How is technology changing our minds and existential experience? What do phones have to do with shame, power, narcissism, and death? How can we think about the difference between virtuality and reality? Is there really even a difference? Why are we not more comforted by our phones when we're addicted to them?

In this AP-level episode of Help Existing, we delve into these questions and more, thinking about technology on both a philosophical and psychoanalytic level. My guests are philosopher Victor Krebs and psychologist Richard Frankel, authors of the new book Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Krebs is a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a philosophical curator. Frankel is a faculty member and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a teaching associate and supervisor at Harvard Medical School.

This was a fascinating conversation I studied up for and wanted to bring my A-game to. I hope you learn as much as I did, and that maybe after this conversation, you'll have some different lenses to think from a psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective about your relationship with technology.