#218 — Welcome to the Cult Factory
Episode Stats
Summary
Tristan Harris is back on the podcast to talk about The Social Dilemma, a new Netflix documentary that explores the growing problem of social media and the fracturing of society. In this episode, Sam talks with Tristan about why we need to get a grip on the problem, and why we can t seem to converge on a shared understanding of what's happening so much of the time, and how we might be to blame for it. Sam also announces a new Zoom call for subscribers, and introduces a new feature-length episode of the podcast called "Wake Up! that will be released on October 7th, featuring a new episode of The Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris, hosted by Alex Blumberg. Subscribe to the Making Sense podcast on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review! You can also become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron patron of Making Sense, where you get 20% off the first month with discount code "MISINGSENSE" at checkout. If you like what you hear, please consider pledging a small monthly fee of $19.99. You'll get access to the show and access to all future episodes, plus an ad-free version for as little as $1.99, plus a free copy of the book "Making Sense" by clicking the link in the iTunes store. Thanks for supporting the podcast! Subscribe, rate, and review on Audible, and share the podcast on your favorite podcast app! Sam Harris's newest book "The Social Media Problem" by Good Mythology. Good Luck, Sam Harris and Good Luck! Timestar, Tim is a fellow Mentioned in the new book, Good Luck Out There! . Thanks, Sam Tim is Thank you, Tim Gooding, Tim, and Good Morning, Tim and Good Fortune, by: by: Tristan Harris. Tim Goodell, Good Morning and Good Life, by , by: Tim Gooden, by , & in the Good Morning's Good Thing, by Tim Gooder, , and is a book written by . . by Jeff Perhans, Good Day, and by David Goodell (Goodbye, and Thank You, and Thanks, Tim's Dad, by Mr. James Goodell.
Transcript
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And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast.
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So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at samharris.org to request a free
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First, I will be doing another Zoom call for subscribers, and that will be on October 7th.
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I'm not sure if that's going to be an open-ended Q&A, or whether the questions will be focused
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But anyway, the last one was fun, and hopefully the fun will continue.
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So I will see you on October 7th, and you should be on my mailing list if you want those details.
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Also, there's a few exciting changes happening over on the waking up side of things.
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So pay attention over there if you're an app user.
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Tristan has been on the podcast before, and he is one of the central figures in a new documentary,
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And that film is The Social Dilemma, which discusses the growing problem of social media
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and the fracturing of society, which is our theme today.
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So as you'll hear, I highly recommend that you watch this film.
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But I think you'll also get a lot from this conversation.
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I mean, if you're looking out at the world and wondering why things seem so crazy out there,
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Or it's the reason that is aggregating so many other reasons.
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It's the reason why we can't converge on a shared understanding of what's happening so much of the time.
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We can't agree about whether specific events attest to an epidemic of racism in our society
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or whether these events are caused by some other derangement in our thinking
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We can't agree about what's actually happening.
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And amazingly, we are about to hold a presidential election that it seems our democracy might not even survive.
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Really, it seems valid to worry whether we might be tipped into chaos by merely holding a presidential election.
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But the fact that we can't stay sane as a society right now,
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that is largely due to the fact that we are simply drowning in misinformation.
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Anyway, that is the topic of today's conversation.
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And I was very happy to get Tristan back on the podcast.
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Pre-COVID, we were bringing everyone into studios where they could be professionally recorded.
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Now we're shipping people Zoom devices and microphones.
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But apologies if any of the audio sounds subpar.
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Tristan, it's great to get you back on the podcast.
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It's been a while since the first time I was on here.
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And it's, to my eye, everything has gotten worse.
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So, there's more damage to analyze and try to prevent in the future.
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But before we jump in, remind people who you are and how you come at these things.
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What's your brief bio that's relevant to this conversation?
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Well, just to say briefly, I guess one of the reasons why we're talking now and most relevant
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to my recent biography is the new Netflix documentary that just came out called The Social Dilemma.
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You know, in which all these technology insiders are speaking about the Frankenstein that they've created.
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Prior to that, I was a Google design ethicist coming in through an acquisition of a technology company that I had started called Apture that Google acquired.
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And after being at the company for a little while, migrated into a role of thinking about how do you ethically steer 2 billion people's attention when you hold the collective human psyche in your hands.
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And then prior to that, as, you know, is also discussed in the film, is I was at Stanford to study computer science, human-computer interaction.
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But specifically at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab, which I'm sure we'll get into, which relates to just sort of a lifelong view of how is the human mind vulnerable to psychological influence?
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And have had a fascination with those topics from cults to sleight of hand magic to mentalism and heroes like Darren Brown, who's a mutual friend of ours, and how that plays into the things that we're seeing with technology.
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Yeah, so I just want to reiterate that this film, The Social Dilemma, is on Netflix now, and yeah, that's the proximate cause of this conversation.
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It really covers the issue in a compelling way.
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I would count Netflix as, I'm sure they're an offender in some way, but they're, I mean, their business model really is distinct from much of what we're going to talk about.
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I mean, they just, they could have made the choice to, they're clearly gaming people's attention because they're, they want to cancel churn, and they want people on the platform and deriving as much value from the platform as possible.
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But there is something different going on over there with respect to not, not being part of the ad economy and the attention economy in quite the same way.
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But is there a bright line between proper subscription services like that and what we're going to talk about?
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Yeah, I mean, I think the core question we're here to talk about is in what, in which ways and where are technology's incentives aligned with the public good?
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And I think the problem that brings us here today is where technology's incentives are misaligned with the public good through the business model of advertising and through models like user-generated content.
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Clearly, because we live in a finite attention economy where there's only so much human attention, we are managing a commons, a collective environment.
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And because Netflix, like any other actor, including politicians, including conferences, including you or I or this podcast or my podcast, we're all competing for the same finite resource.
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And so there's a difference, I think, in how different business models engage in an attention economy, but a business model in which the cost of producing things that are going to reach exponential numbers of people, exponential broadcasts in the case of Netflix, but also in the case of these other companies, there's a difference when there's a sense of ethics or responsibility or privacy or child's controls that we add into that equation.
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And I'm sure we'll get more into that equation, and I'm sure we'll get more into those topics.
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Right. Okay, so let's take it from the top here.
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If you could boil it down to the elevator pitch answer, what is the problem that we're going to unspool over the next hour or so?
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Well, it's funny because the film actually opens with that prompt, the blank stares of many technology insiders, including myself, because I think it's so hard to define exactly what this problem is.
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There's clearly a problem of incentives, but beneath that, there's a problem of what those incentives are doing and where the exact harms show up.
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And the way that we frame it in the film and in a big presentation we gave at the SF Jazz Center back in April 2019 to a bunch of the top technologists and people in the industry was to say that while we've all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths and when we would get the singularity, when would AI take our jobs?
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We missed this much, much earlier point when technology didn't overwhelm human strengths, but it undermined human weaknesses.
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And you can actually frame the cacophony of grievances and scandals and problems that we've seen in the tech industry from distraction to addiction to polarization to bullying to harassment to the breakdown of truth, all in terms of progressively hacking more and more of human vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
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So if we take it from the top, you know, our brain's short-term memory system have seven plus or minus two things that we can hold.
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When technology starts to overwhelm our short-term and working memory, we feel that as a problem called distraction.
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I came here to go to Facebook to look something up, but now I got sucked down into something else.
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That's a problem of overwhelming the human limit and weakness of just our working memory.
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When it overwhelms our dopamine systems and our reward systems, that we feel that as a problem called addiction.
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When it taps into and exploits our reliance on stopping cues that at some point I will stop talking and that's a cue for you to keep going.
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When technology doesn't stop talking and it just gives you the infinite bottomless bowl, we feel that as a problem called addiction or addictive use.
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When technology exploits our social approval and giving us more and more social approval, we feel that as a problem called teen depression because suddenly children are dosed with social approval every few minutes and are hungry for more likes and comparing themselves in terms of the currency of likes.
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And when technology hacks the limits of our heuristics for determining what is true, for example, that that Twitter profile who just commented on your tweet five seconds ago, that photo looked pretty real.
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We only have a few cues that we can use to discern what is real and bots and deepfakes, and I'm sure we'll get into GPT-3, actually overwhelm that human weakness.
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So I think the main thing that we really want people to get is through a series of misaligned incentives, which we'll further get into, technology has overwhelmed and undermined human weaknesses.
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And many of the problems that we're seeing as separate are actually the same.
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And just one more thing on this analogy, it's kind of like, you know, collectively, this digital fallout of addiction, teen depression, suicides, polarization, breakdown of truth.
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We think of this as a collective digital fallout or a kind of climate change of culture that much like the oil extractive economy that we have been living in an extractive race for attention, there's only so much when it starts running out.
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We have to start fracking your attention by splitting your attention into multiple streams.
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I want you watching an iPad and a phone and the television at the same time because that lets me triple the size of the attention economy.
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But that extractive race for attention creates this global climate change of culture.
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And much like climate change, it happens slowly, it happens gradually, it happens chronically.
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And that collectively we called in that presentation human downgrading, but you can call it whatever you want.
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The point is that, you know, if you think back to the climate change movement, before there was climate change as a cohesive understanding of emissions and linking to climate change,
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we had some people working on polar bears, some people working on the coral reefs, we had some people working on species loss in the Amazon.
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And it wasn't until we had an encompassing view of how all these problems get worse that we start to get change.
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And so we're really hoping that this film can act as a kind of catalyst for a global response to this really destructive thing that's happened to society.
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Okay, so let me play devil's advocate for a moment using some of the elements you've already put into play,
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because you and I are going to impressively agree throughout this conversation on the nature of the problem.
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But I'm channeling a skeptic here, and it's actually not that hard for me to empathize with a skeptic,
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because as you point out, it really takes a fair amount of work to pry the scales from people's eyes on this point.
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And the nature of the problem, though it really is everywhere to be seen, it's surprisingly elusive, right?
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So if you reference something like, you know, a spike in teen depression and self-harm and suicide,
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there's no one who's going to pretend not to care about that.
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And then it really is just the question of, you know, what's the causality here?
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And is it really a matter of exposure to social media that is driving it?
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And I don't think people are especially skeptical of that, and that's a discrete problem that I think most people would easily understand and be concerned about.
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But the more general problem for all of us is harder to keep in view.
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And so when you talk about things, again, these are things you've already conceded in a way.
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So attention has been a finite resource always, and everyone has always been competing for it.
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So if you're going to publish a book, you are part of this race for people's attention.
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If you were going to release something on the radio or television, it was always a matter of trying to grab people's attention.
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And as you say, we're trying to do it right now with this podcast.
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So when considered through that lens, it's hard to see what is fundamentally new here, right?
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And then the question is, is it good content or not?
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This is just a matter of interfacing in some way with human desire and human curiosity.
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And you're either doing that successfully or not.
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And what's so bad about really succeeding, you know, just fundamentally succeeding in a way that,
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yeah, I mean, you can call it addiction, but really it's just what people find captivating.
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They want to grant their attention to the next video that is absolutely enthralling.
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But how is that different from, you know, leafing through the pages of, you know,
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a hard copy of Vanity Fair in the year 1987 and feeling that you really want to read the next article
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rather than work or do whatever else you thought you were going to do with your afternoon.
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And then there's this sense that the fact that advertising is involved and really the foundation
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of everything we're going to talk about, what's so bad about that?
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So really, it's a story of ads just getting better.
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You know, I don't have to see ads for Tampax anymore, right?
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I go online and I see ads for things that I probably want or nearly want because I abandoned
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And I think most people are stuck in that place.
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Like they just, we have to do a lot of work to bring them into the place of the conversation
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Gosh, there's so much good stuff to unpack here.
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So on the attention economy, obviously, we've always had it.
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We've had television competing for attention, radio, and we've had evolutions of the attention
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economy before competition between books, competition between newspapers, competition
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between television to more engaging television to more channels of television.
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But I think what we really need to look at is what was mediating, where that attention
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Smartphones, we check our smartphones, you know, 100 times or something like that per day.
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They are intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives and ever more so because
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of if we pre-establish addiction or just this addictive checking that we have, then any
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moment of anxiety, we turn to our phone to look at it.
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So it's intimately woven into where the attention starting place will come from.
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It's also taken over our fundamental infrastructure for our basic verbs.
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Like if I want to talk to you or talk to someone else, my phone has become the primary
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vehicle for just about for many, many verbs in my life, whether it's ordering food or speaking
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to someone or, you know, figuring out what I where to go on a map.
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We are increasingly reliant on the central node of our smartphone to be a router for where
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So that's the first part of this intimately woven nature and the fact that it's our social
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it's part of the social infrastructure by which we rely on.
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And part of what makes technology today inhumane is that we're reliant on infrastructure that's
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not safe or contaminated for many reasons that we'll get into later.
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A second reason that's different is the degree of asymmetry between, let's say, that newspaper
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editor or journalist who is writing that enticing article to get you to turn to the next page
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versus the level of asymmetry of when you watch a YouTube video and you think, yeah, this
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time I'm just going to watch one video and then I've got to go back to work.
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And you wake up from a trance, you know, two hours later and you say, man, what happened
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What that misses is there's literally the Google, you know, Google's billions of dollars
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of supercomputing infrastructure on the other side of that slab of glass in your hand pointed
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at your brain doing predictive analytics on what would be the perfect next video to keep
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You think, OK, I've sort of been scrolling through this thing for a while, but I'm just
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going to swipe up one more time and then I'm done.
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Each time you swipe up with your finger, you know, you're activating a Twitter or a Facebook
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or a TikTok supercomputer that's doing predictive analytics, which has billions of data points
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And I think it's important to expand this metaphor in a way that you've talked about on,
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I think, in your show before about just the power, increasing power and computational power
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When you think about a supercomputer pointed at your brain trying to figure out what's the
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perfect next thing to show you, that's on one side of the screen.
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On the other side of the screen is my prefrontal cortex, which has evolved millions of years
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ago and doing the best job it can to do goal articulation, goal retention and memory and sort
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of staying on task, self-discipline, et cetera.
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Well, a good metaphor for this is, let's say you or I were to play Gary Kasparov at chess.
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It's because, you know, there I am on the chessboard and I'm thinking, OK, if I do this,
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And I'm playing out a few new moves ahead on the chessboard.
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But when Gary looks at that same chessboard, he's playing out a million more moves ahead
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And that's why Gary is going to win and beat you and I every single time.
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But when Gary, the human, is playing chess against the best supercomputer in the world,
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no matter how many million moves ahead that Gary can see, the supercomputer can see billions
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And when he beats Gary, who is the best human chess player of all time, he's beaten like
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the human brain at chess because that was kind of the best one that we had.
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And so when you look at the degree of asymmetry that we now have, when you're sitting there
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innocuously saying, OK, I'm just going to watch one video.
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We have to recognize that we have an exponential degree of asymmetry and they know us and our
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weaknesses better than we know ourselves, to borrow also from a mutual friend, Yuval
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So I guess I still think the nature of the problem will seem debatable even at this point.
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Because, again, you're talking about successfully gaining attention, making various forms of content
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People are losing time, perhaps, that they didn't know they were going to give over to
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But they were doing that with their televisions anyway.
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I mean, the statistics long before we had smartphones, the statistics on watching television
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There was something like the average television was on seven hours a day in the home.
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So the picture was of people in a kind of Aldous Huxley-like dystopia just plugged in to the
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boob tube and being fed bad commercials and therefore being monetized in some way that
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strikes people as not fundamentally different from what's happening now.
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Yes, there was less to choose from, you know, there were three different types of laundry
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detergent, and it was not a matter of a really fine-grained manipulation of people's behavior.
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But it was still, if you wanted, from the perspective of what seems optimal, it still had a character
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of propagandizing people, you know, with certain messages that seem less than optimal.
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I'm sure you could talk about teens or just people in general having, you know, body dysmorphia
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around ideal presentations of human beauty that were, you know, unrealistic, you know,
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whether Photoshop was involved at that point or not.
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I mean, it was just good lighting and good makeup and, you know, selection effects that
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make people feel obliged to aspire to irrational standards of beauty.
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All of these problems that we tend to reference in a conversation like this seemed present.
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I think the thing that strikes me as fundamentally new, and this is brought out in the film by
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several people, relates to the issue of misinformation and the siloing of information, which really
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does strike me as genuinely new, and there are a few analogies here that I find especially arresting.
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I mean, one thing that Jaron Lanier said, he says it in the film, and he said it on this podcast a year or so
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ago, which is, I think, frames it really well, is that just imagine if Wikipedia would present you with
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information in a way that was completely dependent on your search history, all the data on you that had
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been collected that show in your biases and your preferences and the ways in which your attention
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can be gamed, so that when each of us went to Wikipedia, not only was there no guarantee that
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we'd be seeing precisely the same facts, rather there was a guarantee that we wouldn't be, right?
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That we're in this sort of, this shattered epistemology now, and we built this machine.
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So the very machinery we're using to deliver information, really the only, what is almost
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the only source of information for most people now, is a machine that is designed to partially
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inform people, misinform people, spread conspiracy theories and lies faster than facts, spread outrage
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faster than disinterested, nuanced analysis of stories.
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So it's like we have designed an apparatus whose purpose is to fragment our worldview and
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to make it impossible for us to fuse our cognitive horizons, so that if you and I start out in
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a different place, we can never converge in the middle of this psychological experiment.
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And that's the thing that, it strikes me, for which there is no analog in, you know,
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And I mean, if we jump to the chase about what is most concerning, it is the breakdown of a
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shared reality and the breakdown, therefore, of our capacity to have conversations.
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And, you know, you said it, that if we don't have conversation, we have violence.
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And when you shatter the epistemic basis of how do we know what we know, and I've been
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living literally in a different reality, a different Truman show, as Roger McNamee would
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say, for the last 10 years, and we have to keep in mind, we're about 10 years into this
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radicalization, polarization process, where each of us had been fed, you know, really a
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more extreme view of reality for quite a long time, that what I really want people to do
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isn't just to say, is technology addictive or these small questions?
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It's really to rewind the tape and to ask, you know, how has my mind been fundamentally
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And so just to go back to the points you made a second ago, you know, so what, you know,
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Well, first on that chess match I mentioned of, you know, are we going to win?
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70% of the billion hours a day that people spend on YouTube is actually driven by the
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recommendation system, by what the recommendation system is choosing for us.
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Just imagine a TV channel where you're not choosing 70% of the time.
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Then the question becomes, as you said, well, what is the default programming of that channel?
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Is it, you know, Walter Cronkite and some kind of semi-reliable communal sensemaking, as
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our friend Eric would say, or is it actually giving us more and more extreme views of reality?
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So three examples of this several years ago, if you were a teenager and looked at a diet
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video on YouTube, all the, several of the videos on the right-hand side would be Thinspo
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anorexia videos because those things were better at keeping people's attention.
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If you looked at, you know, the 9-11 videos, it would look at, it would give you Alex Jones,
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YouTube recommended Alex Jones conspiracy theories 15 billion times in the right-hand sidebar,
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which is more than the combined traffic of the New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, Guardian,
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So the scale of what has actually transpired here is, is so enormous that I think it's really
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hard for people to get their head around because also each of us only see our own Truman
00:26:25.220
So the fact that I'm saying these stats, you might say, well, I've never seen a dieting
00:26:28.440
video or anorexia video, or someone else might say, I've never seen those conspiracy theories.
00:26:32.280
It's because it fed you some different rabbit hole.
00:26:34.620
You know, Guillaume Chaslow, who's the YouTube recommendations engineer in the film, talks
00:26:38.720
about in an interview we did with him on our podcast, how he, you know, the algorithm found
00:26:43.240
out that he liked seeing these videos of plane landings.
00:26:45.920
And it's this weird, addictive corner of YouTube where people like to see plane landings or the
00:26:50.260
example of flat earth conspiracy theories, which were recommended hundreds of millions of times.
00:26:54.240
And, you know, because we've been doing this work, Sam, for such a long time, and I've
00:26:57.480
talked to so many people, you know, I hear from teachers and parents who say, you know,
00:27:00.920
suddenly all these kids are coming into my classroom and they're saying the Holocaust
00:27:03.840
didn't happen, or they're saying the earth is flat.
00:27:06.360
And it's like, where are they getting these ideas, especially in a time of coronavirus where
00:27:10.020
parents are forced to sit their kids in front of the new television, the new digital
00:27:15.640
You know, they're basically at the whims of whatever that automated system is showing them.
00:27:20.180
And of course, the reason economically why this happened is because the only way that
00:27:25.000
you can broadcast to 3 billion people in every language is you don't pay any human editors,
00:27:29.880
You take out all of those expensive people who sat at the, you know, New York Times or
00:27:34.840
Washington Post editorial department or PBS editorial department saying what's good for
00:27:38.520
kids in terms of Saturday morning or Sesame Street.
00:27:41.420
And you say, let's have a machine decide what's good for people.
00:27:44.300
And the machine cannot know the difference between what we'll watch versus what we actually
00:27:50.600
And the easiest example there is if I'm driving down a freeway on the 5 in LA, and according
00:27:55.660
to YouTube, if my eyes go off to the side and I see a car crash and everybody's eyes
00:28:00.140
go to the side, they look at the car crash, then the world must really want car crashes.
00:28:04.120
And the next thing you know, there's a self-reinforcing feedback loop of they're feeding us more
00:28:07.700
car crashes and we keep looking at the car crashes.
00:28:10.500
That's exactly what's happened over the last 10 years with conspiracy theories.
00:28:14.960
And one of the best predictors of whether you will believe in a new conspiracy is whether
00:28:20.220
And YouTube and Facebook have never made that easier than to sort of open the doorways into
00:28:27.100
And just one last thing before handing it back is, you know, I think this is not to vilify
00:28:32.700
You know, some conspiracies are real or some notions of, you know, what Epstein did with,
00:28:37.400
you know, running a child sex ring is all real.
00:28:40.500
So, but we need a more nuanced way to see this because when you're put into a surround
00:28:44.460
sound rabbit hole where everything is a conspiracy theory, everything that's ever happened over
00:28:50.820
And there's actually this secret cabal that controls everything.
00:28:53.780
And Bill Gates and 5G and coronavirus, you know, this is where the thing goes off the
00:28:58.540
And I think this really became apparent to people once they were stuck at home where you're
00:29:05.960
And so the primary meaning making and sense making system that we are using to navigate
00:29:13.140
And I think that has exacerbated the kind of craziness we've seen, you know, over the
00:29:18.780
Well, you're really talking about the formation of cults.
00:29:22.000
And I know you've thought about a lot about cults and what we have here is a kind of cult
00:29:28.940
factory or, you know, a cult industrial complex that we have built inadvertently.
00:29:35.140
And again, what the inadvertence is, is really interesting because it does, it relates directly
00:29:43.260
It's because we have decided that the only way to pay for the internet or the primary way
00:29:52.280
And when we'll get into the mechanics of this, that is the thing that has dictated everything
00:29:59.040
And it's, it really is incredible to think about because we, you know, we have created
00:30:03.100
a system where indisputably some of the smartest people on earth, I mean, this is really the,
00:30:08.980
where some of our brightest minds are using the most powerful technology we've ever built
00:30:16.880
not to cure cancer or mitigate climate change or respond to a very real and pressing problem
00:30:25.780
They're spending their time trying to get better at gaming human attention more effectively
00:30:31.880
to sell random products and even random conspiracy theories, right?
00:30:37.600
In fact, they're doing all of this not merely as a, in a mode of failing to address other real
00:30:45.060
problems like in mitigating climate change or responding to a pandemic.
00:30:49.060
The consequences of what they're doing is making it harder to respond to those real
00:30:54.220
I mean, we have, you know, climate change and pandemics are now impossible to talk about
00:30:59.160
as a result of what's happening on social media.
00:31:01.620
And this is, this is a direct result of how social media is being paid for, or is it how it
00:31:11.740
And, you know, as you say, it's making it impossible for us to understand one another
00:31:21.660
I mean, like I, on a daily basis, have this experience of looking at people out in the world,
00:31:27.620
you know, on my own social media feed, or just reading news accounts of what somebody is
00:31:33.280
I mean, let's say somebody is into QAnon, right?
00:31:35.340
And this cult is not too strong a word, this cult of indeterminate size, but massively well
00:31:42.640
subscribed at this point, of people who believe that not only is child sexual abuse a real problem
00:31:48.760
out there in the world, as more or less everyone believes, but they believe that there are uncountable
00:31:54.340
numbers of high profile, well-connected people, you know, from the Clintons on down who are part
00:32:00.780
of a cannibalistic cult of child sexual slavery, you know, where they extract the bodily essences
00:32:07.160
of children so as to prolong their lives, right?
00:32:09.580
I mean, it's just, it's as crazy as crazy gets.
00:32:12.180
And so when I, as someone who's outside this information stream, view this behavior, people
00:32:23.200
And some of these people have to be crazy, right?
00:32:25.320
This has to be acting like a bug light for crazy people, at least of some sort.
00:32:30.940
But most of the people are presumably normal people who are just drinking from a fire hose
00:32:37.400
of misinformation and just different information from the information I'm seeing.
00:32:42.340
And so their behavior is actually inexplicable to me.
00:32:49.020
I don't think it's too much to say that we're driving ourselves crazy.
00:32:52.660
We're creating a culture that is not compatible with basic sanity.
00:32:59.280
I mean, we're amplifying incommensurable delusions everywhere all at once.
00:33:05.860
And we've created a system where true information, you know, real facts and, you know, valid, you
00:33:12.580
know, skeptical analysis of what's going on isn't up to the task of dampening down the spread
00:33:20.600
And I mean, maybe there's some other variable here that accounts for it.
00:33:24.520
But it's amazing to me how much of this is born of simply the choice over a business model.
00:33:33.260
Well, I think this is, to me, the most important aspect of what the film hopefully will do is
00:33:39.140
right now we're living in the shattered prism of a shared reality where we're each trapped
00:33:45.840
And like you said, when you look over at someone else and say, how can they believe those crazy
00:33:51.900
Aren't they seeing the same information that I'm seeing?
00:33:54.580
And the answer is, they're not seeing the same information that you're seeing.
00:33:57.940
They've been living literally in a completely different feed of information than you have.
00:34:03.060
And that's actually one of the other, I think, psychological, not so much vulnerabilities, but we did not
00:34:07.500
evolve to assume that every person you would see physically around you would, inside of their
00:34:12.740
own mind, be actually living in a completely different virtual reality than the one that
00:34:17.620
So nothing from an evolutionary perspective would enable us to have empathy with the fact
00:34:22.040
that each of us have our own little virtual reality in our own minds, and that each of
00:34:26.440
them could be so dramatically, not just a little bit, but so dramatically different.
00:34:30.500
Because another aspect you mentioned when you brought up cults at the beginning of what
00:34:33.440
you said was the power of groupthink and the power of an echo chamber, where, you know,
00:34:39.360
many of what's going, many of the things that are going on in conspiracy theory groups on
00:34:42.620
Facebook, I mean, the pandemic video spread actually through a massive network of QAnon
00:34:47.820
There's actually been a capturing of the new spirituality and sort of in psychedelics type
00:34:52.960
community into the QAnon world, interestingly, which are now...
00:34:57.580
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good addition to an already mad world.
00:35:03.460
But I think if we zoom out, it's like, the question is, who's in control of human history
00:35:11.160
Or by the fact that we've seeded the information that feeds into three billion people's brains
00:35:16.440
meant that we have actually seeded control to machines, because the machines control the
00:35:20.840
information that all three billion of us are getting.
00:35:23.980
It's become the primary way that we make sense of the world.
00:35:26.100
And to jump ahead and mind read some of the skeptics out there, some people saying, well,
00:35:30.500
hold on a second, weren't there filter bubbles and narrow partisan echo chambers with Fox
00:35:34.820
News and MSNBC and people sticking with those channels?
00:35:38.820
But I would ask people the question, where are the editorial departments of those television
00:35:46.280
And Twitter's algorithms are recommending, again, that same partisan echo chamber back to
00:35:51.280
If you follow, you had Renee DiResta on your podcast, who's a dear friend and amazing colleague
00:35:56.200
talking about how radicalization spreads on social media.
00:35:59.640
And she worked back in the State Department in 2015, where they noticed that if you followed
00:36:04.000
one ISIS terrorist on Twitter, the suggested user system would say, oh, there's suggested
00:36:10.080
And it gives you 10 more suggested ISIS terrorists for you to follow.
00:36:13.620
Likewise, if you were a new mom, as she was several years ago, and you joined some new
00:36:17.940
mom groups, specifically groups for like making your own baby food, kind of a do-it-yourself
00:36:24.560
Well, Facebook's algorithm said, well, hold on, what are other suggested groups we might
00:36:28.260
show for you that tend to correlate with users in this mom group that keeps people really
00:36:33.060
And one of the top recommendations was the anti-vaccine conspiracy theory groups.
00:36:36.840
And when you join one of those, it says, well, those groups tend to be also in these
00:36:40.340
QAnon groups and the chemtrails groups and the flat earth groups.
00:36:43.060
And so you see very quickly how these tiny little changes, as they say, and Jaren says
00:36:48.660
in the beginning of the film, you know, the business model of just changing your beliefs
00:36:52.120
and identity, just 1%, you know, changing the entire world, 1% is a lot.
00:36:56.640
It's like climate change, quite literally, right?
00:36:58.160
Where you only have to change the temperature a tiny bit and change the basis of what people
00:37:05.520
Because as you know from confirmation bias, when you have a hammer, everything looks like
00:37:09.200
a nail and technology is laying the foundation of hammers that are looking for specific kinds
00:37:14.700
Once you see the world in a paranoid conspiratorial lens, you are seeing, you're looking for evidence
00:37:22.600
It's really a thing that's happened to all of us.
00:37:24.940
This is why my biggest hope really in the global impact of the film, and this is not a
00:37:29.420
marketing push, it's really a social impact push.
00:37:31.860
I genuinely am concerned that there may be no other way to put Humpty Dumpty back together
00:37:36.780
again, than to show the world that we have created, that we need a new shared reality
00:37:47.400
And I think people can get, it doesn't take much work to convince people as we've, I hope
00:37:54.400
we have begun to hear that the shattering of shared reality is a problem.
00:38:03.600
I mean, whether it's a social problem for you, you know, out in the world or in your
00:38:08.600
primary relationships, to see the kind of hyper-partisanship we see now and the, and
00:38:14.980
the just inability to converge on an account of basic facts that could mitigate that partisanship.
00:38:21.600
I think people feel that that is a kind of assault on democracy.
00:38:25.580
And then when you add the piece that bad actors like the Russians or the Chinese or anyone can
00:38:33.460
decide to deliberately game that system, I mean, just the knowledge that, you know, Russia
00:38:37.380
is actively spreading, you know, Black Lives Matter information and pseudo-information so
00:38:43.700
as to heighten the anguish and, and polarization on, on that topic in America.
00:38:49.500
I mean, that just, the fact that we built the tools by which they can do that and they can
00:38:57.140
You don't see the, the 50,000 people who were, who were targeted in a specific state for a
00:39:08.700
But when you're, we're talking about the problem with sharing information or using our information
00:39:15.720
in these ways, and, and I think we should get clear about what's happening here because
00:39:19.880
this is a distinction several people make in, in the film.
00:39:23.740
It's not that these platforms sell our, our data, right?
00:39:29.840
They gather the data, they analyze the data and what they sell are more and more accurate
00:39:38.780
And the ability to, and as that gets more refined, you really have a, as close as we've ever come
00:39:45.440
to advertising being a kind of sure thing, right?
00:39:52.500
And, and even there are people, I think most people won't necessarily care about that because
00:39:59.400
if you tell them, listen, that the thing you really thought you wanted and went out and
00:40:05.640
bought, you were played by the company, the company placed an ad with Facebook and Facebook
00:40:11.100
delivered it to you because you were the perfect target of that ad.
00:40:15.460
I think the person can, at the end of the day, own all of that process and say, and just
00:40:22.040
subsume it with their satisfaction at having bought the thing they, they now actually want,
00:40:28.100
Like, so yeah, I actually, but I want, I wanted a new Prius, right?
00:40:34.860
Like there's some, whether it's confabulatory or not, there's some way in which they don't
00:40:41.280
And I think when, I think people think they care about privacy, but we don't really seem
00:40:48.860
I mean, we care about convenience and we care about money.
00:40:51.380
I mean, at bottom, nobody wants to pay for these things.
00:40:58.200
They don't want to pay for most of what happens on the internet.
00:41:01.220
And they're happy to be enrolled in this psychological experiment so that they don't have to pay for
00:41:07.760
And that's, and the dysfunction of all of that is what we're trying to get across here.
00:41:13.400
But it's, I'm always amazed that it's, you focus on it and parts of this monstrosity begin
00:41:20.560
You know, it's like, it's very hard to keep what is wrong with this in view every moment
00:41:26.780
And so maybe for the moment, let's just focus on, you know, information and privacy and,
00:41:31.900
and the ad model and, and just how we should think about it.
00:41:36.660
Well, when we talk about the advertising model, you know, people tend to think about the good
00:41:40.620
faith uses, like you're talking about, you know, a Prius or a pair of shoes, what dismisses
00:41:45.260
the geopolitical world war three information warfare that's happening right now.
00:41:50.020
Because, you know, a line I say often is, you know, while we've been obsessed with protecting
00:41:54.560
our physical borders as a country, we've left the digital border wide open.
00:41:59.040
I mean, if Russia or China tried to fly a cruise missile or a bomber, you know, plane into the
00:42:03.280
United States, they'd be blasted out of the sky by the Pentagon.
00:42:05.860
But when they try to fly an information bomb into the United States in our virtual infrastructure
00:42:10.820
of Facebook, they're met by a white glove that says, yes, exactly which zip code and
00:42:14.940
which African-American sub-district would you like to target?
00:42:20.560
We are completely unprotected when it comes to the virtual infrastructure.
00:42:24.260
So if you go to the, the roads and the air and the, you know, telephone, telephone lines
00:42:29.020
that we use here in this country, they're completely air capped from, you know, Russia or China.
00:42:34.500
But when most of the activity happening in our country happens in a virtual digital online
00:42:39.220
environment, you know, as Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world, meaning software
00:42:43.140
and the digital world are consuming more and more of the physical world and the physical
00:42:47.260
ways that we used to get around and the physical conversations we used to have.
00:42:50.440
That digital environment is basically the big five tech companies.
00:42:54.140
It's all happening through the landscape of YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, et cetera.
00:43:01.120
You know, you use the power of an empire against itself.
00:43:04.020
You know, after World War II, you know, we had all these nukes and the big powers couldn't
00:43:09.600
So they had to use subtler methods, plausible deniability, proxy wars that would be waging
00:43:16.040
But if you're Russia or Iran or Turkey, you know, and you don't want to see the U.S.
00:43:20.120
in a position of global dominance, would you do, you know, a forward facing attack on the
00:43:27.340
But would you take the already existing tensions of that country and turn the enemy against
00:43:33.920
You know, that's what Chinese military strategy would say to do.
00:43:35.800
And Facebook just makes that a trillion times easier.
00:43:39.260
So, you know, if I was China, I would want extreme right and extreme left groups to proliferate
00:43:44.340
And, you know, we know that this is basically happening and this has been stoking up groups
00:43:49.600
You know, I can go into your country and create an army of bots that look just as indistinguishable
00:43:55.000
If I'm China, I'm running TikTok and I can, you know, manipulate the political discourse in
00:43:58.680
your country with the fact that I have 300 million Americans, you know, on my service.
00:44:02.200
It might even be bigger than that, if I'm remembering correctly.
00:44:04.240
So I think, you know, the advertising model isn't just that it enables these good faith
00:44:09.180
I think people have to recognize the amount of manipulated and deceptive activities that
00:44:15.420
I mean, the fact that I'm saying all this to you and the listeners out there would sound
00:44:18.660
like a conspiracy theory until you know the researchers who are tracking these things.
00:44:22.100
Because if you're, you know, if you're just looking at your own feed, I'm living in California.
00:44:30.000
And it's actually invisible to me, anybody who is.
00:44:33.360
So again, our psychological vulnerabilities here, technology is not allowing us to empathize
00:44:37.920
with people who are closest to being harmed by these systems.
00:44:42.640
So I think people can get the central fear here, which is that it seems at best difficult,
00:44:51.080
more likely impossible, to run a healthy democracy on bad information.
00:44:59.220
I mean, if we can do it for a few years, we probably can't do it for a century.
00:45:06.560
We can't be feeding everyone lies or half-truths, different lies and different half-truths, all
00:45:14.000
at once, 24 hours a day, year after year, and hope to have a healthy society, right?
00:45:21.120
So that's a discernible piece of this problem that I think virtually everyone will understand.
00:45:29.120
And then when you add the kind of the emotional valence of all these lies and half-truths, people
00:45:35.880
get that there's a problem amplifying outrage, right?
00:45:40.980
I mean, the fact that the thing that is most captivating to us is the feeling of in-group outrage
00:45:48.580
pointed outward toward the out-group for whom we have contempt growing into hatred.
00:45:55.820
That's the place we are so much of the time on social media.
00:46:00.120
That runs the gears of this machinery faster than any other emotion.
00:46:05.640
And whatever the, you know, if that changes tomorrow, if it turns out that, you know, sheer
00:46:10.580
terror is better than outrage, well, then the algorithm will find that and it'll be amplifying
00:46:18.180
But the thing that you have to be sure of is that it's contained in the very word, you
00:46:23.240
know, a dispassionate take on current events is never going to be the thing that gets this
00:46:35.940
But when we talk about possible remedies for this problem, then I really think it's hard
00:46:44.000
So I mean, I think there are ways to come at this.
00:46:48.140
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