Hi. My name is Ah pro skipping benefits from Nassig walker and sensation.

Oh yeah, so hello Sam, good to meet you.

I’ve actually watched quite a few of your videos, my name is Andre, I write for a magazine in Canada.

No, it’s actually, it’s been edifying, it’s been very, especially in the area of managing social media engagement and that sort of thing, so it’s been helpful.

Okay, great, great. I’ve been a fan of yours for a while, because I purchased The Living and Self-Love years ago. You used to have that big package of GDS.

You sound like a bunch of liability lawyers about to sue me for multiple offenses.

Video, I bought your book, okay, let’s, you know, let’s have a class action lawsuit and settle this.

But I know who you are, but if you could explain who you are for people who are listening, what your different interests and expertise are.

I wish I knew who I am, so that’s, isn’t this the key question for everyone? Who am I?

But if you’re talking about my biography, it’s distinct from my essence. So I’m a professor of psychology in several universities. I’m also a physicist, I have multiple PhDs and so on, I’m a physicist, I have a PhD in philosophy. I’m a medical doctor, but a non-practicing one. I lecture on psychiatry and neurosciencesand in my other head, I’m a professor of finance in several universities.

So this is my portfolio of things. I’ve written 60-odd books, last count, and published well over 2,000 articles. So I’ve been busy, I think.

I’ve always been interested in your writings on narcissism and personality disorders and your videos, but you recently started talking about another topic that I’ve been really interested in, which is the effects of social media.

And I can give my own personal experience, is I’ve had trouble with being addicted to social media, where I’ve gotten myself off of Twitter for the most part recently, just because I was constantly feeling tense all the time, and I started finding videos from you about the topic. It was really interesting, because you were saying a lot of the things that I was feeling, and one of the things that really stuck to me was the disintegration of truth, where you know who no one is, you don’t know who the person is on the other side, you’re inundated with information constantly, and you lose track of what’s real and what’s not, and things are always going viral. And one thing that was interesting about your videos was how much of it you say is by design.

I kind of wanted to talk about that, about where you think things have started and where you think they’re going, as far as with social media.

Well, first of all, it’s a fact, it is by design. The former chief engineer of Google, former chief engineer of Facebook, and so on and so forth, they’re both testified in the Senate, outside, they granted interviews, it’s all available online, you don’t need to rely on me or anything, I say. And they’ve admitted that they have designed the interface with conditioning and addiction in mind. They don’t call it conditioning, and they don’t call it addiction, obviously. They’re using IT terms, such as stickiness, or, you know, interaction, or whatever.

But they’re talking about conditioning and addiction.

Now, there’s a distinction, a difference, between conditioning and addiction.

Conditioning is when you would like, you would like to, you are aware of what you’re doing, but you wouldn’t, you would not like to break it off.

Position is when you are aware of what you’re doing, but it’s egodystonic, you would like to break it off, but you’re unable to.

And both features exist on social media.

Social media plays mainly with what we call relative positioning.

Relative positioning is constant and instant comparison to your peers, or to others which you deem to be peers, in some way, shape, or form, or aspect, or respect.

So it could be socioeconomic peers, it could be educational peers, it could be anything.

The moment you decide that someone or something is your reference group, from that moment on, you begin an unconscious and later conscious process of comparison.

And the softwares that underlie social media, the platforms, they encourage this comparison in myriad ways, the most famous of which is the like.

The like, the number of the shares, the number of times something is referred to, etc.

The problem is that, one, this creates, as I’ve just said, conditioning in certain people. Certain people who actually enjoy this because they’re getting narcissistic supply, it caters to their narcissism.

Attention regulates their internal environment, so they crave attention.

So these people would be conditioned, they would not be able to stop, even if they wanted to, and they don’t want to.

And then there’s a second group of people who get addicted.

They would have liked to stop.

Some of them try to go dry, you know, to go sober for a month or two off social media, but they simply can’t. They keep coming back for more.

So these two groups are generated by the platform.

And then the problem is that the comparison is not only with others, which one might say has a redeeming feature.

It creates social interactions.

You could say, so what’s wrong with comparing myself to others?

It means that I’m interacting with others. It means that I’m in touch with others. It means that I listen to other people’s opinions.

So it’s not all bad.

Well, true.

There is a redeeming feature there, although actually studies have shown that this leads to silos, to confirmation bias.

In other words, like-minded people tend to go congregate and augment and enhance each other’s prejudices.

But still, it’s still a social function.

But where the problem starts is you begin to compete with yourself, not with others.

Yesterday, you made a post. You received a hundred likes. Today, you make a post. You receive 50 likes.

What your inner critic tells you, you’ve done something wrong. You screwed up. Yesterday, you got a hundred likes. Today, you got 50 likes. You’re a failure. You’re a defeat. Something’s wrong with you.

So these platforms encourage what Freud originally, a hundred years ago, called the superego.

And today, we call the inner critic.

The negative introjects, the negative voices inside your head, some of these voices belong to bad parents, narcissistic, selfish, unpredictable, capricious parents. Other such voices belong to teachers, peers, and so on, but they’re negative.

So these negative introjects, they’re usually dormant.

And social media platforms provoke these voices, stimulate them, and it becomes a cacophony inside your head. This is precisely the reason why numerous studies have linked beyond any doubt the usage of social media to a dramatic explosion, a pandemic, a veritable pandemic, in anxiety disorders and depression, especially among two age groups, up to age 25 and above age 65. These are two vulnerable groups.

People under age 25 and above 65 who use social media platforms show a marked increase in anxiety disorders and depression.

And we are not talking like a 10% increase. We are talking about five times more, five times the original prevalence of anxiety disorders and three times more depression, three times more, like 300% increase and a 500% increase. And we are talking a rise of 40% in suicide among teenagers after the year 2008, when social media platforms became ubiquitous.

And again, the suicides are pretty directly linked to online bullying via social media platforms, to relative positioning, to self-defeating, self-negating thinking, automatic negative thoughts as they’re called. And all of these are provoked by social media platforms.

Now, social media platforms, therefore, are the equivalent, the digital equivalent of alcohol or drugs. I mean, they’re bad for you.

I agree with the alcohol example, because I was telling Andre the other day that some people, their response to feeling addicted to alcohol is they can do moderation, whereas some people decide they have to become teetotalers. I have to abstain.

And I was telling Andre, I feel like if I do one tweet, I’m in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m just there.

So I’m better off.

I’m the exact same way.

And I will say that when you speak of, you know, higher prevalence of anxiety and depression, you’re sitting here describing me, basically.

I mean, you know, in addition to the other disabilities that I have, two of the mental health disorders that I’ve been dealing with for a very long time, but I felt have been exacerbated by social media engagement, have been anxiety and depression.

As a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, I had to tell Trevor, I said, listen, I’m just going to log off. I deleted my account altogether.

And then there’s like articles that I publish, there’s people who interview me on podcasts and so forth. And they ask like, hey, where am I supposed to tag you?

So I let my profile come back, but I don’t really have any plans on engaging for the very same reason that I feel like if I tweet one thing, if I say one thing, it’s like somebody picking the bottle back up. And then I’ll just I’ll lose track of time, it’ll be like two o’clock in the morning. And I’ll be like, what happened? How did I lose all that time?

All modes of communication are essentially regulated or self regulated. You can’t conceive of television without regulatory bodies, you can’t conceive of print media to come in communications, starting with radio, mass communication has always been regulated one way or another regulated, not for content, God forbid, I’m not advocating censorship.

Regulated for ethics, regulated for exposure, regulated for example, age limitation, etc.

It’s extremely easy to convert social media from what it is today, which is essentially an intoxicating substance, it’s extremely easy to convert it from an intoxicating substance to a medicine.

For example, why not limit the usage? Why not limit you?

You can’t use the platform more than two hours a day, it’s very easy to do programming or coding wise, very, why not limit certain features to certain age groups?

Like you have to be 18 or 21 to do certain things. Why not take away altogether likes and or not take them away, but not show the number just show this post has been like why the number is in order to create conditioning Pavlov’s dogs, you know, so there are features malicious features.

I’m an author, I use words very judiciously, and I hope very responsibly, I repeat, they are malevolent, malicious features in these platforms, which could easily be taken away. The platforms could be tweaked, not even rewritten, not even recorded. tweaked, the platforms could be tweaked in a minor way to render them user friendly in the truest sense.

Facilitators of true social interaction, for example, take the feature of friend, why not insist on on ID verification before you become a friend with someone.

Numerous other platforms do this, not social media, why not insist on this in social media?

I feel like one reason why they don’t want that is because there’s some bad actors that they actually want to exist, because it helps with their program.

And one of them is they know a lot of people like to make sock puppets, dummy accounts, bumper accounts, and that chaos for whatever reason, I think helps the toxic addictive experience of it.

As long as that’ll make money, they’ll allow you to do it.

Yeah, I think I mean, I’m not sure why you’re saying we don’t know the reason. We all know the reason.

Now here’s the problem with monetizing eyeballs, everyone in his dog has been monetizing eyeballs since Marconi invented the radio.

I mean, television, network television, and later cable TV, but more so network television.

Of course, newspapers have been monetizing eyeballs like forever, but social media monetize eyeballs in a different way via, as I mentioned, addiction and conditioning.

What does it mean?

It means that social media competes for your eyeballs with other alternatives.

It’s not only that social media competes with television for your eyeball, for your attention. It’s not only that they want you to remain glued to the screen stickiness. It’s not only this.

They are competing with your spouse. They are competing with your children. They’re competing with your friends and neighbors. They’re competing with any other form of intimacy you may have.

Your wife, if you’re married, your wife is Facebook’s largest enemy by far. Facebook’s largest competitor is not MySpace or anything similar. Facebook’s largest competitor is the wives, the spouses, the husband, the friends, the neighbors, the communities. These are Facebook’s largest competitors because Facebook and similar juggernaut are ruthless. They crush this competition.

You see, it’s extremely simple.

There’s a finite amount of minutes a day. Either you give these minutes to your children or you give these minutes to Zuckerberg.

It’s as simple as this. Either you give your minutes to your children or you give these minutes to Facebook.

No third way about it.

So Facebook needs to eliminate the attention that you give to your children.

They need to separate you from their children. They need to.

They must do it to survive or to thrive or both.

It’s so extremely simple, this shocking truth, that social media is an anti-social force, a social force to be more precise. It’s a force that craves to atomize individuals so that they have no window to the world except via the social media platform.

We’ve been talking about this for, I couldn’t even tell you how many months. And I keep saying to you that I feel like sometimes I’m going a little bit paranoid or a little bit crazy.

But because we’re now in a state of quarantine, everything is locked down. We’re staying home. We’re socially distancing, isolating ourselves, etc.

It’s almost like it’s just accelerating the negative aspects of social media that already existed.

For example, you mentioned that social media atomizes us and that’s absolutely true, but it’s also now mediating our interpersonal communication through platforms that are designed to sell us things.

So what does that mean, for example, for things like people who are trying to find relationships, who are just trying to find meaningful relationships.

Maybe it could be a romantic relationship, maybe branching out, having more friendships.

There used to be a time where you would go out into your community and find people to meet with, to network with. Maybe you’d volunteer for the same causes. You might be on, let’s say, the Rotary Club or something like that.

But now it seems that all of our interpersonal relationships and communications are being mediated through these platforms.

Oh, I would go a lot further than this.

It’s not only interpersonal communication that’s mediated, it’s reality, the world.

46% of all news consumption today is via Facebook, not via television, not via newspapers, not via word of mouth either. 46% of all news consumed is via Facebook. That’s by far the greatest news aggregator in human history.

So they tell you what to know and what not to know. There’s implicit censorship, it’s called the algorithm.

Similarly, Google News is a force to reckon with. These things are not random, they are governed by algorithms.

And a good algorithm example is YouTube.

People already think of it as a social media network but it has a lot of social media effects and they have this autoplay algorithm that can really get you into a filter bubble that is nowhere where you started. You end up in a whole different place arguing with people and watching all types of things.

Again it’s worse than this.

I mean, you strike me as a perennial optimist. It’s much worse than this.

I have never been described as such yet. Sorry.

Add it to the class action.

The algorithm is not Google’s or Facebook’s. It’s you. It’s your reflection.

In the autoplay, for example, you mentioned autoplay, YouTube, YouTube actually monitors your preferences, your previous choices and constructs an implicit profile of you. And this profile dictates the next videos that you’re watching.

So the algorithm is you.

The algorithm is protean. It shape shifts. It morphs in order to fit you like a tight clothing, like a second skin, you know, which each one of us generates a whole new medium on YouTube, on Facebook and everything.

And we are actually, we end up talking to ourselves. It’s totally solipsistic. We end up isolated.

That’s what I mean by atomization. We end up in an echo chamber, but this echo chamber is not only other like minded people. Actually, it’s not even mostly other like minded people. It’s you. You talking to yourself.