteen eighty five who wrote the groundbreaking book

616
00:37:43,440 --> 00:37:47,640
Speaker 1: Amusing Ourselves to Death, talked about the new visual medium

617
00:37:47,760 --> 00:37:51,560
Speaker 1: being the soma of our brave new world and that

618
00:37:51,600 --> 00:37:55,640
Speaker 1: we were now more sedated and much more malleable. So

619
00:37:55,760 --> 00:37:58,440
Speaker 1: as you could see that our young people are more

620
00:37:58,440 --> 00:38:01,759
Speaker 1: sedated and getting much more open for behavior modification and

621
00:38:01,760 --> 00:38:04,759
Speaker 1: how they vote, how they think, how they consume, and

622
00:38:05,040 --> 00:38:07,920
Speaker 1: my role is to try to wake people up from

623
00:38:07,920 --> 00:38:11,560
Speaker 1: this enslavement and full disclosure, I'm in long term recovery.

624
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:14,759
Speaker 1: I'm twenty five years in a twelve step program. And

625
00:38:14,800 --> 00:38:19,160
Speaker 1: then I realized firsthand personally the importance of rehitching my

626
00:38:19,239 --> 00:38:23,000
Speaker 1: wagon to something of a more spiritual and intrinsic nature

627
00:38:23,560 --> 00:38:27,520
Speaker 1: rather than an extrinsic numbing agent. And I see that

628
00:38:27,520 --> 00:38:31,400
Speaker 1: that's what's happening on a sort of generational and societal level.

629
00:38:31,760 --> 00:38:35,799
Speaker 1: We're all numb down candy crush and American idol and

630
00:38:36,080 --> 00:38:41,120
Speaker 1: nonsense and influencers. While Rome is burning, You're really breaking

631
00:38:41,200 --> 00:38:43,560
Speaker 1: ground in a way that for a lot of us

632
00:38:43,680 --> 00:38:46,759
Speaker 1: is extraordinarily helpful. And I want to thank you for

633
00:38:46,840 --> 00:38:50,800
Speaker 1: joining me. Your new book, Digital Madness, How Social Media

634
00:38:50,840 --> 00:38:53,520
Speaker 1: is driving our Mental health Crisis and How to Restore

635
00:38:53,560 --> 00:38:56,280
Speaker 1: Our Sanity is going to be on our web page,

636
00:38:56,600 --> 00:39:00,200
Speaker 1: and I think it's essential reading for both parents, those

637
00:39:00,200 --> 00:39:03,000
Speaker 1: in leadership roles who are trying to really understand the

638
00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:08,320
Speaker 1: effects technology and social media having on American life, and frankly,

639
00:39:08,640 --> 00:39:11,319
Speaker 1: as John Clifton pointed out, around the world, I really

640
00:39:11,360 --> 00:39:14,320
Speaker 1: want to thank you your passion for this, your commitment

641
00:39:14,360 --> 00:39:17,359
Speaker 1: to it is really important to the country, and I

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Speaker 1: thank you for joining me in Newtsworld and sharing your

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Speaker 1: lifetime work. Mister speaker, thank you for having me, and

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Speaker 1: thank you for all the work that you've done to

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Speaker 1: try to make things better in the world. Thank you

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Speaker 1: as well. Thank you to my guests, doctor Nicholas Cardis.

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Speaker 1: You can get a link to buy his new book

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Speaker 1: Digital Madness, How social Media is driving our mental health

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00:39:38,719 --> 00:39:42,439
Speaker 1: crisis and How to Restore our Sanity on our show

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Speaker 1: page at nutsworld dot com. Nuts World is produced by

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Speaker 1: Gingwich free sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan,

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00:39:51,200 --> 00:39:55,560
Speaker 1: our producer is Rebecca Howe, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

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Speaker 1: The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.

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Speaker 1: Special thanks to the team at Gingwich three sixty. If

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Speaker 1: you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple

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Speaker 1: Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give

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Speaker 1: us a review so others can learn what it's all about.

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Speaker 1: Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my

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Speaker 1: three free weekly columns at gingwire sixty dot com slash newsletter.

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Speaker 1: I'm newt Ginggwig, this is Newtsworld,