Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris

[Laughter] [Music] chris don how are you good good to be here good to have you here man um you were just telling me before we went on air the numbers of the social dilemma and their bonkers so what just say that yeah uh the social dilemma was seen by a 38 million households in the first 28 days on netflix which i think is broken records and if you assume you know a lot of people are seeing it with their family because parents seeing it with their kids uh the issues that are on teen mental health uh so if you assume one out of ten families saw it with a few family members we're in the 40 to 50 million people range which is just broken records i think for netflix i think it was the second most popular documentary throughout the month of september or film throughout the month of september is really well done documentary but i think it's one of those documentaries that affirmed a lot of people's worst suspicions about the dangers of social media and then on top of that it sort of alerted them to what they were already experiencing in their own personal life and like highlighted it yeah i think that's right i mean most people were aware i think it's a thing everyone's been feeling that the feeling you have when you use social media isn't that this thing is just a tool or it's on my side it is an environment based on manipulation as we say in the film and that's really what's changed that you know i remember you know i've been working on these issues for something like eight or eight years or something now you please tell people who didn't see the documentary what your background is and what you how you got into it yeah so i uh that you know the the film goes back as a set of technology insiders my background was as a design ethicist at google so i first had a startup company that we sold to google and i landed there through a talent acquisition and then um started work about a year into being at google made a presentation that was about how essentially technology was holding the human collective psyche in its hands that we were really controlling the world psychology uh because every single time people look at their phone they are basically experiencing thoughts and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world this has become the primary meaning making machine for the world and that we as google had a moral responsibility to uh you know hold the collective psyche in a thoughtful ethical way and not create this sort of race to the bottom of the brainstem attention economy that we now have uh so my background was as a as a kid i was a magician we can get into that i studied at a lab at stanford called or studied in a class called the stanford persuasive technology class that taught a lot of the engineers at in silicon valley kind of how the mind works and the co-founders of instagram were there and uh then later studied behavioral economics and how the mind is sort of influenced i went into cults and started studying how cults work and then arrived at google through this lens of you know technology isn't really just this thing that's in our hands it's more like this manipulative environment that is tapping into our weaknesses everything from the slot machine rewards to you know the way you get tagged in a photo and it sort of manipulates your social validation and approval these kinds of things when you were at google did they still have the don't be evil sign up i don't know if there's actually a physical sign was there was never a physical sign i thought there was something that they actually had i think it was there's this guy was it paul not paul what was his last name he was the inventor one of the vendors of gmail and they had a meeting and they came up with this mantra because they realized the power that they had and they realized that there was going to be a conflict of interest between advertising on the search results and regular search results and so we know that they knew that they could have used that power and they came up with this mantra i think in that meeting in the early days to don't be don't be evil there was a time where they took that mantra down and i remember reading about it online and and they took it off their page i think that's what it was yeah and uh when i read that i was like that should be big news like there's no reason to take that down why would you take that down yeah why would you why would you say well let me give you a little evil let's not get crazy it's a good question i mean i wonder what logic would have you remove a statement like that that seems like a standard state like it's a great statement okay here it is google removes don't be evil claws from its code of conduct in 2018 yeah yeah i wonder why did they have an explanation did it say anything underneath him don't be evil has been a part of the company's corporate code of conduct since 2000 when google was reorganized under a new patent uh parent company alphabet in 2015 alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the do the right thing do the right thing oh that's a spikey movie [ __ ] however google retained its original don't be evil language until the past several weeks the the phrase has been deeply incorporated into google's company culture so much so that a version of the phrase has served as the wi-fi password on the shuttles that google uses to ferry its employees to its mountain view headquarters i think i remember that yeah get on the bus and you type in don't be evil i wonder why they decided well i mean they did change it to do the right thing i mean we always used to say that um just to friends not within google but just you know instead of saying don't be evil just say let's let's do some good here right that's nice let's do some good years yeah think positive think doing good instead of don't do bad yeah but the problem is when you say do good the question is who's good because you live in a morally plural society and there's this question of who are you to say what's good for people and it's much easier to say let's reduce harms than it is to say let's actually do good like this it says the updated version of google's code of conduct still retains one reference to the company's unofficial motto the final line of the document is still and remember dot dot dot don't be evil and if you see something that you think isn't right speak up okay well they still have don't be evil though so maybe it's much ado about nothing but uh having that kind of power we were just before the podcast we were watching jack dorsey speak to members of the senate uh in regards to twitter censoring the hunter biden story and censorship of conservatives but allowing dictators to spread propaganda dictators from other countries and why and what what this is all about one of the things that uh jack dorsey has been pretty adamant about is that they really never saw this coming when they started twitter yeah and they didn't think that they were ever going to be in this position where they were going to be really the arbiters of free speech for the world right which is essentially in some ways what they are i think it's important to to roll back the clock for people because it's easy to think you know that we just sort of landed here and that they would know that they're going to be influencing the global psychology but i think we should really reverse engineer for the audience how did these products work the way that they did so like let's go back to the beginning days of twitter i think his first tweet was something like checking out the buffaloes in golden gate park in san francisco um you know jack was fascinated by the taxi cab dispatch system that you could send a message and then all the taxis get it and the idea is could we create a dispatch system so that i post a tweet and then suddenly all these other people can see it and the the real genius of these things was that they weren't just offering this thing you could do they found ways of keeping people engaged i think this is important for people to get that they're not competing for your data or for uh you know money they're competing to keep people using the product and so when twitter for example invented this persuasive feature of the number of followers that you have if you remember like that was a new thing at the time right you log in and you see your profile here's the people who you can follow and then here's the number of followers you have that created a reason for you to come back every day to see how many followers do i have so that was part of this race to keep people engaged as we talk about in the film like these things are competing for your attention that if you're not paying for the product you are the product but the thing that is the product is your predictable behavior you're using the product in predictable ways and i remember a conversation i had with someone at facebook who was a friend of mine who said in a coffee shop one day people think that we facebook are competing with something like twitter that one social network is competing with another social network but really he said our biggest competitor is youtube because they're not competing for social networks they're competing for attention and youtube is the biggest competitor in the digital space for attention and that was a real light bulb moment for me because you you realize that as they're designing these products they're finding new clever ways to get your attention that's the the real thing that i think is different in the film the social dilemma rather than talking about you know censorship and data and privacy in these themes it's really what is the core influence or impact that the shape of these products have on how we're making meaning of the world when they're steering our psychology do you think that it was inevitable that someone manipulates the way people use these things to gather more attention and do you think that any of this could have been avoided if there was laws against that if instead of having these algorithms that specifically target things that you're interested in or things that you click on or things that are going to make you engage more if they just allow these things to if someone said listen you can have these things you can allow people to communicate with each other but you can't manipulate their attention span yeah i mean i think the so we've always had an attention economy right and you're competing for it right now um and politicians compete for it can you vote for someone you've never paid attention to never heard about never heard them say something you know outrageous no um so there's always been an attention economy and so it's hard to say we should regulate who gets attention or how but it's it's organic in some ways right like this podcast is an organic i mean if we're in competition it's organic i just put it out there and if you watch it you don't or or you don't i don't you know i don't have any say over it and i'm not manipulating it in any way sort of so i mean let's imagine that the podcast apps were different and they actually while you're watching they had like the hearts and the stars and the kind of voting up in numbers and you could like send messages back and forth and apple podcasts worked in a way that didn't just reward you know the things that you clicked follow on it actually sort of promoted the stuff that someone said the most outrageous thing then you as a podcast creator have an incentive to say the most outrageous thing and then you arrive at the top of the apple podcast or spot or spotify app and and that's the thing is that we actually are competing for attention it felt like it was neutral and it was relatively neutral and to progress that story back in time with um you know twitter competing for attention let's look at some other things that they did so they also added this retweet this instant resharing feature right and that made it more addictive because suddenly we're all playing the fame lottery right like i could retweet your stuff and then you get a bunch of hits and then you could go viral and you could get a lot of attention so then instead of um the companies competing for attention now each of us suddenly win the fame lottery over and over and over again and we're we're getting attention uh and then um i had another example i was gonna think about and i forgot it what was it um you can jump if you want um apple has an interesting way of handling sort of uh the way they have their algorithm for their podcast app is it's secret it's kind of it's weird but one of the things that it favors is it favors new shows and it favors uh engagement and new subscribers so comments engagement and new shows and that's the same as competing for attention because engagement must mean people like it and that's yeah and there's going to be a fallacy as we go down that road but go on well it's interesting because you could say if you have a podcast and your podcast gets like let's say a hundred thousand downloads a new podcast can come along and it can get ten thousand downloads and it'll be ahead of you in the rankings and so you could be number three and it could be number two and you're like well how is that number two and it's got ten times less but they don't do it that way and their logic is they don't want the podcast world to be dominated by you know new york times the big ones yeah and whatever whatever's number one and number two and number three forever we actually just experienced this um we have a podcast called urine divided attention and since the film came out in that first month we went from being you know in the lower 100 or something like that until we shot to the top five i think we were the number one tech podcast for a while and so we just experienced this through the fact not that we had the most listeners but because the trend was so rapid that we sort of jumped uh to the top i think it's wise that they do that because eventually it evens out over time you know you see some people rocking to the top like oh my god we're number three and you're like hang on there fella just give it a couple of weeks and then three weeks later four weeks later now they're number 48 and they they get depressed right well that was really where you should have been but the the thing that apple does that i really like in that is it gives an opportunity for these new shows to be seen and where they might have gotten just stuck because these these rankings and the ratings for a lot of these shows these shows are so consistent and they have such a following already yeah it's very difficult for these new shows to gather attention right and the problem was that there were some people that game the system and there was companies that could literally like earl skakel remember earl became the number one podcast and like no one was listening to it earl has money and he he hired some people to game the system and he was kind of like open about it and and laughing about now isn't he banned from itunes now or something i think he got banned because of that because it was so obvious he game the system he had like a thousand downloads and he was number one i mean the thing is it were apple podcasts you can think of as like the federal reserve or the government of the attention economy because they're setting the rules by which you win right they could have set the rules as you said to be uh you know who has the most listeners and then you just keep rewarding the kings that already exist versus who is the most trending there's actually a story a friend of mine told me i don't know if it's true although it was a fairly credible source who said he was a meeting with steve jobs when they were making the first podcast app and that they had uh made a demo of something where you could see all the things your friends were listening to so just like making a news feed like we do with facebook and twitter right um and then he said was well why would we do that if something is important enough your friend will actually just send you a link and say you should listen to this like why would we automatically just promote random things that your friends are listening to and again this is kind of how you get back to social media how is social media so successful because it's so it's much more addictive to see what your friends are doing in a feed but it doesn't reward what's true or what's meaningful and this and this is the thing that people need to get about social media is it's it's really just rewarding the things that tend to keep people back addictively the business model is addiction in this race to the bottom of the brain stem for attention well it seems like if we in hindsight find size 20 20 what what should have been done or what could have been done had we known where this would pile out is that they could have said you can't do that you can't manipulate these algorithms to make sure that people pay more attention and manipulate them to ensure that people become deeply addicted to these platforms what you can do is just let them openly communicate right but it has to be organic and then the problem is so if this is the thing i was going to say about twitter is when one company does the call it the engagement feed meaning showing you the things that the most people are clicking on and retweeting trending things like that let's imagine there's two feeds so there's the feed that's called the reverse chronological feed meaning showing in order in time you know joe rogan posted this two hours ago but that's you know after that you have the thing that people posted an hour and a half ago all the way up to 10 seconds ago that's the reverse chronological um they have a mode like that on twitter if you click the sparkle icon i don't know if you know this it'll show you just in time here's what people said you know sorted by recency but then they have this other feat called what people click on retweet et cetera the most the people you follow and it sorts it by what it thinks you'll click on and want the most which one of those is more successful at getting your attention the sort of recency what they posted recently versus what they know people are clicking on retweeting on the most certainly what they know people are clicking on retweeting the most correct and so once twitter does that let's say facebook was sitting there with the recency feed like just showing you here's the people who posted in this time order sequence they have to also switch to who is like the most relevant stuff right the most clicked retweeted the most so this is part of this race for attention that once one actor does something like that and they algorithmically you know figure out what people what's most popular the other companies have to follow because otherwise they won't get the attention so it's the same thing if you know netflix adds the autoplay 54321 countdown to get people to watch the next episode that if that works at say increasing netflix's watch time by five percent youtube sits there says we just shrunk how much time people were watching youtube because now they're watching more netflix so we're gonna add 54321 autoplay countdown and it becomes again this game theoretic race of who's going to do more now if you open up tick-tock tick-tock doesn't even wait i don't know if you know if your kids use tick-tock but when you open up the app it doesn't even wait for you to click on something it just actually plays the first video the second you open it which none of the other apps do right and the point of that is that causes you to enter into this engagement stream even faster so this is this again this race for attention produces things that are not good for society and even if you took the whack-a-mole sticker you took the anti-trust case and you whack facebook and you got rid of facebook or you whack google or you whack youtube you're just going to have more actors flooding in doing the same thing and one other example of this is um uh the time it takes to reach let's say 10 million followers so if you remember back in the ash wasn't ashton kutcher who raised for the first million followers race with cnn right yeah so now if you think of it the companies are competing for our attention if they find out that each of us becoming a celebrity and having a million people we get to reach if that's the currency of the thing that gets us to come back to get more attention then they're competing at who can give us that bigger fame lottery hit faster so let's say 2009 or 2010 when ashton kutcher did that it took him i don't know how long it took months to for him to get a million i don't remember it was it was a little bit though right um and then tick tock comes along and says hey we want to give kids the ability to hit the fame lottery and make it big hit the jackpot even faster we want you to go from zero to a million followers in 10 days right and so they're competing to make that shorter and shorter and shorter and i know about this because you know speaking from a silicon valley perspective venture capitalists fund these new social platforms based on how fast they can get to like 100 million users there was this famous line that like i forgot what it was but i think facebook took like 10 years to get to 100 million users instagram took you know i don't know four years three years or something like that tiktok can get there even faster and so it's shortening shortening shortening and that's what people are are that's what we're competing for it's like who can win the fame lottery faster but is a world where everyone broadcasts to millions of people without the responsibilities of publishers journalists etc does that produce an information environment that's helped that that's that's healthy and obviously the film the social dilemma is really about how it makes the worst of us rise to the top right so our hate our outrage our polarization um what we disagree about black and white thinking more conspiracy oriented views of the world q anon you know facebook groups things like that and i can we can definitely go into there's a lot of legitimate conspiracy theories i want to make sure i'm not categorically dismissing stuff um but that's really the point is that we have landed in a world where the things that we are paying attention to are not necessarily the agenda of topics that we would say in a reflective world what we would say is most important so there's a lot of there's a lot of conversation about free will and about letting people choose whatever they choo whatever they enjoy viewing and watching and paying attention to but when you're talking about these incredibly potent algorithms and the incredibly potent uh addictions that people that the people develop to these these things and we're pretending that people should have the ability to just ignore it and put it away right and use your willpower yeah that seems i have another kids i have a folder on my phone called addict and it's all all caps and it's at the end of my all you have to scroll through all my other apps to get to it and so if i want to get to twitter or instagram the problem is that the app switcher will put it in the most recent so once you switch apps and you have twitter in a recent it'll be right there so that's if i want to go left and yeah if i want to see that yeah you can't do that yeah it's um it's insanely addictive and uh if you can control yourself it's not that big a deal but how many people can control themselves well i think the the the thing we have to hone in on is the asymmetry of power um you know as i say in the film it's like we're bringing this ancient brain hardware the prefrontal cortex which is like what you use to do um goal directed action self-control willpower holding back you know marshmallow test don't do the don't get the marshmallow now wait later for the two marshmallows later all of that is through our prefrontal cortex and when you're sitting there and you think okay i'm gonna go watch i'm gonna look at this one thing on facebook because my friend invited me to this event or it's this one post i have to look at and then next thing you know you find yourself scrolling through the thing for like an hour right and you say man that was on me i should have had more self-control but there behind the screen behind that glass slab is like a supercomputer pointed at your brain that is predicting the perfect thing to show you next and you can feel it like it's this is really important so like if i'm facebook and when you flick your finger you think um when you're using facebook it's just going to show me the next thing that my friend said but it's not doing that it when you flick your finger it actually literally wakes up this sort of super computer avatar voodoo doll version of joe and the voodoo doll of joe is um you know the more clicks you ever made on facebook is like adding the little hair to the voodoo doll and the more likes you've ever made adds little clothing to the voodoo doll and the more um you know watch time on videos you've ever had adds little um you know shoes to the voodoo doll so the voodoo doll is getting more and more accurate the more things you click on this is in the film the social dilemma like if you notice like the character you know as he's using this thing uh it builds a more and more accurate model that the ais the three ais behind the screen are kind of manipulating and the idea is it can actually predict and prick the voodoo doll with this video or that post from your friends or this other thing and it'll figure out the right thing to show you that it knows will keep you there because it's already seen how that same video or that same post has kept 200 million other voodoo dolls there because you just look like another voodoo doll so here's an example and this works the same on all the platforms if you are were a teen girl and you opened a dieting video on youtube um 70 of youtube's watch time comes from the recommendations on the right-hand side right so the things that are showing recommended videos next and it will uh show you it'll show what did it show that the the girls who watch the teen dieting video it showed anorexia videos because those were better at keeping the teen girls attention not because it said these are good for them these are helpful for them it just says these tend to work at keeping their attention so again these tend to work if you are already watching diet videos yeah so if you're a 13 year old girl and you watch a diet video youtube wakes up it's voodoo doll version of that girl and says hey i've got like 100 million other voodoo dolls of 13 year old girls right and they all tend to watch these these other videos i don't know i just know that they have this word thin spo the inspiration is the name for it to be inspired for anorexia yeah it's a real thing um youtube addressed this problem a couple years ago but when you let the machine run blind all it's doing is picking stuff that's engaging why did they choose to not let the machine run blind with one thing like anorexia well so now we're getting into the twitter censorship conversation and the moderation conversation so the real this is why i don't focus on censorship in moderation because the real issue is if you blur your eyes and zoom way out and say how does the whole machine tend to operate like no matter what i start with what is it going to recommend next so um you know if you started with um you know a world war ii video youtube would recommend a bunch of holocaust denial videos right if you started teen girls with a dieting video it would recommend these anorexia videos uh in facebook's case if you joined there's so many different examples here because facebook recommends groups to people based on what it thinks is most engaging for you so if you were a new mom you had renee diresta my friend on this podcast we've done a bunch of work together and she has this great example of as a new mom she joined one facebook group for mothers who do do it yourself baby food like organic baby food and then facebook has this sidebar it says here's some other groups you might recommend you might want to join and what do you think was the most engaging of those because facebook again is picking on which group if i got you to join it would cause you to spend the most time here right so force some do-it-yourself baby food groups which group do you think it selected probably something about vaccines exactly so anti-vaccines for moms yeah okay so then if you join that group now it does the same run the process again so then so now look at facebook so it says hey i've got these voodoo dolls i've got like 100 million voodoo dolls and they're all they just join this anti-vaccine moms group and then what do they tend to engage with for very long time if i get them to join these other groups which of those other groups would show up i don't know chemtrails oh the pizzagate flat earth flat earth absolutely yep and youtube recommended so i'm interchangeably going from youtube to facebook because it's the same dynamic they're competing for attention and youtube recommended flat earth conspiracy theories hundreds of millions of times and so when you when you're a parent during covid and you sit your kids in front of youtube because you're like i'm i've got a this is the digital pacifier got to let them do their thing i got to do work right and then you come back to the dinner table and your kid says you know the holocaust didn't happen and the earth is flat and people are wondering why it's because of this and now to your point about this sort of moderation thing we can take the whack-a-mole stick after the public yells and renee and i you know make a bunch of noise or something in a large community by the way of people making noise about this and they'll say okay shoot you're right flat earth we got to deal with that and so they'll tweak the algorithm and then people make a bunch of noise about the inspiration videos for uh anorexia for kids and they'll deal with that problem but then they start doing it based reactively but again if you zoom out it's just still recommending stuff that's kind of from the crazy town section is the problem the recommendation because i i don't mind that people have ridiculous ideas about hollow earth because i think it's humorous but i'm also a 53 year old man right right i'm not i'm not a 12 year old boy with a limited education that is like oh my god the government's lying to us there's lizard people that live under the earth right but if that's the real argument about these conspiracy theories is that they can influence young people or the easily impressionable or or people that maybe don't have a sophisticated sense of vetting out [ __ ] right well and the algorithms aren't making a distinction between who is just laughing at it right and who is deeply vulnerable to it and generally it's just it just says who's vulnerable to it another example the way i think about this is if you're driving down the highway and and you know there's facebook and google trying to figure out like what should i give you based on what tends to keep your attention if you look at a car crash and everybody driving the highway they look at the car crash according to facebook and google's like the whole world wants car crashes we just feed them car crashes after car crashes after car crashes and what the algorithms do as guillaume chaslow in the film says who's the youtube whistleblower from the youtube recommendation system is they find the perfect little rabbit hole for you that it knows will keep you there for five hours and the conspiracy theory like dark corners of youtube were the dark corners that tends to keep people there for five hours and so you have to realize that we're now something like 10 years in to this vast psychology experiment where it's been you know in every language in hundreds of countries right and ever in hundreds of languages it's been steering people towards the crazy town when i say crazytown i think of you know imagine there's a spectrum on youtube and there's on one side you have like the calm walter cronkite carl sagan you know slow you know kind of boring but like educational material or something and the other side of the spectrum you have you know the craziest stuff you can find um crazy town no matter where you start you could start in walter cronkite or you could start in crazytown but if i'm youtube and i want you to watch more am i going to steer you towards the calm stuff or am i going to steer you more towards crazy town crazy dumb always more towards crazy town so then you imagine just tilting the floor of humanity just by like three degrees right and then you just step back and you let society run its course as jaren lanier says in the film if you just tilt society by one degree two degrees that's the whole world that's that's what everyone is thinking and believing and so if you look at the at the degree to which people are deep into rabbit hole conspiracy thinking right now and again i want to acknowledge cointelpro operation mockingbird like there's a lot of real stuff right so i'm not categorically dismissing it but we're asking what is the basis upon which we're believing the things we are about the world and increasingly that's that's based on technology and we can get into you know what's going on in portland well the only way i know that is i'm looking at my social media feed and according to that it looks like the entire city is on fire and it's a war zone but if you i called a friend there the other day and he said it's a beautiful day there's there's actually no violence anywhere near where i am it's just like these two blocks or something like that and and this is the thing is warping our view of reality and and i think that's what really for me the social dilemmas was really trying to accomplish as a film and you know the director jeff werlowski was trying to accomplish is is how did this society get go crazy everywhere all at once you know seemingly you know this didn't happen by accident happened by design of this business model when did the business model get implemented like when did they start using these algorithms to recommend things because initially youtube was just a series of videos and it didn't have that recommended correct section when was that you know it's a good question i mean um you know they originally youtube was just post a video and you can get people to you know go to that url and send it around uh they needed to figure out once the competition for attention got more intense they needed to figure out how am i gonna keep you there and so recommending those videos on the right hand side i think that was there pretty early if i remember actually because that's that was sort of the innovation is like keeping people within this youtube wormhole and once people were in the youtube wormhole constantly seeing videos that was what they could they could offer the promise to a new video uploader hey if you post it here you're going to get way more views than if you posted on vimeo right and that's that's the thing if i open up tik tok right now on my phone do you have tic tac on your phone um well i'm not supposed to obviously but more for research purposes do you know how to take talk at all no okay my 12 year old is obsessed oh really oh yeah she can't even sit around if she's standing still for five minutes she just starts like she starts tick-tocking and that's the thing i mean 2012 2012 oh so the mayans were right right 2012 the platform announced an update to the discovery system uh designed to identify the videos people actually want to watch by prioritizing videos that hold attention throughout as well as increasing the amount of time a user spends on the platform overall utoh youtube could assure advertisers that it was providing a valuable high quality experience for people yeah so um that that's beginning of the end yeah so 2012 on youtube's timeline i mean um you know the twitter and facebook world i think introduces the retweet and reshare buttons in the 2009 to 2010 kind of time period so you end up with this world where the things that we're most paying attention to are based on algorithms choosing for us and so the sort of deeper argument that's in the film that i'm not sure everyone picks up on is these technology systems have taken control of human choice they've taken control of humanity because they're controlling the information that all of us are getting right think about every election like um i think of facebook as kind of a voting machine but it's a sort of indirect voting machine because it controls the information for four years that your entire society is getting and then everyone votes based on that information now you could say well hold on radio and television were there and were partisan before that but actually tv um radio and tv are often getting their news stories from twitter and twitter is recommending things based on these algorithms so when you control the information that an entire population is getting you're controlling their choices i mean literally in military theory if i want to screw up your military i want to control the information that it's getting i want to confuse the enemy and that information funnel is the very thing that's been corrupted and it's like the flint water supply for our minds i was talking to a friend yesterday and she was saying that there were articles that uh she was laughing that there's articles that are written about negative tweets that random people make about a celebrity doing this or that and she was like and she was quoting this article she's like look how crazy this is this is a whole article that's written about someone who decided to say something negative about some something some celebrity had done and then it becomes this huge art and then the tweets are prominently featured right and then the response to those i mean like like really like arbitrary like weird because it's a values-blind system that just cares about what will get attention exactly and that's what the article was it was just an attention grab it's interesting because um prince harry and megan have become very interested in these issues and are actually working on these issues and um getting to know them just a little bit are they really yeah well they're because it affects them personally well it's actually interesting i mean i don't want to speak for them but um i think megan has been the target of the most vitriol hate oriented stuff on the planet right from just the amount of sort of criticism that they that they get really and scrutiny yeah i mean she's just like news feeds filled with hate about just what she looks like what she says just constantly boy i'm out of the loop i've never seen anything she's pretty what do they think she looks like i honestly i don't follow it myself because i don't fall into these attention traps i try not to but people she just faces the worst victory i mean this is the thing with teen bullying right so i think they work on these issues because teenagers are now getting a micro version of this thing where each of us are scrutinized you know and i think that's what's not i mean think about what celebrity status does and how it screws up humans in general right like take an average celebrity like it warps your mind it warps your psychology and you get scrutiny right when you suddenly are followed each person gets thousands or project forward in the future a few years each of us have you know tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people that are following what we say that's a lot of feedback and you know as jonathan heights says in the film and i know you've had him here yeah you know it's made kids much more cautious and and less risk-taking and um and more bullied overall and um there's just huge problems in mental health around this yeah it's really bad for young girls right um especially for celebrities and i've had quite a few celebrities in here and we've discussed it i just tell them that you can't read that stuff just don't read it yeah like there's no good in it like i had a friend um she did a show she's a comedian she did a show and she was talking about this one negative comment that was inaccurate you know that said she only did a half an hour and her show sucked she's like [ __ ] her that's not like i go why are you reading that she's like because it's mostly positive i go but how come you're not talking about most of it then we're talking about this one person yeah it's one negative person we're both laughing about it like she's she's healthy you know she's not she's not completely [ __ ] up by it but this one person got into her head i'm like i'm telling you it's not the juice is not worth the squeeze but don't read those things but this is this is exactly right and this is based on how our minds work i mean our minds literally have something called negativity bias so if you have a hundred comments and 99 are positive and one is negative just where does the average human's mind go right they go to the negative yeah and it also goes to the negative even when you shut down the screen your mind is sitting there looping on that negative comment and why because evolutionarily it's really important that we look at social approval negative social approval because our reputation is at stake in the tribe yes so it matters yes but it's never been easier now for not just that that one comment to sort of gain more airtime but then for that to build a hate mob and then to see the interconnected clicks and i can go in and see 10 other people that responded to that that are now yes and so especially when you have teenagers that are exposed to this and you can keep going down the tree and see all of the hate fest on you this is the psychological environment that is the default way that kids are growing up now yeah i actually faced this recently with the film itself because actually the film has gotten just crazy positive acclaim for the most part and there's just a few you know negative comments and for myself even right becomes a conjunction but i was glued to a few negative comments and i and then you could click and you would see the other people that you know who positively like or respond to those comments like why did that person say that negative thing i thought we were friends that whole kind of psychology and we're all vulnerable to it unless you learn as you said to tell your celebrity friends just don't pay attention even mild stuff i see people fixate on even mild disagreement or mild criticism people fixate on and it's um it's it's also a problem because you realize that someone's saying this and you're not there and you can't defend yourself so you have this feeling of helplessness like hey that's not true i didn't and then you you don't get it out of your system you never you never get to express it and people can share that false negative stuff i mean not all negative stuff is false but you can assert things and build on the hate fest right and start going crazy and saying this person's a white supremacist or this person's even worse and that'll spread to thousands and thousands of people and next thing you know you check into your feed again at you know 8 p.m that night and you your whole reputation's been destroyed yes and you didn't even know what happened to you well and this happened to teenagers too i mean they're anxious like i'll post you know teenager opposed to photo uh their high school they make a dumb comment without thinking about it and then next thing they know you know at the end of the day the parents are all calling because like 300 parents saw it and are calling up the parent of that kid and it it's you know we talk to teachers a lot in our work at the center for humane technology and they um will say that on monday morning this is before kobe but on monday morning they spend the first like hour of class having to clear all the drama that happened on social media from the weekend for the kids jesus and again like this and these kids are in what age group this is like eighth ninth ninth tenth grade that kind of thing and the the other problem with these kids is there's not like uh a long history of people growing up through this kind of influence and successfully navigating it yeah these are the these are the pioneers yeah and they won't know anything different which is why you know we talk about in the film like this they're growing up in this environment and you know one of the simplest principles of ethics um uh is the ethics of symmetry doing onto others as you would do to yourself and as we say at the end of the film like one of the easiest ways you know that there's a problem here is that many of the executives at the social media tech companies don't let their own kids use social media right they literally say at the end of the film like it's we have a rule about it we're religious about it we don't do it the ceo of lunchable's foods didn't let his own kids eat lunchables that's when you know if you talk to a doctor or a lawyer a doctor and you say you know would you get this surgery for your own kids oh no i would never do that like would you trust that doctor right and it's the same thing for a lawyer so this is the relationship where we have a relationship of asymmetry and technology is influencing all of us and we need a system by which you know when i was growing up uh you know i grew up on the macintosh and technology and i was creatively doing programming projects and whatever else the people who built the technology i was using would have their own kits use the things that i was using because they were creative and they were about tools and empowerment and that's what's changed we don't have that anymore because the business model took over and so instead of having just tools sitting there like hammers waiting to be used to build you know creative projects or programming to invent things or paint brushes or whatever we now have a manipulation based technology environment where everything you use has this incentive to not only addict you but to have you play the fame lottery get social feedback because those are all the things that keep people's attention isn't this also a problem with these information technologies being attached to corporations that have this philosophy of unlimited growth yes so they're they're no matter how much they make i i applaud apple because i think they're the only company that takes steps to protect privacy to uh block advertisements to make sure that at least like when you when you use their maps application they're not saving your data and sending it to everybody and it's one of the reasons why apple maps is really not as good as google maps right but i use it and that's one of the reasons why i use it and when apple came out recently and there was um they were doing something to uh to to block your uh information being uh sent to other places and they i forget what was the exact thing that it was in the new ios they released a thing that blocks the tracking identifiers that's right and it's not actually out yet it's going to be out in january or february i think someone told me and what that's due that's a good example of they're putting a tax on the advertising industry because just by saying you can't track people individually that you know takes down the value of an advertisement by like 30 or something here it is pops up and you when i do safari i get this whole privacy report thing right that says it's like in the last seven days it's prevented 125 trackers from profiling me right yeah and you can opt out of that if you'd like if you're like no [ __ ] that track me yeah yeah you can do that you can let them send your data but that that seems to me a much more ethical approach to be able to decide whether or not these companies get your information i mean those things are great um the challenge is imagine you get the privacy equation perfectly right look at this apple working on its own search engine as google ties could be cut soon i started using duckduckgo yep for that very reason just because it's they don't do anything with it you know they give you the information but they don't they don't take your data and and do anything with it the the challenge is let's say we get all the privacy stuff perfectly perfectly right and data production and data controls and all that stuff in a system that's still based on attention and grabbing attention and harvesting and strip mining our brains uh you still get maximum polarization addiction mental health problems isolation teen depression and suicide um polarization breakdown of truth right right so that's we really focus in our work uh on those topics because that's the direct influence of the business model on warping society like we need to name this mind warp we think of it like the climate change of culture that you know we they seem like they seem like different disconnected topics much like with climate change you'd say like okay we've got species loss in the amazon we've got we're losing insects we've got melting glaciers we've got ocean acidification we've got the coral reefs you know getting dying these can feel like disconnected things until you have a unified model of how emissions change all those different phenomena right in the social fabric we have shortening of attention spans we have more outrage driven news media we have more polarization um we have more breakdown of truth we have more conspiracy-minded thinking these seem like separate events uh and separate phenomena but they're actually all part of this attention extraction paradigm that the company's growth as you said depends on extracting more of our attention which means more polarization more extreme material more conspiracy thinking and shortening attention spans because we we also say like you know if we want to double the size of the attention economy i want your attention joe to be split into two separate streams like i want you watching the tv uh the tablet and the phone at the same time because now i've tripled the size of the amount of extractable attention that i can get for advertisers which means that by fracking for attention and splitting you into more junk you know attention that's like thinner we can sell that as if it's real attention like the financial crisis where you're selling thinner and thinner financial assets as if it's real but it's really just a junk asset oh wow and that's kind of where we are now where it's sort of the junk attention economy because we we're we can shorten attention spans and we're debasing the substrate of that makes up our society because everything in a democracy depends on individual sense making and meaningful choice meaningful free will meaningful independent views but if that's all basically sold to the highest bidder that debases the soil from which independent views grow because all of us are jacked into this sort of matrix of social media manipulation that's that's ruining and degrading our democracy and that's really there's many other things that are ruining integrating our democracy but that's that's the sort of invisible force that's upstream that affects every other thing downstream because if we can't agree on what's true for example you can't solve any problem i think that's what you talked about in your 10-minute thing on the social dilemma i think i saw on youtube yeah um your organization highlights all these issues in you know in an amazing way and it's very important but do you have any solutions it's hard right so i just want to say that this is as a complex a problem as climate change um in the sense that you need to change the business model i think of it like we're on the fossil fuel economy and we have to switch to some kind of beyond that thing right because so long as the business models of these companies depend on extracting attention can you expect them to do something different like you can't but how could you is it i mean there's so much money involved and now they've accumulated so much wealth that they have an amazing amount of influence yeah you know and and the asymmetric influence can buy lobbyists can influence congress and prevent things from happening so this is why it's kind of the last missiles that's right but you know i think we're seeing signs of real change we have the anti-trust case that was just filed against google in congress we're seeing more hearings what was the basis of that case you know to be honest i was actually in the middle of uh the social dilemma launch when i think that happened and our my home burned down in the recent fires in santa rosa so i actually missed that happening it's hard to hear that yeah sorry that was a big thing to drop but yeah no it's it's awful there's so much that's been happening in the last six years i've been uh i was evacuated three times where i lived in california oh really yeah so we got real close to our house justice departments who's monopolist google for violating antitrust laws department files complain against google to restore competition and search and search advertising markets okay so it's all about search yeah this is right this was a case that's about google using its dominant position to privilege its own search engine um in its own products and beyond which is similar to sort of microsoft bundling in the internet explorer browser but i you know this is all good progress but really it misses the kind of fundamental harm of like these things are warping our society they're warping how our minds are working and there's no you know congressional action against that because it's a really hard problem to solve i think the the reason the film for me is so important is that if i look at the growth rate of how fast uh facebook has been recommending people into conspiracy groups and um kind of polarizing us into separate echo chambers which we should really break down i think as well for people like exactly the mechanics of how that happens but if you look at the growth rate of all those harms compared to you know how fast has congress passed anything to deal with it like basically not at all they seem a little bit unsophisticated in that regard like big big understatement yeah yeah they are trying to be charitable i i want to be charitable too and i want to make sure i call out and there's senator mark warner blumenthal um uh several other senators we've talked to have been really on top of these issues and led i think senator warner's white paper um on how to regulate the tech platforms is one of the best it's from two years ago in 2018 and rafi martina his staffer is an amazing human being has worked very hard on these issues so there are some good folks but when you look at the broad like the hearing yesterday it's mostly grandstanding to politicize the issue right because you you turn it into on the right um hey you're censoring conservatives and on the left it's hey you're not taking down enough misinformation and dealing with the hate speech and all these kinds of things right and they're not actually dealing with how would we solve this problem they're just trying to make a political point to win over their base now the facebook recently banned the q and on pages which i thought was kind of fascinating because i'm like well this is a weird sort of slippery slope isn't it like if you decide that you i mean it's it almost seemed to me like well we'll throw them a bone we'll get rid of q on because it's so preposterous let's just get rid of that what else like if you keep going down that rabbit hole where do you draw the line like where are you allowed to have jfk conspiracy theories are you allowed to have flat earth are you allowed i mean i guess flat earth is not dangerous is that where they make the distinction so i think their policy is evolving in the direction of when things are causing offline harm when online content is known to precede offline harm that's when the platform that's the standard by which platforms are acting what um what offline harm has been caused by the q and on stuff do you know um there's several incidents we interviewed a guy on our podcast about it um there's some armed gunpoint type thing i can't remember um uh and there's there's things that are priming people to be violent you know um uh these are i just wanna say these are really tricky topics right i think what i wanna make sure we get to though is that there are many people manipulating the group think that can happen in these echo chambers because once you're in one of these things like i studied cults earlier in my career and the power of cults is like they're a vertically integrated persuasion stack because they control your social relationships they control who you're hearing from and who you're not hearing from they give you meaning purpose and belonging they um they have a custom language they have an internal way of referring to things and social media allows you to create this sort of decentralized cult factory where it's easier to grab people into an echo chamber where they only hear from other people's views and facebook i think even just recently announced that they're going to be promoting more of the facebook group content into feeds which means that they're actually going to make it easier for that kind of manipulation to happen but did they make the distinction between group content and conspiracy groups like how do you how do you when when does group content when does it cross a line i don't know i mean the the policy teams that work on this are coming up with their own standards so i'm not familiar with it if you think about you know think about how hard it is to come up with a law at the federal level that all states will agree to then you imagine facebook trying to come up with a policy that will be universal to all the countries that are running facebook right well then you imagine how you take a company that never thought they were going to be in the position to do that correct and then within a decade they become the most prominent source of news and information on the planet earth correct and now they have to regulate it and you know i actually believe zuckerberg when he says i don't want to make these decisions i shouldn't be in this role where my beliefs decide the whole world's views right he genuinely believes that yeah um and and to be certain of that but the problem is he created a situation where he is now in that position i mean he got there very quickly and they did it aggressively when they went into countries like myanmar ethiopia uh all throughout the african continent where they gave do you know about free basics no so this is the program that i think has gotten something like 700 million accounts onto facebook where they do a deal with like a telecommunications provider like at their version of 18t in myanmar or something so when you get your smartphone facebook's built-in facebook's built-in i do know about that and there's a uh asymmetry of uh access where it's free to access facebook but it costs money to do the other things so for the data plan so you get a free facebook account facebook is the internet basically because it's the free thing you can do on your phone and then there's we know that there's fake information that's being spread so the data doesn't apply to facebook use yeah i think like the cost you know how we pay for data here like i think you don't pay for facebook but you do pay for all the other things which creates an asymmetry where of course you're going to use facebook for most things right so you facebook messenger yeah and what's that yeah yeah what's up i don't know exactly with video because different little faces has video calls as well in general they do yeah i just don't know how that works in the developing world but there's a joke within facebook i mean this has caused genocides right so in myanmar which is in the film um the rohingya muslim minority group many rohingya were persecuted and murdered because of fake information spread by the government on facebook using their asymmetric knowledge with fake accounts i mean even just a couple weeks ago facebook took down a network of i think several hundred thousand fake accounts in myanmar and they didn't even have at the time more than something like four or five people in their extended facebook network who even spoke the language of that country oh god so when you realize that this is like the i think of like the iraq war colin powell pottery barn rule where like you know if you go in and you break it then you are responsible for fixing it this is facebook actively doing deals to go into ethiopia to go into myanmar to go into the philippines or whatever and providing these solutions and then it breaks the society and they're now in a position where they have to fix it there's actually a joke within facebook that if you want to know which countries will be quote unquote at risk in two years from now look at which ones have facebook free basics jesus and it's terrifying that they do that and they don't have very many people that even speak the language so there's no way they're gonna be able to filter it that's right and so now if you take it back i know we were talking outside about the congressional hearing and jack dorsey and the questions from the senator about are you taking down the content from the ayatollahs or from the chinese xinjiang province about the uyghurs uh you know when there's sort of speech that leads to offline violence in these other countries the issue is that these platforms are managing the information commons for countries they don't even speak the language of right and if you think the conspiracy theory sort of dark corners crazy town of the english internet are bad and we've we've already taken out like hundreds of whack-a-mole sticks and they've hired hundreds of policy people and hundreds of engineers to deal with that problem you go to a country like ethiopia where um there's something like 90 major there's 90 something dialects i think in the country and six major languages where one of them is the dominant facebook sort of language and then the others get persecuted because they actually don't have um uh they don't have a voice on the platform this is really important that um the people in myanmar who got persecuted and murdered didn't have to be on facebook for the fake information spread about them to impact them for people to go after them right so this is the whole i can assert something about this minority group that minority group isn't on facebook but if it manipulates the the dominant culture to go we have to go kill them then they can go do it and the same thing has happened um you know in india uh where there's videos uploaded about hey those muslims i think they're called flesh killings where they'll say that these muslims killed this cow and hindu um is it hinduism the the cows are sacred um the uh to get that right anyway i believe you did yeah um the uh they will post those they'll go viral on whatsapp and say we have to go lynch those uh muslims because they killed our sacred the sacred cows and they went from something like five of those happening per year to now hundreds of those happening per year because of fake news being spread again on facebook facebook about them on whatsapp about them and again they don't have to be on the platform for this to happen to them right so this is critical that you know imagine you and i are all let's imagine all of your listeners you know i don't even know how many you have like tens of millions right and we all listen to this conversation we say we don't want to even use facebook and twitter or youtube we all still if you live in the us still live in a country that everyone else will vote based on everything that they're seeing on these platforms if you zoom out to the global context all of us don't we don't use facebook in brazil but if brazil which uh was heavily the last election was skewed uh by facebook and whatsapp where something like 87 percent of people saw at least one of the major fake news stories about bolsonaro and he got elected and you have people in brazil chanting facebook facebook when he wins he wins and then he sets a new policy to wipe out the amazon all of us don't have to be on facebook to be affected by a leader that wipes out the amazon and accelerates climate change timelines because of those interconnected effects so i you know we at the center for immune technology are looking at this from a global perspective where it's not just the us election facebook manages something like 80 elections per year and if you think that they're doing all the monitoring that they are for you know english-speaking american election most privileged society now look at the hundreds of other countries that they're operating in do you think that they're devoting the same resources to to the other countries this is so crazy it's like is that you jamie that's a weird noise you hear like a squeaky i heard it too yeah maybe it's me i don't think it is just might be feedback there it is it might be me breathing i don't know do you have a you have asthma i i think i had an allergy coming oh yeah i was like sorry um what's terrifying is that we're talking about from 2012 to 2020 um youtube implementing this program and then what is the even the birth of facebook what is that like 2002 or three like 74 2004. this is such a short timeline and having these massive worldwide implications from the use of these things when you look at the future do you look at this like a runaway train that's headed towards a cliff yeah i mean i think right now this thing is a frankenstein that it's not like even if facebook is aware of all these problems they don't have the staff unless they hired like hundreds of you know tens hundreds of thousands of people definitely minimum to try to address all these problems but the paradox we're in is that the very premise of these services is to rely on automation like it used to be we had editors and journalists or at least editors or you know people edited even when on television saying what is credible what is true like you know you sat here with you know alex jones even yesterday and you're trying to check him on everything he's saying right you're researching and trying to look that stuff up you're trying to be doing some more responsible communication the the premise of these systems is that you don't do that like the reason venture capitalists find social media so um uh profitable and such a good investment is because we generate the content for free we are the useful idiots right instead of paying a journalist 70 000 a year to write something credible we can each be convinced to share our political views and we'll do it knowingly for free actually we don't really know the word the useful idiots that's the kind of the point and then instead of paying an editor a hundred thousand dollars a year to figure out which of those things is true that we want to promote and give exponential reach to you have an algorithm says hey what do people click on the most what people like the most and then you realize the quality of the signals that are going into the information environment that we're all sharing is a totally different process we went from a high quality gated process that cost a lot of money to this um really crappy process that costs no money which makes the company so profitable and then we fight back for territory for for values when we raise our hands and say hey there's a thinspiration video problem for teenagers and anorexia hey there's a mass conspiracy sort of echo chamber problem over here hey there's um you know flat earth sort of issues and again these get into tricky topics because we want to you know i i know we both believe in free speech and we have this feeling that um the solution to bad speech is better you know more speech that counters the things that are said but in a finite attention economy we don't have the capacity for everyone who gets bad speech to just have a counter response in fact what happens right now is that that bad speech rabbit holes into not only called worse and worse speech but more extreme versions of that view that confirms it because once facebook knows that that flat earth rabbit hole is good for you at getting your attention back it wants to give you just more and more of that it doesn't want to say here's 20 people who disagree with that thing right right so i think if you were to imagine a different system we would ask who are the thinkers that are most open-minded and synthesis-oriented where they can actually steal man the other side actually they can do you know for this speech here is the opposite counter argument they can show that they understand that and imagine those people get lifted up but notice that none of those people that you and i know i mean we're both friends with eric weinstein and you know i think he's one of these guys who's really good at sort of offering the steel manning here's the other side of this here's the other side of that but the people who generally do that aren't the ones who get the tens of millions of followers on these surfaces it's the black and white extreme outrage oriented thinkers and and speakers that get rewarded in this detention economy and so if you look at how if i zoom way out and say how is the entire system behaving just like if i zoom out and say climate you know the climate system like how is the entire overall system behaving it's not producing the kind of information environment on which democracy can survive jesus the thing that troubles me the most that i clearly see you're thinking and i agree with you like i don't see any holes in what you're saying like i don't know how this plays out but it doesn't look good and i don't see a solution it's like if there are a thousand bison running full steam towards a cliff and they don't realize the cliff is there i don't see how you pull them back so i think of it like we're trapped in a body and um that's eating itself so like it's kind of a cannibalism economy because our economic growth right now with these tech companies is based on eating our own organs so we're eating our own mental health organs we're eating the health of our children we're eating sorry for being so gnarly about it but it's it's a cannibalistic system in a system that's hurting itself or eating itself or punching itself if one of the neurons wakes up in the body it's not enough to change that it's going to keep punching itself but if enough of the neurons wake up and say this is stupid why would we build our system this way and the reason i'm so excited about the film is that if you have 40 to 50 million people who now recognize that we're living in this sort of cannibalist system in which the economic incentive is to debase the life support systems of your democracy we can all wake up and say that's stupid let's do something differently let's actually change the system let's use different platforms let's fund different platforms let's regulate and tame the existing frankensteins and i don't mean regulating speech i mean really thoughtfully how do we change the incentives so it doesn't go to the same race to the bottom and we have to all recognize that we're now 10 years into this hypnosis experiment of warping of the mind and like you know friends with some hypnotists like how do we snap our fingers and get people to say that that artifact there's an inflated level of polarization and hatred right now that especially going into this election i think we all need to be much more cautious about what's running in our brains right now yeah i don't think most people are generally aware of what's causing this polarization i think they think it's the climate of society because the president and because of uh black lives matter and the the george floyd protests and all this jazz but i don't think they understand that that's exacerbated in a fantastic way by social media and the last 10 years of our addictions to social media and these echo chambers that we all exist in yeah so i want to make sure that we're both clear and i know you agree with this that um these things were already in society to some degree right so we want to make sure we're not saying social media is blamed for all of it absolutely not no no gasoline is gasoline right exactly it's it's lighter fluid for sparks of polarization it's lighter fluid for sparks of you know more paranoid which is ironically what everybody it was the opposite of everybody what everybody hoped the internet was going to be right everybody hoped the internet was going to be this bottomless resource of information where everyone was going to be educated in a way they had never experienced before in the history of the human race where you'd have access to all the answers to all your questions you you know eric weinstein describes as the library of alexandria in your pocket yeah but no well and i want to be clear so that i'm not against technology or giving people access in fact i think a world where everyone had a smartphone and a google search box and wikipedia and like a search oriented of youtube so you can look up health issues or how to do it yourself fix anything sure it would be awesome that would be great i would love that just want to be really clear because this is not an anti-technology conversation it's about again this business model that depends on recommending stuff to people which just to be clear on the polarization front um it social media is more profitable when it gives you your own truman show that affirms your view of reality every time you flick your finger right like it that's going to be more profitable than every time you flick your finger i actually show you here's a more complex nuanced picture that disagrees with that here's a different way to see it that won't be nearly as successful and the best way for people to test this we actually recommend even after seeing the film to do this is um open up facebook on two phones especially like you know two partners or people who have the same friends so you have the same friends on facebook you would think if you scroll your feeds you'd see the same thing you're the same people you're following so why wouldn't you see the same thing but if you swap phones and you actually scroll through their feed for 10 minutes and you scroll through mine for 10 minutes you'll find that you'll see completely different information and it won't you'll also notice that it won't feel very compelling like if you asked yourself my friend emily just did this with with her husband after seeing the film and she literally has the same friends as her husband and she scrolled through the feed she's like this isn't interesting i wouldn't come back to this right and so we have to again realize how subtle and and yeah just how subtle this has been i wonder what would happen if i scrolled through my feed because i literally don't use facebook i don't use it at all i only use instagram use instagram i i stopped using twitter because it's like a bunch of mental patients throwing [ __ ] at each other um and i uh very rarely use it i should say occasionally i'll check some things to see like what the climate is but uh of the cultural climate but i use instagram and i facebook i used to use instagram to post to facebook but i kind of stopped even doing that because just it just seems gross yeah it's just and it's these people in these verbose arguments about the politics and the economy and world events and just we have to ask ourselves is is that medium constructive to solving these problems no just not at all and it's an attention casino right the house always wins and we're you know eric you might see eric weinstein in a thread you know battling it out or sort of duking it out with someone and maybe even reaching some convergence on something but it just whizzes by your feet and then it's gone right and all the effort that we're putting in to make these systems work but then it's just all gone what do you do i mean i try to very minimally use social media overall um luckily the work is so busy that that's easier um i i want to say first that um you know on the addiction fronts of these things i you know myself i'm very sensitive and you know easily addicted by these things myself and that's why i think i notice you were saying in a social dilemma it's email for you huh yeah i well i you know for me if i refresh my email and pull to refresh like a slot machine sometimes i'll get invited to meet the president of such and such to advise on regulation and sometimes i get a stupid newsletter from a politician i don't care about or something right um so i email is very addictive um it's funny i talked to daniel kahneman who wrote the he's like the founder of behavioral economics he wrote the book thinking fast and slow if you know that one and he said as well that email was uh the most addictive for him and he you know the one thing you'll find is the people who know most about these sort of persuasive manipulative tricks they'll say we're not immune to them just because we know about them dan ariely who's another famous persuasion behavioral economics guy talks about flattery and how flattery still feels good even if i tell you i don't mean it like i love that that sweatshirt that's an awesome sweatshirt where'd you get it you're just gonna [ __ ] me but that's that's the um it feels good to get flattery even if you know that it's not real right and the point being that like again we have so much evolutionary wiring to care about what other people think of us that just because you know that they're manipulating you and the likes or whatever it still feels good to get those hundred extra likes on that thing that you posted yeah when do the likes come about um well let's see well actually you know in the film you know justin rosenstein who's the inventor of the like button talks about i think the first version was something called beacon and it arrived in 2006 i think but then the simple like one-click like button was like a little bit later like 2008 2009. are you worried that it's going to be more and more invasive i mean you think about the problems we're dealing with now with facebook and twitter and instagram all these within the last decade or so what what do we have to look forward to i mean is there something on the horizon that's going to be even more invasive well we have to change this system because as you said technology is only to get it is only going to get more immersed into our lives and infuse into our lives not less is technology going to get more persuasive or less persuasive more more is ai going to get better at predicting our next move or less good at predicting our next move well it's almost like we have to eliminate that and i mean it would be really hard to tell them you can't use algorithms anymore that depend on people's attention spans right it would be really hard but it seems like the only way for the internet to be pure correct i think of this like the environmental movement i mean some people have compared the film the social dilemma to um rachel carson's silent spring right where that was the birth that was the book that birthed the environmental movement and that was in a republican administration the knicks administration we actually passed we created the epa the environmental protection agency we went from a world where we said the environment's something we don't pay attention to to we passed a bunch i forgot the laws we passed between 1963 and 1972 over a decade we started caring about the environment we created things that protected the national parks we and i think that's kind of what's going on here that you know imagine for example it is illegal to show advertising on youth oriented social media apps between 12 a.m and 6 a.m because you're basically monetizing loneliness and lack of sleep right like imagine that you cannot advertise during those hours because we say that like a national park our children's attention between this is a very minimal example by this would be like you know taking the most obvious piece of low-hanging fruit and land it's like let's quarantine this off and say this is sacred but isn't the problem like the the environmental protection agency it resonates with most people the idea oh let's protect the world for our children right there's not a lot of people profiting off of polluting the rivers right but when you lose i mean over over hunting you know certain lands or overfishing certain fisheries and collapsing them i mean there there are if you have big enough corporations that are based on an infinite growth profit model you know operating with less and less you know resources to get this is a problem we faced before for so for sure but it's not the same sort of scale as 300 and x amount of millions of people and a vast majority of them are using some form of social media and also this is not something that really resonates in a very clear like one plus one equals two way like the environmental protection agency it makes sense like if you ask people right should you be able to throw garbage into the ocean everyone's gonna say no that's a terrible idea right should you be able to make an algorithm that shows people what they're interested in on youtube like yeah what's wrong with that well it's more like sugar right because sugar is always going to taste way better than something else because our evolutionary heritage says like that's rare and so we should pay more attention to it this is like sugar for the fame lottery for our attention for social approval and so it's always going to feel good and we need to have consciousness about it and we haven't banned sugar but we have created a new conversation about what healthy you know eating is right i mean there's a whole new fitness movement in sort of yoga and all these other things that people care more about their bodies and health than they probably ever have i think many of us wouldn't have thought we'd ever reach it through uh you know get through the period of soda being at the sort of pinnacle popularity that is i think in 2013 or 14 was the year that water crossed over as being more of a successful drinking product than soda i think really i think that's true you might want to look that up but so i think we could have something like that here we have to i think of it this way if you want to even get kind of weirdly i don't know spiritual or something about it which is we are the only species that could even know that we were doing this to ourselves right like we're the only species with the capacity for self-awareness to know that we have actually like roped ourselves into this matrix of like literally the matrix um of of sort of undermining our own psychological weaknesses like a lion that somehow manipulated its environment so that there's gazelles everywhere and is like overeating on gazelles doesn't have the self-awareness to know wait a second if we keep doing this this is going to cause all these other problems it can't do that because its brain doesn't have that capacity our brain we do have the capacity for self-awareness we can name negativity bias which is that if i have 100 comments and 99 are positive my brain goes to the negative we can name that and once we're aware of it we get some agency back we can name that we have a draw towards social approval so when i see i've been tagged in a photo i know that they're just manipulating my social approval we can name social reciprocity which is when i get all those text messages and i feel oh i have to get back to all these people well that's just an inbuilt bias that we have to get back reciprocity we have to get back to people who do give stuff to us the more we name our own biases like confirmation bias we can name that my brain is more likely to feel good getting information that i already agree with that information that disagrees with me once i know that about myself i can get more agency back yeah and we're the only like species that we know of that has the capacity to realize that we're in a self-terminating sort of system and we have to change that by understanding our own weaknesses and that we've created the system that is undermining ourselves and i i think the film is doing that for a lot of people it certainly is but i think it needs more it's like inspiration it needs a refresher on a regular basis right do you feel this massive obligation to be that guy that is out there sort of as the the paul revere of uh the the technology influence uh invasion i just see these problems and i want them to go away yeah you know i i didn't i you know didn't desire and wake up to run a social movement but honestly right now that's what we're trying to do um with the center for humane technology we realize that before the success of the film we were actually more focused on working with technologists inside the industry you know i come from silicon valley many of my friends are executives at the companies and we have these inside relationships so we focused at that level we also worked with policymakers um and we were trying to speak to policymakers we weren't trying to mobilize the whole world against this problem but with the film suddenly we as an organization have had to do that and we're frankly i wish we had i'm speaking really honestly we i really wish we'd had those funnels so that people who saw the film could have landed into you know a carefully designed funnel where we actually started mobilizing people to deal with this issue because there are ways we can do it we can pass certain laws we have to have a new cultural sort of set of norms about how do we want to show up and use the system um you know families and schools can have whole new protocols of how we want to do group migrations because one of the problems is that if a teenager says by themselves whoa i saw the film i'm going to delete my instagram account by myself or tiktok account by myself that's not enough because all their friends are still using instagram and tiktok and they're still going to talk about who's dating who or gossip about this or homework or whatever on those services and so the services instagram and tick tock prey on social exclusion that you will feel excluded if you don't participate and the way to solve that is to get whole schools or families together like put different parent groups or whatever together and do a group migration from instagram to signal or imessage or some kind of group thread that way because notice that when you as you said apple's a pretty good actor in this space if i make a facetime call to you facetime isn't trying to monetize my attention right it's just sitting there being like yet when how can i help you have a good face it's close to face-to-face you know conversation is possible jamie pulled up an article earlier that was saying that uh apple was creating its own search engine yeah uh i hope that is the case and i i hope that if it is the case they apply the same sort of ethics that they have towards sharing your information that they do uh with other things to to their search engine but i wonder if there would be some sort of value in them creating a social media platform that doesn't rely on that sort of algorithm yep well i think in general one of the exciting trends that has happened since the film is there's actually many more people trying to build alternatives social media products that are not based on these business models yeah um uh i could name a few but i i don't want to be endorsing it i mean there's people building marco polo clubhouse wikipedia is trying to build a sort of for a non-profit version um i always forget the names of these things but okay but the the interesting thing is that for the first time people are trying to build something else because now there's enough people who feel disgusted by the present state of affairs and that wouldn't be possible unless we created a kind of a cultural movement based on something like the film that reaches a lot of people it's interesting that you made this comparison to the environmental protection agency because there's kind of a parallel in the way other countries handled the environment versus the way we do and how it makes them competitive i mean that's always been the republican argument for um not getting rid of certain fossil fuels and coal and all sorts of things that have a negative consequence we we need to be competitive with china we need to be competitive with these other countries that don't have these regulations in effect the concern would be well first of all the problem is these companies are global right like facebook is global if they put these regulations on america but didn't put these regulations worldwide then wouldn't they use the uh the income and the algorithm in other countries unchecked right and have this negative consequence and gather up all this money which is why just like sugar it's like everyone around the world has to understand and be more antagonistic yeah and not like sugar's evil but just you have to have a common awareness about the problem but how could you educate people that like if you're talking about some a country like myanmar or these other countries that that have had these like serious consequences because of facebook how how could you possibly get our ideas across to them if we don't even know their language and it's just this system that's already set up in this very advantageous way for them where facebook comes on their phone like how could you hit the brakes on that well i mean first i just want to say this is an incredibly hard and depressing problem yeah just the scale of it right right um you need something like a global i mean language independent global self-awareness about this problem now again i don't want to be tweeting the horn about the film but the thing i'm excited about is it launched on netflix in 190 countries and in 30 languages so you shouldn't the horn [Laughter] well i think you know the film was seen in 30 languages so you know the cool thing is i wish i could show the world my inbox i think people see the film and they feel like oh my god this is huge and i'm a huge problem and i'm all alone how are we ever going to fix this but i get emails every day from indonesia chile argentina brazil people saying oh my god this is exactly what's going on in my country i mean i've never felt more optimistic and i felt really pessimistic for the last eight years working on this because there really hasn't been enough movement but i think for the first time there's a global awareness now that we could then start to mobilize i know the eu's mobilizing canada is mobilizing australia's mobilizing california state is mobilizing with prop 24 there's a whole bunch of movement now in the space and they have a new rhetorical arsenal of you know why we have to make this bigger transition now you know are we going to get all the the countries that you know where there's the six different major dialects in in ethiopia where they're going to know about this i don't think the film was translated into all those dialects i think we need to do more um it's it's a really really hard messy problem but on the topic of um uh if if we don't do it someone else will you know one interesting thing in the environmental movement was um there's a great um wnyc radio piece about the history of lead and when we regulated lead i don't do you know anything about this yeah i do yeah yeah the cruises matches up with with your experience the my understanding is that obviously lead was this sort of miracle thing we put it in paint we put it in gas it was like great and then um the way we figured out that we should regulate lead out of our sort of infused product supply is by proving there was this this guy who proved that it dropped kids iq by four points for every i think mike uh microgram per deciliter i think in other words for for the amount of if you had a microgram of lead per deciliter of either i'm guessing air um it would drop like the iq of kids by four points and they measured this by actually doing a sample on their teeth or something because lead shows up in your bones i think and they proved that if the iq points dropped by four points it would lower future age warning age earning excuse me wage earning potential of those kids which would then lower the gdp of the country because it would be shifting the iq of the entire country down by four points if not more based on how much lead is in the environment if you zoom out and say is social media now let's replace the word iq which is also a wrought term because there's like a whole bunch of views about how that's designed in certain ways and not others and measuring intelligence let's replace iq with problem solving capacity what is your problem solving capacity which is actually how they talk about it in this radio episode um and imagine that we have a societal iq or a societal problem-solving capacity the u.s has a societal iq russia has a societal iq germany has a societal iq how good is a country at solving its problems now imagine that what does social media do to our societal iq what distorts our ideas it gives us a bunch of false narratives it fills us with misinformation it makes it impossible to agree with each other and in a democracy if you don't agree with each other and you can't even do compromise people recognize that politics is invented to avoid warfare right so we have compromise and understanding so that we don't like physically are violent with each other we have compromise and conversation if social media makes compromise conversation and undershared understanding and shared truth impossible it doesn't drop our societal iq by four points it drops it to zero because you can't solve any problem whether it's human trafficking or poverty or climate issues or um you know racial injustice whatever it is that you care about it depends on us having some shared view about what we agree on and by the way and on the optimistic side there are countries like taiwan that have actually built a digital democratic sort of social media type thing audrey tang you should have audrey tang on your show she's amazing she's the digital minister of taiwan and they've actually built a system that rewards unlikely consensus so when two people who would traditionally disagree post something online um and when when they actually two people who traditionally disagree actually agree on something that's what gets boosted to the top of the way that we look at our information feeds really yeah so it's about finding consensus whether it'd be unlikely and saying hey actually you know you joe and tristan you typically you agree you disagree on these six things you agree on these three things and of things that we're going to encourage you to talk about on a menu we hand you a menu of the things you agree on and how did they manipulate that um honestly we did a great interview with her on our podcast um that people can listen to uh i think you should have iran honestly i would love to but what does your podcast again tell people it's called your undivided attention um and with the interview is with audrey tang is her name uh and i think that's this is one model of how do you have you know sort of digital media bolted onto the top of a democracy and have it work better as opposed to how do you it just degrades into kind of nonsense and polarization and inability to agree that's such a unique situation too right because china doesn't recognize them and there's a real threat that they're going to be invaded by china correct and so what's interesting about taiwan is there's we didn't we haven't talked about the disinformation issues but it's under like you said not just physical threat from china but massive propaganda disinformation campaigns are trying to run there right i'm sure and so what's amazing is that their digital media system is good at um dealing with these disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories and other things even in the face of a huge threat like china but there's more binding energy in the country because they all know that there's a tiny island and there's a looming threat of this big country whereas the united states we're not this tiny island with a looming threat elsewhere in fact many people don't know or don't think that there's actually information warfare going on um i actually think it's really important to point out to people that um the social media is one of our biggest national security risks because while we're obsessed with protecting our physical borders and building walls and you know spending a trillion dollars redoing the nuclear fleet um we left the digital border wide open like if russia or china tried to fly a plane into the united states our pentagon and billions of dollars of defense infrastructure from raytheon and boeing or whatever will shoot that thing down and it doesn't get in if they try to come into the country they'll get stopped by the passport control system ideally if they try to fly if russia or china try to fly an information bomb into the country instead of being met by the department of defense they're met by a facebook algorithm with a white glove that says exactly which zip code you want to target like it's the opposite of protection so social media makes us more vulnerable i think of it like if you imagine like a bank that spent billions of dollars um you know surrounding the bank with physical bodyguards right like just the buffers guys in every single quarter you just totally secured the bank but then you installed on the bank a computer system that everyone interacts with and no one changes the default password from like lower case password anyone can hack in that's what we do when we install facebook in our society or you install facebook in ethiopia because if you think russia or china you know or iran or south korea or excuse me north korea um influencing our election is bad just keep in mind the like dozens of countries throughout africa where we actually know recently there was a huge campaign that the stanford cyber policy center did a report on of russia targeting i think something like seven or eight major countries and disinformation campaigns running in those countries or the facebook whistleblower who came out about a month ago uh sophie zhang i think is her name uh saying that she personally had to step in to deal with disinformation campaigns in honduras azerbaijan um i think greece or some other countries like that so the scale of what these technology companies are managing they're managing the information environments for all these these countries but they don't have the resources to do it so they not only that they're not trained to do it they're not qualified correct they're making up as they go along 20 to 30 to four and they're way behind the curve when when i had rene de rest on and she detailed all the issues with the uh internet research agency in russia and what they did during the 2016 campaign for both sides i mean the idea is they just promoted trump but they were basically selling the seeds of uh just the decline of the democracy they were trying to figure out how to create turmoil and they were doing it in this like very bizarre calculated way that it didn't seem it was hard to see like what's the end game here well the end game is to have everybody fight yeah i mean that's really what the end game was and if i'm you know one of our major adversaries you know after world war ii there was no ability to use kinetic like nukes or something on the bigger countries right like that's all done so the what's the best way to take down the biggest you know country you know on the planet on the block you use its own internal tensions against itself this is what sun tzu would tell you to do yeah and that's never been easier because of facebook and because of these platforms being open to do this manipulation and if i'm looking now we're four days away from the u.s elections or something like that when this goes out jesus christ there is never we have never been more destabilized as a country until now i mean this is the most disabled you probably have ever been i would say um and polarized um maybe people would argue the civil war was worse but in recent history um there is maximum incentive for foreign actors to drive up again not one side or the other but to drive us into conflict so i would really you know i think what we all need to do is recognize how much incentive there is to plant stories to actually have so physical violence on the streets i think there was just a story wasn't we talking about this morning that um there's some kind of truck i think in philadelphia or dc loaded with explosives or something like this there's there's such an incentive to try to you know throw the agent provocateur like throw the first stone throw the first um you know molotov cocktail throw the first uh you know make the first shot fired uh to drive up that conflict and i think we have to realize how much that may be artificially motivated very much so and the rene de resta podcast that i did where she went into depth about all the different ways that they did it and the most curious one being funny memes yep that there's so many of the memes that you read that you laughed at yeah well there's it was just so weird that's they were humorous and she said she looked at probably a hundred thousand memes and the funny thing is you actually can agree with them right like they should you would you would laugh at them like oh you know and they're being constructed by foreign agents that are doing this to try to mock certain aspects of our society and pit people against each other and create a mockery and you know back in 2016 there was no there's very little collaboration between our defense industry and cia and dod and people like that uh and the tech platforms and the tech platform said it's government's job to deal with if foreign actors are doing these things how do you stop something like the ira like say if they're creating memes in particular and they're funny memes well so one of the issues that renee brings up and i'm just a huge fan of her and her work uh is as am i yeah uh is that if i'm you know china i i don't need to invent some fake news story i just find someone in your society who's already saying what i want you to be talking about and i just like amplify them up i take that dial and i just turn it up to ten right so i find your texas secessionists and like oh texas that would be a good thing if i'm trying to rip the country apart so i'm going to take those tested secessionists and the california secessionists and i'm just going to dial them up to 10. so those are the ones we hear from now if you're trying to stop me in your facebook and you're the integrity team or something on what grounds are you trying to stop me because it's your own people your own free speech i'm just the one amplifying the one i want to be out there right and so that's what gets tricky about this is i think our moral concepts that we hold so dear of free speech are inadequate in an attention economy that is hackable and it's really more about what's getting the attention rather than what are individuals saying or can't say and you know again they've created this frankenstein where they're making mostly automated decisions about who's looking like what pattern behavior or coordinated and authentic behavior here or that and they're shutting down people i don't know if people know this people facebook shut down two billion fake accounts i think this is a stat from a year ago they shut down two billion fake accounts they have three billion active real users do you think that those two billion were the perfect like real you know real fake accounts and they didn't miss any or they didn't overwhelm and took some real accounts down with it you know our friend brett weinstein he just got taken down by facebook i think he saw that that seemed calculated though facebook has shut down 5.4 billion fake accounts this year and that was in november 29th oh my god oh my god that is insane that's so many and so again it's the scale that these things are operating at and that's why you know when brett got his thing taken down i didn't like that but i it's not like there's this vendetta against brett right oh i don't know about that that seemed to me to be a calculated thing because uh you know eric uh actually tweeted about it saying that you know you could probably find the tweet because i retweeted it like basically it was reviewed by a person so you're lying he's like this is not something that was uh taken down by an algorithm he believes that it was because it was unity 2020 platform where they're trying to bring together conservatives and and liberals and try to find some common ground and create like a third party candidate that combines the best of both worlds i don't understand what policy his uni unity 2020 thing was going up against like i have no idea he's going against a two-party system the idea is that it's taking away votes from biden and then it might help trump win right banned him off twitter as well you know that too they they blocked the account or something from they they banned the entirety they banned the 20 unity 2020 account yeah unity yeah i mean literally unity they're like nope no unity [ __ ] you we want biden yeah the the political bias on social media is undeniable and that's maybe the least of our concerns in the long run but it's a tremendous issue and it also it it for sure sows the seeds of discontent and it creates more animosity and it creates more conflict the interesting thing is that if i'm one of our adversaries i see that there is this view that people don't like the social media platforms that i want them to be more like let's say i'm rushing china right and i'm currently using facebook and twitter successfully to run information campaigns and then i want them i can actually plant a story so that they end up shutting it down and shutting down conservatives or shutting down one side which then forces the platforms to open up more so that i then russia china can keep manipulating even more i understand yeah so right now they want it to be a free-for-all where there's no moderation at all because that allows them to get in and they can weaponize the conversation against itself right i don't see a way out of this tristan we have to all be aware of it i mean even if we are all aware of it it seems so pervasive yeah well it's not just pervasive it's like we said it's we're 10 years into this hypnosis experiment this is the largest psychological experiment we've ever run on humanity it's insane it is insane and it and it's also with tools that never existed before evolutionarily so like we would we really are not designed just the way these brightly lit metal devices and glass devices interact with your brain they're so enthralling right we've never had to resist anything like this before with the things we've had to resist is don't go to the bar you know you have an alcohol problem stop smoking cigarettes it'll give you cancer right we've never had a thing that does so much right you can call your mom you can text a good friend you can you can receive your news you can get an amazing email about this project you're working at and it could suck up your time staring at butts and the and the infusion of the things that you that are necessary for life like text messaging or like looking something up are infused and right next to right all of the sort of corrupt stuff right and if you're using it to order food and if you're using it to get an uber and right but imagine if we all wiped our phones of all the extractive business model stuff and we only had the tools have you thought about using a light phone yeah it's funny i those guys just to be brought up in my awareness more more often um for those who don't know it's like it's like a mini one of the guys on the documentary is one of the creators of it right no i think you're thinking of tim kendall who started he's the guy who invented who brought in facebook's business model of advertising and he runs a company now called moment that shows you uh the number of hours you spend on different apps and helps you use it someone involved in the documentary was also a part of the light phone team no no no not not officially no i don't think so um but the light phone is like a basically a thing black and white black and white phone things text and i think it does it plays music now which i was like well that's a mistake right like that's a slippery slope that's the thing and we have to all be comfortable with losing access to things that we might love right like oh maybe you do want to take notes this time but you don't have your full keyboard to do that and are you willing to i think the thing is one thing people can do is to take like a digital sabbath one day a week off completely because at the very imagine if if you got several hundred million people to do that that drops the revenue of these companies by 15 because that's one out of seven days that you're not on the system so long as you don't rebalance and use it more on the other days i'm inclined to think that apple's their solution is really the way out of this that to opt out of all sharing of your information and uh if if they could come up with some sort of a social media platform that kept that as an ethic yeah i mean it might allow us to communicate with each other but stop all this algorithm nonsense and it's look if anybody has the power to do it they have so much goddamn money totally well and also they're like that you know people talk about you know the government regulating these platforms but apple is kind of the government that can regulate the attention economy because when they do this thing we talked about earlier of um saying do you want to be tracked right and they give you this option when like 99 of people are gonna say no i don't want to be tracked right when they do that they just put a 30 tax on all the advertising-based businesses because now you don't get as personalized in ad right which means they make less money which means that business model is less attractive to venture capitalists to fund the next thing which means so they're actually enacting right a kind of a carbon tax but it's like a uh you know on the polluting stuff right they're enacting a kind of um social media polluting stuff they're taxing by 30 but they could do more than that like imagine you know they have this 30 70 split on um app developers get 70 of the revenue when you buy stuff and apple keeps 30 percent they could modify that percentage based on how much sort of social value that those things are delivering to society so this gets a little bit weird people may not like this but if you think about who's the real customer that we want to be like how do we want things oriented how should we if i'm an app developer i want to make money the more i'm helping society and helping individuals not how much i'm extracting and stealing their time and attention um and imagine that governments in the future actually paid um like some kind of budget into let's say the app store there's anti-trust issues with this but you pay money into the app store and then as apps started helping people with more social outcomes like let's say learning programs or schools or things like khan academy things like this that more money flows in the direction of where people got that value and it was that that revenue split between apple and the app developers um ends up going more to things that end up helping people as opposed to things that were just good at capturing attention and monetizing uh zombie behavior one of my favorite lines in the film is justin rosenstein from the like button um saying that you know so long as a whale is worth more dead than alive and a tree is worth more as lumber and two-by-fours than a living tree now we're the whale we're the tree we're worth more when we have predictable zombie-like behaviors when we're more addicted distracted outraged polarized and disinformed than if we're a living thriving citizen or a growing child that's like playing with their friends and i think that that kind of distinction that just like we protect national parks or we protect you know certain fisheries and we don't kill the whales in those areas or something we need to really protect like we have to call out what's sacred to us now yeah it's um it's an excellent message my problem that i see is that i just don't know how well that message is going to be absorbed on the people that are already in the trance i mean i think it's so difficult for people to put things down i mean how like i was telling you how difficult it is to for me to tell my friends don't read the comments right you know right it's it's hard to have that kind of discipline and it's hard to have that kind of because people do get bored and when they get bored like if you're waiting in line for somewhere you pull out your phone you're at the doctor's office you pull out your phone like totally i mean and that's why you know and i do that right i mean this is incredible right this is incredibly hard um back in the day uh when i was at google trying to change i tried to change google from the inside for two years before leaving what was it like there pl please share your experiences because when you said you tried to change it from the inside what kind of resistance were you met with and what was their reaction to these thoughts that you had about the unbelievable negative consequences of well this is in 2013 so we didn't know about all the negative consequences but you saw the writing on the wall at least some of it some of it yeah i mean the notion that things were competing for attention which would mean that they would need to compete to get more and more persuasive and hack more and more of our vulnerabilities and that that would grow that was the core insight i didn't know that it would lead to polarization or conspiracy theory like recommendations but i would i did know you know more addiction kids having less you know weaker relationships when did it occur to you like what were your initial feelings um i was on a hiking trip in the santa cruz mountains with our co-founder now um azeraskin um it's funny enough our co-founder aiza his dad was jeff raskin who invented the macintosh project at apple i don't know if you know the history there but he started the macintosh project and actually came up with the word um humane to describe the humane interface and that's where our name and our work comes from is from his father's work he and i were in the mountains in santa cruz and just experiencing nature and just came back and realized like this all of this stuff that we've built is just distracting us from the stuff that's really important and that's when coming back from that trip um i made the first google deck that then spread virally throughout the company saying never before in history have you know 50 designers uh you know white 20 to 35 year old engineers who look like me to hold the collective psyche of humanity and then that presentation was released and about you know 10 000 people at google saw it it was actually the number one um meme within the company they have this internal thing inside of google called moma that has like people can post like gifs and memes about various topics and it was the number one meme that hey we need to talk about this at this week's tgif which is the like weekly thank god it's friday type company meeting um it didn't get talked about but i got emails from across the company saying we definitely need to do something about this it was just very hard to get momentum on it and really the the key interfaces to change within google are chrome and android because those are the neutral portals into which you're then using apps and notifications and websites and all of that like those are the kind of governments of the attention economy that google runs and when you work there did they um did you have to use android was it part of the the requirement to work there no i mean a lot of people had android phones i still used an iphone was it an issue no no i mean people because they realized that they needed products to work on on all the phones i mean if you worked directly on android then you would have to use an android phone but we tried to get you know some of those things like the screen time features that are now launched you know so everyone now has on their phone like it shows you the number of hours or whatever is that on android as well it is yeah and actually that came i think as a result of this advocacy and that's shipping on a billion phones which shows you you can you can change this stuff right like that goes against their financial interest people spending less time in their phones getting less notifications it does but it doesn't work well correct so it doesn't actually work is the thing yeah and let's separate the intention and the fact that they did it it's like labels on cigarettes that tell you it's going to give you cancer like by the time you're buying them you're already hooked correct i mean it's even worse imagine like um every cigarette cigarette box had like um a little pencil inside so you can mark there's like little streaks that said the number of days in a row you haven't smoked and you could like mark each day it's like it's too late right right like yeah um it's just the wrong paradigm um the fundamental thing we have to change is the incentives and how money flows because we want money flowing in the direction of the more these things help us like leave me a concrete example like let's say um you want to learn a musical instrument and you go to youtube to pick up ukulele or whatever um and you're seeing how to play the ukulele like from that point in a system that was designed in a humane and sort of time well-spent kind of way it would really ask you instead of saying here's 20 more videos that are going to just like suck you down a rabbit hole it would sort of be more oriented towards what do you really need help with like do you need to buy ukulele here's a link to amazon to get the ukulele are you looking for a ukulele teacher let me do a quick scan on your facebook or twitter search to find out which of those people are ukulele teachers do you need instant like tutoring because there's actually the service you never heard of called skillshare or something like that where you can get instant ukulele tutoring and if we're really designing these things to be about what would most help you next you know we're only as good as the menu of choices on life's menu and right now the menu is here's something else to addict you and keep you hooked instead of here's a next step that would actually be on the trajectory of helping people live their lives better but you'd have to incentivize the companies because like there's so much incentive on getting you addicted because there's so much financial reward what would be the financial reward that they could have to get you something that would be helpful for you like lessons or this i mean so one way that could work is like let's say people pay a monthly subscription of like i don't know 20 bucks a month or something so it's never gonna work i get you but like let's say you pay some you put money into a pot where the possibility but then we have the problem the problem is like it costs some money versus free like there was a um there's a company that still exists for now that uh was trying to do the netflix of podcasting and uh they they approached us and they're like we're just gonna get all these people together and they're gonna make them people gonna pay to use your podcast i'm like why would they do that when podcasts are free yeah like that's one of the reasons why podcasts work is because they're free right when things are free they're they're attractive it's easy when things cost money you have to have something that's extraordinary like netflix yeah like when you say the netflix of podcasting well netflix makes their own shows right they spend millions of dollars on special effects and all these different things and they're really like enormous projects like you're you're just talking about people talking [ __ ] and you want money right well that's the thing is we have to actually deliver something that's totally qualitatively better right and would also have to be like someone like you or someone who's really aware of the issues that we're dealing with with addictions to social media should have to say this is this is the best possible alternative like in this environment you are you yes you are paying a certain amount of money per month but maybe that could get factored into your cell phone bill and maybe with this sort of an ecosystem right you're no longer being uh drawn in by your addictions and you know it's not playing for your attention span it's rewarding you in a very productive way and imagine joe if like 15 more of your time was just way better spent like he was actually spent on you were actually doing the things you cared about and it actually helped improve your life yeah like imagine when you use email if it was truly designed i mean forget email people don't relate to that because email isn't that popular but whatever it is that's a huge time sync for you for me email's a huge one for me you know web browsing or whatever is a big one imagine that those things were so much better designed that i actually wrote back to the right emails and i mostly didn't think about the rest that when i was spending time on you know whatever i was spending time on that it was really my my more and more of my life was a life well lived and time well spent that's like the retrospective view i keep going to apple but because i think that the only social media comp or excuse me the only technology company that does have these ethics to sort of protect privacy have you thought about coming to them yep have you well i mean i i think that they've made great first steps and they were the first along with google to do those the screen time management stuff but that was just this barely scratching the surface like baby baby baby steps like what we really need them to do is radically um reimagine how those incentives and how the phone fundamentally works so it's not just all these colorful icons and one of the problems they do have a disincentive which is a lot of the revenue comes from gaming and as they move more into apple tv competing with hbo and hulu and netflix and that whole thing where they they need subscriptions so the apple's revenue on devices and hardware is sort of maxing out and where they're going to get their next bout of revenue to keep their stock price up is on these subscriptions i am less concerned with those addictions i'm less concerned with gaming addictions than i have information addictions because at least it's not fundamentally altering your view of the world right it's screwing up democracy and making it impossible to agree well and this is coming from a person that's had like legitimate video game addictions in the past but uh like my wife is addicted to subway surfer like i don't know what it is it's a crazy game it's like you're riding on the top of subways you jumping around it's like it's really ridiculous but it's fun like you watch like whoa but i don't [ __ ] with video games but i watch it and it's those games at least are enjoyable there's something silly about it like ah [ __ ] and then you start doing it again when i see people getting angry about things on social media i don't see the upside right i don't mind them making a profit off games there is an issue though with games that addict children and then these children there's like you could spend money on like roadblocks and you can you know have all these different things you spend money on you wind up you know you're having these enormous bills you leave your kid with an ipad and you come back you have a 500 bill like what did you do yeah this is this is an issue for sure but at least it's not an issue in that it's changing their view of of the world right and i i feel like there's a way for i keep going back to apple but a company like apple to rethink the way that you know they already have a walled garden right with imessage and facetime and all this different i can totally build those things out i mean imessage in icloud could be the basis for some new neutral social media yeah it's not based on instant social approval and rewards right yes they can make it easier to share information with small groups of friends and have that all synced and even you know in the pre-covet days i was thinking about apple a lot i think you're right by the way to really poke on them i think they're the one company that's in a position to lead on this and they also have a history of thinking along those lines you know they had this feature that's kind of hidden now but to find my friends right they call it find my now it's all buried together so you can find your devices and find your friends but in a pre-coveted world imagine they really built out the you know where are my friends right now and making it easier to know when you're nearby someone so you can easily more easily get together in person so right now all the like to the extent facebook wants to bring people closer together they don't want to and again this is pre-coveted but they don't want to incentivize lots and lots of facebook events they really care about groups that keep people posting it online and looking at ads because of the category of bringing people closer together they want to do the online screen time based version of that right as opposed to the offline apple by contrast if you had little imessage groups of friends you could say hey does everyone in this little group want to opt into being able to see where each other are where we all are on say weekdays between 5 and 8 pm or something like that so you could like time bound it and make it easier for serendipitous connection and availability to happen that's hard to do it's hard to design that but there's things like that that apple's in a position to do if it really took on that mantle and i think as people get more and more skeptical of these other products they're in a better and better position to do that one of the antitrust issues is do we want a world where our entire well-being as a society depends on what one massive corporation worth over a trillion dollars does or doesn't do right like we need more openness to try different things and we're really at the behest of whether one or two companies apple or google does something more radical and there has to be some massive incentive for them to do something that's really going to change yeah the the way we interface with these devices and the way we interface with social media and i don't know what incentive exists it's more potent than financial incentives well and this is where the you know if the government in the same way that we want to transition long term uh from a fossil fuels oriented economy to something that that doesn't um that changes the kind of pollution levels uh you know we have a hugely emitting um you know society ruining kind of business model of this attention extractive paradigm and we could long term sort of just like a progressive tax on that transition to some other thing the government could do that right um that's not like who do we censor it's how do we disincentivize these businesses to pay for the sort of life support systems of society that they've ruined a good example of this i think in australia is there um i think it's australia that's regulated that google and facebook have to pay the publishers who they're basically hollowing out because one of the effects we've not talked about is the way that google and facebook have hollowed out the fourth estate in journalism i mean because journalism has turned into in local web news websites can't make any money except by basically producing click bait so even to the extent that local newspapers exist they only exist by basically click betification of even lower and lower paid you know workers who are just generating content farms right so anyway so that's an example of if you force those companies to pay to to revitalize the fourth estate and to make sure we have a very sustainably funded fourth estate that doesn't have to produce this clickbait stuff uh that's that's you know another direction yeah that uh that's interesting that they have to pay i mean these are the wealthiest companies in like the history of humanity right so that's the thing so we shouldn't be cautious about how much they should have to pay except we also don't want to happen on the other end right you don't want to have a world where you know we have roundup making a crazy amount of money from giving everybody cancer and lymphoma from uh you know all the chemicals right glyphosates and then they pay everybody on the other end after a lawsuit of a billion dollars but now everyone's got cancer let's actually do it in a way so we don't want a world where facebook and google profit off of the erosion of our social fabric and then they pay us back how do you quantify how how much money they have to pay to journalism yeah it seems like it's almost a form of socialism or yeah i mean this is where like that the iq led example is interesting because they were able to disincentivize and tax the lead producers because they were able to produce some results on how much this lowered the wage earning potentials of the entire population i mean like how much does this cost our society we used to say free is the most expensive business model we've ever created because we get the free downgrading of our attention spans our mental health our kids like our ability to agree with each other our capacity to do anything as a democracy like yeah we got all that for free wonderful obviously we get lots of benefits and i want to acknowledge that but that's just not sustainable the real question i mean right now we're we have huge existential problems we have a global competition power competition going on i think china just passed the gdp of the us i believe there is you know if if we care about the us having a future in which it can lead the world in in some meaningful and enlightened way we have to deal with this problem and we have to have a world where digital democracy outcompetes digital authoritarianism which is the china model and right now that builds more coherence and is more efficient and doesn't evolve the way that our current system you know does i think taiwan estonia and countries like that where they are doing digital democracies are good examples that we can learn from but we're behind right now well china also has a really fascinating situation with huawei where google is banned huawei so you can't have google applications on huawei so now huawei is creating their own operating system and they have their own ecosystem now that they're building up and that's you know it's it's weird that there's only a few different operating systems now i mean there's a very small amount of people using linux phones then you have a large amount of people using android and iphones and if china becomes the first to adopt their own operating system and then they have even more unchecked rules and regulations in regards to like the influence they have over their people with an operating system that they've developed and they control and who knows what kind of back doors and spying tons yeah it's it's weird yeah when you see this do you like it feels so futile for me on the outside looking in looking but you you're working on this how long do you anticipate is going to be a part of your life i mean what does it feel like to you [Music] um i mean it's not easy right um in the the film ends with this question do you think we're gonna get there yeah i just say we have to like i mean if you care about this going well i wake up every day and i ask what will it take for this whole thing to go well like and how do we just orient each of our choices as much as possible towards this going well we have a whole bunch of problems i do look a lot at the environmental issues the permafrost methane bombs like the timelines that we have to deal with certain problems are crunching and we also have certain dangerous exponential technologies that are emerging decentralization of you know crispr and like there's a lot of existential threats i hang out with a lot with the sort of existential threats community it's going to take it must be a lot of fun it's uh there's a lot of psychological problems in that community actually a lot of depression there's only an imaginary suicide as well it's it's uh you know it's it's hard but i i think we each have a responsibility when you see this stuff to say what will it take for this to go well and i will say that really seeing the film impact people the way that it has i i used to feel like oh my god how are we ever going to do this no one cares like none of people know right at the very least we now have about 50 40 to 50 million people who are at least introduced to the problem the question is how do we harness them into a collective movement and that's what we're trying to do next i mean i i'll say also these issues get more and more weird over time my co-founder is raskin will say that it's making reality more and more virtual over time because we haven't talked about how as technology advances at hacking our weaknesses we start to prefer it over the real thing we start for example there's a recent company vc funded raised like i think it's worth like over 125 million dollars and what they make are virtual influencers so these are like virtual people virtual video that is more entertaining more interesting and that fans like more than real people oh boy and it's kind of related to the kind of deep fake world right where like people prefer this to the real thing and cheri turkel um you know who's been working at mit wrote the book reclaiming conversation and alone together she's been talking about this forever that over time humans will prefer connection to robots and bots and the computer generated thing more than the real thing think about ai generated music being more it'll start to sweeten our taste buds and give us exactly that thing we're looking for better than we will know ourselves just like youtube can give us the perfect next video that actually every bone in our body will say actually i kind of do want to watch that even though it's a machine pointed at my brain calculating the next thing there's an example from microsoft writing this chat bot called xiaoice i couldn't pronounce it that after nine weeks people preferred that chatbot to their real friends and 25 or 10 10 to 25 percent of their users actually said i love you to the chatbot oh boy and that many there are several who actually said that it convinced them not to commit suicide to have this relationship with this chatbot so it's her it's her it's the movie exactly which is what so all these things are the same right we're veering into a direction where technology if it's so good at meeting these underlying paleolithic emotions that we have the way out of it is we have to see that this is what's going on we have to see and reckon with ourselves saying this is how i work i have this negativity bias if i get those 99 comments and one spot one's positive comments and one's negative my mind is going to go to the negative i don't see that i see you in the future wearing an overcoat you're you are literally lawrence fishburne in the matrix trying to tell people to wake up well that's there's a line in the social dilemma where i say how do you wake up from the matrix if you don't know you're in the matrix well that is the issue right and i even in the matrix we at least had a shared matrix the problem now is that in the matrix each of us have our own matrix that's the real kicker i struggle with the idea that this is all inevitable because this is a natural course of progression with technology and that it's sort of figuring out the best way to to have us with as little resistance embed ourselves into its system and that our ideas are what we are with emotions and with our biological uh issues that this is just how life is and this is how life always should be but this is just all we've ever known that's all we've ever known einstein didn't write into the laws of physics that social media has to exist for humanity right right we've gotten rid again the environmental movement is a really interesting example because we passed all sorts of laws we got rid of lead we've changed from you know some of our pesticides um you know we're slow on some of these things and corporate interests and asymmetric power of large corporations you know which i want to say markets and capitals are great is that when you have asymmetric power for predatory systems that that cause harm they're not going to uh terminate themselves they have to be bound in by the public by culture by by the state and um we just have to point to the examples where we've done that and in this case i think the prob the problem is that how much of our stock market is built on the back of like five companies generating a huge amount of wealth so this is similar i don't mean to make this example but um there's a great book by um adam hokeshield called bury the chains which is about the british abolition of slavery in which he talks about how for the british empire like if you think about it when when we collectively wake up and say this is an abhorrent practice that has to end but then at that time in the 17 1800s in britain slavery was what powered the entire economy it was free labor for you know huge percentage of the economy so if you say we can't do this anymore we have to stop this how do you decouple when your entire economy is based on slavery right and the book is actually inspiring because it tracks a collective movement that was through networked all these different groups the quakers uh in the u.s the uh people testifying before parliament the former slaves who did first-hand accounts the graphics and art of all the people had never seen what it looked like on a slave ship and so by making the invisible visceral and showing just how abhorrent this stuff was through a period of about 60 to 70 years the british empire had to drop their gdp by 2 every year for 60 years and willing to do that to get off of slavery now i'm not making a moral equivalent i want to be really clear for everybody taking things out of context um but just that it's possible for us to do something that isn't just in the interest of economic growth and i think that's the real challenge that's actually something that should be on the agenda which is how do we one of the major tensions is economic growth you know being in conflict with dealing with some with many of our problems whether it's some of the environmental issues or you know with some of the technology issues we're talking about right now artificial intelligence is something that people are terrified of as an existential threat they think of it as one day you're going to turn something on and it's going to be sentient it's going to be able to create other forms of artificial intelligence that are exponentially more powerful than the one that we created and that will have unleashed this beast that we cannot control what my concern is with all this yeah that's my concern my concern is that this this is a a slow acceptance of drowning yeah that's like a slow we're okay i'm only up to my knees oh it's fine it's just uh my waist high it could be boiling water exactly exactly it seems like this is like humans have to fight back to reclaim our autonomy and free will from the machines i mean one clear okay neo it's very much the matrix and one of my favorite lines is actually when the oracle says to neo and don't worry about the vase and he says what face and he knocks it over that face and so it's like she's the ai who sees so many moves ahead in the chess board she can say something which will cause him to do the thing that verifies the thing that she predicted what happened yeah that's what ai is doing now except it's pointed at our nervous system and figuring out the perfect thing to dangle in front of our dopamine system and get the thing to happen which instead of knocking off the vases to be outraged at the other political side and be fully certain that you're right even though it's just a machine that's calculating [ __ ] that's going to make you you know do the thing when you're concerned about this how much time do you spend thinking about simulation theory the simulation yeah the idea that it if not currently one day there will be a simulation that's indiscernible yeah from regular reality and it seems we're on that path i don't know if you mess around with vr at all but well this is the point about you know the virtual chat bots out competing for exactly the technology you know i mean that's what's happening is that reality is getting more and more virtual right because we interact with a virtual news system that's all this sort of click-bait economy outrage machine that's already a virtual political environment that then translates into real world action then becomes real and that's the weird feedback go back to 1990 whatever it was when the internet became mainstream or at least started becoming mainstream and then the small amount of time that it took the 20 plus years to get to where we are now and then think what what about the virtual world and once this becomes something that's has the same sort of rate of growth that the internet has experienced or that we've experienced through the internet i mean we're looking at like 20 years from now being unrecognizable yeah we're looking at i mean it's it almost seems like that is what life does the same way bees create bee hives you know a caterpillar doesn't know what the [ __ ] going on when it gets into that cocoon but it's becoming a butterfly we seem to be a thing that creates newer and better objects correct more effective but we have to realize ai is not conscious and won't be conscious the way we are and so many people think that but is consciousness essential i think so to us i don't know essentially we're the only ones who have it no i don't know that no theory but there might be more yeah things that have consciousness but is it is it essential i mean it's the to the extent that choice exists it would exist through some kind of consciousness and this choice is choice essential it's essential to us as we know it like as life as we know it but my worry is that we're in essential that like we we're thinking now like single-celled organisms being like hey i don't want to gang up with a bunch of other people and become an object that can walk i like being a single cell organism this is a lot of fun i mean i hear you saying you know are we a bootloader for the ai that then runs that's eli's perspective i mean i think this is a really dangerous way to think i mean we have to yeah so are we then dangerous for us yeah i mean what if the next version of the life is the next version being run by machines that have no values that don't care that don't have choice and are just maximizing for things that were programmed in by our little miniature brains anyway but they don't cry they don't commit suicide but then consciousness and life dies that could be the future i think this is the last chance to try to snap out of that and is it important in the eyes of the universe that we do that i don't know it feels important how does it feel to you it feels important but i i'm i'm a monkey you know the monkey's like i'm staying in this tree man you guys are out of your [ __ ] mind i mean this is the weird paradox of being human is that again we have these lower level emotions we care about social approval we can't not care at the same time like i said there's this weird proposition here we're the only species that if this were to happen to us we would have the self-awareness to even know that it was happening right like we can consent like this two-hour interview we can conceptualize that this this thing has happened to us right that we have built this matrix this external object which has like ai and supercomputers and voodoo doll versions of each of us and it has perfectly figured out how to predictably move each of us in this matrix let me propose this to you we are what we are now human beings homo sapiens in 2020. we we are this thing that uh if you believe in evolution i'm pretty sure you do we've evolved over the course of millions of years to become who we are right now should we stop right here are we done no right we should keep it evolving what does that look like what does it look like if we go ahead just forget about social media what would you like us to be in a thousand years or a hundred thousand years or five hundred thousand years you certainly wouldn't want us to be what we are right now right no one would no i mean i think this is what visions of star trek and things like that we're trying to ask right like hey let's imagine humans do make it and we become the most enlightened we can be and we actually somehow make peace with these other you know alien tribes and we figure out you know space travel and all of that i mean actually a good heuristic that i think people can ask is on an enlightened planet where we did figure this out what would that have looked like isn't it always weird that those movies it's people are just people but they're in some weird future but they haven't really changed that much right i mean and which is to say that the fundamental way that we work is just unchanging but there are such things as more wise societies more sustainable societies more peaceful or harmonious societies ultimately biologically we have to evolve as well but our version of like the best version is probably the gray aliens right maybe so that's the ultimate future i mean we're going to get into gene editing and becoming more perfect perfect on the sense of you know that but uh we're going to start optimizing for what are the outcomes that we value i think the question is how do we actually come up with brand new values that are wiser than we've ever thought of before that actually are able to transcend the win lose games that lead to omni lose lose that everyone loses if we keep playing the win lose game at greater and greater scales i like you have a vested interest in the biological existence of human beings i think people are pretty cool yeah i love being around them i enjoy talking to you today my fear is that we are we're we're a model t right you know and there's there's no sense in making those [ __ ] things anymore the brakes are terrible they smell like [ __ ] when you drive them they don't go very fast we need a better version you know the funny thing is god there's some quote by someone i think like i wish i could remember it it's something about how much would be solved if we were at peace with ourselves like if we were able to just be okay with nothing like just being okay with living and breathing i don't mean to be you know playing the woo new age card i just genuinely mean how much of our lives is just running away from you know anxiety and discomfort and aversion it is but you know in that sense some of the most satisfied and happy people are people that live a subsistence living that have these subsistence existences in the middle of nowhere just chopping trees and catching fish right and more connection probably yeah authentic than something else i think that's probably resonates biologically too because of the history of human beings living like that is just so much longer and greater totally and i think that those are more sustainable societies we can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves dalai lama yeah but i don't buy that guy you know that guy he's uh he's an interesting case i was thinking there was a different slightly different quote but actually there's one quote that i would love to if it's possible one of the reasons why i don't buy him he's just chosen they just chose that guy yeah also he doesn't have sex wait how how um yeah how much can you be enjoying life if that's not not a party come on bro you wear the same outfit every day the [ __ ] out of here with your orange robes can i there's a there's a really um important quote that i i think would really be good to share uh it's from the book have you read amusing ourselves death by neil postman no from 1982 no um so especially when we get into big tech and we talk about censorship a lot and we talk about orwell um he has this really wonderful opening to this book it was written in 1982 it literally predicts everything that's going on now i frankly think that i'm adding nothing and it's really just neil postman called it all in 1982. uh he had this great opening it says um let's see we're all looking out for you know 1984 when the year came and the prophecy didn't thoughtful americans sang softly in praise of themselves the roots of liberal democracy had held this is like we made it through the 1984 gap wherever else the terror had happened we at least had not been visited by orwellian nightmares but we had forgotten that alongside orwell's dark vision there was another slightly older slightly less well-known equally chilling vision of aldous huxley's brave new world contrary to common belief even among the educated huxley and orwell did not prophecy the same thing orwell warns that we will become overwhelmed overcome by an externally imposed oppression but in huxley's vision no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy maturity or history as he saw it people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think what orwell feared were those who would ban books what huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who wanted to read one orwell feared those who would deprive us of information huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance orwell feared we would become a captive culture but huxley feared we would become a trivial culture preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelis and the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble puppy don't know what that means as huxley remarked in brave new world revisited the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions lastly in 1984 orwell added people are all people are controlled by inflicting pain in brave new world they are controlled by inflicting pleasure in short or well feared that what we fear will ruin us huxley fear that what we desire will ruin us holy [ __ ] isn't that good that's that's the best way to end this god damn but again if we can become aware that this is what's happened we're the only species with the capacity to see that our own psychology our own emotions our own paleolithic evolutionary system has been hijacked i like that you're optimistic we have to be optimism is probably the only way to live in a meet suit body and keep going otherwise it certainly helps yeah it certainly helps thank you very much for being here man i really enjoy this even though i'm really depressed now i really don't want you to be depressed i really hope people you know i'm kidding we're not we really want to build a movement and and uh you know we're just i wish i could give people more resources we do have a podcast um called undivided attention and we're trying to build a movement at humanetech.com but well listen any new revelations or new developments that you have i'd be more than happy to have you on again we'll talk about them and send them to me and i'll put them on social media and whatever you need awesome i'm here to help awesome man great great to be here resist yeah grizzly together humanity resist humanity we're in this together thank you tristana i really really appreciate it goodbye everybody [Music] you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 4,368,629

Rating: 4.749929 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma, JRE #1558, comedian, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Apple, Android, iPhone

Id: OaTKaHKCAFg

Length: 141min 32sec (8492 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020

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[u/stopstatic27]

Joe Rogan certainly is capable of having an in-depth conversations and interviewing well, but it's odd to me to see him discuss this given how much he makes stuff up himself. Love Tristan Harris though.