Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris = ENTIRE SUBTITLES CAPTIONS TRANSCRIPT

[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 theyre 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 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 spike lee movie [ __ ]
however google retained its original
don't be evil language until the past several weeks
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 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 way
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 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 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 tik-tok tik-tok doesn't even wait
i don't know if you know if
your kids use tik-tok 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 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 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 tik-toking 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 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
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 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 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 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 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
[INTERRUPTION]
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
[/INTERRUPTION]
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 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 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 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 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 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 paul revere of uh
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 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 [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 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
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 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 aza raskin 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 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 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 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 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 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 optimism is probably the only way to live in a meat 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 tristan
i really really appreciate it
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