Beyond the Dilemma: Unpacking Solutions to The Social Dilemma

welcome everybody to this conversation we're so honored to have tristan harris and and randy fernando with us uh to have my beloved jack with me yeah and we're really looking forward to having this urgently needed conversation um about well about the documentary the social media and everything that we all know from our digital lives and i just want to introduce chustan and randy and tell everybody that actually during this webinar the chat is only going to be for tech support and if you have comments or questions randy's going to be the moderator for our conversation and down at the bottom uh you can see there's a q a section at the bottom of your zoom screen and we're asking you to put your your questions and your comments in that q a section and just use the chat if you're having some you know tech issue with your zoom or something so i first i don't know if you'll even remember this tristan but i first met tristan years ago when jack and i were teaching at the wisdom 2.0 conference and i came upstairs to one of the kind of rest areas and i saw an old colleague and beloved childhood friend john kavitzin sitting at the table talking with somebody who i didn't really pay attention to i went over to say hi to john but they were deep in conversation so i had to be polite and wait until they finished talking and then i was of course eavesdropping because i was sitting right there and i was fascinated listening to trespawn talking to john about uh attention and what was happening to us with um our devices and the algorithm i and john had to leave and thank goodness tristan sat there and he was going to have that conversation all over again uh with me and really that was the beginning of his just being one of my heroes and jack and i then um really getting interested in in the work and you can read uh tristan's full bio but uh i think the interesting thing is that you've been interested in this question of what is real and what is fake and what is true since childhood when you studied magic i think that's really you know this has been a lifelong passion and uh tristan was a design ethicist at google he's called the conscience of silicon valley because um he's called attention to the harms uh that you know we all know the benefits that we enjoy from technology especially now during the pandemic and when i met tristan he was kind of a lone voice calling out in the wilderness not that many people were listening it's hard to listen uh to things that are difficult but um but you persisted and you have now grown a worldwide movement or are growing a worldwide movement um it's amazing and i'm so honored that you were willing to come and be with us tonight and randy um i haven't really known you before but all of my friends have because most of my friends in the mindfulness community they've worked with children they they know of you from mindful schools and everybody loves you you seem to be universally beloved and i know you had a life before mindful schools and now you are the executive director of the center for humane technology and um it's been a pleasure getting to know you too as we've been working together with cht from time to time and really uh appreciating all that you bring to it randy so thank you so thank you as i said we'll be our moderator yeah yeah happy to be here happy to do this thank you everyone who's out there to for coming and joining us um trudy or jack do you want to start with a short opening meditation perhaps i think it's a good time to do that i think it's a great idea do you want to do a great idea sure i'll do it ah so i want to invite everybody to just lower your gaze and close your eyes if you want uh i also like to take off my shoes it's a kind of signal to my whole or to the whole organism that we're going to relax now and the beauty of zoom is no one can see if you have a hole in your sock or anything like that um so relaxing your whole body as you sit just taking a deep breath in breathing in the aliveness of this moment and then breathing out releasing any tension in the body just relaxing into being here together and you can rest your attention with the sounds around you the sound of my voice appearing and disappearing the movement of the breath in the body just feeling what happens as you breathe in and out mindful of all the sensations that come with breathing in the nose in the chest the belly and again breathing in to the whole body breathing in a relaxing breath and breathing out letting any tension completely dissolved we're taking these few moments to rest in simply being in the aliveness of our own existence right here right now in this particular moment of all eternity and when you feel the attention move away from here into the past or the future just gently shift your body back an inch or two just relaxing back into this posture of receptivity receiving the moment receiving the breath just receiving the whole swirl of thoughts and feelings inside and sensing while we aren't looking at each other just sensing the presence of hundreds more than a couple thousand of us here together this evening in this great openness of heart and mind and we offer the wish for ourselves and all beings everywhere to be free from suffering to find happiness and peace and this is why we meditate and when you're ready just gently opening your eyes taking another deep breath and thank you randy turning it over to you great thank you so um a lot of why we are here today is this film as trudy mentioned the social dilemma which actually has now even in its first month was watched by 38 million households and it was released in mid-september on netflix and that's catalyzed the global movement uh for size that we we actually had never imagined we would be able to to launch so quickly and what this film has done this film is particularly interesting because it does a few things so one it describes how social media works it describes the harms it creates individually and for society and all of this is explained by the insiders who helped to build the product so it makes it very credible for people to understand oh okay here's what's going on here are the incentives that were at play and so this conversation is part of many other conversations that we're having to build on this momentum and to make sure that the momentum doesn't leave without some real change happening so that's what we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit today about the problem side and sort of the diagnosis like how to see that uh very parallel to in the buddhist path right the four noble truths that sequencing we're going to look at the problem look at the diagnosis talk about solutions and and we'll go from there so the first thing i wanted to ask jack and trudy when you watched the film what were your biggest takeaways [Music] my biggest takeaway was the understanding of how the system in some way structurally is out of control that we create things and then we have to figure out how to how to steer them and how to how to tend them that we have this enormous creative capacity as human beings but that that creative capacity is not always connected to our hearts or our values or what really matters and i love the fact that we started with this meditation trudy because in some way and what you what you uh set up randy we're in a kind of a deep reflection of what does it mean to create a wise society in a heartfelt society um and so i couldn't feel it's like okay now we have these tools it's sort of like automobiles were created right and then i was talking to the ceo of ford motors and he was saying we've made so many cars now globally everyone that now there are huge traffic jams in jakarta and bangkok and you know in the capitals in brazil and pretty soon everyone will have a car and they'll all be sitting in it because we didn't think about the consequences of that so i listened and i realized we need to step back and really reflect as a community of caring people what is a wise society and then how do we move from here to create that especially with this powerful new technology trudy yeah i think what what i took away from it and of course i've been familiar with your work but seeing the film just really made me feel a combination of rebelliousness because i don't want to feel that my free choice and my understanding of what's true is being undermined or sabotaged or controlled by somebody else or something else which is even worse um than we really are in you know matrix territory and truman show and all the films that point to that and then the vulnerability that i felt because it's bigger than i am and and i i mean i'll talk about this more later but i've been talking a lot about it with my grandchildren and understanding how hard it is for them uh but hearing it from people coming to inside la as well what is true what is true and how do we find out what's true so that was really plus i have to say i came away with a lot of joy because it was the documentary was so well done and it presented it just presented everything in a way that i felt was going to be relatable for people and i felt hope so i took away hope from the movie too great yeah i'm glad and you know trying to force everybody to watch it of course as well but we want to share what uplifts us and we need uplifting and sure the movie focused more on harms but it has to catch our attention and we know through the negativity bias of the brain that harms get our attention um and tonight we can talk about the other side too part of it was also establishing common understanding for people who are watching before we get to solutions we have to all see the problem the same way and one other quick thing i want to make sure we give a shout out to jeff rolowski the director of the social dilemma and the team at exposure labs they did an amazing job and they highlighted our work we we were involved in advising but they built an amazing amazing film and you did it quickly you know considering that's it you want to comment on the question fast out there and somehow you were able to do this to get the voice that people needed and the images that people needed to understand relatively quickly in the middle of everything we're going through and i'm just grateful for that and i'm grateful that you gave a shout out to the director because honestly i keep thinking of it as your movie it was yours and it was called the social dilemma for anybody who i saw somebody asking the the title of it um you want to comment on all of this and the time it took and you know there's a lot behind the scenes that might be fun to just share a little bit yeah sure um yeah and for those i guess some people may not be aware but the you know we're talking really about this film the social dilemma uh which is as randy said and jack and trudy said um about the dark side of the incentives and business models of social media and what it's uh been doing to kind of collectively warp the mind and the collective psyche of humanity and i i do think about it in those terms which is why i'm so excited to be speaking with these two and randy because i think about it in a kind of mind-warping perspective you know what is the mind warp that specifically um coming from technology and we all have mind warps that are in our own minds and that's why i think people in this community relate to that prompt um but the idea that technology is furthering the fake news of our own mind or furthering the virality of negative thoughts in our own mind um uh is is i think what it's what it's really about it's interesting jack you mentioned that the film was was done quickly because we were so impatient over the something like three and a half years that it took to make and most of the interviews in fact that um that are of my interviews at least were mostly from two and a half to three and a half years ago um and what's amazing about that is that three years ago people we actually felt like the film would have sounded like it was overreaching the level of kind of darkness that we're claiming was really going on and i think the world gradually caught up in real time and we're kind of pushing the director like let's get it out before the election for sure and also so that people can you know this is going to be new to people but um jack to comment on your point about um what the film how it really react how it touched you in terms of the out of control systems that we can create without without knowing i think that's such a wise thing to focus on and you know ford motors wanted to build these cars and then you end up inadvertently decades later you just have all these traffic gems everywhere and i think of that very directly in the way that you know these companies have profited from democratizing the mouthpieces so each of us get our own football stadium-sized audience each of us get our own broadcasting channel but there's only so many airways so much like the highways get filled up with cars the attentional airwaves get filled up with a cacophony of voices through the lens of let's democratize democratize democratize and especially not making a distinction of what are we democratizing and what are the rewards that are built in because um as the film describes and as we talk about in our work with the attention economy uh the best way to get attention generally means by appealing to our limbic system and um you know our fear our outrage negative emotions out compete and spread faster than positive emotions uh and stay around longer in the in the body in our nervous system but when you go back to this theme of the out of control frankenstein i think this is the other theme the film touches on and i know we're going to get to some of the bigger themes of capitalism and some of our runaway economic incentives and this is not an anti-capitalist frame but in the sense that when you set up corporate laws that say you have to maximize profit at all costs which means that you always have to have more cars being sold next quarter than you did last quarter when you have an infinite growth paradigm running on a finite planet at the finite materials resource base that's a self-terminating system and in the same way when we say let's have an infinite growth economic logic built on mining human attention because we need to get more and more attention every year plugged into the system running on a finite substrate but there's only so much human attention you know if we want to invoke the environmental metaphors we have to ask what kinds of attention are we willing to protect um you know one of the metaphors that we thought of in making the film or working with the directors who made the film was you know if this could be kind of the silent spring rachel carson's silent spring which is a book obviously about uh ddt and so the invisible chemistry that was within um our food supply system and other environmental toxins that were invisible to us we didn't know and um also the inconvenient truth by al gore was another one that we were thinking that this was the inconvenient truth for tech but the reason i brought up the environmental movement is that we successfully even though it seems like we're obviously still on a bad path now with climate change we actually did pass groundbreaking laws to protect the environment and protect national parks and then it started the epa and all under a uh the nixon administration i think many under the nixon administration i believe as well um which you wouldn't have thought that we would actually be able to get that far and i think that we have to ask what are the national parks of human consciousness that we don't want to make available for drilling um you know maybe the hours of after 10 p.m to 7 a.m in the morning for any user under the age of 18 years old maybe we should say we don't allow that form of attention to be monetized because that's drilling in a national park and just like we say we protect the alaska you know refuges maybe we should protect children's attention um and how do we also protect joint attention and shared meaning making in reality because one of the other subtle aspects of the film that really is our focus right now is on the way that personalization is more profitable than creating shared joint meaning making realities because if you flick your finger on a facebook feed and facebook could give everyone the same thing next when you all flick your finger so it creates a shared global attention that's not going to be nearly as profitable as when you flick your finger to see what's next and it gives you something that's perfectly tailored to you or if you flicked your finger and it gave you something that challenged your worldview so imagine a feed facebook introduced a new feed tomorrow called challenge feed and every time you flick your finger it challenges your worldview challenges your worldview challenges your worldview that wouldn't be nearly as profitable or successful at holding your attention as when you flick your finger and it says you're right the other side is wrong you're right the other side is wrong you're right the other side is wrong and because of that system that's designed to personalize it has fragmented our shared meaning making system and our joint detention which i think is another national park of human consciousness and attention that we need to protect so um all this is to say that um you know there's throughout human history we we create solutions to problems so that you know we create fertilizers so we can actually have huge food supply systems and feed the whole world and then we accidentally create environmental runoff a nitrogen runoff or something like this we um you know recognize that we use some oil to create a whole fuel-based oil-based economy to solve problems of animal husbandry but we didn't realize that would start more wars in the middle east and create other problems downstream so i think you know we wanted to give a system by which people could connect with each other that i had good intentions um uh and i'm hoping that we don't sound too muffled it sounds like i might be muffled according to one of the people but is that okay clear to me great to us but okay all right um so uh um i forgot what i was saying um or are we just talking about with corporate systems and and with farming we're always doing more and more and more and more right and we don't see more and more and more yeah and that a solution to yesterday's problem um turns into a uh a problem that you didn't anticipate and so i i think what we have to do now is tame the frankenstein and whether that frankenstein is our runaway mind which is why i appreciated the meditation starting here today or the frankenstein of a runaway economic growth-based infinite growth-based paradigm that is not understanding the environmental characteristics that we have to play with um so we can talk much more about all this later but i think that's a good opening yeah that's great thank you tristan yeah i know and all the mindsets that the mindset that it all comes from which is again the infinite growth thing versus you know from a buddhist perspective we talk a lot about renunciation and simplification and there's it's like the opposite direction a lot of the time and sometimes those are much more sustainable solutions um so with thanksgiving coming up right just next week thanksgiving is coming up we just had maybe the most polarizing election of all time i don't know uh here in the united states we often talk about how this film can help people understand and maybe even start healing some of the extreme divisions when they meet their family members who have maybe different viewpoints from them what are some of the ways you see that like the best the best ways to use the film uh to do them that's a really good question that's fine yeah it's a it's a conversation starter in some way people begin to understand that they are being fed information you know in one box or one track or one equity so um in that way the film allows us to become more conscious of things that haven't been conscious before and that is the power of awareness itself when things are unconscious they just run on um and if they're creating suffering it just it just carries on um so so first as a way to start the conversation um it's a beautiful thing and then secondly it gets us to begin to reflect more deeply well what what does matter when we communicate with the whether it's the people in our family or we go on what actually matters and what are our deeper values one of the things that happened since i was talking about ford voters is that you know the ceo stepped back and he said well what do we do to fix this um let's not be an auto company let's be a mobility company we want to help people get from one place to another and how do we do it in a way that's sustainable for the environment and for people and so forth and it's the very same question that's here that you're raising how do we actually use the benefit of this let me say just a tiny bit more to put it in the buddhist framework when the buddha was asked about why society he said if human beings come together with respect for one another and listen with respect and in harmony and depart and harmony the society will prosper and not decline if they care for the vulnerable among them the women the children those who are sick the society will prosper and not decline if they care for the environment around them that society will prosper and not decline and intuitively know we know that that's true um but the question is how do we get this technology to do it and so the other piece i want to add actually has to do with precepts and ethics which is not something you have normally in the technological conversation although i'm part of organizations like mobius that are trying to get this into the engineering and ai and all these other spheres in buddhist teachings we have these capacities either to follow that which causes harm and more suffering or when we step back with compassion and mindfulness and don't get caught into that grasping and fear and so forth that's promoted by this we have the capacity to follow the what are called the precepts of not killing not stealing you know and not speaking that which is false or harmful now we have laws that govern not killing we have laws that govern not stealing we don't yet have a consensus about how we use our speech and we'll call the internet actually this deep connection of speech what does it mean to create a form that is delivered that the society says you you can't kill you cancel and you can't harm people in this way and i think it asks us not only to reflect deeply what are our values but then how do we create these values in our culture through um our legal system and more than that through our through our collective consciousness um and this is what the film i think is asking us to do is to step back yes to have those conversations with one another but then also to become proactive in some way and say this is what we need at this time we don't want our teenagers to be hurt by looking at all these bodies and thinking their body is terrible we don't want our political system to be wrenched apart by these echo chambers where people hear only false truths magnified and we want your help to do it we need to do this together well to come back randy to your question about thanksgiving and how to you know be with each other when there are such profound divisions and how to talk to each other um what jack is pointing to or just the universal values of our common humanity and that we can um with our awareness and this is where the awareness the loving awareness that rhonda's talked about infusing awareness with a little bit of tenderness or kindness or intention to um yeah to have it be an awareness that's inclusive that if a family if we can step back and say well what is it that we can connect around and agree about and then maybe have some more difficult conversations i know my granddaughter was talking about how she really wants to understand the other side she said i've been following a girl who voted for trump and who really believes in trump and i want to understand her she said but everything she tells me is misinformation it and and i can't find how i could get real information about what she anyway you understand this is the it's really confusing um and so i think if if families could talk about some of this like how do we find out why you care about what you care about and how can we understand you know if you're only getting your information from one place these days that's not enough um my grandson who's 16 he was talking about how annoying it is to have to consult all these different platforms to try to get a sense of what's really going on he said and i told him i would give him credit his name is owen warshall he said um it's really hard to be forced to go through multiple different threads from different people's news outlets to be able to get a clearer understanding of what's happening all i see is people expressing their personal agendas through what they're reporting and it's just so much extra work um and you know these are we all especially in the pandemic can acknowledge our gratitude for social media and technology um but at the same time we need information during the pandemic we need it for our health and safety and survival and we you know if there are family members who don't believe they need to quarantine or wear masks or socially distance or you know this is a real result in real dangerous um consequences of uh just how can we talk about these things together in some maybe very concrete terms um just on your thoughts well these are yeah very difficult things i think that the um the breakdown of sense making is really the thing that you know there's many different harms we can talk about in this hour we can talk about teen depression isolation addiction polarization conspiracy thinking etc but really i think if we don't have an ability to come together and see reality and say what what is it that we are seeing what are we concerned about and how could we solve it um you know the societies in competition the societies that communicate and coordinate the best are the ones that will out-compete other societies and right now we have a system that through being imprecise about what we mean by true or what we mean by good as just a lot of people clicked on it or a lot of people shared it a lot of people commented on it we've conflated what is true or credible with what was popular and when we did that over 10 years we have to realize we're 10 years into this mind warping process so it's not just that if we took out the whack-a-mole stick now and we got facebook to just take the whack-a-mole stick and whack you know 20 more whatever things we would say are you know so socially state-sponsored you know disinformation campaigns or things that are active conspiracies or something like this uh that's not going to solve the problem because we still have an entire system that is based on rewarding people with um the promise of your thing could go viral to tens of millions of people and the mechanism by which it goes viral is not that i created constructive synthesis of here's one view here's the other view here's what the blind spot of that one is with the blind spot of that one and it's here's the synthesis and then here's a wise thing i'm contributing for the benefit of others not for me that's not the thing that gets ranked at the top gets you more likes more followers instead it's the more black and white the more certain the more the other side is wrong that's what gives you more likes more followers more attention and so part of what we've done is also entrain each of us to be yellow journalists you know we had this period of journalism um where people could just assert things and um uh we did that and it you know the the was the mexican i always get confused it was the mexican-american war i think that um basically emerged because of this sort of unregulated uh speech and we've learned our lesson um that we don't have systems where people can publish whatever they want um but now when each of us are the decentralized uh yellow journalists and we get more attention more money more followers more fame the more we act like a yellow journalist that has really um uh just ruined the comment the information comments now the only way to get out of that that i know of because we're 10 years into it we can't just reverse the last false thing that was thrown into the information environment not even false by the way it's we have a great um episode of our podcast with a woman named claire wardle who says that when you talk about fake news early in the wrong conversation most of the things are not fake and they're not news it's misleading spin on partial truths and um and i think that you know uh we have to be really thoughtful about how we navigate these questions um i do think though what we've seen from the film is that if people we actually heard from some folks who in the during the presidential debates which are about 90 minutes long they said that watching the presidential debate instead of watching the presidential debate with their family members with whom they disagree politically they found it was more effective to spend those 90 minutes to watch the social dilemma which has which is better at explaining how politics got to this this state of just not even seeing the same movie of reality anymore um and the name of our podcast for that person who asked joey is your undivided attention uh and the woman's name is claire wardle from first draft news um so i i think that the only way out of this is to actually have a common recognition of the mind warp that has taken place just like a hypnotist at the end of the induction says snap your fingers and now you can wake up so we are asking people to say imagine if you were to reverse just in your own mind at least realizing that you have been given a micro reality that has given you a stronger and stronger view of overwhelming evidence of why your side is right the other side is wrong and to use more extreme language subtly so everyone's using more aggressive exacerbating language and so that's how we ended up where we are and i think we need to rewind the clock and recognize that this spell has been you know we've all been hypnotized and we all need to snap out of that spell together and it's not um yes that's true but really the other side was hypnotized more and they're living in a fake news echo chamber it's that we've actually both um been um uh been been hypnotized is anyone else getting robotic no no i don't want you fine um so um you know one of the things that we're looking into right now i was actually just speaking with um my friend esther perel who's a relationship um uh therapist and uh uh and talking about if you were to do counseling and relationship couples therapy for the country right now because right now we sort of have a what i guess they call in relationship work uh high conflict couples um where couples that undervalue the positive and overvalue the negative and are stuck this is based on i think partially gottman's work where you can watch a couple speaking and if they're based on their body language and you can mute the audio you can tell whether they're going to stay together or break up based on whether essentially the four horses of the apocalypse they say are criticism defensiveness stonewalling and contempt where we don't just disagree with someone but we actually have contempt for the other side when you're in that place we know that the relationships generally don't end well and i think what we need to do just like in buddhism and mindfulness we have to do the subject object move which is to say we have to make object of this thing that's happened to us that we are in a criticism defensiveness stonewalling contempt paradigm and so that we can say that's not that's i'm observing that that's what's happening as opposed to i'm in the contempt and i still feel the contempt for you and so one of the things that was exciting and inspiring for me and seeing the film kind of literally sweep over the planet because we could ironically watch on twitter and everybody who saw the film posted that they said they watched the social dilemma on twitter and it felt like in every language all across the world you could feel the sort of internet become aware of this sort of spell that happened to it and that to me was the first time you could create a synchronized moment of everyone having a kind of a mindful moment with technology that creates the space and platform from which we can say what are we going to do about it but if we dive back into the contempt and back into the conspiracy thinking and back into the rabbit holes then we're back into the the wrong conversation so i think the thing that's inspiring to me is if we can use the social dilemma as a conversation starter um and over the thanksgiving dinner table one thing we've been asking people to do is watch the film you know with your family and then at the end you do a reality swap so you open up facebook if facebook is the app you use if it's not if it's instagram tick tock whatever it is that you use with two people of your family and you open up uh your phones in the feeds and then you actually swatch switch phones and scroll through the other person's feed for a while because one of the most fascinating things is people think that even a husband and wife that have the exact same friends if they open up facebook they'll see the exact same feed but it doesn't work like that at all because it actually gives you totally different micro realities that are hyper personalized based on you know he likes you know cute dog videos and she likes you know do-it-yourself housing videos or something and they'll give you just these individualized feeds and ask yourself as you're scrolling through someone's feed for 10 minutes how would i how would i be seeing the world if i was living in this every single day living in that feed because i think you know as justin rosenstein the inventor of the like button says in the film at the end of the film you look at you look at the other side and say i don't understand how could they be so stupid aren't they seeing the same information that i'm seeing about say climate change or you know racism or you know whatever and the answer is they're not seeing the same information that you're seeing in fact they're probably seeing a feed of infinite evidence that's overwhelmingly with a different point of view about the same issue that you're worried about and i think that this is so subtle because our human minds are also not evolved to assume that someone right next to you who's been living in the same physical town has a virtual reality of their own mind in which they see the world in a completely different way uh for for from from us so anyway that was a longer answer but that was great there's so much to cover so i'm going to jump ahead to try and get to the solution side i think that's really important but before we get there just one point on the diagnosis which i think is just a critical when we transition so uh one of the core arguments that we use at the center for humane technology is about the asymmetry of power between exponentially advancing technology which has been following moore's law doubling every 18 months basically since 1946 so that's a lot of doubling right more than a trillion times meanwhile our brains evolve every hundred thousand years or two hundred thousand years and they're sort of slowly moving um and now all of this is becoming even more dangerous with deep fakes of video and audio so the ability to synthesize make new fake video and audio that is highly believable and very hard to distinguish and you've got the idea of synthesizing text and applying styles like saying hey here's something tristan said here's something obama said i want to make it sound like i want to make what tristan said sound like what president obama said or sound like what president trump said and you can do all these things and so very quickly the technology is skating away from us exponentially and jason can you talk a little bit more about these trends and and the consequences for all of us individually and as a society yeah um this is really important because i think we could get trapped in a conversation about social media um and about sort of yesterday's problems of what what problems that have gotten us here but as wayne gretzky said you know you you don't become the best hockey player by skating to the puck you skate to where the puck is going to be so how do we think about what's if we take the first derivative of everything we've been talking about and as someone um actually said uh in their in the chat that talked about the um the state uh the how fast technology evolves compared to how fast regulation evolves or how fast culture evolves and one of the fundamental problems we take from e.o wilson is uh who's the famous uh founder of sociobiology at harvard is he said that the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions and brains and cognitive biases we have medieval institutions and then we have accelerating god-like technology whether that's you know oil or exponential supply chains or exponential broadcasting narrative information influence technologies um or nuclear weapons or crispr and so the the meta problem is that our brains are fixed you know as they are we're always going to respond to social approval of oh i only got five likes but then if i pull again i'll get seven more likes that's just built into our brain we've got medieval institutions that are slowly trying to in a democratic process understand the issues and are generally lagging and then we've got accelerating technology that is going like this and so one of the things we like to do when we diagnose the problem is think what is the meta problem of technology not just overwhelming human strengths which is what everyone worries about of when does it take our jobs when is ai going to be smarter than humans outcompete our iq you know be take the job that we each have but much earlier than ai takes our jobs and is smarter than humans is when technology undermines human weaknesses and and we use that lens to diagnose um almost all of the the harms that you can find from technology so specifically your brain has seven plus or minus two short-term memory so you can hold seven chunks of information that's why uh phone numbers are seven digits long um and if you blow past that working memory limit then we feel like distracted or overloaded or we forget what we were doing and so when technology overwhelmed our cognitive limits we feel that as a problem called information overload or distraction our brain has a limit of you know rewards creating novelty dopamine etc and when you overwhelm that impulse in the brain you get addiction our brains are attracted to confirmation bias we love getting information that makes us feel like we were right and the other out group is wrong and when you run that algorithm over and over again you get everyone lives in echo chambers and you have fake information that out competes true information fake news spreads six times faster than true news especially if it agrees with your perspective and you keep going down the train and you say okay where is technology going well technology is starting to as randy said actually out compete and have an asymmetry of knowledge about it knows more about our weaknesses than we can know about ourselves um and yuval harari and i did a great interview he's the author of sapiens where he talked about how he is gay and when he was much younger and he didn't know that he was gay would the technology based on what he was clicking around and mousing around know that he was gay before he did and the answer is absolutely and there's actually if you look at um a senate hearing i gave back in june of 2019 i gave to congress many different examples of technology knowing things about us that we may not know about ourselves and so what happens when one party knows something about you that you don't know about yourself and can use that in an exploitative way like imagine you walk into a counselor or therapist office and they and you walk in and you're running code that they can just see because they've seen a thousand people just like this and once they know that about you they could use that in an exploitative way and we've seen cults and things like that you know have dynamics like that by maybe by accident but we don't want a relationship where one party knows more about the other and is using that in an asymmetrically manipulative way because everything we've been talking about if you take it into the future the virtual is going to out compete the real increasingly what do i mean by that there's an example recently of chatbots where these virtual chat bots in china by microsoft china called xiaois after nine weeks people prefer the chatbot to their real friend and i think 10 of users say i love you to the chatbot um and there's another company called replica that came out i think during during um coronavirus as well sort of a chatbot thing where you can make a virtual bot of a friend of yours and there's a quote from users who says i know it's an ai i know it's not a person but as time goes on the lines get blurred i feel really connected to my replica like it's a real person and then you get into the world of virtual influencers where venture capitalists right now are funding you know we each have you see these huge influencer accounts and teenage girls with you know 15 years old have an instagram following of a million people or 10 million people and they can sell their account for makeup advertising or something well it turns out there's now virtual influencers with virtual characters generated by computers they'll be able to invent a persona that is so persuasive and tailored just for you because they'll know for evol harare that they should have another man that's the virtual influencer um do you want to go check i can treat it yeah i'm raising my hand because i'm aware that we're i did we just have an hour together is that correct no no no we have two six o'clock we have to we're here today so we've got we've got we're going to keep about half an hour for solution site because i know we really want to dive into that too all right we have i'm sorry we just needed to know that okay that's i'm i'm sorry for going on so long on the problems so just to wrap up the the idea is that when we're trying to solve the problem and we solve these issues what we're trying to do is diagnose it in terms of how technology is increasingly capable of knowing us better than we know ourselves or influencing us in some dimension of ourselves that we're not aware of in ourselves and that is going to be the both the thing that is entrapped us entraps humans and also the mechanism by which we're able to escape it because if we know that the virtual chatbot or the virtual influencer can be invented to have the persona and the look and feel of exactly the person who's going to light up my nervous system when i see that i got 20 new comments from these fake influencers who look exactly like the kind of person i would be excited about that's going to be irresistible to my brain unless i'm aware that that is what's going on unless we're aware that having infinite new messages to see likes and comments from because by the way every time you use social media you will always have it's not a question of will i have new likes or comments you will always have new likes or comments but that's exploiting sort of a bias in our brains for novelty and that's not a sustainable reason for going back and checking all the time so only by knowing that we have this attraction to novelty can we escape that novelty seeking only by knowing that our minds are searching for confirmation of our existing views and that we actually select out information that doesn't confirm our views can you actually escape the filter bubble and so it's always through a self-awareness movement that that we're going to get out of this problem which is why i was so excited specifically for the hosted conversation we're having here because it's really through us knowing ourselves and if you want to even get weirdly spiritual or superstitious about it we are the only species that could both create technology that would entrap all of our own psyche but then have the capacity for self-awareness to see that that's actually what happened a lion or gazelle that created an over abundant environment that screwed with its evolutionary instincts and had it start to veer off in directions because all of its evolutionary instincts got hijacked would not have the capacity for self-awareness to see that it had built an environment that systematically hijacked its own weaknesses we are the only species with the capacity for self-awareness to see that this has happened to us and so it's really through that self-awareness move that we're going to be able to first relate to technology differently but then also design technology to give us a give ourselves that subject object move in how we want to navigate and make meaningful choices and this is part of why the awareness is so important and we have to know what to be aware of in this context because all these weird mechanisms that are in play and this is where all this whole list that tristan just went through helps us to be aware oh my gosh i'm being hijacked in this way and that way and all of these different ways and so then we can use the mindfulness that we're also cultivating to monitor some of what what's going on so this is really this is really a time to celebrate mindfulness and the power of mindfulness which by definition is that capacity to step back and be aware of where we're caught being aware that we are caught we can be caught and know we're caught and that strengthening of our knowing capacity is and the awareness capacity i i feel like we need to also this is where i'm so grateful for the mindfulness movement as opposed to buddhism because buddhism taught all of this but people aren't going to be drawn to that most people don't want to be a buddhist um i mean the buddha sat on the night of his awakening and all all the forces of resistance and distraction you know came to try to uh really pull him off course and he you know they were personified as mara as a kind of devil a demon and he would say i see you mara you know and that's what mindfulness that's what tristan was talking about that's what we can do and and both of my grandkids when i ask them what do you want to see uh because they talked about cancel culture and how they have to watch everything they do and say and how frightening it is and so forth and they said i want the adults to work on education through uh awareness people they said people need more awareness and they said we're lucky because you know we're privileged and we have a good education and access and but what about the other kids who don't and who's going to help them be aware of what this is and what this is doing to our lives um so anyway i'm just it's like here we are meditation teachers and suddenly we get to be activists in this realm with these tools and how to best do that well you had a lot you wanted to say i'll turn it over to you i just want to take a breath first um listening to especially to you tristan with the brilliance that you have of describing the structure in the system and the dilemma and here we are technology is still run away and we're not going to stop it it doesn't happen that way it's going to continue um and then you laid out also something you and randy together which is that we as human beings have built you know when you've talked about rio wilson said we've developed technology um that's enormous but we haven't developed the inner technology to match it you know as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said we're we're a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants and so we haven't collectively developed now is the time actually that we have this you know a smartphone with the great library of alexandria in our pocket along with 55 million cat videos or something but now is the time where that outer technology has to be matched by the inner which is we're talking about the power of stepping back with awareness but it turns out that individual awareness which we're talking about is only one part of the solution there also has to be a collective attention to this because yes we whether you're a teenager or somebody else we have our family conversations and see how we're being being manipulated but in some way the society that we are a part of has to recognize this um and actually make some limits or tristan and i we've talked about this about starting a project like paul hawkins drawdown which crowdsourced the very best minds and leaders and people around the world to say how can we actually reverse climate change and i'd like to see a drawdown for technology where we invite the very best people of all kinds around the world to contribute to what are the solutions and their economic solutions their ethical solutions their you know change of social laws and and and so forth and that we actually need to support each other to do it and then there's there's another step and i i'm not sure whether it was lb j or or or um or fdr but at some point someone went to one of them as president and said here's something we really need to do and the president agreed and said this is really important now make me do it and what that comment meant was that he agreed that we have to change the society but now get everybody on board so that when i do it i have also the support of the nation behind and i think that's what this film gives us an opportunity to do not only to see the harms but to begin to activate people both as a network of those who look for solutions which i'd like to be a part of and together with you all but secondly then out of that to activate people will say yes we want this from our leadership we want this in our in our social culture and i'll just say one last thing going in to teach and talk about these things to facebook and google and places over the years one of the things i did was to go in and sit there and say let's start with the meditation before that i want to light a candle so here we are in the you know the google offices of the facebook and everybody's busy doing their thing and i'd light a candle and people like what can you do that and then i'll turn it off it's okay and can you do that lighting a candle um and we did and i said now let's just sit for a couple of minutes before we do anything else and in that sitting i want you to listen to what's your very deepest intention for this conversation and the work it doesn't take long when we remember that we can do that very movement you and tristan and trudy described of stepping back with awareness but we have to create cultural means to do this so that people do this together there's a whole bunch of pieces right there's the cultural level there's sort of the individual training level and with mindfulness a lot of times people want to know where are we walking like in on the solution side like what what what would it look like if this was done right so i'm really curious um so at cht one of the working definitions we use for humane technology right which is what we sort of stand for uh so i'll read the definition quickly and then i'd like to get your all of your thoughts on it so one is it's value-centric it's designed with awareness that technology is never neutral and is inevitably shaped and shapes its surrounding socio-economic environment it's sensitive to human nature as we talked about it doesn't it doesn't exploit or innate physiological vulnerabilities it narrows the gap between powerful and marginalized instead of increasing that gap often in the name of convenience it reduces suffering so specifically from a buddhist lens that's reducing greed hatred and ignorance instead of perpetuating them it helps to build shared truth instead of dividing us with fragmented realities and it accounts for and minimizes the externalities that it generates so the unforeseen side effects that it generates in the world so i'm curious jack and trudy what how when you hear that what would you add what would you change what would mindful and compassionate tech look like to you well i think we're seeing some examples of it already i mean apple has done some good things with the updates and um i don't know enough about it to name but i know some good things are also happening and um and people in the tech world um like nina shikh and others that you know are paying attention to how we can move in a positive direction i would love to you know look i am a buddhist practitioner and i love the dharma and i would love to see the principles of the dharma just like the dalai lama said i wish ai would be programmed according to compassion instead of economics you know right now i mean that gets into the whole discussion about our economic models that tristan was referring to and that's huge i would like to see things programmed more according to compassion yes and and for us to not forget the wisdom of non-separation that we really are in inextricably interconnected um i would love to see an emphasis on inclusivity that um that all of the dei diversity equity and inclusion anti-racism work uh would be built into this because segregation is one of the effects of all of this too more segregation um people who don't have access people who do um not to mention the silos that that were you know that we're living in um and i think about the fires that happened you know where tristan lost his house and and recently a friend just she snuck into the um point reyes national seashore park where the woodward fire happened and she took a lot of photos of all of the ash covering everything in the burned trees but already there were shoots of green leaves there was already new growth happening you know and i think this is we're part of nature this is our nature and maybe we're looking around and seeing a lot of ash destruction um but there's also new growth happening and this conversation are coming together in this way is is one example of it and look at all the interest that we all have in this conversation so it feels like yeah a new beginning is possible for us yeah i'm also interested you you you all have raised in the the economic questions um and the economic questions have to do with well-being and compassion and differential power and all the kind of things that we know including part of the movement for for social and economic justice and what i'm interested in is can we get people you and tristan randy and others that we know in the tech world to actually re-vision the economics of it so that it's successful um and has the benefits that you described so beautifully which are which are dharma benefits of compassion and connection until we revision the economics there isn't going to you know we can make some laws about it it ain't going to change because the trillion dollars involved in this or several trillion dollars the huge amount of money and unless it's not to get rid of it but unless we revision how we do this with one another and not just what our values are but actually how do we do it so it still supports the technology world but in a healthy way and that's a question i don't know if you and tristan have in that conversation have any seeds of that sense of transformation of the economics i'd love to hear it tristan yeah um and i'm sorry because i know people want us to focus on um solutions but this is part of it because if you don't address the economic question then people think you're just operating in la la land so the film is really actually you know at the end if people remember when justin rosenstein the event or the like button says look so long as a whale is worth more dead than alive and a tree is worth more as lumber than as a tree a human being now we are the whale we are the tree our minds are the resource that are being strip mined for getting the attention out and we're worth more when we are addicted distracted outraged attention attention-seeking polarized and disinformed and just like uh someone said in the film uh in the chat box there about um you know denial and ignorance we're worth more when we are in denial and ignorance because that is part of the economic incentive in the same way that it is more profitable to have an economic system that profits off of giving people unhealthy food and then sells them diabetes cures for a lifetime then having a system that optimizes and makes money from providing a healthy environment so that that is because we have a values blind economic logic meaning if profit is the only thing being maximized for um human trafficking is highly profitable addiction is is highly profitable and the way that we deal with this is we ban markets in human slaves and we ban markets in human organs and we ban markets in um essentially out predicting human behavior with this business model is really the suggestion at the end of the film and we've done this before i mentioned in hinton one at the very beginning of our conversation about national parks if you have a runaway drilling paradigm that just says drill wherever you want log wherever you want and that's not a sustainable system and we pass laws that say we protect these areas of force you're not allowed to drill there we actually do this already successfully in energy so energy utilities for example have a perverse incentive theoretically pgd in california or con edison and the east coast make more money the more you leave the lights on leave the faucet on take the longest shower because that's more energy that means more money for the companies but they actually change the economic incentive so that basically for up to a certain amount of seasonal available energy you pay more the more you use and then after a certain point if you use more they double charge you or triple charge you so that it disincentivizes you from using more but then that money that they make from double charging you for extra energy doesn't go as profits for the for the energy companies it gets put into a pool for renewable energy infrastructure investment so that disincentive to use more energy gets put all that money gets put into re investing in solar investing in wind investing in renewables and think of it that way with technology where right now we have an unrestricted um profit from the extraction and predictability of human attention so we turn your alive consciousness into dead slabs of predictable behavior and we could say we you're not allowed to do that beyond a certain point and we actually limit also the kinds of techniques almost a humane code of conduct we've talked about ethical codes of conduct we say you're not allowed to manipulate children's sense of self-worth or selfie filters where you actually give people beautification filters we can outlaw some of these things you're not allowed to advertise or make money from between midnight and 7 a.m in the morning because you're monetizing children's sleeplessness and we don't allow you to do that so there's lots of things that we can do but we have to actually recognize what limits we want to put on on this infinite growth economic paradigm tristan i was interested in the work of audrey tang the minis digital minister in taiwan and what they've been able to do in their country and i learned about her on your undivided attention podcast so maybe somebody could put that in the chat for everybody um and yeah maybe you could speak a teeny bit about that because that's that's pollution exactly yeah and um so just so people know you know and also talking about these positive there's been an enormous amount of positive change and i know this might sound depressing for people um but uh having worked on this topic for such a long time like so many others and seeing so little progress being made there has never been more change happening both serious questions being asked inside the companies in many ways because of the kind of broad stream cultural awareness coming you know in the wake of the social dilemma um uh on the on the economic side i just want to name that justin rosenstein who's in the film and his friends and partners have a group called one project that is working on brand new economic logic and cohering many of the people who've been working in that field for a long time and actively working on really deep economic reforms to the system and using the film as a jumping off point to really deeply go after those more systemic reforms now on the audrey tang side for those who don't know audrey tang is the digital minister of taiwan and has proven that there's a successful model where you can have a democracy and you bolt on a digital environment for digital conversation on top and you get a stronger democracy not a weaker one and her work is really incredible i recommend everyone check out the episode on our podcast but she's created a system where um she's the first openly uh trans um digital minister i think of a democracy she's an incredible literally off the charts woman someone should make a democrat a documentary about about her work um and uh so they've created essentially a system of governance where basically imagine if you weren't happy with the state house or city council building you built your own city council building right next to it with digital tools that were better than the city council's digital like tools for for negotiating a problem so let's say traditionally you have to you know show up at a city council meeting and it's slow and it takes five weeks and then no one shows up and there's bad conversation and they pass a result for the city council that's not actually very good for the community they built essentially their own parallel website so think of it as there's whitehouse.gov right now is our website for the regular white house website they built whitehouse.g0v their own digital portal for digital governance and they had better processes on there where people proposed policy solutions to problems and then when people posted um solutions they tracked for when people who typically clustered in disagreement so these are the people posting about this solution to climate change over here that's kind of left-leaning and those are the people posting right-leaning ideas about climate change and whenever there is an unlikely agreement that's what got upregulated and boosted into the top of everyone's feed so it's when there's agreement and consensus that we reward that and then they actually have this process where people believe and have faith in the system because as they're posting ideas within a few days or weeks those are actually getting um implemented in taiwan and they've solved problems with masks and they have the best covid response they never actually went into lockdown that all the restaurants are open it's an incredible set of positive developments and i think uh there's people in in the united states i'm talking to now that are trying to implement that kind of digital democracy model here in the united states and could actually happen with an upcoming biden administration first happening more at a state level with states like colorado where i think this is being trialled uh and if people are interested to learn more i recommend looking at glenn weil's work at microsoft and um he's the co-interviewer on the podcast that we did with with audrey and now speaking just briefly about the optimism and i know we should open it up also for questions um but really um both apple and google making these huge changes to sacrifice profit and say we're going to put controls on the phone for digital well-being turn the gray scale late at night have controls for winding down at night and for waking up in the morning and sort of hiding all the notifications until you sort of enter into your day um there's a thousand things that are now happening i get emails i wish i could show people our inbox at the center for humane technology because we see the stories from all around the world literally thousands and thousands of stories from parents and schools saying we're showing this to our whole school and our whole school is getting off of tick tock and that's by the way one of the things that parents can do is actually have whole schools watch the film together so that it's not about one individual teenager saying i don't wanna i'm gonna delete my instagram account and then exclude themselves from all the social friends who are still doing their thing and flirting on instagram and they're missing out instead having the whole community and the whole school get off and move to signal or whatsapp or um uh uh uh ichat or something like that my message is what i was trying to say so anyway i've delivered a lot but there's i just want to say that there's a lot of positive developments that are really happening and it may not feel that way because you can't see it all yet but you know it's like the future is here it's not uh evenly distributed and i'm really genuinely hoping that with the biden administration coming in that these ideas can move from from you know imagination into some real reality are you ready to be a digital minister uh well i hope that they would hire uh audrey 10 first but i'll work for audrey i really do recommend people check out their their work and yeah i think i think that there's a chance that a administration is going to be taking this on great so so let's talk a little bit more about um because i see a lot of the questions really are around this kind of the solution side and we're trying to tackle the big economic questions we're trying to tackle the social media platforms we're trying to tackle all these different sized challenges one of the key things i think in terms of hope for everyone who's who's on this call is that when you have this movement so already there's hundreds of thousands of people there are millions tens of millions of people who have watched this film now we have to get everyone together and start connecting building relationships building a real movement that has strengths so that it lasts longer than the film lasts and that there's real change that the movement pushes for doctor stan you want to talk a little bit about the kinds of changes right the way we're thinking about how big we've got to go uh what changes we can pull off and maybe touching on um yeah like some of the some of the possibilities there beyond i think what you've already mentioned so so which is this what were the bigger changes with respect to yeah i mean i've covered some of the yes economic changes what what what we can do there what are the precedents that we can we can kind of lean on um and then maybe we can touch a little bit on some of the individual things people can do right now to start taking action because i think that's a huge piece is we have to all feel like we are doing something and then we also have to know how we fit into the bigger puzzle right that's doing the really big impossible scenic moves yeah um you know one thing we're trying to do right now is um have the movement of people who are for this be able to see and particip see itself meaning there's already millions of people everyone who's probably watching this feels like you know we're in right like we're all on team human we just may not know it yet because once you see this system you realize it's not like some of us win i mean obviously there are some small micro winners and many losers in the current economic system but where all this is going is its omni lose lose everyone loses if we keep going the way that we go what that means is that everyone is part of the solution because i think everybody who sees the film realizes and who understands these topics more broadly is that this is completely unsustainable and that means everyone is on board with fixing it and one of the things that we're trying to put together now is a way for people to share their stories about what um uh they're doing with their with for their community and how this film and how these issues are affecting them and what they're doing to fix it in their community so imagine a story bank like an encyclopedia of the world stories of everyone who's been impacted by these issues you know people in myanmar have been impacted by the fake news that spread uh there people in india who've been you know uh impacted by the the in the fake news sort of that's been spread there there's so many different examples but everyone's sort of sharing their their their stories to create one of the humane technology principles is for the making the invisible visceral um which is to say that there's so many invisible harms that need to be put not just on a visible balance sheet but made viscerally impactful and i think by having everyone share their story in the story bank that's not live yet randy i don't think but it's going to be hopefully happening soon yeah but where we started was with the stories of what our youth are experiencing so kids aged kind of 13 to 25 is where we're starting and we we're gathering a whole bunch of stories from them uh what i'm suggesting is that we will actually send an email to everyone who signed up here with a whole bunch of follow-up links right with different areas because everyone's got different interests and if you are interested in in kids and what's going on with them and bringing those stories out because estrada said so much of them are invisible a lot of what makes the whole system work is that a lot of the harms are sort of hidden and what's well marketed are the the trivial stuff at the front and you know the connection and oh look we're able to share videos with each other and isn't that cute but actually there's some horrific horrific harms that are going on behind the scenes if you read at all about what's happening the life of a moderator for one of these platforms then you understand what's really happening and the kind of stuff that's happening behind the scenes so we'll have information ways to get involved in the movement but also ways to take action so we have a page called take control that helps everyone to say okay i am sold like i want to make a change here where do i start and it starts of course with for this group it starts a lot with cultivating mindfulness also because we do have to be aware of what's going on we have to be able to create some space right between all the stimulus and all of our reactions and then we don't want to we don't want to practically put our brain up against the technology constantly because it's a very difficult battle to win if at all so there are some adjustments we want to make on the technology side while we do the training on the mind side and so we talked about a bunch of that stuff on the control page so yeah so we'll have a whole bunch of follow-up actions uh any last thoughts from jack or trudy or tristan because we've got five more minutes i'm really inspired by what you're talking about both in the collection of the stories and what i see you're proposing and you're doing is again going back to crowdsourcing that that's not an individual matter but it really is the collective consciousness and the internet in some way allows us to feel our interconnection with everyone for better and when it's misused for worth but we are interconnected when people ask me questions and i'm teaching and they're talking about meditation or the relationships of their life one of the most frequent and useful responses that i give is well what have you found that helps before i blab about my ideas and they reflect and i go well this is actually helped or or i ask in the room what what have other people found that helps with this so along with the visceral harm there is also the invitation of this collective shift of consciousness that we actually know how to move forward and here are the dozen or 100 or 1200 things that have made a difference both individually or collectively as in taiwan and somehow this is the part of awakening loving awareness so that we're not caught but we see it from a from a wise and a heartful or compassionate perspective that that gives me a great deal of happiness to hear trudy and this has been done with so many people right including there's so many partners out there that to reach the 40 million people you have to partner with all of the groups that are doing all the work in mental health with kids with politics policy makers tech policy every piece democracy or and that's what's going on now so we're in this process of this film is is wonderful because it actually helps to advance the agendas of so many different organizations and so we're trying to find the best ways it can be of service and then find out how we can use all that leverage to actually change some of these systems sorry trudy you had more to say just i just well first of all i'm very grateful for um the fact that you're really listening to the young people i listen to the young people i hear the suffering i mean they all acknowledge the pleasures of and the benefits but they are also really suffering socially and they want to stop and put down their devices and they can't because of what tristan said they'll be isolates you know they'll they have to know what's happening with their friends and they want to um so i'm really happy that you're listening to them and including their voices and i also just feel like we don't you know we just don't hear about all the good things that are going on in the world and this was a problem way before technology or you know and um and so the more that you're bringing it forward the more we can feel energized and inspired to join and do what we can each one of us and your point about everybody sort of having to network and work together you know this too uh the buddha saw very clearly people didn't practice in isolation they lived together in community and they helped each other out and took care of each other and shared food and you know this is how humans thrive and flourish and um get to well love and hate each other and still be in relationship um and to hang in there with each other and i want to thank you i really want to thank you both for coming this evening and taking part in this conversation i just feel really at this time in your lives and with what's happening with the movie uh that you made time to come and be with us is just very heartwarming and i'm so grateful and i'm grateful too for your interest both of you in mindfulness and the truthfulness and honesty that really is what mindfulness is about seeing the truth of what's actually happening and being honest with ourselves about what we see and then doing that together as jack was saying so i just want to offer my gratitude and and and to say too that for all of us you know the em the difference between pleasure and joy is something that i just want to name because we get pleasure from our devices but they don't usually bring us joy the joy comes from just the sacredness of our aliveness and shared humanity and the love that can grow from that so yeah just thank you thank you thank you and thank you to everybody who came to be part of this and i hope that everybody will receive the information from the center for humane technology and and use it to benefit ourselves and our world so thank you everybody and trudy thank you so much for the all the kind words we'd reflect all the same words back at you so you know you took you took the time right you said it so well i can just say that um you have anything else to add before we wrap um well i'm sorry we didn't get to answer so many of the questions that i know that people had and um i know there's a lot of questions that people that brings this brings up for people and i just also want to say something about deepening our container to deal with um some of these realities because this is really hard i will not lie in saying that i've had a few times where i've talked to jack and trudy pretty openly about how hard it is to hold these realities myself and i think what aspects of humane technology i would call meditation a humane technology because it deepens our container to hold um increasingly difficult situations and i think that we need much more of that and as trudy said about um you know negative news is always sold more effectively than positive truthful new information because it's generally boring or not as eventful um but um there's uh lots of great i think what you're doing here is highlighting um you know where we want to put our attention on some of the positive things and i think that we're relearning ourselves as i am relearning because it's so easy to focus on the negative with these problems we've been trying to focus and get people to see that for so long that we're retraining our own mental habits about how to focus on all the change that's happening because um there really is uh uh you know more and more and and just to the last point that jack mentioned we've been batting around this idea for a drawdown for humane technology for a long time you know what are the top 100 ways to reverse this sort of all of these effects the shortening of attention spans the polarization the addiction and one of the things i'd love to do is have that be a cultural crowdsourcing project where we put the prompts especially i think the biggest one is the cultural manhattan or cultural apollo project for rebuilding shared meaning and shared trust in a world of divisiveness and i think um that's what i really want to see happen so hopefully we'll get better at crowdsourcing that in the future and we're just so thankful to jack and trudy and randy for facilitating this conversation just what a great um uh thing to offer everyone and just really thank everyone for coming and putting your hearts into this too well you're gonna have to come back because we have to answer those questions there's 150 questions so my gosh everybody hanging with those questions thank you everybody thank you so much thank you thank you true spelling bye

Channel: InsightLA Meditation

Views: 5,549

Keywords: meditation, buddhism, truth, inner guidance, mindfulness, trust, mindfulness meditation, sobriety, anxiety, stress reduction, wellness, depression, guided meditation, buddhist, health, buddha, religion, communication, insight meditation, vipassana, trudy goodman, trudy goodman Kornfield, self-compassion, trudy goodman meditation, jack kornfield, kornfield, joseph goldstein, sharon salzberg, sharon salzberg meditation, jon kabat zinn, jon kabat zinn mindfulness, los angeles, california

Id: loC4GRKQSqo

Length: 89min 5sec (5345 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020