Understanding Digital Addiction and Humanality

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. And today I’m hanging out with another new friend. His name is Andrew Laubacher and he is the executive director of Humanality. Humanality is helping people detox from digital addiction and be more fully human.

This movement is helping people discover freedom through an intentional relationship with technology. Dude, there’s so much to unpack here, Andrew. This is going to be a really fun conversation.

Yeah, dude, I’m really excited to be here and share some of our work. It’s like, it’s so pertinent to all of our lives. Like if you have a phone, I think there’s 6 billion people in the world that have a cell phone or some type of device. So it’s a lot of us. And we’re kind of helping people navigate how to, how to live in this digital age.

Yeah. And it’s, one of those things that I’m sure we’ll talk about. It’s like, now you kind of grow up with it and when do you set boundaries? When do you learn how to properly use it? And if it’s not part of our experience growing up, then what boundaries are we crossing and all that stuff. But before, before we get in there, we’re definitely going to get into the meat. I’d love to hear a story just about you, Andrew, and what, kind of got you into this work, as much as you want to share.

Andrew’s Personal Journey and Background

Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s definitely a story I could try to share quickly. Yeah, I grew up in Ventura, California. a surf beach bum. That was my life. That’s what I grew up doing. I played music since I was like 11 years old, started playing guitar. Yeah, I loved sports. I had a really great childhood.

In high school is when, know, kind of the beginnings, I’m a millennial. So you started to, you know, you had AOL and some messaging. MySpace came out, you know, I had to flip phone. It was like the dopest thing ever when you had to flip phone and Yeah. Did you have the dial-up internet that would go, yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about that the other day actually. Yeah, I had to dial up and all that and I’d say even at that time, and again, I’m really excited to learn more about your work and life experience, during that time in high school, that’s when I got stuck in the party scene. So I was exposed to a lot of things.

Drugs, alcohol, the whole kind of she bang at like 14, you know, so Trying to fit in and belong, know, you don’t want to be different you do these things and I definitely started to experience addictions in many of those realms and at that age, you know, I was exposed to pornography at 14 and This is terrifying to say but that was 20 years ago now For me and yeah extremely addicted it was so detrimental my life in so many ways. But you know, I was playing a lot of music. I was in the popular crowd. Everything seemed to be like going well. But inside, know, I had really severe anxiety growing up at panic attack anxiety. Like since I was like 11 and that really affected my life, you know, in a lot of ways. I didn’t really know why this was happening to me. I had a really great childhood again and but I turned to drugs and alcohol and tech. You know, I realized it kind of escaped some of that pain and long story short, you know, graduated high school and I’ve been caught by the cops and had to go to court and for drugs. And in that moment in the back of his cop car, I was like, this is not the life I want to live. And ended up going on a retreat after that and had this kind of conversion, reversion to my face.

And along with that, you know, I started playing music at my church, you know, and I went from like T-Pain and like Usher and like, you know, you’re kind of like, you know, like just gangster thug rap to like playing like Christian music, you know, and it was like, it was a weird transition. But anyway, I went to this school called Franciscan University. It’s a school in Ohio.

Study theology and philosophy and that’s when I started playing music at these conferences and events and then Just started getting calls to go play around the country and I was like wait You’re gonna pay me to like play music and fly me there and put me up at hotel and feed me like this is amazing, you know So I started doing that that was 2013 I started traveling playing music and it just turned into a career. mean, it was not anything I was looking to do, but I was touring full time with a band, singing and playing guitar. And that was my life really till 2020 when COVID hit. And during that time, obviously everything was online and Zoom music and events were pretty boring and exhausting and long story short, ended up actually entering a seminary.

The Impact of Technology on Mental Health

So, I was a monk pretty much for about two years. So, there’s a whole story within that, but you really just live a life of, of study and prayer. There’s no tech, you know, you are, yeah, living a pretty much monastic, you know, life. anyway, I did that for two years. left, discernment is what we would call it. And out of that, I started my own kind of health and wellness company, which kind of led me into humanality, what I’m doing now. So to backtrack, just to make more sense of why I’m so passionate about what I’m doing now is in 2018, I decided to delete all my social media and go to a flip phone.

So this is at the height of my touring as an artist. I’m going all over the world playing music, playing in front of hundreds of thousands of people. And my phone is like addicting me. I’m comparing my day to everyone else’s. It’s leading me to lust. It’s just like this digital overload. And I was just tired of it. And my life looked awesome online, but inside, it really wasn’t.

I deleted all my social media and my record label, you know, management at the time was like, that’s a horrible idea. And, and I’m like, dude, I know, but I really think I need to do this. And anyway, the year I did that, I went like my music, like I went to all over Canada, South America, Europe, Jerusalem, like it blew up.

And I was already playing at a lot of these events. So people saw me, right? And I had that kind of infrastructure in place. But anyway, my relationships improved. My concentration improved. My productivity improved. My purity improved. My happiness improved. So I was this weird random guy with a flip phone playing these concerts around the world. And I had no idea how this was going to be used in my life. It was just this experiment I kind of ran.

And so eventually it led me into this role at Humanality where I’m hoping to cultivate healing is really what I’m passionate about in people’s lives. To use technology again as a tool and not allow it to use us and really just unpacking the vast amounts of scientific, philosophical, psychological data that is unfolding right now on the experiment that we’re all in. mean, sadly, we are rats in an experiment right now. And so that’s a little bit of the background. There’s a lot to unpack there, but hopefully that gives you a start.

Yeah, wow, that does give me a start. And we’re around the same age too, because I was born in 91, so you’re 90. Okay, cool. And yeah, think what’s so fascinating is that when you are touring, it’s one of those lives that you think, right, I’m marketing all the time, I’m touring.

Cool, yeah. you deleted your marketing per se. You’re like, I’m not going to be on social media. I’m not going to embrace what everyone is saying I’m going to doing. But on the inside, you felt so much better. And that leads us to your passion for humanality. This program you’ve built that, you know, is on your website is y’all do speaking engagements. You have a curriculum and a program people can follow and just being, being a positive influence to show that there’s a healthy way to use technology that you don’t have to be a slave to it, that it is, it doesn’t own your life or control your life, but it’s just a tool and there’s a healthy way to use it. And I think that’s such a, such a needed thing right now because technology connects us to all these other things that are harmful, you know, like you mentioned. So I’m curious from your perspective now doing the work that you do.

What’s the most common problem that people, or like what are the problems you see in the world that that humanality is like a natural fit for? Like what do we need to be looking out for as far as technology dangers and things like that?

Common Issues Faced by Students Today

Yeah, it’s a great question. mean, that would take probably 17 hours to go through everything, but I’ll hit you with the main stuff that, you know, we’re experiencing. So students at universities right now are voluntarily either giving up their smartphone and going to a light phone or a wise phone. So this is my cell phone. If viewers can see, If you’re on YouTube, check out that. It looks like a little Kindle.

Yeah, it’s literally just the tool, right? It’s a phone alarm clock calculator directions hotspots by a company called the Light Phone. So students decide to join the village and they go through a bunch of detox protocols. We run them through, which is really like recalibrating how to be human again. So here’s some of the issues. And this is again, laid out in a lot of different literature of the most famous book that’s come out recently is Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which I recommend everyone read. yeah, a lot of what students are experiencing, which again, we’ll get into the mechanism on why this is happening, how companies are knowingly addicting us to their products and a lot of the different psychological, emotional and physical effects of technology. So we’ll get into some of that, but what a lot of students are experiencing, I guess, at college now, which is Gen Z, right? Which is a little different than you and me, Jake, but there’s still a lot of similarities, because I was addicted to all these things myself as an adult. And here’s the thing, like this addiction with the phone, with screens, social media, gaming, like whatever your kind of kryptonite is, we all kind of have it. YouTube. mean, I was addicted to YouTube for a while. My dad at 65 years old is addicted to Facebook. There’s no age because the mechanisms at play are exploiting vulnerabilities in our human psychology. Some of the things that young people are experiencing, and again, I’d say this is actually most people, one is just information overload. One of the things that the phone has done, which I, you know, this is a biblical reference, but, the half eaten apple on the back of your iPhone, you know, is, to me precarious. And so far is that the lie in the garden, you know, that the serpent gave to Adam and Eve was if you eat at, you know, the tree, the knowledge of getting evil, you’ll become like God. Right.

And I actually believe with the phone, we are participating in an attribute of God, namely his omnipresence that we were never supposed to be able to handle or participate in. So for example, with the phone in your hand, you are now everywhere at once. You can see things happening all over the world in an instant. And we just weren’t designed for that power. We weren’t designed to participate in that function of being present everywhere. I remember like, I don’t know if you remember this, I remember when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka and it was just a and I don’t know if I was on Facebook or if it was just my phone, but I remember just scrolling through and watching a 30 to 50 foot wave like take out multiple people, you know, and obviously they’re instantly killed. then I just went on to another scroll, you know, is like the next thing and the next thing. so what a lot of what we’re seeing online with the constant scrolling information overload, actually empathy has decreased.

30 % the last 40 years amongst college students. So we’re seeing real psychological effects from information overload that I would say is part of the anxiety and depression increase. The last 10 years, self-harm has quadrupled amongst 10 to 14 year old girls. Suicidality has increased exponentially the last 10 years. Again, a lot of mood disorders that are actually directly causally linked to our interaction with these platforms, right? So the more you start to dive into the data, and again, we see this in students, they don’t know how to talk to one another. They actually don’t know how to relate to one another. There’s something like 68 % of Gen Zers feel like no one sees them and they feel alone. So what’s happening is actually this hyper-connectivity, this omnipresence, this capacity for us to know and see everything in an instant is actually overloading our circuitry. We actually don’t have the neurological wiring to be able to handle what’s being presented to us in a normal scroll. There was something I was reading actually today that’s like in a single morning of scrolling, you have already seen and consumed more information than a relative did in the 1960s, like in their entire life.

You know, like the amount of information that you’re able to ping read, it’s absolutely over stressing the body. yeah, plenty of self-image issues. There’s literally some psychological clinical diagnoses now called Snapchat dysphoria, where young girls are literally trying to manipulate their bodies through past plastic surgery to look like their Snapchat filters. I mean, there’s an insane amount of.

The Science Behind Digital Addiction

What we would call nature deficit disorder that’s now being clinically diagnosed, where because of the technologies, we’re inside more, we’re not with people more, we’re actually at a deficit of getting natural environment in our lives. So students are really sharing these really cool stories of like, they start to go outside and realize that they can hear the birds. You know, or they can go outside and they realize like, there’s a certain smell to this area because they didn’t have technology with them. Like they had been to that place before, but just not noticed it because they were consumed by, wow.

Yeah. Right. So like real actually, you know, our senses are being dulled with so much stimulation. That’s really what’s happening. There’s an increase in cortisol every time you scroll. Because again, every post, every whether YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, whatever, it’s two major mechanisms that play, right? Social approval and intermittent positive feedback.

Now these two mechanisms are what these companies deploy to keep you coming back for more. we share this a lot in our villages, like you shouldn’t feel bad that you’re addicted to your phone. Like this has been planned, this has been designed, this is their intention. The ease and the convenience that we thought was going to be like so amazing and life-changing is actually obviously creating this addiction. There’s a real, again, diagnosis called nomophobia which is literally a fear of not having your phone on you. Where people, when you don’t have your phone on you, you start to get anxious and stressed out like, I’m missing a notification, I’m missing an email. Oh my gosh, someone’s going to text me or I’m missing that street. I mean, kids are literally having physiological detox symptoms when they go through some of our programs. anyway, there’s a lot to unpack of what we’re seeing, but that’s maybe a little taste. Yeah.

Yeah, that is a lot. And you can see all the legs of where this technology takes us and how it impacts the brain and things like that, which I’m sure, like you said, we could spend days talking about that. And because the brain is such a miracle and all these things that just totally just like substances like a drug will hijack the dopamine receptors in your brain and how that relates to technology as well. All these different things that are just fascinating to learn about, they’re also really scary to learn about. And it makes me definitely wanna pivot to the hope, the good side of this, of what you’re doing and what that process is. Because you talked about a dopamine detox. And I wanna if you give us a brief, in my mind, when I hear dopamine detox, it basically says, hey, you are cutting dopamine. And maybe you didn’t say that. You said technology detox. That’s what you said. So you’re not using technology for a certain period of time, which if you are addicted, is going to trigger withdrawal symptoms and things like that. And so you would need some support around you. But before we get into that process how do you prevent, how do we have a culture, what does it look like to protect young people from this before it happens? What does that look like today?

Strategies for Detoxing from Technology

Yeah, that’s a great question. And this is why I think we got, you have to dive into how these companies are operating and their ethos. this is, you know, the funny thing is that none of this is even conspiratorial. It’s actually like all documented of, you know, multiple whistleblowers like Francis Hagen and at Facebook revealed studies that they know that their algorithms are increasing suicidality and self-harm in young girls. all of these companies know that their products are harming people. And that’s what’s really difficult about this, right, Jake? I assume what you’re doing is amazing. And you’re trying to help people. And you’re probably on these social media platforms to try and help people. But the sad reality is, as Marshall McLuhan said this, he’s kind of the godfather of a lot of this philosophically with Neil Postman.

The medium is the message. It was his kind of famous saying. And the sad reality is, is the medium is actually corrupting our capacity for real connection, real comprehension, obviously sustained attention, and actually allowing us to be free. So my point is that these algorithms they know on these platforms are designed to addict you.

And actually, because their algorithms are in what’s called a dark, like black box, like we actually don’t know how they operate, but we know their effects. And we know that they know that their algorithms do a few things, but they’re all about engagement. So on all these platforms, what gets engagement usually because of our human psychology and human nature is our negative emotions.

So negative emotions reside longer in the human person. So you’ll notice on your YouTube and a lot of your posts, it’s like people’s faces are like really exaggerated. It’s a lot of red colors, everything down to the color to the emotional response is getting us to engage. Cause the more that we stay longer on these products, the more money they make. So while you and me are trying to maybe share things or post things that are good to change the world, these algorithms are set up in a way that is trying to keep the user engaged. Like these aren’t free platforms. Now we’re specifically talking about your Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, right? Your kind of traditional social media platforms X too. So the name of the game is engagement and they make money from your engagement. So they aren’t incentivized actually to respect your autonomy. So to answer your initial question, to me, it’s getting hard. Like the more I’m studying about how these companies work, how the algorithms work, the data we know on the effects, it is dose dependent. So there’s multiple studies that show that the more your time increases on these social media platforms, the worse your mental health outcomes are. It’s dose dependent. Okay. So your average American’s teenage, you’re spending five and a half hours on social media day. Your average American is seven hours a day on the screen.

Protecting Young People from Technology Addiction

And average actually for young people, like screen time a day is about 11 hours. So literally more time. The CEO of Netflix actually said once he’s like our main competitor is actually sleep. Like the main competitor is sleep. And that’s really what’s happening. Our screen times are out of control because again, these platforms aren’t designed for moderation. So to answer your question, I would say, how do we help these generations, there’s kind of multiple things humanality is doing, right? We’re helping people detox that have grown up with this since age seven, right? That’s going to be a whole protocol. It’s going to be a whole new protocol for you and me, like our generation. It’s going to be a whole different protocol for parents and your grandma and grandpa, you know, like, for teens, Dr. Nicholas Cardaris is on our team. He’s probably the top tech addiction expert in the world. He has a book called Digital Madness that I highly recommend.

But his whole point for the younger generations is delay, delay, delay. So we’re talking specifically about smartphones and social media. And so for people that are listening, they’re like, man, the experiment went bad, right? Like we have enough data that shows like, uh-oh, something didn’t go well. And in 2017, I think the 19 was the first time we’ve seen US life expectancy drop this is even pre-COVID, Like our chronic disease epidemic, loneliness epidemic, obesity epidemic. I mean, we are in a slew of epidemics that I would say technology as a whole is having impacts on all these. So the question is really what can we do, right? And again, this idea I’ve been working with for a while is this minimal effective dose. So that’s kind of in the health and wellness fitness world. super in, like, I was just in a sauna prior to this podcast and I’m a nerd with all this stuff, right? I like the health and wellness space. It’s a lot of what we’re doing, but this idea in the health and wellness world is this minimal effective dose. It’s like a seven minute workout will give you like enough impact on your health to give you the biggest bang for your buck, right? So my thing with people who are maybe looking to have a better relationship with tech, maybe detox from the doom scrolling or pornography or gaming or gambling or whatever your kryptonite is, is actually find what is that minimal dose of technology in your day that’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. So for me, I operate on a light phone. I deleted all my social media. I have no social media.

Finding the Minimal Effective Dose of Technology

It’s been like that for about seven years. I use a laptop which literally allows me in Wi-Fi to do everything that I need. I have an iPad for like specific apps that I need when I’m in Wi-Fi. I can access them and use them as a tool, but I don’t have any social media, YouTube, any of those things on there. So again, this is going to look different for everyone. I don’t know if this is fully answering your question, but if you have children, the idea is delay as long as possible.

That’s what all the data is kind of pointing to. And then if you’re in this technological world and you’re looking to live a better relationship with tech, you really have to identify what’s your highest value and what’s your goals. And do these technologies get me closer to that vision of that life I want to live? Do they get me closer to those goals? And if so, how can I put them in their proper place?

The Similarities Between Technology and Substance Addiction

Yeah, I’m gonna recap a couple of things I think are important that you said and then we can close by just telling us a little bit more about humanality, what you’re doing now and how people can check it out. But I have seen what you’re talking about. like during COVID, at Vive 18, like I was speaking.

I had a ton of work across the country doing drug prevention. And the idea is very similar, is that if you delay use, you know, when your brain is fully developed and that frontal lobe is developed, you can handle certain things. But as a young student or somebody, when your brain is growing, you’re more susceptible to addiction. just by waiting, you’re less likely to become addicted. So I get that. And I think our listeners will get that too, because the technology you’re playing with it operates in your brain in a very similar way to those substances.

I mean, that’s what all the data shows. Actually gaming now, they show, with cocaine, this amount of increase, 300 % increase in dopamine, sex is 100 % increase in dopamine. When you game, they have done these studies, it is 100 % increase in dopamine, the same as sex. So these technologies aren’t yet, to exactly to your point, they’re not a substance, but they are playing on the same neurophysiology that a substance would.

So the addiction science and detox are like very, very similar to what probably it worked that you’re sharing with people.

Well, I’ve heard it say like, I mean, it’s a substance you use through your eyes, not through your mouth or nose, you know, like. Yeah, I think it’s I think it was my friends there with Fight the New Drug. Yeah, they’re big in like if you’re addicted to pornography, they have a great holistic program around that and a lot of tools.

That’s cool, I haven’t heard that before. Yeah, they’re great.

But I think another thing that you mentioned too that I want to relate to is that when I was doing during COVID, I didn’t stay in speaking. Cause like you were doing music, right? And you’re like, Hey, people don’t want to do that virtually. And I’m the same way Vibe 18 is really engaging high energy fun presentations that are very actionable. I can’t get that like the modality of doing it online. doesn’t work very well. And there’s not the connection.

So I wasn’t gonna push it. And my wife and I were just praying, like, what are we supposed to do during this time? And our pastor at our church was also praying and it ended up, we ended up being the youth pastor group, like helping out with that. And I could tell, I could tell which students didn’t have technology because they had more confidence. They knew how to talk to their friends. They knew how to talk to adults. They were very creative.

Like if they were one student was bored and you’re like, man, they shut down or they pick up their phone. These students were so creative. were getting people involved. They were leaders. They were conversationalists. And it was big evidence and feedback for me to say like what you’re talking about, Andrew, and what you’re teaching. That is so important and you can visually see it. So I would echo that delay, delay, delay. So important.

The Creativity Crisis and Real Connections

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah. There’s been like a 60 % decrease in creativity the last 50 years. I mean, one of these authors was saying like, we’re in a creativity crisis. And actually one of the main predictors of success in life was discovered through, think Dr. Paul Torrance and the Torrance Tolerance Test, which essentially followed a group of people and showed, you know, their levels of creativity long story short, the ones who were the most creative had the most successful careers. I really think it’s hard. Yeah, it’s hard like to not get too doom and gloom in this stuff, but I do have to like, you do need to scare people a little bit because like what, what I, what we’re compiling and the information that we’re sharing, I mean, it’s funny. It feels like kind of what social media does to us in so far as the FOMO thing is real.

But if you don’t get what this stuff is doing to us and undoing in our lives, you’re actually going to be missing out on your life. So really one of the things that students do that’s like so mind blowing, they’ll go on phone free hikes and just live it and not post it. There’s so much freedom in actually living your life and not having to document it all for people to share to get validation that it’s cool.

That was really changing for me where all of a sudden my life wasn’t a performance and I just got to catch up with people like Jake, I still get to experience this. I just found out my friend had a baby the other day and I had no idea and I found out like two weeks later and it was like, yes, would have been nice to know the day off through a post that I could like? Yeah, but I got to hear it from him after he didn’t sleep for two weeks and share the story and it was like and it was amazing, you know, like there, is so much that’s being lost that I do want to, wake people up to the reality that this isn’t working. Like the way we’re living, isn’t working. I think there’s going to be other technologies. think Substack to me seems to be a great technology that is a place where there’s articles, you’re sharing your work. It’s not so much of this comparison you know, experience. Like I think there’s going to be technologies that come out that can be used as a great tool to share great work like you’re doing, Jake, and that aren’t going to be harming people along the way. There’s literally 15,000 people that are hired by Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and these other companies that are called moderators. And every day around the world, these moderators are in horrible working conditions. They have to watch and view the most grotesque, horrible things that come on all of our feeds.

And they have to click through them and like filter through them so we don’t see them on our feeds. Now a lot of these people are having to go through major PTSD, therapeutic help because their lives are sitting at a screen all day, moderating just the worst things you can think of. so anyway, I just don’t like how people are being used by these products and really humanality is about freeing people.

Like you, dude, I’m in the business of freeing people and I was addicted to all these things myself. I know what exactly it’s like to feel like you’re stuck to where like, man, I should be, I should be making this much money at this point because this guy’s 21 and he’s making a million dollars or this person’s married to that person or that person has that job. And anyway, I know what these things feel like cause I went through them, you know? So, I do want to encourage people to really take this stuff seriously like this is your life the average 18 year old right now and then I’ll shut up Jake I could talk about this stuff forever The average 18 year old right now is on pace with a 90 year lifespan To be on the phone 93 % of their free time, which if you break their lives into months That’s over 27 years of their lives are going to be spent on a screen.

So dude, I looked at my own screen time and I was like, no social media, nothing. I was about five and a half hours on my smartphone and I would find time on the weather channel. I would waste time on my Delta app. I would freaking find something to waste time. And I looked at my screen time and did the math myself. And I was just thinking to the end of my life. And I know at the end of my life, I’m not going to look back and wish I would have scrolled more.

Living Life Beyond the Screen

I’m just not going to wish I would have liked more or watch what other people are Really what most people that are dying, you know this from pastors that talk about near-death experiences and people that are dying, what’s the two things they talk about when they’re dying?

Who you connected with, your people, your impact, I don’t know. It’s who you loved and regrets. And usually those regrets are connected to people. They’re not connected to things. They’re not connected to money. They’re not connected to career. It’s people. And actually I think like right now this is an amazing technology. You and me can talk. It’s disembodied, but we are communicating, but we’re not together. So there’s something missing here that’s not fully present, but it’s still good.

But in our day to day, if we can find ways to get more in person, that would maybe be my closing encouragement, right? What are some ways that you can get in person with people that you love, right? Your average family in 1960 ate meals together for 90 minutes. Your average family today eats a meal for 12 minutes together. Like find ways to share a meal together where technology is not involved and you just converse and catch up with your day.

Okay, that’s good you know. I love that, Andrew. That’s great. our audience is hearing that and they’re like, yes, protective factors that protect you with good relationships, with connection, with positive dopamine, all that stuff is, man, this was really helpful. I want to get people over to learn more about what you’re doing at Humanality. Where should we send them to go learn more?

Humanality: A Movement for Change

Yeah, Humanality.org. So we just have a website, which is always funny. It’s like, are you on Instagram? It’s like, no. I mean, we’re doing a very different, obviously, methodology here. So yeah, anyone listening to this that’s at a university, you can be religious, you can be atheist. It doesn’t matter, political, religious. If you want to start a village, you can launch a village at your university. It’s for free.

All you do is go to our website, humanality.org, click start a village, and you can start meeting together, going through these detox protocols. We have a whole curriculum that is really, again, unpacking blue light science. It’s unpacking our movement, sedentary living, technology on multiple different fronts. And eventually we’ll have villages ready for families and individuals. And there’s going to be a bunch of fun stuff ready in the coming months.

I want to see people, yeah, just being more fully human. I mean, we have lost some of the most beautiful gifts of being human and we want to help reclaim some of those things. Well, again, using technology with intentionality. I am not Amish and I’m not a Luddite. I’m using technology as a tool, you know, but we want to help free people.

So that’s where you can find us. I’m in the process of writing a book. That’s going to take months. I think podcasts like we’re on right now are great. So we’re going to launch one of those in the future. And hopefully, Jake, you can come on ours because I’m really fascinated with addiction science in general. So I’d love to pick your brain about stuff like that. But that’s where you can find us.

Cool, Andrew. Well, thank you for being on the show and for everyone listening. I hope you found something really encouraging. I definitely took away some data points. can talk about addiction and not just substance use, but technology. I’ve got a place to go to look for resources at Humanality.org and probably have some cool stories to relate to parents and educators on just what stuff to look out for and where do we want to spend our time? Where do we want to spend our effort?

And even for me, like my takeaway today is looking at if we’re on these social media platforms, one thing that you mentioned that just thinking of the medium is the message is that somewhere I want to invest and live and where do you make that choice? Because that’s just such an interesting concept. I don’t, I know Andrew, I probably could set you off. we could talk more about philosophy because you said you’re a philosophy guy.

Yeah, yeah, that was my major in school.

Yeah, so we could probably have, we could have a dinner sometime and all that. So when I’m in Wyoming next, I’ll hit you up. We were just there a few weeks ago, but yeah, yep. So we’ll stay in touch, Andrew, and for everyone listening, this has been another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour, and we will see you next Monday.