Child Psych Podcast Episode #130

[Tania Johnson] Hello, and welcome to The Child Psych Podcast. I’m Tania Johnson, registered psychologist, registered play therapist, and co-founder of the Institute of Child Psychology. Today, we are thrilled to have Dr. Nicholas Kardaras with us. Dr. Kardaras is an Ivy League–educated psychologist, internationally acclaimed speaker, and one of the world’s leading experts on addiction. He is the CEO of Omega Recovery in Texas and the creator of CEAB, which is a very innovative program—an intensive, experiential form of nature immersion therapy. He is also a clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine. You might be familiar with Dr. Kardaras’ groundbreaking book that was released nearly a decade ago.

[Nicolas Kardaras] It was published in 2016—so, just about a decade ago. Nine years.

[Tania] Glow Kids—one of the books that absolutely transformed the way we work at the Institute of Child Psychology. He’s also the author of two other powerful books, including How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life—amazing!—and his newest title, Digital Madness. For everyone listening, please remember to leave a review or rating on your favorite podcast platform. So just to recap: Glow Kids was published in 2016, and Digital Madness came out in 2022. Nicolas, I have so many questions about your experience writing these books. What was that like for you? Because things have both changed—and in many ways, stayed the same.

[Nicolas] Right. When I wrote Glow Kids in 2016, I was honestly shocked. At the time, I was doing a lot of clinical work with adolescents and young adults. It doesn’t feel like that long ago, but people were extremely unaware of the problem. I looked around at the mental health landscape, the educational system—no one was really talking about tech addiction or the consequences of excessive screen time. Sure, people had started acknowledging an adolescent mental health crisis, but they weren’t connecting the dots. As someone specializing in addiction, I looked at what was happening and thought, “Clearly, something is going on here.” That’s when I started digging into the research. And there was a lot of it—studies linking screen time to depression, anxiety, ADHD, attention issues, and even the loneliness epidemic we’re seeing now. Screen time was—and still is—radically changing our society. But it seemed like most adults were too busy playing Candy Crush to notice. So, I wanted to write a book that would raise a red flag—something that would say, “Houston, we have a problem.”

How Screen Addiction Is Changing Our Children’s Mental Health

[Tania] Honestly, I didn’t think of it until I read your book—right when it came out. I don’t think I had even realized that there was anything significant going on. I knew some kids were struggling, but as I read your book, I thought, “Oh, this is way bigger than we realized.”

[Nicolas] Exactly. And I think now the question—“Is there such a thing as screen addiction?”—has been asked and answered. At the time, though, it was highly controversial. I wrote an article called Digital Heroin, which stirred up a lot of debate. But now, at least gaming addiction is an official diagnosis in the ICD-11. It’s become more legitimized. You can’t live in 21st-century society and not see that everyone is impacted. We’re impacted. You’re impacted. I’m impacted—by this new, digitally immersed world. Some are more affected than others based on their age or pre-existing vulnerabilities. But the idea that we wouldn’t be changed by this immersive digital environment is unrealistic. It feels like we’ve always lived in a digital world, and yet, from a chronological or evolutionary perspective, it’s happened in the blink of an eye. Really, it’s only been the last 10 to 15 years that we’ve experienced a seismic shift in how we live—and how we do the human thing.

[Tania] That’s wild. Did you find that writing Digital Madness felt like a different journey—because now there’s more awareness, more research, and so much more public conversation around the topic?

[Nicolas] Yes, absolutely. The mission of the first book was to raise awareness—that devices could be habit-forming, that tech addiction was real. I wanted people to understand that “a screen by any other name” could be just as addictive. The mission for the second book was different. Now that we’re aware of the issue, I wanted to say: As we become mad for our devices, our devices are increasingly driving us mad. There’s both correlation and causal links between screen time and the mental health crisis we’re seeing today. There’s a reason why younger people are disproportionately struggling with psychiatric issues compared to older generations. When I started looking at generational cohorts—Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha—the pattern was clear. The younger the generation, the more psychiatric distress we were seeing: higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, self-harm, and overdose. There was something real happening there. My hypothesis was that the more screen-immersed a generation is, the more unwell they tend to be—and that hypothesis has largely been validated. That was the goal of Digital Madness—to go beyond saying, “Yes, tech addiction is real,” and instead ask, “What is the byproduct of our tech-immersed lives? What’s really behind this mental health crisis—and how do we begin to address it?”

[Tania] It’s interesting. I feel like in many ways—you know, a lot of people are now familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s work—but you were a forerunner. You saw this coming years and years ago.

[Nicolas] Yeah, I was like Nostradamus. In the second book, I actually wrote that I felt a bit like Paul Revere—riding through the night, shouting, “There’s an issue here! Wake up, people!” Ten years ago, I think we were all so seduced—so awestruck—by our devices. And let’s be honest: our smartphones are amazing. Adults, especially, were mesmerized by these shiny new marvels of the modern age. But we weren’t looking down at the kids. We weren’t seeing how these devices were disproportionately affecting them. I often use this analogy: You can buy a brand-new, beautiful car and drive it around saying, “Look how cool this car is!” But we don’t hand the car keys to our seven-year-olds—because it’s not age-appropriate technology. The same goes for powerful digital technology. When we give it to children, it affects them more significantly than it does us, as adults—with our, hopefully, fully developed brains… depending on how old we are.

A Wake Up Call from the US Air Force on the Alarming Toll of Gaming Addiction

[Tania] Absolutely. Absolutely. In the preface of Glow Kids, you’ve included an updated introduction. Can you talk about the email you received from the U.S. Air Force? Can you share a little bit about that request and the alarm bells it set off for you?

[Nicolas] Yeah, it was right before COVID—I want to say it was around 2018—when I received an email from the person who was head of mental health support services for the Air Force. There’s an acronym for their division, though I can’t recall it at the moment. These are the folks who treat PTSD and other mental health issues—psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurse practitioners. They sent me an email asking if I could do training for the Air Force’s mental health staff. It was going to take place in Florida that year, with around 300 clinicians attending. They wanted me to do tech addiction sensitization and treatment training. I asked, “What’s happening in the Air Force that you’re asking me to do this training?” And this is the part that really shocked me—my jaw dropped, honestly. I wasn’t shocked easily, but I was truly stunned by what she said. She explained, “We’re having an epidemic of video game addiction—screen overuse, whatever you want to call it—within the Air Force specifically. These are young men, essentially teenagers, 18- and 19-year-olds, coming out of video game culture. They don’t drink or use drugs because we drug test on the bases, but if you go to any military base in the country now, you’ll see gaming-addicted young men who just can’t stop gaming.” And the real kicker? She told me that in the past year, five Air Force babies had died in their cribs due to parental neglect—because their Airman fathers had been on multi-day gaming binges. The Department of Defense had to come up with a new designation on the death certificates: death by electronic distraction. That completely knocked my socks off. At that time, in 2018, I was still going on television and debating people about whether tech addiction was even real. Meanwhile, here was a respected military mental health clinician telling me that five babies had died because of their fathers’ gaming addiction. She also made it clear that these weren’t just “pimply 14-year-olds”—these were trained military personnel. She emphasized that the armed forces typically have very low rates of child maltreatment, so this was an alarming and specific anomaly related to gaming. And in all five cases, it was World of Warcraft. The wives had left for the weekend, and the fathers were left alone with the babies—and they got so consumed by the game that the babies were neglected. That, for me, was a major wake-up call.

Digital Heroin and the Brain: Understanding the Addictive Power of Screens

[Tania] Yeah. Heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking. And you touched earlier a little bit on “digital heroin” and that this is what’s playing in here. Can you explain to our listeners what you mean by digital heroin and how that addictive process actually works?

[Nicolas] Yeah. And I know that we’re currently going through a fentanyl scourge—over 110,000 overdoses, with 70 to 80 thousand of them being fentanyl or opioid-based. So I’m not trying to trivialize opioid addiction. This is really about highlighting how compulsive this is from a neurological standpoint. What changed over the last few years is that we started getting brain imaging research that showed—very clearly—that if you look at fMRI scans of an opioid addict and compare them to the scans of a gaming addict, they look almost identical in terms of the impact on the prefrontal cortex. Literally, what happens in the brain is that the dense gray matter of the prefrontal cortex in both opioid addicts and gaming addicts begins to shrink and atrophy over time. And as most of your audience knows, the prefrontal cortex is our executive functioning center—it’s where decision-making, consequential thinking, and impulse control reside. So if nothing else, what we’re doing is hardwiring children, adolescents, and young adults to be highly impulsive because we’re compromising the very part of the brain that allows them not to be impulsive. In the same way that drug addicts compromise their brains the more they engage in their drug of choice, gaming addicts break the same brain functions that would otherwise help them resist the addiction. So it’s a double whammy. That brain imaging research, I think, was an eye-opener for a lot of clinicians who realized—this isn’t just behavioral. Most laypeople can understand that ingesting a substance can change the brain neurophysiologically, but they were less aware that visual experiences can do the same. We already know trauma changes the brain, so it shouldn’t really be shocking that visual experiences—like gaming—can reshape brain function as well.

[Tania] And the dopamine impact—what’s happening there? Whether it’s a game or social media, what is actually happening with dopamine?

[Nicolas] Right. So with most addictions, the main neurotransmitter is dopamine. There’s a part of the brain called the mesolimbic dopamine reward loop, and when we engage in pleasurable, dopamine-activating (or dopaminergic) experiences, dopamine levels rise. So if you hit a free throw in basketball, eat a piece of chocolate, or have sex—dopamine gets released. And depending on various biological and psychological factors—there are over a dozen major theories about addiction—some people are more vulnerable to chasing those feel-good experiences. Dopamine is central to that process. What we’re finding with screen-based experiences—and not all screen experiences are created equal—is that certain types, like first-person shooter games or specific platforms, significantly raise dopamine levels. In one study published in Nature by Dr. Cupp showed that video games raised dopamine levels to the same extent as a sexual experience. Now, when I give talks on this, I sometimes joke (not to be crude) that sexual experiences tend to be time-limited—unless you’re Sting or some tantric practitioner. But I’ve had gamers tell me they’ve played for 12, 18, even 24 hours straight. So you’re spiking dopamine and creating what we call dopamine overload or dopamine desensitization. In essence, you’re feeding into an addictive cycle where you now need that dopamine spike just to feel normal—but at the same time, you’re burning out or desensitizing your dopamine receptors. In real-world terms, for adolescents or young adults, if you’ve been overstimulated by these hyper-immersive, arousing, often virtual experiences, everything else in life starts to feel flat by comparison. The world becomes gray when you’re not in those digital spaces. And that’s a major problem.

[Tania] And for the Air Force, as we were just talking—for those men who were struggling—what I’m hearing is that they were experiencing dopamine spikes, but their ability to use their prefrontal cortex was compromised. And then we saw hours and hours of gaming—to the extent that children were dying.

[Nicolas] Yeah. And you know, with any addiction, what it does—Dr. Haymon had written in an article for the NIH—he described addiction as a “disease of now.” Addiction tends to really collapse your consequential thinking. So, if you’re that young father who has a baby in the crib and you’re in the middle of your addictive experience—whether it’s smoking crack or playing a video game addictively—you’re locked into that moment. I don’t want to call it a Buddhist “now” because the Buddhist concept of being in the present is different—it’s mindful and healthy. But addiction creates a kind of negative now, where you have such blinders on that you’ve forgotten—or you’re no longer aware—that your baby is in the crib and needs food or a diaper change. All you care about is staying in that moment. And that’s an addiction.

[Tania] You mentioned earlier that some people are just more vulnerable to addiction. We have some kids who can play games and turn them off, and then others who really, really struggle. What makes a child or teen more vulnerable to that addiction process?

[Nicolas] Yeah, sometimes it can be a bit of Russian roulette. I’ve seen some young kids or adolescents who seemed to have all the protective factors, and yet they still fell prey to gaming when they went down that rabbit hole. But we do talk in our profession about risk and protective factors. Protective factors tend to be healthy support systems at home, educational engagement, intellectual capacity, resilience—all those things we associate with having a strong psychological foundation. I often use the phrase “a healthy psychological immune system.” The stronger that system is, the more resistant you are to what I call virtual toxic viruses—whether that’s gaming, social media, or other screen-based stimuli. On the other hand, we see that young people on the autism spectrum tend to be much more vulnerable to losing themselves in those deep rabbit holes. Their social challenges make them more likely to prefer screen experiences, and their tendencies for perseveration and hyperfocus can make it harder for them to disengage. We also see increased vulnerability in kids with underlying mood disorders. If there’s depression or anxiety, for example, screen time can become a form of self-medication. But that starts a vicious cycle—kind of like when an adult loses a spouse, becomes depressed, and starts drinking to cope. Drinking is a depressant, so the more they drink, the more depressed they become. And the more depressed they are, the more they drink. The same thing can happen with screen time—there may be an initial vulnerability, but the more they use screens to cope, the more that use deepens the underlying problem.

Balancing the Benefits and Risks of Gaming and Social Media

[Tania] That makes so much sense. One of the arguments—and I know you’ve probably heard this a hundred times—is that whenever we talk about all the things we need to be cautious about when it comes to screens, people quickly start listing the benefits of gaming or being connected via social media platforms. What are your thoughts on how we should approach the pros and cons of screen use?

[Nicolas] That’s a great question, right? And I think the only research that I’ve seen—like, for example, with gaming and what we might call neurophysiological benefits—suggests that there’s a part of the brain called the salience network, which has to do with hand-eye coordination. That does seem to improve with gamers. Gamers get better hand-eye coordination. Okay, perhaps I’ll concede that point—that gamers can get better hand-eye coordination. One article I read even said this could potentially make them better drone pilots. Okay. But does that outweigh the detriments, the mental health impacts? Because we know that increased screen time correlates with increased depression, anxiety, and many other psychiatric issues. So I would say, is that worth it? Is that hand-eye improvement worth the potential detrimental effects of screen time? With social media, it’s interesting. Many of our young people find their tribe, they find community online. And I get that, especially marginalized communities—they might find community, right? That was a great promise. The great promise of social media was going to be the great connector, giving community to people. But if that were true, why are Gen Z and millennials—quote unquote—the loneliest generation, where one out of four millennials have zero friends? Why has social media led to such an antisocial state of affairs? So what I think we’re experiencing is that digital connectivity doesn’t really equal meaningful social relationships that we need to be healthy human beings. We need face-to-face contact and human interaction. Social media and other digital experiences act as an illusory form of connection. Yes, it’s better than nothing—like during COVID, if I couldn’t see Grandma, a Zoom session with Grandma was definitely better than nothing. But aside from outliers like that, for the most part, they seduce people into thinking they’re socially connected. “I have friends on my gaming platform. I have friends online. I’m in a relationship with someone I’ve never met in three years, but I have a relationship.” It gives us a false sense of connectivity. That’s why depression rates are so high. And another layer is that when I have an adult client who’s mild to moderately depressed, we usually recommend physical activity and some kind of group activity—join a knitting club, a book reading club, go to the library, do a Tai Chi class, do something with other people—because we know community is anti-depressive. Physical activity raises serotonin levels and is healthy for you. When you think about what screen time has done, screen time has dropped a nuclear bomb on physical activity and interpersonal community. Now we have many young people who are sedentary, screen-staring, meaning-deprived, and without genuine community. The communities we’re seeing on the negative side include many negative influencer communities—not just Kardashians and the junk values of the materialistic Kardashian world, but also psychiatric influencers. I’ve written about this in Digital Madness—the subtitle is How Social Media is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis. Young people struggling for community latch onto influencers who have borderline personality disorder, dissociative identity disorder, the TikTok Tourette’s phenomenon—aspirational, performative influencers displaying psychiatric unwellness, ostensibly to raise awareness. But vulnerable young people often mimic or share some of those symptoms in a social contagion-like way. We see this in our clinic. We run a residential treatment program in Austin, Texas. Many young people come in with certain diagnoses. We do a digital detox for six weeks—take away the digital toxin—and often, though not always, the psychiatric issues dissipate once they’re away from the social media contagion. The symptoms go away because they’re no longer being shaped or influenced by unhealthy influencers. So that’s another dynamic.

[Tania] Yeah, it’s interesting, Nicolas. I’ve actually seen exactly the same thing in the clinic with many teens who come in. They watch so much that they no longer know what’s theirs, what’s not theirs, or where they got it from. Everything becomes mixed up.

[Nicolas] Yeah. I think there’s also a gestalt now where it’s aspirational to have a laundry list of psychiatric disorders. It’s kind of cool. I hate to say it, but it is kind of cool. We have clients who come in—young females, young males—who know the DSM better than the therapists. They self-diagnose. Back in the day, 20 or 30 years ago, you had hypochondriacs who knew the Physician’s Desk Reference and would self-diagnose, but nowadays many young people come into our clinic saying, “I have ABCDE disorder.” Like, okay, hold on. Let’s pump the brakes a little bit. Let’s let the dust settle. Let’s get to know you and see what’s actually going on. But it seems to be giving them a sense of identity—people who need identity and are losing a sense of intrinsic identity and value in this really confusing digital age that we’re in.

[Tania] Dr. Gordon Neufeld talks a lot about how we used to take our guidance vertically—from a therapist, a doctor, grandparents, mom and dad. But now, for so many of our youth, their guidance is horizontal. It’s peers, it’s influencers, but not necessarily someone who comes with knowledge or value systems. That has shifted the dynamics of everything.

[Nicolas] Yeah. And you know the old cliché: it takes a village. We had a sense that the community was the healing agent. I wrote about it in my new book. There was a horrific event in Nova Scotia—the explosion in the harbor on 9/11. I hadn’t even heard about it until I researched it. The community had a ship loaded with munitions explode, killing and horribly burning about 2,000 people. A meta-analysis showed that those who survived had an amazing sense of intrinsic resilience if they had the right community support. Back then, there was no such thing as psychotherapy—well, there was psychoanalysis, but it wasn’t available to most common folks. The narrative was that we lived in much healthier, supported communities that helped us get through the slings and arrows of life. Now, we live in a wave that is isolating and atomizing. So, if I go through turbulence in my life—a breakup, a divorce, a job loss, death, illness—I’m less able to handle it. My psychological immune system is compromised. Part of this is because our young people are growing up through this digital funnel; they’re not developing the resilience traits we need in this instant gratification, narcissistic-fueling environment. I hate to say it—I sound like an old-timer—but young people today are lacking the core resilience you get from falling down, failing, and having to get yourself back up. Angela Duckworth, who wrote Grit and studied the ingredients of grit and resilience, found that these are absent in today’s virtual world. Kids don’t develop grit or resilience; they get to secondary school, experience a bit of helicopter parenting and pampering, then go to university or enter the workforce, and they’re ill-equipped to handle life on life’s terms. That then often looks like depression, anxiety, and acting-out behavior because they’ve never developed the psychological immune system to handle these situations. This is due to a complex variety of sociological reasons, including immersion in screen time.

The Impact of Predictive Algorithms on Youth Mental Health

[Tania] It’s huge when you look at it across the lifespan. We start off so innocently, playing a kids’ game or whatever it may be, but it just progresses. Finally, like you said, we have college-age students who don’t know how to handle their world when life inevitably hits those road bumps.

[Nicolas] Well, think about even just the narcissistic aspect of our virtual world, right? We talk about predictive algorithms, and because of the way the digital world is created, it’s curated to really meet what the algorithm thinks our needs or preferences are. That might sound simple if you’re just shopping for a pair of shoes—we all know that if we search for shoes, for the next three days your news feed will be full of shoes. So, in a very real way, it’s a very curated experience. Now, think if you’re a 12- or 13-year-old and your virtual world is literally created in your image. As you seek something or think something, you see it echoed back to you. That can create a sense that you are the center of your world because, in a very real sense, you are the center of your digital world due to these curated, predatory predictive algorithms. I’ve begun to see algorithms and social media as acting almost like heat-seeking missiles that target psychological vulnerability. We know that what drives engagement is emotional reactivity, and typically, good emotions don’t have the same “stickiness” (as the IT folks call it) as negative emotions. So, if I can get your fear or other heightened emotional responses, those algorithms will capitalize on that. For example, the Wall Street Journal did an interesting study where they created 13 fictitious profiles of adolescent females with body image issues. Within 24 hours, these profiles were bombarded with thousands of pieces of content—algorithms firing 24/7—featuring hashtags like #thin and “bones,” “100 calories or less,” and really unhealthy imagery. As unhealthy as it was—because we know anorexia is one of the most fatal disorders for young people—the algorithm, although supposedly value-neutral, understood that a person with body image issues wouldn’t be able to look away from some of these images, even though it would worsen their body image problems. The study found that anorexia risk increased by 17%. Internal emails at Meta were interesting. When Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, went to Congress, she showed emails and the playbook they were using. They had internal discussions about whether to tone down the algorithms to make them less predatory and less attacking of psychological vulnerability. The answer was an absolute no because that would decrease engagement. So, if I’m a young person struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harm, I’m going to get content about suicide. We know that’s a dangerous intersection, but that’s the current landscape—soulless, like heat-seeking missiles attacking our young people. That’s where we are right now with these predictive algorithms that aren’t just sending you shoe ads—they’re sending you content that inflames and exacerbates your unwellness.

[Tania] As I hear that, it actually hurts my heart. We have children who are developing, learning, and trying to figure out who they are in the world, and at the same time, so much is working against them.

[Nicolas] They’re swimming in such turbulent seas. I really do feel sorry for children today because they’re exposed to so much information overload and toxic content. Even 30 years ago, life felt like some kind of Norman Rockwell, bygone era of simplicity—when the news was just 30 minutes on the evening news, when you had the evening paper, when you could ride your bike with your friends and just be present. All those are vestiges of a bygone era, unfortunately.

[Tania] Absolutely. Nicolas, for parents listening who might recognize some of this in their own kids—where it feels like there might be digital dependency—where do they even start to pull back a little and help their child, and maybe even help themselves too?

[Nicolas] Yeah. So, I think some of the countervailing forces here are what you can do. There’s a tipping point where a child develops substance use issues. Somebody can have a drinking problem, and then there’s a tipping point where it becomes full-blown alcoholism or alcohol addiction. But when you’re still on the one side of the fence where it’s maybe still a problem, what I would encourage parents to do is to backdoor real-life activities — music, sports, social engagements, camp experiences. All those things act as protective factors to keep kids from falling fully into the rabbit hole. Kids tend to shut down parents who lecture them about screen time. So if you don’t talk to them about — I mean, yes, you should have a conversation about screen time, but I’m going to put that on the shelf for one second — encourage them to have real-life experiences without saying, “You’re on your phone too much. I want you to do this instead.” Instead of just saying, “Hey, I signed you up for this phenomenal music camp. I’d like you to go,” and not even mentioning that it’s a counterstrike to their screen time. What I find very effective in my treatment program with young people is, for example, the documentary The Social Dilemma. That was the first documentary that pulled back the curtain where the screen moguls themselves say, “This is our playbook. This is how we’re manipulating you. This is how we’re essentially exploiting and monetizing you.” So, no teenager or young adult wants to feel like they’re being told what to do, especially by their parents. But when I tell my young clients, “Hey, you don’t want your mom and dad telling you what to do, but you know who is telling you what to do and shaping what you do? Big tech. Here’s how they’re doing it,” and then I show them The Social Dilemma or talk about how the current digital landscape is monetizing and using them — that’s when you get a visceral response: Hell no, I don’t want to be manipulated and used like that. Well, good. If you don’t want to be used like that, begin to own your life back. Begin to live in the real world. Begin to take your agency back. Those are some buttons to push that I think can be really helpful with young people because a lot of times they don’t realize. They just think, “Look, everyone’s online. Everyone’s doing social media.” They don’t realize what’s behind the curtain, how manipulative it really is, and how really smart behavioral psychologists are creating these platforms to be habit-forming, mind-shaping, behavior-modifying — all those things are baked into this innocent-looking TikTok feed you have.

[Tania] And I love it. I feel like there’s so much more awareness now. There are new documentaries coming out all the time. There are books coming out now telling kids what’s happening. So I feel like we’re at the stage where we can give them information that’s not just from “Mom” — who’s annoying and has been annoying them forever — but from somebody else saying, “Look at what’s happening.” It’s a more immersive experience too if they’re watching something, so they can say, “Okay, what’s happening? Let’s talk about this. Let’s actually engage in critical thinking and look at what’s going on here.”

[Nicolas] Exactly. Mom and Dad, get it — you know, I’m a parent. There’s a certain point where we get tuned out. If there are other members of the choir who might resonate or echo that, that helps. There’s a movement now, a grassroots movement that I’m really thrilled to see. There are a lot of young people who are beginning to realize it’s cool to have a flip phone or a “wise phone” now. There’s an organization I’m involved with, recently invited to join their board, called Humanity. They are here in the United States. They are young people who have formed college clubs and are now spreading to high schools. It’s low-tech. These young people are basically trying to own their lives back and break free from the bondage of the smartphone. Every member gets what’s called a Wise Phone. The Wise Phone looks like a smartphone — so you’re not going to get ostracized for having a flip phone — but it’s not Wi-Fi compatible. There’s no social media, no gaming, but you can text, call, and listen to music. Then they do all sorts of experiential adventures together — hiking and other activities. Humanity was started by a group of young people who got some big corporate sponsors to donate these phones and support them. But it was grassroots, and it’s really great to see. On a legislative, political, and legal level, I’m involved in class action lawsuits happening right now. Multiple law firms and states have over 10,000 plaintiffs suing big tech for harms done to their children — either suicide or other harms intentionally designed into the platforms. It’s the same legal strategy used against big tobacco back in the ’50s: “You knowingly sold our children a carcinogen. You knew it was harmful, and you lied about it.” The same playbook used with Purdue Pharmaceuticals and OxyContin. I’m on bi-weekly meetings with the legal teams as a consultant. The big tech companies are crying uncle. They want to settle. But what we’re asking for now is more than damages for the harmed families — we want regulatory changes, warning labels, and an end to predatory practices. We want exactly what happened with tobacco and toxic content: awareness and change in these harmful business models. They know they’re harming kids. That’s what gets me. They go before Congress — Zuckerberg, and other big tech leaders — every six months. They say, “We’re sorry, we’ll look at it. Yes, we violated some antitrust laws. Yes, we’ve hurt some kids. But we’ll get back to you.” And nothing ever happens. The only thing that seems to change is through litigation. That’s what’s happening right now. It’ll be an 18-month to two-year process, but I think at the end of the day, we’ll see some changes.

[Tania] Yeah. It gives me hope for the world my little girls are growing up in. I think we’ve gone one way, and hopefully, we’ll start to come back the other way again. Nicholas, for everybody listening, where can they find out more about you?

[Nicolas] So, my website is www.drkardaras.com. I don’t have much of a social media presence, but you can reach me there. I run a treatment program in Austin called Omega Recovery. If you or a young loved one is struggling, you can also reach out to Omega Recovery at https://omegarecovery.org/ . We have been treating this issue residentially in Austin for eight years now, and we’re working on other initiatives and projects aimed at reclaiming our humanity. That’s really the best way I can put it, especially now with AI adding another layer of complexity. What really gets to me—and I wrote about this in Digital Madness—is when you look at some of the tech oligarchs, whether it’s Sergey Brin or Larry Page at Google, or Bill Gates, I find myself asking: Is it just about money? Is this just greed? Are they simply trying to swallow up the world with their platforms to monetize us? Then you read Ray Kurzweil—he was a senior Google guru—and Bill Gates considers him his mentor. Kurzweil, originally from Queens, New York, was a genius from Caltech. He wrote a book called The Singularity Is Near, where he lays out his ideas. He’s a transhumanist and believes we are on the cusp of the next level of human evolution. He is about 80 years old now and believes AI innovation will lead to a marriage of human and machine, essentially creating immortality. If you look at where Google has invested, they have put $25 billion into a company called Calico, which focuses on biological life extension. Their narrative is that we are just a few years away from the Singularity, this human-machine AI immortality reality. They are trying to stay alive long enough to see this happen. It sounds a bit bizarre and crazy, but you only have to read it in their own words. Look up Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near and see what Bill Gates has said about him. That seems to drive a lot of their motives. There also seems to be a strong financial incentive behind it—monetizing as many of us as possible to achieve this very non-human goal. So, there’s that. I wanted to throw that in at the end because I think motives are important. When we understand the people we’re struggling against, it sheds some light on who they are and what they might be trying to accomplish.

[Tania] I love that. I think holding on to what we need to do is reclaiming humanity—reclaiming those experiences that make us all human. Being outside, playing, having vulnerable conversations with friends, apologizing face to face with somebody—all of those things that have somewhat disappeared. This is about coming back to that real, authentic human experience.

[Nicolas] Yeah. So, I think touching the grass, being outdoors—nature immersion—is a big part of it because it grounds us back into our physicality and our humanity. Another metaphor I like to use is learning how to be better swimmers in turbulent water. The water’s going to continue to be turbulent; we’re not going to make the ocean calmer. So, what are those better swimming skills? Those skills are teaching our kids critical thinking, ethical discernment, and resilience. Critical thinking is a big one because social media is an emotional economy—it thrives and lives off, as we said earlier, on negative emotions. If a young person can develop the ability to think critically—which is why I wrote a book years ago called How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Our Lives—there is a lot of wisdom in the ancient Western world. Ancient Greek philosophy talked about living a certain kind of way, asking deep “why” questions, and looking up at the night sky with a sense of awe and wonder. A lot of the young people I work with today have lost that. They have no curiosity. They are just being overstimulated and addicted to dopamine. It saddens me because part of growing up is looking up at the night sky, being curious about the nature around you. So many of our young people are dulled to those experiences. If we can expose our kids to nature, critical thinking, and deeper, intrinsic experiences—values that are more meaningful rather than focusing on who has the most likes or followers, which is the coin of the realm on social media—then we can help restore a healthier value system for our young people. The average American high school kid today wants to be a YouTuber; that is the number one vocational choice. Twenty years ago, I was an astronaut. In China, the number one vocational aspiration is still astronaut. So, I do feel, in a very real way, that our kids are under attack, and it is our role to help immunize them from these attacks and teach them to be better swimmers in these turbulent times.

[Tania] Beautiful. That’s such a beautiful note for us to end on. Thank you so much, Nicolas.

[Nicolas] Great. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

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