Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Gaia Bernstein on How to Fix the Tech Addiction Crisis EP 274

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

I am joined by Gaia Bernstein, a Doctor of Judicial Science and a Doctor of Jurisprudence, who holds the positions of Technology, Privacy, and Policy Professor of Law, Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection, and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute of Law Science and Technology at Seton Hall University. In this episode, Gaia Bernstein and I discuss her new book titled “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.” In This Episode, Gaia Bernstein And I Discuss Her Book "Unwired" On the podcast, we discuss Gaia’s latest book, “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.” Gaia Bernstein, an expert on the connections between law, technology, health, and privacy, explained how our society is addicted to technology and legal recourse that can help avoid this dependency. Gaia shows that the solution is to shift the responsibility to the tech corporations who create addictive technology instead of the users who resort to self-help options to limit screen time. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/gaia-bernstein-fix-the-tech-addiction-crisis/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/RUSmW-llK3Y  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct Podcast. The main thing is, there seems to be an impending public health crisis for children. What I call the science wars, research is coming up and investigating and coming up with data and showing the harm. And then the company is saying no and also subsidizing their own research. These science wars have been going on for too long. I think at a certain point, if you want to move on to long policy, you have to declare what's going on here. And from history, we can see that

when medical professional organizations or government organizations say this is a harmful impact on people's health. Things start changing. We don't have that. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeyles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you

and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators,

scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 274 of PassionStruck, recently ranked by InterviewValais as the fourth best podcast for mindset. And thank you to each and every one of you come back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world.

And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for joining us. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize and to convene your topics. To give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show, either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed it earlier in the week, I interviewed Dr. Arthur Brooks about his number one New York Times bestselling book from Strength to Strength.

I also interviewed John Hopkins University professor Susan McSaman about the power of the arts. Please go check them both out if you haven't had a chance to listen or watch either one of those. And I also wanted to say thank you for your continued support of the show, your ratings and reviews, those such a long way, and helping to bring more people

into the passion start community, where we can bring them messages of hope, meaning, connection, and inspiration. And I also know our guests love to hear from you. Now, let's talk about today's episode. Our society is facing a huge technology problem. As people find it difficult to disconnect from screens, despite their strongest desire to do so, the amount of time that has been spent on screens has

increased significantly, almost six hours a day for the average person, which is leading some to attempt self-help measures that ultimately fail. Parents feel so powerless in their attempts to limit their children's technology use. In today's interview, Gaia Bernstein, author of Unwired, gaining control of our addictive technologies, joins me to discuss how we might solve this addiction by shifting the moral responsibility and accountability

for solutions to this issue, the corporations rather than just solely blaming individuals. In today's discussion, Daya draws on lessons from the tobacco and food industries to demonstrate why government regulation is necessary to curb technology addiction. She describes a grassroots movement that is already underway and provides a blueprint for its development to allow people to gain control over their technology use. Today's episode provides hope for those who are struggling to disconnect from technology. Guy Bernstein is a law professor, co-director for the Institute of Privacy Protection and co-director for the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science, and Technology at the Seton Hall

University School of Law, Science, and Technology at the Seaton Hall University School of Law. She teaches and lectures on the intersection of law, technology, health, and privacy. Guy has academic degrees in both law and psychology, and her research has been featured extensively, including in the New York Times, Forbes, ABC News, and Psychology Today. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited today to have Gaya Bernstein

on the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome, Gaya. Thank you for having me. Well, I wanted to congratulate you on the release of your new book, Unwired, gaining control over addictive technologies, which we'll be discussing today. Congratulations again. Thank you. Well, you came to this realization that your reality was gradually changing,

and you write about it in the book. What was it that caused you to become passionate about technology over use? I think it was not one thing. It's basically a few things that happened around the same time, around 2015 and 2016. I felt like my own life was changing. I'm in a academic and I used to sit in the morning

and I was just sit there and noticed after two or three hours that nothing was done and when I tried to figure out what was happening I realized I was going from blog to blog, I was texting, I was emailing, work email, and I was feeling exhausted. And I noticed that and I noticed how I would go with a friend to have coffee and I'll have my phone next to me just waiting for babysitter to text or something to happen. I always had to look at my phone and I look at the kids when I would go to kids birthday parties and they were sitting on their phone and we're not playing with each other. And I just felt that something was changing so much in the way we're living our life. And it does not feel good to me, it does not feel good to the people around me. Yes, and I know for myself around the 2009 time. I was working as a chief information officer at Dell, and I was supporting our consumer group. And at the time, Dell was developing something that we called

the streak, which is about the size of your typical iPhone today. But at the time, people thought it was this large form factor. But what was interesting is the gentleman I was working for Ron Gehrig's, who's claimed a fame as, while he was at Motorola, he used the one who was credited for creating razor phone, which was the first mainstream kind of flip phone that was out there. But as we were playing around with this, he had this at the time really brilliant idea that we should create this kind of application middleware that would sit between any of the different providers who are out there.

And at the time, it was really Apple at its early stages, Android, whoever one thought was gonna be the biggest and then Microsoft. But then any cell phone manufacturer, whoever one thought was going to be the biggest and then Microsoft. But then any cell phone manufacturer, whoever, we would kind of sit between that and the customer and give different communities developer options so that they could customize everything

that was going to go on the phone. And unfortunately, it didn't come to fruition. But I just remember even then having conversations about how you could use this technology to be really a turning point in society. And that's exactly kind of what happened in that time frame. And you list that there were two major reasons for that. Yeah, I think around 2009, two things happened. The first thing is people started using smartphones

because suddenly we were connected everywhere we went and we could do things everywhere we went. So I would go to work, I commute to work from New York City to New Jersey and suddenly I could answer work emails and I could text and I could shop. And I would not notice anything happened around me. At the same time, we got social networks.

And Facebook was the big thing. And everybody was joining Facebook. So I didn't want to join Facebook, so I could be in contact with colleagues. And people's interactions started changing because they started spending more time interacting for social networks instead of in person this is especially affected younger people did not yet crystallize their way of interacting. Yes and I remember that time and I don't think we realized because it was

kind of happening in the periphery, how much that technology was starting to change, how we were living our lives. And something that I talk about on the podcast very often is that we really need to be intentional about the choices that we make, because they take us towards either getting closer to the dreams that we want to retrieve or farther away. And unwired in many ways is also about our choices.

And you believe that kind of during this time frame, people started to make small decisions to replace historic modes of personal interaction with virtual interactions. And I wanted to ask, how did these microchoises lead the users to unintentionally spend many of their waking hours online? And I think the key thing here is unintentionally. Yes, it's all about time. When we made these small decisions, I just thought I was joining Facebook. And I'll spend a few minutes a day on Facebook or I will text on the go. And we didn't realize it's all these small apps we were joining adding on they just became one bigger habit. So every small decision

ended up taking much more time than we expected because we didn't realize that the tech companies were designing their devices, their apps in a way that will take more time for us because the whole business model was based on data and time. They need to have us online for as long as possible so they can collect more data from us and also to stick around for longer so they can target more advertising it as. So we ended up spending much more time and by a time we realized all of that. I think people became much more conscious about this around 2018 much much later when there was lots of media about that. At that point our whole life was basically dependent on screens. It was not just easy to turn back and say,

no, we're not doing this anymore. So we were a bit like frog in the famous fable of the frog in the boiling water. Basically, according to the famous fable, if you put a frog in the water, it could still jump out. But if it stays there at a certain point, when it realizes the water is boiling, it can no longer get out. For us, we were for years at a stage where we were just making small decisions. We didn't realise what was happening, but the water was boiling when the silver was happening. Everything we were doing was on screens. And not only that, it was the biggest industries in the country, the tech industries, whole business model, dependent on us staying there for longer. Yeah, technology, as you say in the book, really has metastasized from being something that

we all thought would be for a public good into a problem that's threatening to unravel not only American society, but much of the world's society. Yeah, and I think what's paradoxical about this is that these companies started out as the gooders of the corporate world. I mean, Google's model was Dunoevo, who was there to connect the world. And I do remember, I think earlier on on when I was thinking about this issue, there was no evidence at that point that the tech companies were doing it. And I suspected that it was the case. When I started thinking about this problem, I realized that the tech companies might be addicting people, but because they kept saying that they're to do good, it was

very difficult to come out and say, no, this is not the case. And of course, a few years later, we got all the evidence from the whistleblowers from Francis Hogan about how Facebook knew that Instagram was bad for teens, especially girls, and was still addicting them and going on with a business model. It was interesting that these companies that everybody believed in, even in academia, where people are often much more skeptical of corporate entities, people believed in the tech industry when it started out, things turned out so very differently. Yeah, and it's interesting from where we started the conversation in 2009, to as you brought up, people started to realize the harm of this about a decade later when studies during 2018 to 2019 started to show that adults were spending an average of five

and a half hours on their phone daily. And that was excluding time on computers or tablets. And the kid's screen time, which is really scary, is even higher. So people now take their phones and virtual life everywhere that they go. And I wanted to ask, how is this causing the social norms of technology overuse to weave throughout individuals daily lives? Well, the fact that everywhere you go, you have a scream in you with you means that the second you don't have

something to do, you're standing in line to get coffee, you take out your phone. So you're no longer talking, no longer looking around you, you're not going to get to have any unexpected encounters, you may not see people you know who are right next to you. I remember this for me, there was one of these moments that I realized things were very wrong. I was in a yoga class in New York City and I went to get coffee and I was standing in this long line and I guess maybe it was the yoga class. I was feeling differently. I did not take my phone out. So I looked around, but nobody was looking up. Everybody was looking down. I realized something is so different here. There's something about us that are studies

which investigated happiness. For a long time, we knew that long-term relationships are important for happiness. But these studies show that these small encounters of just talking to somebody in the street or saying hi to a colleague on your way up to work or talking for a few minutes, even children talking in the playground

end up basically, end up making us much more happy. And if we're missing out on all these moments, we end up just feeling down and drained. And I played this experiment with myself when I was writing in the book, I work at a law school and I could easily get to my office within three minutes. I will just get coffee, take the elevator, get to my office in three minutes. And then I try doing something different. I remember I was just coming to the law school. I would talk to the person who sold me the coffee, like a federa for a few minutes.

I would see some students near the elevator and I would not just say hi, I would chat with them for a few minutes. I would stop by my assistant and instead of just saying hi, good morning, I would talk to her for a couple of minutes and I would get to my office. So maybe 15 minutes and 7.3. But I was feeling so much better on these mornings. Well yeah, the thing that's most important to us in our happiness is the relationships that we have with others. And I think when we mask that with digital substitutions for the real thing, it has major ramifications. And I know that from the research and what you bring up in the book, that there are really bad associations between increased screen time and the detrimental effects it's having on this next generation or two of kids who are now getting into adulthood?

Yes, I think the data on kids is quite alarming. Now, let's say, if until two or three years ago, things were unclear at this point, there are very significant data in several areas on how kids are affected. And we have to remember these kids have been in front of screens for over a decade now. So a cognitive development, not just psychology studies, but also brain imaging showing that kids who are exposed to more screen time have lower scores in cognitive development. And their brain images look different than kids who spent less time on screens. I think we've all heard about the impact on kids' mental health, the rates for suicide anxiety and depression have been going up in 2010.

And at first it was unclear. There could have been other factors, but the research is showing more and more that there is a connection of correlation in some of the studies between the rise of anxiety and depression and race of suicide, especially for girls in this period, studies showing the impact on attention and the other areas like social disconnection kids don't meet as much far less or go to parties.

But I think the main thing is there seems to be an impending public health crisis for children. This is what I call the science wars. The just coming up and investigating and coming up with data and showing the harm and then the company is saying no and also subsidizing their own research. These science boards have been going on for too long. I think at a certain point if you want to move on to law and policy, you have to declare what's going on here. And from history, we can see that when

medical professional organizations say this is a harmful impact on people's health, things start changing. We don't have that. No, I mean, I see it as my kids were growing up. I remember myself being a kid and we would do our homework, but after that, it would basically be, we'll see you when it becomes dusk and it's time to eat. And we spent all our time outdoors hanging out with friends, exploring, being out in nature. And now I look around the streets and the neighborhoods and there are no kids outside anymore. And even with my own kids, I started to see them really get excited about video games and wanting to be part of these networks. And it was so hard to see the ramifications of body image, feeling shame, feeling other

things because of the peer pressure that it brings on. Not to mention, as you were discussing, the structural changes that it's having in their brain structure. So there's a lot going on there. As you were saying, we often blame ourselves for smoking too much, for eating too much junk food, for drinking too much alcohol, and we often blame ourselves for spending too much time

on our phones. What is causing the cycle of self- blame that we can't seem to get over? So what happens is basically the tech companies are supposed to deal with innovation, but here they have been playing a very old playbook. This is something that happens frequently when you have a strong industry

which is producing a harmful product and the truth starts leaking out and what happened there, to see how we can implement this, to deal with technology overuse. And one of the biggest themes that I've seen is this theme of how they result to the choice in person or responsibility theme. So take the tobacco industry when smokers started suing tobacco companies because there were a sick with lung cancer, they were dying. The tobacco companies said to the courts, well, smokers chose to smoke. They're responsible and the courts actually for decades accepted this argument until things shifted. The same things happened with food when a group of teens sued McDonald's because there were secret diabetes because there were obese.

McDonald's argued in the Horton-Jork accepted this that the teens chose to eat McDonald, nobody forced them to supersize, they're responsible. So we're seeing the tech companies doing this as well, they're doing it outright, gay manufacturers who had to defend it in the Federal Trade Commission because the Federal Trade Commission was exploring an addictive mechanism in games called loot boxes. They said the gamers chose to play. They or their parents are responsible for this. But I think the most interesting thing is that doing it with the tools they give us.

So the moment I would say around 2018, when people started realizing the tech companies that are addicting us, just spend more time online, the first thing they did was result digital wellbeing tools. And what is that? Oh, and we all know this. If you have an iPhone, you have screen time. It shows you how much time you spend on the screen.

If you can also turn your phone gray, you can go on Instagram and put reminders or to take a break. You can also even change how much time you spend on your app. What you cannot change is the really addictive features in the phone. And so why do we have this? We have this because it's a perfect way of telling us, we're giving you the tools to stop spending so much time on the phone because you're the chooser. If you're still spending so much time on the phone, you're responsible. Yes, and I love how you put it in the book. You wrote that we assume we're in

control, but these choices accumulate into a reality we never imagined for ourselves. This illusion of control blinds us from seeing where we are. And that is addicted to our screens. People blame themselves a lot. People feel that they could do better. And I think that's the big problem. They blame themselves. They blame their children. They blame their families. They blame everybody. Apart from the tech industry. And that's just by the fact that for years we have had lots of media coverage that's about the tech industry's responsibility. But it's so easy to forget because the designs are invisible, they're in a computer,

even I who know this forget and end up spending too much time doing nothing. It's easier to say I should be responsible, I should do better than to blame an invisible enemy you can't see. Yes, and I think your parallels to those other industries are very eye-opening. And what is alarming for me is it's not only in the courts, it's in the way that those companies are able to lobby the government. I sit there and almost chuckle when I hear the lawmakers start screaming at Facebook and Twitter, etc. Yet the lobbyists have been writing checks to all these politicians for so many years, just like they did in the tobacco industry that were in this endless loop,

that now were stuck. And I think another big problem is we need to get rid of the lobbying ability to affect the laws because we need the government to work in addition with the regulators and everyone else to start taking more heart to the situation. Yeah, I think what you're describing is a larger problem in American politics. The question is how can we resolve things faster here? Because I do think times of the essence for this generation of kids,

whose development is affected. And I think what makes me hopeful is, I would say it's two things. First of all, from studying the past, you can see that this area where the argument you're responsible, you chose it breaks, and that's what children are concerned. And we always saw change start with children, because you cannot really say a child chose or a child is responsible. You're more likely to protect them and people are less opposed to paternalistic measures when children are concerned. So you can see them in kids to this day cannot buy cigarettes under age of 21. I have to legally weigh kids and send the parents their BMI. I can't imagine an employer being required to do that or do not agree to that. So that was done to fight obesity. So I think we're going to see change,

we are already seeing change through measures to protect children and it's really important to see the whole picture. Change does not come in one day. It took me decades for things to change for tobacco. We know how vital tobacco is for food as well, things are still in the process. So it's not about getting one law. Many laws will fail, but in the meantime, there's lots of attention, and I think the fact that people are conscious of the problem is important. There's no magic pill, though, it's going to be pressure for many different areas for things to change. Yeah, and I really think that what the tech companies have done is in a time when we need people to be focused on changes in society and on helping others, they've really built tools that are fostering individuality because they wouldn't make money if they were doing this for a group. Everything that they're doing is really based on

sucking the individual in, rewarding the individual, rewarding the expression of individuality on these platforms. I wanted to ask you how was this impacting our psychological vulnerability? What they did, they basically took the places where most likely to be manipulated, and used it to have a stand line for longer on top of that basically We are getting more and more detached from each other because on the one hand that telling us so synetics are here to connect you all But that is not exactly true because if you're staying home and you're not seeing people if your communication is now reduced to likes and three word comments,

then you're not really interacting with anybody. The whole cycle intensifies itself. The less you do it, the less you're used to doing it, the more you just used to staying home. And especially for people who don't even know a different way of life, like children. Yeah, and I, another piece of research I dug out as I was getting prepared for the interview is you wrote a paper for the law review, and in there you were talking about the history

of the bicycle and about how it impacted society at that time, but how people were trying to design the bicycle in different ways as it was taking its shape. And I wanted to ask, how does that analogy of the creation of the bicycle apply to today's digital age? So the bicycle is more like a typical technology. And we don't think about it as technology anymore. But often when a new technology comes in, we notice it, we see it, we decide how we want to use it. So with a bicycle, people didn't even know what to do with it at first. And so it didn't

realize it will be used for transportation. They thought it would be some kind of match of vehicle, so they had a huge front wheel and a small back wheel, and only man rode it at the time. back will, and only man wrote it at the time. And with time, basically, the structures changed, and eventually there was some kind of closure, and we got the bicycle we have today. I would say, for example, chat GPT is a bit similar to that, it's in our face. We see it. We don't know what to do with it, like everybody, I don't know how this will end, but we cannot ignore how it's an Arabled society. But what happened with these designs, these manipulations is that we never had this window of opportunity to think, to assess, to be reflective, to be autonomous of how much we want to spend online.

I mean, and as you mentioned earlier, adults spend five hours on their phone. I'm sure that nobody if asked, do you want to spend five hours on your phone? 2009 would have said yes. And we didn't see it and we never made a decision. And the window opportunity closed because at a certain point, by the time we realized we were spending, as I said, so much time on screens, so many business interests were entrenched. I do think though, and that's the place where I'm optimistic is with pandemic, because we suddenly saw how we're heading towards a very

definite future, and we are heading there, with small cities when we're going to be connected everywhere, even outside, using a phone for everything, and with smart cities when we're going to be connected everywhere, even outside, using a phone for everything and with virtual reality, we'll have much more of this. But then this thing in 2020 made everybody stop, especially during lockdown, having to be at home and feel what it means to be on your screens for so many hours a day. Before the pandemic, I would say that mostly parents worried about it because they looked at their kids. From the pandemic, lots of people realized what it means in their bodies, what it means to their lives to be disconnected from people.

Before the pandemic, people wanted to do online education. During the pandemic, students revolted, they wouldn't go to classes, they deferred college. So people started realizing much more. So I think in a way we got the bicycle moment here, people understand what is happening. And I think there's an opportunity to restructure these technologies, to redesign them, not to go back to his screenless world, but to come up with a design that's not there to addictus and still useful for us. Yeah, I love that you're referring to that because this was going to be my next area I wanted to go to in that same paper I brought up. You brought up the topic of mega historical events and there are things like World War 1,

World War II, the Bibonic play. You could say 9-11. But things like that, and as you mentioned, the whole COVID pandemic really shook up our entrenched norms and practices, and it started to stabilize our lives, which you're bringing up now is giving us a unique window of opportunity because people now recognize this shake up. And I think it really has played a huge role in changing how we were working, being face-to-face to this virtual communication as you're bringing up. But why do you believe that now is the time to seek a better balance between

online and offline pursuits? I think the time is now because before there was not as much awareness as there is now, a few things happened together. We got so much more scientific data. I think there's no doubt about children. There's lots of evidence about a balance that our current anti-alphan balance is not helping us health wise or mentally and is affecting kids development. So you have the data. At the same time you have the evidence from the whistleblowers, from Francis Hogan, from Facebook, from Tristan Harris. Lots of people connected the way the technology is designed to why we're spending so much time online. And then you have the third thing, you have the pandemic, which made people aware of how they might not want to live.

So I think we've woken up and we have all the parts. I think some things have to happen here. I think there has to be some proclamations by medical association or government organizations about closing these science wars because yes, of course, you don't want to regulate too early. You wait until you have enough evidence, but also you don't want to miss your chance because a window can close again and a generation of children may not have another chance to develop differently. So I think that now is the time

and I think there are lots of people who are already acting. It's very easy not to notice because the pieces are very different, but you have parents suing class actions. They're suing social networks for addicting their kids for calling them mental damage. You have them suing game makers. You have schools now suing social networks for the costs that they're paying for the kids' mental health because that social networks are addicting them.

You have all these legislatures attempts. You have antitrust lawsuits, which are important because they could destabilize this whole model, which is based on our time and our manning, because if you break up matter, for example, which owns Instagram, which owns Instagram, which owns Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, you create more competition,

and maybe more innovation. People might come up with different models based as subscription or maybe pay as you go, instead of a model which really means that companies have no choice but to find different ways to add dictates because that's how they get revenue. I think it's important to know that the moment is already started, already movement out there and I do believe it's just going to grow. Well, how would you then answer the person who would argue that when the heat came down on Facebook and there were more whistleblowers coming out discussing how they were manipulating the technology. You heard about it for a couple weeks in the news and then

Zuckerberg came up with the new business model of the metalverse. Seemingly diverse took away the whole conversation. It seemed to me overnight because all of a sudden you stopped hearing about it and shifted the focus to something else. How long do you think those tactics can last? If the regulators aren't gonna intervene to protect the users, especially children from the harms of excessive screen time?

I think immediate always turns from one topic to another. So whatever is the big thing in the media changes from day to day, but there are enough people who are aware of this, whether they're lawmakers or parents or teachers who are seeing what's happening with children or people understanding what's happened to themselves to keep it going. It's not just about the next things that takes media attention. I'm often surprised when I'm asked in the media, can you give it me more self-help measures to help?

Because I keep thinking after all we know why are we still asking this question. But I think there is something that people want to consume in the media. It doesn't mean that's what's really happening on the ground. In the ground, I think the train has already started moving. I think that's what matters more. Okay, and so some of the things that you brought up earlier, some of the most promising legal strategies would be around antitrust laws and trying to break up some of these tech companies and create more competition. Another one that you brought up is that there are more schools

and other agencies who are suing the tech companies. What is the Federal Trade Commission doing because I understand they're trying to take root here as well? The Federal Trade Commission is looking at one thing more and more recently and forcing what they call dark patterns, which are the patterns that we don't see in the internet to manipulate us. One of them is something I think many people are aware of is subscriptions. When you subscribe to something, it's very easy to subscribe, very difficult to unsubscribe and there will be ways in which this was done so that's a

dark part pattern but the designs which make us spend so much time online are also dark patterns and I believe they could be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and so I think we'll see action along these lines. Also, I think it's important to remember all the action to privacy because basically data and time are two parts of this business model. If you break this business model, you destabilize the whole thing. And that's important to remember as well. Another thing that's really important, and that's why I think it's not just about lawyers, it's about spaces as well, it's about schools and what we could do to change things at schools.

We have federal regulation right now, which is basically the more technology, the better. Schools get funding for incorporating more technology. The studies have not shown that students learn better from screens, actually, the opposite. So after a pandemic, we have much more technology than before. We have teachers who got used to this during a pandemic

using through games like Roblox and Minecraft, posting on TikTok, so you have the bad guys of the tech industry inside the classroom. They have education departments. That's an important legal change that could be made to assess every technology for what it is. Do you want to use quizzes? Is it better for the teacher? Or is it not?

But not just maximizing the technology in the classroom. Now this is a place where parents have a lot of impact because many schools make individual decisions or district decisions. So if you affect what happens in school, it affects what happens to your kid at home as well. Because if a kid cannot use the smartphone at recess, then they learn to talk to their friend. If Minecraft, on the other hand, is homework, how can you tell your kid to stop playing at home?

Yeah, you bring up a good point. And I think there are a lot of different things that we can start doing right now to change this and one of these things would be as you brought up in the book is to create some type of warning similar to cigarette warnings or movie rating warnings that they could be placed on different things that have these dark patterns or are fostering

technology abuse. In your opinion, what would be some of the most effective ways to deliver those messages? I think delivering messages depending on how you deliver them. The research shows that it has the messages have to be very short, very extreme, cigarette labels, for example, we're not that effective until they streamed deaf and can so all over the package. They depends when they're delivered. So for example, I think,

half of the example of effective delivery would be for games for children. Children often cannot download their games, especially if you have to pay for them or when they're younger, they can't download them at all. If there was a rating for games, you could see it when you download it. I can't imagine that the parallel would all be happy to see, oh, this game is addictive. I'm not going to download this game. What we're letting you see next is very quick redesign. Because game makers will change the features in order to make sure

that parents will download the games. This is basically placing the warning exactly at the entrance and the place people would see it. And I think warnings are helpful. I don't think there are enough by themselves. Exactly at the entrance, at the place people would see it. And I think warnings are helpful. I don't think there are enough by themselves. They raise consciousness and they can help, they can remind you when you forget. But I think there's always a danger of saying, oh, no people know and that's it.

That's not enough. You need to also use substantive measures. Yeah, it's interesting. A number of months ago, I was talking to Seth Goden and he had put out the climate almanac and we were talking about that solving climate change is really about creating systems change. And I think the same thing applies here when it comes to this technology addiction that we're facing. And a big part of this, and you just brought up the awareness word, is that when we started to really take on the tobacco industry and other industries like it, it was really by raising public consciousness of the problem where you started to see more and more people lean in and start to do something about it. And I still think, although we can regulate

the tech companies and try to put more pressure on them, there still is an individual responsibility here as well, just as it would be if I were an alcoholic to stop drinking or I was abusing food or abusing something else. So what are some things that a listener could do differently if they wanted to change this behavior in either themselves or in their family members. I think people can do small things. For example, when I need to right now, I close all my windows and I turn my finger on my phone for 20 minutes and I write and then I check my emails and then I do it again. That's effective for me. But I think the most important thing is to stop blaming ourselves and move from internal battles with ourselves inside our home to acting collectively. And I think listeners can do things because we all operate in the outside world.

I already talked about parents in schools, but people have jobs, they have businesses. If you own a restaurant that you can design a thing for overuse or you can design things for limited use, if you put a QR code instead of regular menu, you can be assured that people will take out their phones and have them on the table, probably for the rest of the meal. If you use iPads for people to order, that's another design, and all New York airports, there are iPads on every table. There's no way you can have a conversation there. If you are working as a designer of technology, you can think for a second what you're designing. Am I designing a feature that's there for nothing but the user to come back and stay longer on the website? If that is the case, do I want to design this feature? This is where awareness can bring each and every one of us. It's also, if you're creating a new business,

an online business, do you want to use this model, the advertising model, which depends on time and data or do you want to innovate and try something else? So I think we can do a lot, but it's not in a traditional way of doing a lot. I'm just going to do better for myself and then I'm going to blame myself because I didn't. I think we can do much more doing things in the outside, in the public sphere than with ourselves, because I do believe technology will change. But I think there's a gap.

It would take a couple of years until things would start changing. And the meantime, yes, we can do whatever we can. When I'm home with my kids, I never use my phone unless I have to, I always put it on the side, because I know that modeling has an impact. So there are things you can do. I just think that there are not what will bring change. And you also mentioned that abroad we're starting to see some laws restricting tech companies. For example, in the Netherlands, Belgium and Japan,

what are those countries doing that we could do here in the United States as well? What they focused on was something called loot boxes. Loot boxes is an addictive feature in games. It's something very few adults have heard about, but every kid I've met seems to know about this. It's like surprise boxes in a game. It can be like in Fortnite in the shape of a Lana, and if you open it, you can get an extra power in you to win the game. The thing is the way their game manufacturers used it, some kids

may not want to wait and keep trying because you don't know what's inside you have to keep opening and opening but they have an option of paying money and that started sounding like gambling because so money and kids really raised alerts. So many countries in Europe basically restricted use of these addictive features, loot boxes and games. Some of them for everyone, some just for children. But the important thing is that this design is based on a very common's all over the internet. It's the intermittent reward model that our Bane releases more of the dopamine than a pleasure enhanced in neurotransmitter when we get a reward once in a while. That's exactly what happens with these loot boxes.

That's why he's keep opening them because they don't know when they're going to find the power or the extra food or whatever you need. And that's where we have everywhere. Every time we look on Facebook or on Twitter, we don't know if you're going to get comments, so if you're going to get likes, when you start dealing with these things, it's the beginning of seeing much more regulation. Yes. And I like in the book how you say that the real choice maker has been the technology industry. And I mentioned to you before we got on the show that I have a friend in New York, Yael, Eisenstadt, and I interviewed her a few years ago and we were talking about how so often

people who are creating technology do not necessarily understand the consequences of what that technology can do in the hands of a bad actor. In the case of companies like Facebook, they know exactly what they're doing because they're designing everything to take and influence choices out of our lives. They're doing it intentionally, it's happening to us unintentionally, and that's why this pattern of using it more and more, all of a sudden goes from something small to something huge. And if we don't put a stop to it, then the reality in that movie Ready Player One is going to become our new norm, because people are going to exist in the cybersphere instead of

the real sphere. And when that starts happening, it breaks down all the components that are necessary to live a fulfilling life, the most important, which is human connection. And I think the ripple effects of this, if we don't put some type of breaks on this, are going to be enormous in the decades to come. So I really think your book is coming at a very important time. And I applaud you and wanted to recognize that the next idea club also recognized it as a must read book for 2023, especially for anyone who's got the kids of really any age, because we can start making changes right now that can help them live more fulfilling lives. Yeah, and I think at the end, I agree.

I think it's all about our choice and our autonomy. It's basically, we never made a choice to live like this. And we should have the opportunity to decide how we make this choice. And we also had we know that these would be the results. Autonomy is also a means to an end. So if we'd known that we'll end up living in such socialist connection and so much hatred and so have such an impact on our kids' well-being, I don't think we would have autonomously chosen this for ourselves. Yes, well, just the other weekend, my fiance and I were having a nice dinner at this

high-end restaurant, and there was a family of three next to us, and I remember just thinking they had this three or four-year-old with them, and I didn't hear a peep the whole time. And I had my back turned. And I went to go congratulate the parents on having such a well-behaved child when I turned around and the child was on an iPad playing games. And I think as you brought up earlier, one of the things that I started saying 2015, 2016, when I would enter restaurants is 60% of the people in the restaurant, whether they were alone or with someone else, was staring at their phone.

And that really shouldn't be acceptable in any shape or form and yet it has become that way. So, saying a lot here, but I wanted to ask if there was one takeaway that you wanted a listener or reader of the book to get from it, what would that be? Don't blame yourself for things not working out. Change is possible, but it's not going to take place in internal battles with ourselves and our homes will take place in the public sphere and exerting pressure on technology companies and to redesign products so we will be able to live much healthier online offline balance. Okay and if there was one place you wanted the listener to go to to learn more about you where would that be? Gaia Bernstein.com. Okay well Gaia thank you very much for coming on the show today and for producing this great book that is a must read.

Thank you. It was a pleasure being here. I thirdly enjoyed that interview with Gaya Bernstein. It's such an important topic and I wanted to thank Gaya, Cambridge University Press, and Brooke Craven, for the honor and privilege of having her on today's show. Links to all things Gaya will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links in the show notes to purchase any of the books or the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting this show. Videos are on YouTube at both John Armiles

and PassionStruck Clips. Everties are deals and discount codes are in one communion place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Armiles on both Twitter and Instagram where I post daily to compliment everything we do here on the show. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Start Podcast interview that I did with the one and only Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and we do a deep dive on the importance that sauna plays in extending your life

and making it happier. We also go into numerous biohacks to extend your longevity. And episode you absolutely don't want to miss. This is one of the most profound effects of the sauna. So there's been epidemiological studies. These are observational studies looking at correlations and people that use the sauna four to seven times a week have a 46% reduced risk of hypertension. But there's also been intervention studies, some people that are into the sauna for 30 minutes, and blood pressure is then measured, blood pressure is improved, both systolic and diastolic, blood pressure is improved after the sauna. There's a pretty profound effect on blood pressure, which is not only important for cardiovascular

health, it's extremely important for brain aging and brain health. In fact, it's one of the most important lifestyle factors for preventing dementia. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or inspirational. If you know someone who's stealing with technology addiction, then definitely share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is when you share it with those that you love and care about.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, passion's drop. you