In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe talks to Tristan Thompson about his new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. Tristan talks about how he got into the field of technology ethics, and why he thinks the "Don't Be Evil" mantra should be taken down. Joe also talks about his background as a magician and how he ended up in Silicon Valley, and what it means to be a "design ethicist" in the early days of Google, and how they adopted the mantra, "Don t be evil." Joe also discusses the impact of the film on the teen mental health crisis, and the impact it can have on our perception of the world and how technology can be a tool for manipulation and control. Joe also asks the question, why did Google take down their own mantra, Don't be evil? and what would you do if you had the power to make a statement that could change the world? And how would you take that statement down? What would you say to your friends, family, colleagues, and enemies? How would you remove it? What is the best piece of advice you could give them? Do you agree or disagree with that statement? Is it a good or bad one, or a bad one? Joe and Tristan answer these questions, and explain why you think it would be a good one, and if you would take it down, or not? If you have a problem with it, let us know what you think about it. We'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Tweet us in the comments section below! or send us your thoughts, thoughts, opinions, or thoughts, feelings, or anything else we could improve on it! or anything you think we could help us do about it and we'd like to hear about it in the next episode of The SocialDilemma? in a future episode about it :) Timestamps: 5:30 - What is a good thing that s going to happen in the future? 6:00 - What do you think of it? 5:20 - What are you looking for? 7:00 8:00 | What s a good idea? 9:30 | Is it better? 10: What s the worst thing you ve done? 11:40 | What does it matter? 12:30 13:40 15:40 - How do you feel about it?
00:00:24.000The Social Dilemma was seen by 38 million households in the first 28 days on Netflix, which I think is broken records.
00:00:33.000And if you assume, you know, a lot of people are seeing it with their family because parents seeing it with their kids, the issues that are around teen mental health, So if you assume one out of ten families saw it with a few family members, we're in the 40 to 50 million people range, which is just broken records, I think, for Netflix.
00:00:48.000I think it was the second most popular documentary throughout the month of September, or film throughout the month of September.
00:00:54.000It was a really well-done documentary, but I think it's one of those documentaries that affirmed a lot of people's worst suspicions about the dangers of social media, and then on top of that, It sort of alerted them to what they were already experiencing in their own personal life and,
00:01:15.000I mean, most people were aware—I think it's a thing everyone's been feeling—that the feeling you have when you use social media isn't that this thing is just a tool or it's on my side.
00:01:26.000Is an environment based on manipulation, as we say in the film.
00:01:31.000I remember, you know, I've been working on these issues for something like eight years or something now.
00:01:38.000Can you please tell people who didn't see the documentary what your background is and how you got into it?
00:01:43.000Yeah, so I... The film goes back as a set of technology insiders.
00:01:50.000My background was as a design ethicist at Google.
00:01:53.000So I first had a startup company that we sold to Google, and I landed there through a talent acquisition.
00:01:59.000And then started, about a year into being at Google, made a presentation that was about how, essentially, technology was holding the human collective psyche in its hands, that we were really controlling the world's psychology.
00:02:15.000Because every single time people look at their phone, they are basically experiencing thoughts and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world.
00:02:22.000This has become the primary meaning-making machine for the world.
00:02:25.000And that we as Google had a moral responsibility to, you know, hold the collective psyche in a thoughtful, ethical way and not create this sort of race to the bottom of the brainstem attention economy that we now have.
00:02:45.000I studied at a class called the Stanford Persuasive Technology class that taught a lot of the engineers in Silicon Valley kind of how the mind works.
00:02:55.000Some of the co-founders of Instagram were there.
00:02:58.000And then later studied behavioral economics and how the mind is sort of influenced.
00:03:03.000I went into cults and started studying how cults work and then arrived at Google through this lens of, you know, technology isn't really just this thing that's in our hands.
00:03:10.000It's more like this manipulative environment that is tapping into our weaknesses.
00:03:15.000Everything from the slot machine rewards to the way you get tagged in a photo and it sort of manipulates your social validation and approval, these kinds of things.
00:03:24.000When you were at Google, did they still have the don't be evil sign up?
00:03:29.000I don't know if there's actually a physical sign, was there?
00:03:32.000I thought there was something that they actually had.
00:03:34.000I think it was, there was this guy, was it Paul, not Paul, what was his last name?
00:03:39.000He was the inventor, one of the inventors of Gmail, and they had a meeting, and they came up with this mantra.
00:03:43.000Because they realized the power that they had, and they realized that there was going to be a conflict of interest between advertising on the search results and regular search results.
00:03:51.000And so we know that, they know that they could abuse that power, and they came up with this mantra, I think, in that meeting in the early days, to don't be, don't be evil.
00:03:59.000There was a time where they took that mantra down, and I remember reading about it online.
00:04:42.000Don't Be Evil has been a part of the company's corporate code of conduct since 2000 when Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet.
00:04:50.000In 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the model.
00:05:24.000Well, I mean, they did change it to do the right thing.
00:05:27.000I mean, we always used to say that, just to friends, not within Google, but just, you know, instead of saying, don't be evil, just say, let's do some good here, right?
00:05:38.000Think doing good instead of don't do bad.
00:05:42.000Yeah, but the problem is when you say do good, the question is who's good, because you live in a morally plural society, and there's this question of who are you to say what's good for people, and it's much easier to say let's reduce harms than it is to say let's actually do good like this.
00:05:54.000It says, the updated version of Google's Code of Conduct still retains one reference to the company's unofficial motto.
00:06:00.000The final line of the document is still, and remember, dot, dot, dot, don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right, speak up.
00:06:13.000Well, they still have Don't Be Evil, so maybe it's much ado about nothing.
00:06:17.000But having that kind of power, we were just before the podcast, we were watching Jack Dorsey speak to members of the Senate in regards to Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden story and censorship of conservatives, but allowing dictators to spread propaganda,
00:06:34.000dictators from other countries, and why and what this is all about.
00:06:39.000One of the things that Jack Dorsey has been pretty adamant about is that they really never saw this coming when they started Twitter.
00:06:47.000And they didn't think that they were ever going to be in this position where they were going to be really the arbiters of free speech for the world.
00:06:56.000Which is essentially in some ways what they are.
00:06:59.000I think it's important to roll back the clock for people because it's easy to think...
00:07:03.000You know, that we just sort of landed here and that they would know that they're going to be influencing the global psychology.
00:07:08.000But I think we should really reverse engineer for the audience.
00:07:13.000How did these products work the way that they did?
00:07:15.000So, like, let's go back to the beginning days of Twitter.
00:07:17.000I think his first tweet was something like, Yeah.
00:07:36.000And the real genius of these things was that they weren't just offering this thing you could do, they found ways of keeping people engaged.
00:07:46.000I think this is important for people to get, that they're not competing for your data or for money, they're competing to keep people using the product.
00:07:56.000And so when Twitter, for example, invented This persuasive feature of the number of followers that you have.
00:08:02.000If you remember, like, that was a new thing at the time, right?
00:08:08.000And then here's the number of followers you have.
00:08:10.000That created a reason for you to come back every day to see how many followers do I have.
00:08:14.000So that was part of this race to keep people engaged, as we talk about in the film, like these things are competing for your attention, that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product, but the thing that is the product is your predictable behavior.
00:08:27.000You're using the product in predictable ways.
00:08:30.000And I remember a conversation I had with...
00:08:33.000Someone at Facebook, who's a friend of mine, who said in a coffee shop one day, people think that we, Facebook, are competing with something like Twitter, that one social network is competing with another social network.
00:08:46.000But really, he said, our biggest competitor is YouTube, because they're not competing for social networks, they're competing for attention.
00:08:53.000And YouTube is the biggest competitor in the digital space for attention.
00:08:57.000And that was a real lightbulb moment for me, because you realize that as they're designing these products, they're finding new clever ways to get your attention.
00:09:06.000That's the real thing that I think is different in the film The Social Dilemma, rather than talking about, you know, censorship and data and privacy and these themes.
00:09:14.000It's really what is the core influence or impact that the shape of these products have on how we're making meaning of the world when they're steering our psychology.
00:09:23.000Do you think that it was inevitable that someone manipulates the way people use these things to gather more attention?
00:09:30.000And do you think that any of this could have been avoided if there was laws against that?
00:09:36.000If instead of having these algorithms That specifically target things that you're interested in or things that you click on or things that are going to make you engage more.
00:09:46.000If someone said, listen, you can have these things, you can allow people to communicate with each other, but you can't manipulate their attention span.
00:09:59.000So we've always had an attention economy, right?
00:10:01.000And you're competing for it right now.
00:10:20.000Like, this podcast is an organic, I mean, if we're in competition, it's organic.
00:10:25.000I just put it out there, and if you watch it, you don't, or you don't, I don't, you know, I don't have any say over it, and I'm not manipulating it in any way.
00:10:34.000So, I mean, let's imagine that the podcast apps were different, and they actually, while you're watching, they had, like, the hearts and the stars and the kind of voting up in numbers, and you could, like, send messages back and forth, and Apple Podcasts worked in a way that didn't just reward, you know, the things that you clicked follow on.
00:10:50.000It actually sort of promoted the stuff that someone said the most outrageous thing.
00:10:55.000Then you as a podcast creator have an incentive to say the most outrageous thing and then you arrive at the top of the Apple Podcasts or Spotify app.
00:11:03.000And that's the thing, is that we actually are competing for attention.
00:11:06.000It felt like it was neutral, and it was relatively neutral.
00:11:10.000And to progress that story back in time with Twitter competing for attention, let's look at some other things that they did.
00:11:15.000So they also added this retweet, this instant resharing feature, right?
00:11:19.000And that made it more addictive, because suddenly we're all playing the fame lottery, right?
00:11:23.000Like, I could retweet your stuff, and then you get a bunch of hits, and then you could go viral, and you could get a lot of attention.
00:11:28.000So then instead of the companies competing for attention, now each of us suddenly win the fame lottery over and over and over again, and we're getting attention.
00:12:09.000And that's the same as competing for attention because engagement must mean people like it.
00:12:14.000And there's going to be a fallacy as we go down that road, but go on.
00:12:17.000Well, it's interesting because you could say if you have a podcast and your podcast gets like, let's say, 100,000 downloads, a new podcast can come along and it can get 10,000 downloads and it'll be ahead of you in the rankings.
00:12:30.000And so you could be number three and it could be number two and you're like, well, how is that number two?
00:12:35.000And it's got 10 times less, but they don't do it that way.
00:12:40.000And their logic is they don't want the podcast world to be dominated by, you know, New York Times.
00:12:52.000We have a podcast called Urine Divided Attention, and since the film came out in that first month, we went from being in the lower 100 or something like that to we shot to the top five.
00:13:01.000I think we were the number one tech podcast for a while, and so we just experienced this through the fact not that we had the most listeners, but because the trend was so rapid that we sort of jumped to the top.
00:13:11.000I think it's wise that they do that because eventually it evens out over time.
00:13:17.000You see some people rock it to the top like, oh my god, we're number three.
00:13:21.000And you're like, hang on there, fella.
00:13:24.000And then three weeks later, four weeks later, now they're number 48. They get depressed.
00:13:28.000That was really where you should have been.
00:13:31.000But the thing that Apple does that I really like in that is it gives an opportunity for these new shows to be seen.
00:13:39.000Where they might have gotten just stuck because these rankings and the ratings for a lot of these shows are so consistent and they have such a following already.
00:13:49.000It's very difficult for these new shows to gather attention.
00:13:52.000And the problem was that there were some people that gamed the system.
00:13:58.000And there was companies that could literally move.
00:14:29.000Apple Podcasts you can think of as like the Federal Reserve or the government of the attention economy because they're setting the rules by which you win, right?
00:14:36.000They could have set the rules, as you said, to be, you know, who has the most listeners and then you just keep rewarding the kings that already exist versus who is the most trending.
00:14:46.000A friend of mine told me, I don't know if it's true, although it was a fairly credible source, who said there was a meeting with Steve Jobs when they were making the first podcast app, and that they had made a demo of something where you could see all the things your friends were listening to.
00:15:03.000So just like making a news feed like we do with Facebook and Twitter, right?
00:15:07.000And then he said was, well, why would we do that?
00:15:09.000If something is important enough, your friend will actually just send you a link and say you should listen to this.
00:15:16.000Like, why would we automatically just promote random things that your friends are listening to?
00:15:21.000And again, this is kind of how you get back to social media.
00:15:25.000Because it's much more addictive to see what your friends are doing in a feed, but it doesn't reward what's true or what's meaningful.
00:15:31.000And this is the thing that people need to get about social media is it's really just rewarding the things that tend to keep people back addictively.
00:15:39.000The business model is addiction in this race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention.
00:15:42.000Well, it seems like if we, in hindsight, if hindsight is 20-20, what should have been done or what could have been done had we known where this would...
00:16:13.000And then the problem is, so this is the thing I was going to say about Twitter, is when one company does the, call it the engagement feed, meaning showing you the things that the most people are clicking on and retweeting, trending, things like that.
00:16:29.000So there's the feed that's called the reverse chronological feed, meaning showing in order in time, you know, Joe Rogan posted this two hours ago, but that's, you know, After that, you have the thing that people posted an hour and a half ago all the way up to 10 seconds ago.
00:16:43.000They have a mode like that on Twitter.
00:16:45.000If you click the sparkle icon, I don't know if you know this, it'll show you just in time, here's what people said, you know, sorted by recency.
00:16:52.000But then they have this other feed called what people click on, retweet, etc., the most, the people you follow.
00:16:57.000And it sorts it by what it thinks you'll click on and want the most.
00:17:00.000Which one of those is more successful at getting your attention?
00:17:03.000The sort of recency, what they posted recently, versus what they know people are clicking and retweeting on the most.
00:17:10.000Certainly what they know people are clicking on and retweeting the most.
00:17:13.000And so once Twitter does that, let's say Facebook was sitting there with the recency feed, like just showing you here's the people who posted in this time order sequence.
00:17:22.000They have to also switch to who is like the most relevant stuff, right?
00:17:29.000So this is part of this race for attention that once one actor does something like that, and they algorithmically We're good to go.
00:18:01.000And it becomes, again, this game-theoretic race of who's going to do more.
00:18:04.000Now, if you open up TikTok, TikTok doesn't even wait—I don't know if you know or your kids use TikTok—but when you open up the app, it doesn't even wait for you to click on something.
00:18:13.000It just actually plays the first video the second you open it, which none of the other apps do, right?
00:18:17.000And the point of that is that causes you to enter into this engagement stream even faster.
00:18:22.000So again, this race for attention produces things that are not good for society.
00:18:27.000And even if you took the whack-a-mole sticker, you took the antitrust case, and you whack Facebook, and you got rid of Facebook, or you whack Google, or you whack YouTube...
00:18:34.000You're just going to have more actors flooding in doing the same thing.
00:18:38.000And one other example of this is the time it takes to reach, let's say, 10 million followers.
00:18:46.000So if you remember back in the—wasn't it Ashton Kutcher who raced for the first million followers?
00:18:52.000So now, if you think of it, the companies are competing for our attention.
00:18:56.000If they find out that each of us becoming a celebrity and having a million people we get to reach, if that's the currency of the thing that gets us to come back to get more attention, then they're competing at who can give us that bigger fame lottery hit faster.
00:19:10.000So let's say 2009 or 2010 when Ashton Kutcher did that.
00:19:14.000It took him, I don't know how long it took, months for him to get a million?
00:19:20.000And then TikTok comes along and says, hey, we want to give kids the ability to hit the fame lottery and make it big, hit the jackpot even faster.
00:19:28.000We want you to be able to go from zero to a million followers in 10 days, right?
00:19:32.000And so they're competing to make that shorter and shorter and shorter.
00:19:35.000And I know about this because, you know, speaking from a Silicon Valley perspective, Venture capitalists fund these new social platforms based on how fast they can get to like 100 million users.
00:19:46.000There was this famous line that like, I forgot what it was, but I think Facebook took like 10 years to get to 100 million users.
00:19:52.000Instagram took, you know, I don't know, four years, three years or something like that.
00:20:34.000There's a lot of legitimate conspiracy theories, so I don't want to make sure I'm not categorically dismissing stuff.
00:20:39.000But that's really the point, is that we have landed in a world where the things that we are paying attention to are not necessarily the agenda of topics that we would say, in a reflective world, what we would say is the most important.
00:20:52.000So there's a lot of conversation about free will and about letting people choose whatever they enjoy viewing and watching and paying attention to.
00:21:07.000But when you're talking about these incredibly potent algorithms and the incredibly potent addictions that people...
00:21:19.000The people develop to these things, and we're pretending that people should have the ability to just ignore it and put it away.
00:22:11.000We're bringing this ancient brain hardware, the prefrontal cortex, which is like what you use to do goal-directed action, self-control, willpower, holding back, you know, marshmallow test, don't get the marshmallow now, wait later for the two marshmallows later.
00:22:27.000All of that is through our prefrontal cortex.
00:22:29.000And when you're sitting there and you think, okay, I'm going to go watch, I'm going to look at this one thing on Facebook because my friend invited me to this event, or it's this one post I have to look at.
00:22:38.000And the next thing you know, you find yourself scrolling through the thing for like an hour.
00:22:58.000So if I'm Facebook, when you flick your finger, you think, when you're using Facebook, it's just going to show me the next thing that my friend said.
00:23:07.000When you flick your finger, it actually literally wakes up this sort of supercomputer avatar voodoo doll version of Joe.
00:23:13.000And the voodoo doll of Joe is, you know, the more clicks you ever made on Facebook is like adding the little hair to the voodoo doll.
00:23:21.000And the more likes you've ever made adds little clothing to the voodoo doll.
00:23:25.000And the more, you know, watch time on videos you've ever had adds little, you know, shoes to the voodoo doll.
00:23:31.000So the voodoo doll is getting more and more accurate the more things you click on.
00:23:34.000This is in the film The Social Dilemma.
00:23:35.000Like, if you notice, like, the character, you know, as he's using this thing...
00:23:40.000It builds a more and more accurate model that the AIs, the three AIs behind the screen, are kind of manipulating.
00:23:45.000And the idea is it can actually predict and prick the voodoo doll with this video or that post from your friends or this other thing, and it'll figure out the right thing to show you that it knows will keep you there, because it's already seen how that same video or that same post has kept 200 million other voodoo dolls there,
00:24:02.000because you just look like another voodoo doll.
00:24:05.000And this works the same on all the platforms.
00:24:07.000If you were a teen girl and you opened a dieting video on YouTube, 70% of YouTube's watch time comes from the recommendations on the right-hand side, right?
00:24:17.000So the things that are showing recommended videos next.
00:24:43.000So if you're a 13-year-old girl and you watch a diet video, YouTube wakes up its voodoo doll version of that girl and says, hey, I've got like 100 million other voodoo dolls of 13-year-old girls, right?
00:24:53.000And they all tend to watch these other videos.
00:24:55.000I just know that they have this word thinspo.
00:25:09.000Why did they choose to not let the machine run blind with one thing, like anorexia?
00:25:15.000Well, so now we're getting into the Twitter censorship conversation and the moderation conversation.
00:25:19.000So this is why I don't focus on censorship and moderation, because the real issue is if you blur your eyes and zoom way out and say, how does the whole machine tend to operate?
00:25:28.000Like, no matter what I start with, what is it going to recommend next?
00:25:32.000So, you know, if you started with, you know, a World War II video, YouTube would recommend a bunch of Holocaust denial videos, right?
00:25:42.000If you started teen girls with a dieting video, it would recommend these anorexia videos.
00:25:47.000In Facebook's case, if you joined—there's so many different examples here because Facebook recommends groups to people based on what it thinks is most engaging for you.
00:25:56.000So if you were a new mom—you had Renee DiResta, my friend, on this podcast— We've done a bunch of work together, and she has this great example of as a new mom, she joined one Facebook group for mothers who do do-it-yourself baby food, like organic baby food.
00:27:29.000And now, to your point about this sort of moderation thing, we can take the whack-a-mole stick after the public yells, and Renee and I make a bunch of noise or something, in a large community, by the way, of people making noise about this, and they'll say, okay, shoot, you're right.
00:27:43.000Flat Earth, we've got to deal with that.
00:27:45.000And then people make a bunch of noise about the inspiration videos for anorexia for kids, and they'll deal with that problem.
00:27:52.000But then they start doing it based reactively, But again, if you zoom out, it's just still recommending stuff that's kind of from the crazy town section of YouTube.
00:28:23.000But if that's the real argument about these conspiracy theories is that they can influence young people or the easily impressionable or people that maybe don't have a sophisticated sense of vetting out bullshit.
00:28:43.000And generally, it just says who's vulnerable to it.
00:28:45.000Because another example, the way I think about this is if you're driving down the highway And, you know, there's Facebook and Google trying to figure out, like, what should I give you based on what tends to keep your attention?
00:28:54.000If you look at a car crash, and everybody driving on the highway, they look at the car crash.
00:28:58.000According to Facebook and Google, it's like, the whole world wants car crashes.
00:29:01.000We just feed them car crashes after car crashes after car crashes.
00:29:04.000And what the algorithms do, as Guillaume Chaslow in the film says, who's the YouTube whistleblower from the YouTube recommendation system...
00:29:12.000Is they find the perfect little rabbit hole for you that it knows will keep you there for five hours.
00:29:16.000And the conspiracy theory, like dark corners of YouTube, were the dark corners that tends to keep people there for five hours.
00:29:23.000And so you have to realize that we're now something like 10 years in to this vast psychology experiment, where it's been, you know, in every language, in hundreds of countries, right, in hundreds of languages, it's been steering people towards the crazy town.
00:29:36.000When I say crazy town, I think of, you know, imagine there's a spectrum on YouTube.
00:29:41.000And there's on one side you have like the calm Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan, you know, slow, you know, kind of boring, but like educational material or something.
00:29:51.000And the other side of the spectrum, you have, you know, the craziest stuff you can find.
00:29:57.000No matter where you start, you could start in Walter Cronkite or you could start in Crazy Town.
00:30:02.000But if I'm YouTube and I want you to watch more, am I going to steer you towards the calm stuff or am I going to steer you more towards Crazy Town?
00:30:47.000And increasingly, that's based on technology.
00:30:49.000And we can get into, you know, what's going on in Portland.
00:30:52.000Well, the only way I know that is I'm looking at my social media feed, and according to that, it looks like the entire city's on fire and it's a war zone.
00:30:59.000I called a friend there the other day, and he said, it's a beautiful day.
00:31:03.000There's actually no violence anywhere near where I am.
00:31:05.000It's just like these two blocks or something like that.
00:31:07.000And this is the thing is warping our view of reality.
00:31:10.000And I think that's what really, for me, The Social Dilemma was really trying to accomplish as a film.
00:31:15.000And, you know, the director, Jeff Wolowski, was trying to accomplish, is how did this society go crazy everywhere all at once, you know, seemingly?
00:31:24.000You know, this didn't happen by accident.
00:31:26.000It happened by design of this business model.
00:31:28.000When did the business model get implemented?
00:31:31.000Like, when did they start using these algorithms to recommend things?
00:31:33.000Because initially, YouTube was just a series of videos, and it didn't have that recommended section.
00:31:41.000I mean, I... You know, originally YouTube was just post a video and you can get people to, you know, go to that URL and send it around.
00:31:51.000They needed to figure out, once the competition for attention got more intense, they needed to figure out, how am I going to keep you there?
00:31:58.000And so recommending those videos on the right-hand side, I think that was there pretty early, if I remember, actually.
00:32:04.000Because that was some of the innovation is like keeping people within this YouTube wormhole.
00:32:07.000And once people were in the YouTube wormhole constantly seeing videos, that was what they could offer the promise to a new video uploader.
00:32:16.000Hey, if you post it here, you're going to get way more views than if you post it on Vimeo.
00:32:48.0002012, the platform announced an update.
00:32:51.000To the discovery system designed to identify the videos people actually want to watch by prioritizing videos that hold attention throughout, as well as increasing the amount of time a user spends on the platform overall, YouTube could assure advertisers that it was providing a valuable, high-quality experience for people.
00:33:11.000Yeah, so 2012 on YouTube's timeline, I mean, you know, the Twitter and Facebook world, I think, introduces the retweet and reshare buttons in the 2009 to 2010 kind of time period.
00:33:23.000So you end up with this world where the things that we're most paying attention to are based on algorithms choosing for us.
00:33:31.000And so the sort of deeper argument that's in the film that I'm not sure everyone picks up on is...
00:34:25.000And that information funnel is the very thing that's been corrupted.
00:34:29.000And it's like the Flint water supply for our minds.
00:34:31.000I was talking to a friend yesterday and she was saying that there were articles that she was laughing that there's articles that are written about negative tweets that random people make about a celebrity doing this or that.
00:34:50.000This is a whole article that's written about someone who decided to say something negative about some Something some celebrity had done, and then it becomes this huge article, and then the tweets are prominently featured.
00:35:02.000And then the response to those, I mean, like really arbitrary, like weird.
00:35:07.000Because it's a values-blind system that just cares about what will get attention.
00:35:10.000Exactly, and that's what the article was.
00:35:13.000It's interesting because Prince Harry and Meghan have become very interested in these issues and are actively working on these issues and getting to know them just a little bit.
00:35:27.000I mean, I don't want to speak for them, but I think Meghan has been the target of the most vitriol hate-oriented stuff on the planet, right?
00:35:33.000From just the amount of sort of criticism that they get.
00:36:27.000And as Jonathan Haidt says in the film, and I know you've had him here, it's made kids much more cautious and less risk-taking and more bullied overall.
00:36:38.000And there's just huge problems in mental health around this.
00:36:40.000Yeah, it's really bad for young girls, right?
00:36:54.000Like, I had a friend, she did a show, she's a comedian, she did a show, and she was talking about this one negative comment that was inaccurate.
00:37:02.000It said she only did a half an hour and her show sucked.
00:37:05.000She's like, fuck her and this and that.
00:37:47.000Because evolutionarily, it's really important that we look at social approval, negative social approval, because our reputation is at stake in the tribe.
00:38:15.000This is the psychological environment that is the default way that kids are growing up now.
00:38:20.000I actually faced this recently with the film itself because actually the film has gotten just crazy positive acclaim for the most part and there's just a few negative comments and for myself even, right?
00:39:16.000And people can share that false negative stuff.
00:39:19.000I mean, not all negative stuff is false, but you can assert things and build on the hate fest and start going crazy and saying, this person's a white supremacist or this person's even worse.
00:39:29.000And that'll spread to thousands and thousands of people, and next thing you know, you check into your feed again at, you know, 8 p.m.
00:39:35.000that night, and your whole reputation's been destroyed, and you didn't even know what happened to you.
00:39:45.000They'll make a dumb comment without thinking about it.
00:39:47.000And then next thing they know, you know, at the end of the day, the parents are all calling because, like, 300 parents saw it and are calling up the parent of that kid.
00:39:57.000We talk to teachers a lot in our work at the Center for Humane Technology, and they will say that on Monday morning, this is before COVID, but on Monday morning, they spend the first hour of class having to clear all the drama that happened on social media from the weekend for the kids.
00:40:17.000This was like 8th, 9th, 10th grade, that kind of thing.
00:40:21.000And the other problem with these kids is there's not like a long history of people growing up through this kind of influence and successfully navigating it.
00:41:21.000So this is the relationship where we have a relationship of asymmetry and technology is influencing all of us.
00:41:27.000And we need a system by which, you know, when I was growing up, you know, I grew up on the Macintosh and technology and I was creatively doing programming projects and whatever else.
00:41:36.000The people who built the technology I was using would have their own kits use the things that I was using because they were creative and they were about tools and empowerment.
00:41:45.000We don't have that anymore because the business model took over.
00:41:48.000And so instead of having just tools sitting there like hammers waiting to be used to build creative projects or programming to invent things or paintbrushes or whatever, we now have a manipulation-based technology environment where everything you use has this incentive to not only addict you but to have you play the fame lottery,
00:42:04.000get social feedback, because those are all the things that keep people's attention.
00:42:08.000Isn't this also a problem with these information technologies being attached to corporations that have this philosophy of unlimited growth?
00:42:16.000So no matter how much they make, I applaud Apple because I think they're the only company that takes steps to protect privacy, to block advertisements, to make sure that at least when you Use their Maps application.
00:42:34.000They're not saving your data and sending it to everybody.
00:42:38.000And it's one of the reasons why Apple Maps is really not as good as Google Maps.
00:44:04.000For that very reason, just because they don't do anything with it.
00:44:08.000They give you the information, but they don't take your data and do anything with it.
00:44:14.000The challenge is, let's say we get all the privacy stuff perfectly, perfectly right, and data production and data controls and all that stuff.
00:44:21.000In a system that's still based on attention and grabbing attention and harvesting and strip mining our brains...
00:44:29.000You still get maximum polarization, addiction, mental health problems, isolation, teen depression, suicide, polarization, breakdown of truth, right?
00:44:39.000So we really focus in our work on those topics because that's the direct influence of the business model on warping society.
00:45:53.000I want you watching the TV, the tablet, and the phone at the same time, because now I've tripled the size of the amount of extractable attention that I can get for advertisers.
00:46:02.000Which means that by fracking for attention and splitting you into more junk attention that's thinner...
00:46:10.000It's like the financial crisis where you're selling thinner and thinner financial assets as if it's real, but it's really just a junk asset.
00:46:17.000And that's kind of where we are now where it's sort of the junk attention economy because we can shorten attention spans and we're debasing the substrate.
00:46:27.000Because everything in a democracy depends on individual sensemaking and meaningful choice, meaningful free will, meaningful independent views.
00:46:34.000But if that's all basically sold to the highest bidder that debases the soil from which independent views grow, because all of us are jacked into this sort of matrix of social media manipulation, That's ruining and degrading our democracy.
00:46:48.000There's many other things that are ruining and degrading our democracy, but that's this sort of invisible force that's upstream that affects every other thing downstream.
00:46:55.000Because if we can't agree on what's true, for example, you can't solve any problem.
00:46:59.000I think that's what you talked about in your 10-minute thing on The Social Dilemma I think I saw on YouTube.
00:48:11.000You know, to be honest, I was actually in the middle of the Social Dilemma launch when I think that happened, and my home burned down in the recent fires in Santa Rosa, so I actually missed that happening.
00:48:45.000Right, this was a case that's about Google using its dominant position to privilege its own search engine in its own products and beyond, which is similar to sort of Microsoft bundling in the Internet Explorer browser.
00:49:01.000Good progress, but really it misses the kind of fundamental harm of like, these things are warping our society.
00:49:07.000They're warping how our minds are working.
00:49:08.000And there's no, you know, congressional action against that, because it's a really hard problem to solve.
00:49:13.000I think that the reason the film for me is so important is that if I look at the growth rate of how fast Facebook has been recommending people into conspiracy groups and Kind of polarizing us into separate echo chambers, which we should really break down, I think, as well for people like exactly the mechanics of how that happens.
00:49:31.000But if you look at the growth rate of all those harms, compared to, you know, how fast has Congress passed anything to deal with it, like basically not at all.
00:49:40.000They seem a little bit unsophisticated in that regard.
00:50:10.000But when you look at the broad, like the hearing yesterday, it's mostly grandstanding to politicize the issue, right?
00:50:17.000Because you turn it into, on the right, hey, you're censoring conservatives.
00:50:21.000And on the left, it's, hey, you're not taking down enough misinformation and dealing with the hate speech and all these kinds of things.
00:50:27.000And they're not actually dealing with, how would we solve this problem?
00:50:30.000They're just trying to make a political point to win over their base.
00:50:33.000Now, Facebook recently banned the QAnon pages, which I thought was kind of fascinating, because I'm like, well, this is a weird sort of slippery slope, isn't it?
00:51:05.000I mean, I guess flat earth is not dangerous.
00:51:08.000Is that where they make the distinction?
00:51:10.000So I think their policy is evolving in the direction of when things are causing offline harm, when online content is known to precede offline harm, that's when the platform, that's the standard by which platforms are acting.
00:51:23.000What offline harm has been caused by the QAnon stuff, do you know?
00:51:36.000And there's things that are priming people to be violent, you know.
00:51:42.000I just want to say these are really tricky topics, right?
00:51:44.000I think what I want to make sure we get to, though, is that there are many people manipulating the groupthink that can happen in these echo chambers.
00:51:51.000Because once you're in one of these things, like I studied cults earlier in my career.
00:51:56.000And the power of cults is like they're a vertically integrated persuasion stack because they control your social relationships.
00:52:01.000They control who you're hearing from and who you're not hearing from.
00:52:04.000They give you meaning, purpose, and belonging.
00:52:10.000They have an internal way of referring to things.
00:52:12.000And social media allows you to create this sort of decentralized cult factory where it's easier to grab people into an echo chamber where they only hear from other people's views.
00:52:23.000And Facebook, I think even just recently, I think?
00:52:45.000I mean, the policy teams that work on this are coming up with their own standards, so I'm not familiar with it.
00:52:51.000If you think about how hard it is to come up with a law at the federal level that all states will agree to, then you imagine Facebook trying to come up with a policy that will be universal to all the countries that are running Facebook, right?
00:53:05.000Well, then you imagine how you take a company that never thought they were going to be in the position to do that.
00:53:35.000And they did it aggressively when they went into countries like Myanmar, Ethiopia, all throughout the African continent, where they gave...
00:53:43.000So this is the program that I think has gotten something like 700 million accounts onto Facebook, where they do a deal with like a telecommunications provider, like their version of AT&T in Myanmar or something.
00:53:55.000So when you get your smartphone, it comes...
00:54:23.000I think you don't pay for Facebook, but you do pay for all the other things, which creates an asymmetry where, of course, you're going to use Facebook for most things.
00:54:45.000I mean, this has caused genocides, right?
00:54:46.000So in Myanmar, which is in the film, the Rohingya Muslim minority group, many Rohingya were persecuted and murdered because of fake information spread by the government on Facebook using their asymmetric knowledge with fake accounts.
00:55:01.000I mean, even just a couple weeks ago, Facebook took down a network of, I think, several hundred thousand fake accounts in Myanmar.
00:55:08.000And they didn't even have at the time more than something like four or five people in their extended Facebook network who even spoke the language of that country.
00:55:16.000So when you realize that this is like the, I think of like the Iraq War Colin Powell Pottery Barn Rule, where like, you know, if you go in and you break it, then you are responsible for fixing it.
00:55:27.000This is Facebook actively doing deals to go into Ethiopia, to go into Myanmar, to go into the Philippines or whatever, and providing these solutions.
00:55:36.000And then it breaks the society, and they're now in a position where they have to fix it.
00:55:41.000There's actually a joke within Facebook that if you want to know which countries will be quote-unquote at risk in two years from now, look at which ones have Facebook free basics.
00:56:00.000And so now, if you take it back, I know we were talking outside about the congressional hearing and Jack Dorsey and the questions from the senator about, are you taking down the content from the Ayatollahs or from the Chinese Xinjiang province about the Uyghurs, you know, when there's sort of speech that leads to offline violence in these other countries?
00:56:18.000The issue is that these platforms are managing the information commons for countries they don't even speak the language of.
00:56:25.000And if you think the conspiracy theory sort of dark corners, crazy town of the English internet are bad, and we've already taken out like hundreds of whack-a-mole sticks and they've hired hundreds of policy people and hundreds of engineers to deal with that problem.
00:56:56.000They don't have a voice on the platform.
00:56:57.000This is really important that the people in Myanmar who got persecuted and murdered didn't have to be on Facebook for the fake information spread about them to impact them, for people to go after them, right?
00:57:12.000So this is the whole, I can assert something about this minority group.
00:57:16.000That minority group isn't on Facebook.
00:57:18.000But if it manipulates the dominant culture to go, we have to go kill them...
00:57:23.000And the same thing has happened in India, where there's videos uploaded about, hey, those Muslims, I think they're called flesh killings, where they'll say that these Muslims killed this cow, and in Hinduism, the cows are sacred.
00:57:48.000They'll go viral on WhatsApp and say, we have to go lynch those Muslims because they killed the sacred cows.
00:57:54.000And they went from something like five of those happening per year to now hundreds of those happening per year because of fake news being spread, again, on Facebook about them, on WhatsApp about them.
00:58:04.000And again, they don't have to be on the platform for this to happen to them, right?
00:58:14.000I don't even know how many you have, like tens of millions, right?
00:58:16.000And we all listen to this conversation.
00:58:18.000We say, we don't want to even use Facebook and Twitter or YouTube.
00:58:21.000We all still, if you live in the US, still live in a country that everyone else will vote based on everything that they're seeing on these platforms.
00:58:28.000If you zoom out to the global context, all of us, we don't use Facebook in Brazil, but if Brazil, which was heavily, the last election was skewed by Facebook and WhatsApp, where something like 87% of people saw at least one of the major fake news stories about Bolsonaro,
00:58:44.000and he got elected, and you have people in Brazil chanting, Facebook, Facebook, when he wins...
00:58:50.000He wins and then he sets a new policy to wipe out the Amazon.
00:58:54.000All of us don't have to be on Facebook to be affected by a leader that wipes out the Amazon and accelerates climate change timelines because of those interconnected effects.
00:59:03.000So, you know, we at the Center for Immune Technology are looking at this from a global perspective where it's not just the US election.
00:59:09.000Facebook manages something like 80 elections per year.
00:59:12.000And if you think that they're doing all the monitoring that they are for, you know, English-speaking, American election, most privileged society, now look at the hundreds of other countries that they're operating in.
00:59:21.000Do you think that they're devoting the same resources to the other countries?
00:59:48.000What's terrifying is that we're talking about from 2012 to 2020 YouTube implementing this program and then what is even the birth of Facebook?
01:00:01.0002004. 2004. This is such a short timeline and having these massive worldwide implications from the use of these things.
01:00:11.000When you look at the future, do you look at this like a runaway train that's headed towards a cliff?
01:00:17.000Yeah, I mean, I think right now, this thing is a Frankenstein that it's not like even if Facebook is aware of all these problems, they don't have the staff unless they hired like hundreds of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, definitely, minimum, to try to address all these problems.
01:00:35.000Is that the very premise of these services is to rely on automation.
01:00:40.000It used to be we had editors and journalists, or at least editors or people who edited even what went on television, saying, what is credible?
01:01:15.000Instead of paying a journalist $70,000 a year to write something credible, we can each be convinced to share our political views and we'll do it knowingly for free.
01:01:23.000Actually, we don't really know that we're the useful idiots.
01:01:26.000And then instead of paying an editor $100,000 a year to figure out which of those things is true that we want to promote and give exponential reach to, you have an algorithm says, hey, what do people click on the most?
01:01:39.000And then you realize the quality of the signals that are going into the information environment that we're all sharing is a totally different process.
01:01:47.000We went from a high-quality, gated process that cost a lot of money...
01:01:51.000To this really crappy process that costs no money, which makes the company so profitable.
01:01:57.000And then we fight back for territory, for values, when we raise our hands and say, hey, there's a thinspiration video problem for teenagers and anorexia.
01:02:06.000Hey, there's a mass conspiracy sort of echo chamber problem over here.
01:02:10.000Hey, there's, you know, flat earth sort of issues.
01:02:13.000And again, these get into tricky topics because we want to, you know, I know we both believe in free speech and we have this feeling that the solution to bad speech is better, you know, more speech that counters the things that are said.
01:02:26.000But in a finite attention economy, We don't have the capacity for everyone who gets bad speech to just have a counter response.
01:02:35.000In fact, what happens right now is that that bad speech rabbit holes into, I don't want to call it worse and worse speech, but more extreme versions of that view that confirms it.
01:02:43.000Because once Facebook knows that that flat earth rabbit hole is good for you at getting your attention back, it wants to give you just more and more of that.
01:02:50.000It doesn't want to say here's 20 people who disagree with that thing.
01:02:54.000So I think if you were to imagine a different system, we would ask, who are the thinkers that are most open-minded and synthesis-oriented, where they can actually steelman the other side?
01:03:04.000Actually, they can do, you know, for this speech, here is the opposite counterargument.
01:03:08.000They can show that they understand that.
01:03:10.000And imagine those people get lifted up.
01:03:12.000But notice that none of those people that you and I know, I mean, we're both friends with Eric Weinstein, And, you know, I think he's one of these guys who's really good at sort of offering the steel manning, here's the other side of this, here's the other side of that.
01:03:23.000But the people who generally do that aren't the ones who get the tens of millions of followers on these surfaces.
01:03:29.000It's the black and white, extreme, outrage-oriented thinkers and speakers that get rewarded in this attention economy.
01:03:35.000And so if you look at how, if I zoom way out and say, how is the entire system behaving?
01:03:39.000Just like if I zoom out and say, you know, the climate system, like, how is the entire overall system behaving?
01:03:45.000It's not producing the kind of information environment on which democracy can survive.
01:04:07.000If there are a thousand bison running full steam towards a cliff and they don't realize the cliff is there, I don't see how you pull them back.
01:04:16.000So I think of it like we're trapped in a body that's eating itself.
01:04:21.000So it's kind of a cannibalism economy because our economic growth right now with these tech companies is based on eating our own organs.
01:04:28.000So we're eating our own mental health organs.
01:04:30.000We're eating the health of our children.
01:04:31.000Sorry for being so gnarly about it, but it's a cannibalistic system.
01:04:36.000In a system that's hurting itself or eating itself or punching itself, if one of the neurons wakes up in the body, it's not enough to change that.
01:04:44.000But if enough of the neurons wake up and say, this is stupid, why would we build our system this way?
01:04:49.000And the reason I'm so excited about the film is that if you have 40 to 50 million people who now recognize that we're living in this sort of cannibalist system in which...
01:05:21.000And we have to all recognize that we're now 10 years into this hypnosis experiment of warping of the mind.
01:05:26.000And like, you know, friends with some hypnotists, it's like, how do we snap our fingers and get people to say, there's an inflated level of polarization and hatred right now that especially going into this election, I think we all need to be much more cautious about what's running in our brains right now.
01:05:41.000Yeah, I don't think most people are generally aware of what's causing this polarization.
01:05:45.000I think they think it's the climate of society because the president and because of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests and all this jazz.
01:05:55.000But I don't think they understand that that's exacerbated in a fantastic way by social media and the last 10 years of our addictions to social media and these echo chambers that we all exist in.
01:06:09.000Yeah, so I want to make sure that we're both clear, and I know you agree with this, that these things were already in society to some degree, right?
01:06:19.000So we want to make sure we're not saying social media is blamed for all of it.
01:06:38.000Everybody hoped the internet was going to be this bottomless resource of information where everyone was going to be educated in a way they had never experienced before in the history of the human race, where you'd have access to all the answers to all your questions.
01:06:51.000You know, Eric Weinstein describes it as the library of Alexandria in your pocket.
01:06:56.000Well, and I want to be clear so that I'm not against technology or giving people access.
01:07:00.000In fact, I think a world where everyone had a smartphone and a Google search box and Wikipedia and a search-oriented YouTube so you can look up health issues and how to do-it-yourself fix anything would be awesome.
01:07:13.000I just want to be really clear because this is not an anti-technology conversation.
01:07:16.000It's about, again, this business model that depends on recommending stuff to people, which, just to be clear on the polarization front, it...
01:07:24.000Social media is more profitable when it gives you your own Truman Show that affirms your view of reality every time you flick your finger.
01:07:32.000That's going to be more profitable than every time you flick your finger.
01:07:34.000I actually show you, here's a more complex, nuanced picture that disagrees with that.
01:07:41.000And the best way for people to test this, we actually recommend, even after seeing the film to do this, is open up Facebook on two phones.
01:07:49.000Especially like, you know, two partners or people who have the same friends.
01:07:52.000So you have the same friends on Facebook.
01:07:54.000You would think if you scroll your feeds, you'd see the same thing.
01:07:57.000You have the same people you're following.
01:07:59.000So why wouldn't you see the same thing?
01:08:00.000But if you swap phones and you actually scroll through their feed for 10 minutes, and you scroll through mine for 10 minutes, You'll find that you'll see completely different information.
01:08:10.000And you'll also notice that it won't feel very compelling.
01:08:13.000Like if you asked yourself—my friend Emily just did this with her husband after seeing the film.
01:08:17.000And she literally has the same friends as her husband.
01:08:20.000And she scrolled through the feed and she's like, this isn't interesting.
01:09:23.000You might see Eric Weinstein in a thread battling it out or sort of duking it out with someone and maybe even reaching some convergence on something, but it just whizzes by your feet and then it's gone.
01:09:33.000And all the effort that we're putting in to make these systems work, but then it's just all gone.
01:09:39.000I mean, I try to very minimally use social media overall.
01:09:45.000Luckily, the work is so busy that that's easier.
01:09:48.000I want to say first that, you know, on the addiction fronts of these things, I, you know, myself am very sensitive and, you know, easily addicted by these things myself.
01:10:00.000You were saying in a social dilemma, it's email for you, huh?
01:10:03.000Yeah, you know, for me, if I refresh my email and pull to refresh like a slot machine, sometimes I'll get invited to meet the president of such and such to advise on regulation, and sometimes I get a stupid newsletter from a politician I don't care about or something, right?
01:10:20.000It's funny, I talked to Daniel Kahneman, who wrote the—he's like the founder of behavioral economics.
01:10:24.000He wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow, if you know that one.
01:10:27.000And he said as well that email was the most addictive for him.
01:10:31.000And he, you know, the one thing you'll find is that the people who know most about these sort of persuasive manipulative tricks, they'll say we're not immune to them just because we know about them.
01:10:39.000Dan Ariely, who's another famous persuasion behavioral economics guy, talks about flattery and how flattery still feels good even if I tell you I don't mean it.
01:11:00.000And the point being that, like, again, we have so much evolutionary wiring to care about what other people think of us, that just because you know that they're manipulating you in the likes or whatever, it still feels good to get those hundred extra likes on that thing that you posted.
01:11:19.000Well, actually, you know, in the film, you know, Justin Rosenstein, who's the inventor of the like button, talks about I think the first version was something called Beacon and it arrived in 2006, I think.
01:11:29.000But then the simple like one click like button was like a little bit later, like 2008-2009.
01:11:34.000Are you worried that it's going to be more and more invasive?
01:11:37.000I mean, you think about the problems we're dealing with now with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, all these within the last decade or so.
01:11:47.000I mean, is there something on the horizon that's going to be even more invasive?
01:11:50.000Well, we have to change this system because, as you said, technology is only going to get more immersed into our lives and infused into our lives, not less.
01:12:00.000Is technology going to get more persuasive or less persuasive?
01:12:24.000I think of this like the environmental movement.
01:12:26.000I mean, some people have compared the film The Social Dilemma to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
01:12:32.000Right, where that was the birth, that was the book that birthed the environmental movement.
01:12:36.000And that was in a Republican administration, the Nixon administration, we actually passed, we created the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.
01:12:42.000We went from a world where we said the environment is something we don't pay attention to, to we passed a bunch, I forgot the laws we passed between 1963 and 1972. Over a decade, we started caring about the environment.
01:12:53.000We created things that protected the national parks.
01:12:55.000We And I think that's kind of what's going on here, that, you know, imagine, for example, it is illegal to show advertising on youth-oriented social media apps between 12am and 6am, because you're basically monetizing loneliness and lack of sleep.
01:13:13.000Like, imagine that you cannot advertise during those hours, because we say that like a national park, our children's attention between...
01:13:19.000This is a very minimal example, by the way.
01:13:21.000This would be like, you know, taking the most obvious piece of low-hanging fruit and land and say, let's quarantine this off and say, this is sacred.
01:13:28.000But isn't the problem, like, the Environmental Protection Agency, it resonates with most people.
01:13:34.000The idea, oh, let's protect the world for our children.
01:13:42.000Well, there's, I mean, overhunting, you know, certain lands or overfishing certain fisheries and collapsing them.
01:13:47.000I mean, there are, if you have big enough corporations that are based on an infinite growth profit model, you know, operating with less and less For sure.
01:14:36.000Because sugar is always going to taste way better than something else, because our evolutionary heritage says, like, that's rare, and so we should pay more attention to it.
01:14:44.000This is like sugar for the fame lottery, for attention, for social approval.
01:14:48.000And so it's always going to feel good, and we need to have consciousness about it.
01:14:51.000And we haven't banned sugar, but we have created a new conversation about what healthy...
01:15:20.000You might want to look that up, but...
01:15:22.000So I think we could have something like that here where we have to...
01:15:26.000I think of it this way, if you want to even get kind of weirdly, I don't know, spiritual or something about it, which is we are the only species that could even know that we're doing this to ourselves.
01:15:38.000Like, we're the only species with the capacity for self-awareness to know that we have actually, like, roped ourselves into this matrix of, like, literally the matrix, of sort of undermining our own psychological weaknesses.
01:15:52.000A lion that somehow manipulated its environment so that there's gazelles everywhere and is overeating on gazelles doesn't have the self-awareness to know, wait a second, if we keep doing this, this is going to cause all these other problems.
01:16:03.000It can't do that because its brain doesn't have that capacity.
01:16:08.000We do have the capacity for self-awareness.
01:16:10.000We can name negativity bias, which is that if I have 100 comments and 99 are positive, my brain goes to the negative.
01:16:16.000We can name that, and once we're aware of it, we get some agency back.
01:16:19.000We can name that we have a draw towards social approval.
01:16:22.000So when I see I've been tagged in a photo, I know that they're just manipulating my social approval.
01:16:26.000We can name social reciprocity, which is when I get all those text messages and I feel, oh, I have to get back to all these people.
01:16:32.000Well, that's just an inbuilt bias that we have to get back reciprocity.
01:16:36.000We have to get back to people who give stuff to us.
01:16:39.000The more we name our own biases, like confirmation bias, we can name that my brain is more likely to feel good getting information that I already agree with than information that disagrees with me.
01:16:54.000And we're the only species that we know of that has the capacity to realize that we're in a self-terminating sort of system, and we have to change that by understanding our own weaknesses and that we've created the system that is undermining ourselves.
01:17:06.000And I think the film is doing that for a lot of people.
01:17:10.000It certainly is, but I think it needs more.
01:17:14.000It needs a refresher on a regular basis.
01:17:17.000Do you feel this massive obligation to be that guy that is out there sort of as the Paul Revere of the technology influence invasion?
01:17:30.000I just see these problems and I want them to go away.
01:17:33.000I didn't desire and wake up to run a social movement, but honestly, right now, that's what we're trying to do with the Center for Humane Technologies.
01:17:42.000We realized that before the success of the film, we were actually more focused on working with technologists inside the industry.
01:17:56.000We also worked with policymakers, and we were trying to speak to policymakers.
01:18:00.000We weren't trying to mobilize the whole world against this problem.
01:18:05.000But with the film, suddenly we as an organization have had to do that.
01:18:08.000And frankly, I wish we had—I'm speaking really honestly—I really wish we'd had those funnels so that people who saw the film could have landed into a carefully designed funnel where we actually started mobilizing people to deal with this issue.
01:18:22.000We have to have a new cultural sort of set of norms about how do we want to show up and use this system.
01:18:28.000You know, families and schools can have whole new protocols of how do we want to do group migrations?
01:18:32.000Because one of the problems is that if a teenager says by themselves, whoa, I saw the film, I'm going to delete my Instagram account by myself or TikTok account by myself, that's not enough because all their friends are still using Instagram and TikTok and they're still going to talk about who's dating who or gossip about this or homework or whatever on those services.
01:18:52.000And so the services, Instagram and TikTok, prey on social exclusion, that you will feel excluded if you don't participate.
01:18:59.000And the way to solve that is to get whole schools or families together, like different parent groups or whatever together, and do a group migration from Instagram to Signal or iMessage or some kind of group thread that way.
01:19:12.000Because notice that when you, as you said, Apple's a pretty good actor in this space.
01:19:16.000If I make a FaceTime call to you, FaceTime isn't trying to monetize my attention.
01:19:22.000It's just sitting there being like, yeah, how can I help you have a good, as close to face-to-face conversation as possible?
01:19:28.000Jamie pulled up an article earlier that was saying that Apple was creating its own search engine.
01:19:34.000I hope that is the case, and I hope that if it is the case, they apply the same sort of ethics that they have.
01:19:40.000Towards sharing your information that they do with other things to their search engine.
01:19:45.000But I wonder if there would be some sort of value in them creating a social media platform that doesn't rely on that sort of algorithm.
01:19:57.000Well, I think in general, one of the exciting trends that has happened since the film is there's actually many more people trying to build alternatives, social media products, that are not based on these business models.
01:20:10.000I could name a few, but I don't want to be endorsing anything.
01:20:13.000There's people building Marco Polo, Clubhouse, Wikipedia is trying to build a sort of non-profit version.
01:20:19.000I always forget the names of these things.
01:20:21.000But the interesting thing is that for the first time people are trying to build something else because now there's enough people who feel disgusted by the present state of affairs.
01:20:31.000And that wouldn't be possible unless we created a kind of a cultural movement based on something like the film that reaches a lot of people.
01:20:37.000It's interesting that you made this comparison to the Environmental Protection Agency because there's kind of a parallel in the way other countries handle the environment versus the way we do and how it makes them competitive.
01:20:48.000I mean, that's always been the Republican argument for not getting rid of certain fossil fuels and coal and all sorts of things that have a negative consequence, that we need to be competitive with China.
01:21:02.000We need to be competitive with these other countries that don't have these regulations in effect.
01:21:07.000The concern would be, well, first of all, the problem is these companies are global, right?
01:21:13.000If they put these regulations on America but didn't put these regulations worldwide, then wouldn't they use the income and the algorithm in other countries unchecked and have this tremendous negative consequence and gather up all this money?
01:21:30.000Which is why, just like Sugar, it's like everyone around the world has to understand and be more antagonistic.
01:21:34.000Not like sugar is evil, but just you have to have a common awareness about the problem.
01:21:38.000But how could you educate people that, like, if you're talking about a country like Myanmar or these other countries that have had these, like, serious consequences because of Facebook, how could you possibly get our ideas across to them if we don't even know their language?
01:22:12.000You need something like a global—I mean, language-independent, global self-awareness about this problem.
01:22:19.000Now, again, I don't want to be tooting the horn about the film, but the thing I'm excited about is It launched on Netflix in 190 countries and in 30 languages.
01:22:45.000But I get emails every day from Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, people saying, oh my god, this is exactly what's going on in my country.
01:22:54.000I mean, I've never felt more optimistic, and I've felt really pessimistic for the last eight years working on this, because there really hasn't been enough movement.
01:23:02.000But I think for the first time, there's a global awareness now that we could then start to mobilize.
01:23:07.000I know the EU is mobilizing, Canada is mobilizing, Australia is mobilizing, California state is mobilizing with Prop 24. There's a whole bunch of Movement now in the space, and they have a new rhetorical arsenal of, you know, why we have to make this bigger transition.
01:23:21.000Now, you know, are we going to get all the countries that, you know, where there's the six different major dialects in Ethiopia, where they're going to know about this?
01:23:30.000I don't think the film was translated into all those dialects.
01:23:34.000It's a really, really hard, messy problem.
01:23:37.000But on the topic of if we don't do it, someone else will...
01:23:43.000One interesting thing in the environmental movement was there's a great WNYC radio piece about the history of lead and when we regulated lead.
01:24:07.000And then the way we figured out that we should regulate lead out of our sort of infused product supply...
01:24:17.000There was this guy who proved that it dropped kids' IQ by four points for every, I think, microgram per deciliter, I think.
01:24:29.000So in other words, if you had a microgram of lead per deciliter of either, I'm guessing, air, it would drop the IQ of kids by four points.
01:24:39.000And they measured this by actually doing a sample on their teeth or something, because lead shows up in your bones, I think.
01:24:45.000And they proved that if the IQ points dropped by four points, it would lower future wage-earning potential of those kids, which would then lower the GDP of the country, because it would be shifting the IQ of the entire country down by four points,
01:25:03.000if not more, based on how much lead is in the environment.
01:25:06.000If you zoom out and say, is social media...
01:25:10.000Now, let's replace the word IQ, which is also a rot term because there's like a whole bunch of views about how that's designed in certain ways and not others and measuring intelligence.
01:25:19.000Let's replace IQ with problem-solving capacity.
01:25:22.000What is your problem-solving capacity?
01:25:24.000Which is actually how they talk about it in this radio episode.
01:25:28.000And imagine that we have a societal IQ or a societal problem-solving capacity.
01:25:33.000The US has a societal IQ. Russia has a societal IQ. Germany has a societal IQ. How good is a country at solving its problems?
01:25:42.000Now imagine that what does social media do to our societal IQ? Well, it distorts our ideas.
01:25:50.000It gives us a bunch of false narratives.
01:25:52.000It fills us with misinformation and nonsense.
01:25:55.000It makes it impossible to agree with each other.
01:25:57.000And in a democracy, if you don't agree with each other and you can't even do compromise, you have to recognize that politics is invented to avoid warfare, right?
01:26:12.000If social media makes compromise, conversation, and shared understanding and shared truth impossible, It doesn't drop our societal IQ by four points.
01:26:22.000Because you can't solve any problem, whether it's human trafficking, or poverty, or climate issues, or racial injustice, whatever it is that you care about.
01:26:33.000It depends on us having some shared view about what we agree on.
01:26:59.000And when two people who traditionally disagree actually agree on something, that's what gets boosted to the top of the way that we look at our information feeds.
01:27:09.000So it's about finding consensus where they'd be unlikely and saying, hey, actually, you, Joe, and Tristan, typically you disagree on these six things, but you agree on these three things.
01:27:18.000And of things that we're going to encourage you to talk about on a menu, we hand you a menu of the things you agree on.
01:28:29.000Whereas the United States, we're not this tiny island with a looming threat elsewhere.
01:28:33.000In fact, many people don't know or don't think that there's actually information warfare going on.
01:28:38.000I actually think it's really important to point out to people that...
01:28:43.000The social media is one of our biggest national security risks because while we're obsessed with protecting our physical borders and building walls and spending a trillion dollars redoing the nuclear fleet, we left the digital border wide open.
01:28:56.000Like if Russia or China try to fly a plane into the United States, Our Pentagon and billions of dollars of defense infrastructure from Raytheon and Boeing or whatever will shoot that thing down and it doesn't get in.
01:29:06.000If they try to come into the country, they'll get stopped by the passport control system, ideally.
01:29:11.000If Russia or China try to fly an information bomb into the country, instead of being met by the Department of Defense, they're met by a Facebook algorithm with a white glove that says exactly which zip code you want to target.
01:29:23.000Like, it's the opposite of protection.
01:29:25.000So social media makes us more vulnerable.
01:29:27.000I think of it like, if you imagine like a bank that spent billions of dollars, you know, surrounding the bank with physical bodyguards, right?
01:29:35.000Like, just the buffest guys in every single quarter, you just totally secured the bank.
01:29:39.000But then you install on the bank a computer system that everyone interacts with.
01:29:44.000And no one changes the default password from like lowercase password.
01:30:02.000Just keep in mind the dozens of countries throughout Africa where we actually know recently there was a huge campaign that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center did a report on of Russia targeting I think something like seven or eight major countries and disinformation campaigns running in those countries.
01:30:18.000Or the Facebook whistleblower who came out about a month ago, Sophie Zhang, I think is her name, saying that she personally had to step in to deal with disinformation campaigns in Honduras, Azerbaijan, I think Greece or some other countries like that.
01:30:32.000So the scale of what these technology companies are managing, they're managing the information environments for all these countries, but they don't have the resources to do it.
01:30:47.000They're 20 to 30 to 40. And they're way behind the curve.
01:30:49.000When I had Renee to rest on, and she detailed all the issues with the Internet Research Agency in Russia and what they did during the 2016 campaign for both sides.
01:31:00.000I mean, the idea is they just promoted Trump, but they were basically sowing the seeds of...
01:31:27.000And if I'm one of our major adversaries, after World War II, there was no ability to use kinetic nukes or something on the bigger countries, right?
01:32:16.000Maybe people would argue the Civil War was worse, but in recent history, there is maximum incentive for foreign actors to drive up, again, not one side or the other, but to drive us into conflict.
01:32:30.000So I think what we all need to do is recognize how much incentive there is to plant stories, to actually have so physical violence on the streets.
01:32:40.000I think there was just a story, wasn't we talking about this morning, that Yeah.
01:33:08.000And the Renee DiResta podcast that I did, where she went into depth about all the different ways that they did it, and the most curious one being funny memes.
01:33:31.000You would laugh at them and say, like, oh, you know.
01:33:33.000And they're being constructed by foreign agents that are doing this to try to mock certain aspects of our society and pit people against each other and create a mockery.
01:33:46.000And, you know, back in 2016, there was very little collaboration between our defense industry and CIA and DOD and people like that and the tech platforms.
01:33:56.000And the tech platforms said it's government's job to deal with if foreign actors are doing these things.
01:34:00.000How do you stop something like the IRA? Like, say, if they're creating memes in particular, and they're funny memes.
01:34:07.000One of the issues that Renee brings up, and I'm just a huge fan of her and her work, is that if I'm China, I don't need to invent some fake news story.
01:34:19.000I just find someone in your society who's already saying what I want you to be talking about, and I just amplify them up.
01:34:26.000I take that dial, and I just turn it up to 10. So I find your Texas secessionists, and like, oh, Texas secessionists, that would be a good thing if I'm trying to rip the country apart.
01:34:34.000So I'm going to take those Texas secessionists and the California secessionists, And I'm just going to dial them up to 10. So those are the ones we hear from.
01:34:41.000Now, if you're trying to stop me in your Facebook and you're the integrity team or something, on what grounds are you trying to stop me?
01:34:48.000Because it's your own people, your own free speech.
01:34:50.000I'm just the one amplifying the one I want to be out there.
01:34:54.000And so that's what gets tricky about this is I think our moral concepts that we hold so dear of free speech are inadequate in an attention economy that is hackable.
01:35:03.000And it's really more about what's getting the attention rather than what are individuals saying or can't say.
01:35:10.000Again, they've created this Frankenstein where they're making mostly automated decisions about who's looking like what pattern behavior or coordinated and authentic behavior here or that, and they're shutting down.
01:35:21.000Facebook shut down 2 billion fake accounts.
01:35:24.000I think this is a stat from a year ago.
01:35:27.000They shut down 2 billion fake accounts.
01:35:29.000They have 3 billion active real users.
01:35:31.000Do you think that those 2 billion were the perfect real fake accounts and they didn't miss any or they didn't overwhelm and took some real accounts down with it?
01:35:40.000Our friend Brett Weinstein, he just got taken down by Facebook.
01:36:09.000That seemed to me to be a calculated thing because, you know, Eric actually tweeted about it saying that, you know, you could probably find the tweet because I retweeted it.
01:36:18.000Like, basically, it was reviewed by a person, so you're lying.
01:36:22.000He's like, this is not something that was taken down by an algorithm.
01:36:26.000He believes that it was because it was Unity 2020 platform where they were trying to bring together conservatives and liberals.
01:36:33.000And try to find some common ground and create, like, a third-party candidate that combines the best of both worlds.
01:36:39.000I don't understand what policy his Unity 2020 thing was going up against.
01:36:44.000Like, I have no idea what they would say.
01:36:45.000It's going against the two-party system.
01:36:46.000The idea is that it's taking away votes from Biden and that it may help Trump win.
01:37:04.000The political bias on social media is undeniable, and that's maybe the least of our concerns in the long run, but it's a tremendous issue, and it also, it for sure sows the seeds of discontent, and it creates more animosity, and it creates more conflict.
01:37:20.000The interesting thing is that if I'm one of our adversaries, I see that there is this view that people don't like the social media platforms and I want them to be more...
01:37:36.000I can actually plant a story so that they end up shutting it down and shutting down conservatives or shutting down one side, which then forces the platforms to open up more so that I then, Russia or China, can keep manipulating even more.
01:39:01.000And it could suck up your time staring at butts.
01:39:04.000And the infusion of the things that are necessary for life, like text messaging or looking something up, are infused and right next to all of the sort of corrupt stuff.
01:39:15.000And if you're using it to order food, and if you're using it to get an Uber.
01:39:20.000But imagine if we all wiped our phones of all the extractive business model stuff and we only had the tools.
01:39:26.000Well, have you thought about using a light phone?
01:40:22.000I think the thing is, one thing people can do is just take like a digital Sabbath one day a week off completely.
01:40:27.000Because imagine if you got several hundred million people to do that.
01:40:31.000That drops the revenue of these companies by like 15%.
01:40:34.000Because that's one out of seven days that you're not on the system, so long as you don't rebalance and...
01:40:39.000I'm inclined to think that Apple's, their solution is really the way out of this.
01:40:44.000To opt out of all sharing of your information.
01:40:49.000And if they could come up with some sort of a social media platform that kept that as an ethic, I mean, it might allow us to communicate with each other, but stop all this algorithm nonsense.
01:41:01.000Look, if anybody has the power to do it, they have so much goddamn money.
01:41:05.000Well, and also, people talk about the government regulating these platforms, but Apple is kind of the government that can regulate the attention economy.
01:41:23.000When they do that, they just put a 30% tax on all the advertising-based businesses because now you don't get as personalized an ad, which means they make less money, which means that business model is less attractive to venture capitalists to fund the next thing.
01:41:35.000So they're actually enacting a kind of a carbon tax, but it's like on the polluting stuff.
01:41:43.000Social media polluting stuff, they're taxing by 30%, but they could do more than that.
01:41:47.000Imagine they have this 30-70 split on app developers get 70% of the revenue when you buy stuff and Apple keeps 30%.
01:41:55.000They could modify that percentage based on how much social value that those things are delivering to society.
01:42:04.000This gets a little bit weird, and people may not like this, but if you think about who's the real customer that we want to be, how do we want things oriented?
01:42:11.000If I'm an app developer, I want to make money the more I'm helping society and helping individuals, not how much I'm extracting and stealing their time and attention.
01:42:19.000And imagine that governments in the future actually paid some kind of budget into, let's say, the app store.
01:42:25.000There's antitrust issues with this, but you pay money into the app store.
01:42:28.000And then as apps started helping people with more social outcomes, like let's say learning programs or schools or things like Khan Academy, things like this, that more money flows in the direction of where people got that value.
01:42:40.000And it was that revenue split between Apple and the app developers ends up going more to things that end up helping people, as opposed to things that were just good at capturing attention and monetizing zombie behavior.
01:42:51.000One of my favorite lines in the film is Justin Rosenstein from the Like button, Saying that, you know, so long as a whale is worth more dead than alive, and a tree is worth more as lumber and two-by-fours than a living tree,
01:43:07.000now we're the whale, we're the tree, we're worth more when we have predictable zombie-like behaviors, when we're more addicted, distracted, outraged, polarized, and disinformed than if we're a living, thriving citizen or a growing child that's like playing with their friends.
01:43:24.000And I think that that kind of distinction that just like we protect national parks or we protect, you know, certain fisheries and we don't kill the whales in those areas or something, we need to really protect, like, we have to call out what's sacred to us now.
01:43:41.000My problem that I see is that I just don't know how well that message is going to be absorbed on the people that are already in the trance.
01:43:52.000I think it's so difficult for people to put things down.
01:43:55.000Like I was telling you how difficult it is for me to tell my friends don't read the comments.
01:44:28.000Please share your experiences because when you said you tried to change it from the inside, what kind of resistance were you met with and what was their reaction to these thoughts that you had about the unbelievable negative consequences?
01:44:42.000Well, this is in 2013, so we didn't know about all the negative consequences.
01:44:46.000But you saw the writing on the wall, at least some of it.
01:44:49.000I mean, the notion that things were competing for attention, which would mean that they would need to compete to get more and more persuasive and hack more and more of our vulnerabilities, and that that would grow, that was the core insight.
01:44:59.000I didn't know that it would lead to polarization or conspiracy theory, like, recommendations.
01:45:03.000But I did know, you know, more addiction, kids having less, you know, weaker relationships...
01:45:14.000I was on a hiking trip in the Santa Cruz Mountains with our co-founder now, Aza Raskin.
01:45:20.000It's funny enough, our co-founder Aza, his dad was Jeff Raskin, who invented the Macintosh project at Apple.
01:45:26.000I don't know if you know the history there.
01:45:28.000He started the Macintosh project and actually came up with the word humane to describe the humane interface.
01:45:34.000And that's where our name and our work comes from, is from his father's work.
01:45:37.000He and I were in the mountains in Santa Cruz and just experiencing nature and just...
01:45:43.000I came back and realized all of this stuff that we've built is just distracting us from the stuff that's really important.
01:45:50.000And that's when, coming back from that trip, I made the first Google Deck that then spread virally throughout the company, saying, never before in history have 50 designers.
01:46:00.000You know, white 20 to 35 year old engineers who look like me to hold the collective psyche of humanity.
01:46:07.000And then that presentation was released and about, you know, 10,000 people at Google saw it.
01:46:12.000It was actually the number one We need to do something about this.
01:46:37.000It was just very hard to get momentum on it.
01:46:40.000And really the key interfaces to change within Google are Chrome and Android because those are the neutral portals into which you're then using apps and notifications and websites and all of that.
01:46:51.000Like those are the kind of governments of the attention economy that Google runs.
01:46:55.000And when you worked there, did you have to use Android?
01:47:01.000Was it part of the requirement to work there?
01:47:04.000No, I mean a lot of people had Android phones.
01:47:09.000No, I mean, people, because they realized that they needed products to work on all the phones.
01:47:14.000I mean, if you work directly on Android, then you would have to use an Android phone.
01:47:17.000But we tried to get, you know, some of those things like the screen time features that are now launched, you know, so everyone now has on their phone, like, it shows you the number of hours or whatever.
01:48:10.000The fundamental thing we have to change is the incentives and how money flows.
01:48:13.000Because we want money flowing in the direction of the more these things help us.
01:48:17.000Like, let me give you a concrete example.
01:48:19.000Like, let's say you want to learn a musical instrument.
01:48:22.000And you go to YouTube to pick up ukulele or whatever.
01:48:26.000And you're seeing how to play the ukulele.
01:48:28.000Like, from that point, in a system that was designed in a humane and sort of time-well-spent kind of way...
01:48:34.000It would really ask you, instead of saying, here's 20 more videos that are going to just like suck you down a rabbit hole, it would sort of be more oriented towards what do you really need help with?
01:48:54.000Because there's actually this service you never heard of called Skillshare or something like that, where you can get instant ukulele tutoring.
01:48:59.000And if we're really designing these things to be about what would most help you next, You know, we're only as good as the menu of choices on life's menu, and right now the menu is here's something else to addict you and keep you hooked instead of here's a next step that would actually be on the trajectory of helping people live their lives better.
01:49:17.000But you'd have to incentivize the companies because like there's so much incentive on getting you addicted because there's so much financial reward.
01:49:23.000What would be the financial reward that they could have to get you something that would be helpful for you like lessons or this?
01:49:31.000I mean, so one way that that could work is like, let's say people pay a monthly subscription of like, I don't know, 20 bucks a month or something.
01:49:54.000And they approached us and they're like, we're just going to get all these people together and people are going to pay to use your podcast.
01:50:01.000I'm like, why would they do that when podcasts are free?
01:50:32.000We have to actually deliver something that is totally qualitatively better.
01:50:36.000And it would also have to be someone like you or someone who's really aware of the issues that we're dealing with with addictions to social media should have to say this is the best possible alternative.
01:50:48.000Like in this environment, yes, you are paying a certain amount of money per month, but maybe that could get factored into your cell phone bill.
01:50:58.000And maybe with this sort of an ecosystem, you're no longer being drawn in by your addictions and, you know, it's not playing for your attention span.
01:51:09.000It's rewarding you in a very productive way.
01:51:14.00015% more of your time was just way better spent.
01:51:18.000You were actually doing the things you cared about.
01:51:21.000And it actually helped improve your life.
01:51:32.000For me, web browsing or whatever is a big one.
01:51:35.000Imagine that those things were so much better designed that I actually wrote back to the right emails and I mostly didn't think about the rest that when I was spending time on whatever I was spending time on that it was really more and more of my life was a life well lived and time well spent.
01:52:15.000Barely scratching the surface, like baby, baby, baby steps.
01:52:18.000What we really need them to do is radically reimagine how those incentives and how the phone fundamentally works.
01:52:25.000So it's not just all these colorful icons.
01:52:27.000And one of the problems, they do have a disincentive, which is a lot of their revenue comes from gaming.
01:52:30.000And as they move more into Apple TV competing with HBO and Hulu and Netflix and that whole thing, where they need subscriptions, so Apple's revenue on devices and hardware is sort of maxing out.
01:52:41.000And where they're going to get their next bout of revenue to keep their stock price up is on these subscriptions.
01:52:46.000I'm less concerned with those addictions.
01:52:48.000I'm less concerned with gaming addictions than information addictions because at least it's not fundamentally altering your view of the world.
01:53:34.000I don't mind them making a profit off games.
01:53:37.000There is an issue, though, with games that addict children, and then these children, you could spend money on Roblox, and you can have all these different things you spend money on.
01:53:49.000You wind up having these enormous bills.
01:53:52.000You leave your kid with an iPad, and you come back, you have a $500 bill.
01:54:00.000But at least it's not an issue in that it's changing their view of the world.
01:54:06.000And I feel like there's a way for—I keep going back to Apple—but a company like Apple to rethink the way—you know, they already have a walled garden, right, with iMessage and FaceTime and all this different— They can totally build those things out.
01:54:21.000I mean, iMessage and iCloud could be the basis for some new neutral social media that's not based on instant social approval and rewards, right?
01:54:30.000They can make it easier to share information with small groups of friends and have that all synced.
01:54:33.000And even, you know, in the pre-COVID days, I was thinking about Apple a lot.
01:54:37.000I think you're right, by the way, to really poke on them.
01:54:39.000I think they're the one company that's in a position to lead on this.
01:54:42.000And they also have a history of thinking along those lines.
01:54:46.000You know, they had this feature that's kind of hidden now, but the Find My Friends, right?
01:54:51.000It's all buried together so you can find your devices and find your friends.
01:54:54.000But in a pre-COVID world, imagine they really built out the, you know, where are my friends right now and making it easier to know when you're nearby someone so you can more easily get together in person.
01:55:05.000Because right now, to the extent Facebook wants to bring people closer together...
01:55:08.000They don't want to, and again, this is pre-COVID, but they don't want to incentivize lots and lots of Facebook events.
01:55:14.000They really care about groups that keep people posting it online and looking at ads because of the category of bringing people closer together, they want to do the online screen time based version of that as opposed to the offline.
01:55:24.000Apple, by contrast, if you had little iMessage groups of friends, you could say, hey, does everyone in this little group want to opt into being able to see where we all are on, say, weekdays between 5 and 8 p.m.
01:55:45.000But there's things like that that Apple's in a position to do if it really took on that mantle.
01:55:50.000And I think as people get more and more skeptical of these other products, they're in a better and better position to do that.
01:55:56.000One of the antitrust issues is do we want a world where our entire well-being as a society depends on what one massive corporation worth over a trillion dollars does or doesn't do?
01:56:05.000We need more openness to try different things.
01:56:09.000And we're really at the behest of whether one or two companies, Apple or Google, I think we're good to go.
01:56:39.000You know, we have a hugely emitting, you know, society-ruining kind of business model of this attention-extractive paradigm, and we could long-term sort of just like a progressive tax on that transition to some other thing.
01:56:56.000It's how do we disincentivize these businesses to pay for the sort of life support systems of society that they've ruined.
01:57:02.000A good example of this, I think, in Australia.
01:57:06.000I think it's Australia that's regulated that Google and Facebook have to pay the publishers who they're basically hollowing out.
01:57:12.000Because one of the effects we've not talked about is the way that Google and Facebook have hollowed out the fourth estate in journalism.
01:57:18.000I mean, because journalism has turned into, and local news websites can't make any money except by basically producing clickbait.
01:57:24.000So even to the extent that local newspapers exist, they only exist by basically clickbaitification of lower and lower paid workers who are just generating content farms.
01:57:35.000Anyway, so that's an example of if you force those companies to pay to revitalize the fourth estate and to make sure we have a very sustainably funded fourth estate that doesn't have to produce this clickbait stuff, that's another direction.
01:57:50.000Yeah, that's interesting that they have to pay.
01:57:55.000I mean, these are the wealthiest companies in, like, the history of humanity, right?
01:57:59.000So we shouldn't be cautious about how much they should have to pay.
01:58:03.000Except we also don't want it to happen on the other end, right?
01:58:05.000You don't want to have a world where, you know, we have Roundup making a crazy amount of money from giving everybody cancer and lymphoma from, you know, the chemicals.
01:58:39.000Yeah, I mean, this is where the IQ lead example is interesting because they were able to disincentivize and tax the lead producers because they were able to produce some result on how much this lowered the wage earning potentials of the entire population.
01:58:54.000I mean, how much does this cost our society?
01:58:56.000We used to say free is the most expensive business model we've ever created because we get the free downgrading of our attention spans, our mental health, our kids, our ability to agree with each other, our capacity to do anything as a democracy.
01:59:21.000We have a global competition, power competition going on.
01:59:23.000I think China just passed the GDP of the US, I believe.
01:59:29.000If we care about the US having a future in which it can lead the world in some meaningful and enlightened way, we have to deal with this problem.
01:59:39.000And we have to have a world where digital democracy outcompetes digital authoritarianism.
02:01:34.000If you care about this going well, I wake up every day and I ask, what will it take for this whole thing to go well?
02:01:41.000And how do we just orient each of our choices as much as possible towards this going well?
02:01:45.000And we have a whole bunch of problems.
02:01:47.000I do look a lot at the environmental issues, the permafrost, methane bombs.
02:01:51.000The timelines that we have to deal with certain problems are crunching, and we also have certain dangerous exponential technologies that are emerging, decentralization of, you know, CRISPR, and, like, there's a lot of existential threats.
02:02:02.000I hang out a lot with the sort of existential threats community.
02:02:18.000It's hard, but I think we each have a responsibility when you see this stuff to say, what will it take for this to go well?
02:02:26.000And I will say that really seeing the film impact people the way that it has I used to feel like, oh my god, how are we ever going to do this?
02:03:30.000And it's kind of related to the kind of deepfake world, right?
02:03:33.000Where like people prefer this to the real thing.
02:03:34.000And Sherry Turkle, you know, who's been working at MIT, wrote the book Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together.
02:03:39.000She's been talking about this forever, that over time, humans will prefer connection to robots and bots.
02:03:46.000And the computer-generated thing more than the real thing.
02:03:48.000Think about AI-generated music being more...
02:03:52.000It'll start to sweeten our taste buds and give us exactly that thing we're looking for better than we will know ourselves.
02:03:57.000Just like YouTube can give us the perfect next video that actually every bone in our body will say, actually, I kind of do want to watch that, even though it's a machine pointed at my brain calculating the next thing.
02:04:06.000There's an example from Microsoft writing this chatbot called Zhao Ice, I don't know how to pronounce it, that after nine weeks people preferred that chatbot to their real friends.
02:04:15.000And 10 to 25% of their users actually said, I love you, to the chatbot.
02:04:29.000So all these things are the same, right?
02:04:31.000We're veering into a direction where technology, if it's so good at meeting these underlying paleolithic emotions that we have, the way out of it is we have to see that this is what's going on.
02:04:44.000We have to see and reckon with ourselves, saying, this is how I work.
02:05:20.000I struggle with the idea that this is all inevitable because this is a natural course of progression with technology and that it's sort of figuring out the best way to...
02:06:04.000We've changed— Some of our pesticides were slow on some of these things, and corporate interests and asymmetric power of large corporations, which I want to say markets and capitalism are great, because when you have asymmetric power for predatory systems that cause harm,
02:06:20.000they're not going to terminate themselves.
02:06:22.000They have to be bound in by the public, by culture, by the state.
02:06:27.000And we just have to point to the examples where we've done that.
02:06:30.000And in this case, I think the problem is that how much of our stock market is built on the back of like five companies generating a huge amount of wealth.
02:06:40.000I don't mean to make this example, but there's a great book by...
02:06:45.000Adam Hochschild called Bury the Chains, which is about the British abolition of slavery, in which he talks about how for the British Empire, like if you think about it, when we collectively wake up and say, this is an abhorrent practice that has to end,
02:07:01.000but then at that time in the 1700s, 1800s in Britain, slavery was what powered the entire economy.
02:07:08.000It was free labor for a huge percentage of the economy.
02:07:11.000So if you say, we can't do this anymore, we have to stop this, how do you decouple when your entire economy is based on slavery?
02:07:19.000And the book is actually inspiring because it tracks a collective movement that was through networked all these different groups, the Quakers in the U.S., the people testifying before Parliament, the former slaves who did firsthand accounts, the graphics and art of all the People had never seen what it looked like on a slave ship.
02:07:37.000And so by making the invisible visceral and showing just how abhorrent this stuff was, through a period of about 60 to 70 years, the British Empire had to drop their GDP by 2% every year for 60 years and willing to do that to get off of slavery.
02:07:52.000Now, I'm not making a moral equivalence.
02:07:54.000I want to be really clear for everybody taking things out of context.
02:07:58.000But just that it's possible for us to do something that isn't just in the interest of economic growth.
02:08:04.000And I think that's the real challenge.
02:08:06.000That's actually something that should be on the agenda, which is one of the major tensions is economic growth being in conflict with dealing with many of our problems, whether it's some of the environmental issues or some of the technology issues we're talking about right now.
02:08:20.000Artificial intelligence is something that people are terrified of as an existential threat.
02:08:25.000They think of it as one day you're going to turn something on and it's going to be sentient and it's going to be able to create other forms of artificial intelligence that are exponentially more powerful than the one that we created and that will have unleashed this beast that we cannot control.
02:08:41.000What my concern is with all of this...
02:09:31.000That's what AI is doing now, except it's pointed at our nervous system and figuring out the perfect thing to dangle in front of our dopamine system and get the thing to happen, which instead of knocking off the vase is to be outraged at the other political side and be fully certain that you're right, even though it's just a machine that's calculating shit that's going to make you,
02:10:04.000I don't know if you mess around with VR at all, but...
02:10:07.000Well, this is the point about the virtual chatbots out-competing our real friends and the technology.
02:10:12.000I mean, that's what's happening is that reality is getting more and more virtual because we interact with a virtual news system that's all this sort of clickbait economy, outrage machine that's already a virtual political environment that then translates into real-world action and then becomes real.
02:10:29.000Go back to 1990, whatever it was, when the internet became mainstream, or at least started becoming mainstream, and the small amount of time that it took, the 20 plus years, to get to where we are now, and then think, what about the virtual world?
02:10:45.000And once this becomes something that's...
02:11:50.000It's essential to us as we know it, like as life, as we know it.
02:11:54.000But my worry is that we're inessential.
02:11:58.000We're thinking now, like single-celled organisms, being like, hey, I don't want to gang up with a bunch of other people and become an object that can walk.
02:12:06.000I like being a single-celled organism.
02:12:22.000But what if the next version of what life is is better?
02:12:26.000But the next version being run by machines that have no values, that don't care, that don't have choice, and are just maximizing for things that were programmed in by our little miniature brains anyway.
02:13:31.000We are what we are now, human beings, homo sapiens in 2020. We are this thing that, if you believe in evolution, I'm pretty sure you do, we've evolved over the course of millions of years to become who we are right now.
02:14:11.000No, I mean, I think this is what visions of Star Trek and things like that were trying to ask, right?
02:14:15.000Like, hey, let's imagine humans do make it, and we become the most enlightened we can be, and we actually somehow make peace with these other, you know, alien tribes, and we figure out, you know, space travel and all of that.
02:14:28.000Actually, a good heuristic that I think people can ask is, on an enlightened planet where we did figure this out, what would that have looked like?
02:14:35.000Isn't it always weird that those movies, it's people are just people, but they're in some weird future.
02:14:41.000But they haven't really changed that much.
02:15:07.000I mean, we're going to get into gene editing and becoming more perfect, perfect on the sense of, you know, that, but we are going to start optimizing for what are the outcomes that we value.
02:15:18.000I think the question is, how do we actually come up with brand new values that are wiser than we've ever thought of before, that actually are able to transcend the win-lose games that lead to omni-lose-lose, that everyone loses if we keep playing the win-lose game at greater and greater scales?
02:15:33.000I, like you, have a vested interest in the biological existence of human beings.
02:16:16.000I don't mean to be, you know, playing the woo-woo new age card.
02:16:19.000I just genuinely mean how much of our lives is just running away from, you know, anxiety and discomfort and aversion.
02:16:27.000It is, but, you know, in that sense, some of the most satisfied and happy people are people that live a subsistence living, that have these subsistence existences in the middle of nowhere, just chopping trees and catching fish.
02:16:40.000Right, and more connection, probably, that's authentic, than something else.
02:16:43.000And I think that's what this is really bad.
02:16:44.000It probably resonates biologically, too, because of the history of human beings living like that.
02:17:40.000So especially when we get into big tech and we talk about censorship a lot and we talk about Orwell, he has this really wonderful opening to this book.
02:17:48.000It was written in 1982. It literally predicts everything that's going on now.
02:17:51.000I frankly think that I'm adding nothing and it's really just Neil Postman called it all in 1982. Wow.
02:18:04.000We were all looking out for, you know, 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.
02:18:11.000The roots of liberal democracy had held.
02:18:14.000This is like we made it through the 1984 gap.
02:18:16.000Wherever else the terror had happened, we at least had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
02:18:22.000But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling vision of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
02:18:32.000Contrary to common belief, even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophecy the same thing.
02:18:39.000Orwell warns that we will become overcome by an externally imposed oppression.
02:18:44.000But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, or history.
02:18:50.000As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
02:18:57.000What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
02:19:00.000What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
02:19:07.000Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
02:19:10.000Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
02:19:16.000Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us.
02:19:19.000Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
02:19:24.000Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
02:19:27.000But Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies and the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble puppy.
02:19:36.000As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
02:19:50.000Lastly, in 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
02:19:55.000In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
02:19:59.000In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us.
02:20:02.000Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
02:20:12.000But again, if we can become aware that this is what's happened, we're the only species with the capacity to see that our own psychology, our own emotions, our own paleolithic evolutionary system has been hijacked.