Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLNEojqZlUE
[Music] gentlemen thank you for being here once let's let's i keep doing these podcasts where i just talk to people so please introduce yourself and tell people what you do uh i am tristan harris and uh came on the show about a year ago after the social dilemma came out that's probably where most people know me um and used to be a design ethicist at google studying how do you ethically influence people's attention and thoughts and behaviors and really enjoyed the conversation last year the reason that today i'm here with daniel schmuckenberger who's really a person i've learned so much from the last few years and why i thought it'd be a good through line is that the issues of social media which i know we're going to talk about today are connected to a number of other issues that are going wrong in society that are all kind of interconnected and i've learned a tremendous amount from daniel and i thought it would help really clarify some of these these issues for for everyone well thank you daniel thanks for coming aboard thanks for having me here what a daunting task how to ethically influence people and what a weird thing that this industry that didn't exist 20 years ago has such a i mean think about life on earth and then 20 years ago all of a sudden this social media thing sort of evolves and now you have to wonder how much of an effect it has on our just day-to-day lives and how to ethically influence people yeah what is that what the [ __ ] does that even mean well first of all how do those thoughts even get you know how does that get worked out actually i should first say that there wasn't at google a department that said how do we ethically influence people i actually sort of um as was shown in that in the film the social dilemma wrote this presentation worried about how technology was influencing people's thoughts concerns behaviors et cetera and i studied persuasive technology at stanford which is a whole discipline and field the idea that
technology can influence people and it was that of my own personal concern that when that presentation went viral at google i uh kind of worked my way into this position that never existed before which was how could we create a framework for what it means to ethically influence other people and a lot of that has to do with asymmetries of power i mean when i was a kid i was a magician we talked about this before magic is about an asymmetric relationship the magician knows something about your mind that you don't know about your own mind that's what makes the trick work and actually across some of the issues i think we're going to talk about today are ways that there is an asymmetric relationship between what technology knows about us and what we don't know about ourselves when you were studying at stanford what year was this this was um 2002 to 2006 i was in undergrad and then 2006 i got involved with professor bj fogdan who again actually studied ways that persuasive technology could be used for positive purpose like how do you help people be healthier how do you help people floss how do you help people work out more often things like that it could be used in a positive way right but i got concerned because it was all of this increasing arms race to use persuasive tools to harvest and capture people's attention now known as the race to the bottom of the brain stem to go down the brain stem into more social validation more social narcissism all of that and that's one of the arms races we see everywhere which is like in every single thing if one oil company doesn't drill for that oil well the other one will if one attention company doesn't add the beautification filter the other one will if one company doesn't do narcissism social validation hacking and certain likes and variable rewards the other one will and it's true across so many of the other issues that we're facing whether it's like if i don't build the drone for everyone then someone else is going to build the drone for everyone if i don't so that's how i think did you realize it back then i mean 2002 2006 you're
talking about a completely different world in terms of social media before the iphone actually yeah yeah 2007 right iphone came out in 2007 we were studying persuasive technology and i was i've said in the past uh partners with the co-founder of instagram in the persuasive technology class so we were actually studying how would you apply persuasive technology to people before the iphone even existed and um you know for you know what bothered me is that i think when people think about how do you ethically persuade people you just get into a whole bunch of ethical cop-outs like well we're just giving people what they want you know or if they don't want to this they'll use something else there's these very simple ways that the minds of people in technology the tech industry i think defend what they're doing and what concerned me was that the ethical framework wasn't really there not that i had one at the time by the way i studied at google for three years to try to develop like what does it mean to ethically influence three billion people who were jacked into the system this is before cambridge analytica before the facebook files and francis haugen talking about the you know we now have the receipts for all these things so we talked about all these things in the social dilemma but now there's the evidence with francis haugen's whistleblowing that um you know instagram makes uh body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls i know i'm going fast but that's the broad strokes do you know the conspiracy theory about her tell me the the conspiracy theory amongst uh the tin foil hat folk is uh first of all she was uh she started a uh twitter account like right before she went there and was immediately verified right and then instantaneously was on all these major uh media outlets major network television shows and being interviewed and p and she was saying something that a lot of people felt like was a call to authoritarian intervention into social media that it was government censorship uh was the solution and regulation was a solution to dealing with this problem
and that it seemed like she was a sanctioned whistleblower like they she was saying all the things that they wanted to hear and that's why they put her in the position to make a big loud noise what did you think about that when it came out i'm just curious i always have to do this you know when something like that happens like maybe maybe because you know the government would do that like most certainly they would love to have control over social media they would love to be able to censor things like the hunter biden laptop story they would love to be able to you know hide joe biden's medical records or you know kamal harris's uh time as a prosecuting attorney like there's a lot of stuff they would like to do yeah or district attorney rather there's a lot of stuff they would like to do uh with access to information i mean you're seeing it right now in terms of one of the things that's been fascinating about covid is uh during his pandemic and during this terrible time of uh you know paranoia and dealing with this disease and fear and anxiety you're seeing this narrative from social media networks that absolutely walk step in step with the government where if the government wants certain information censored it's being censored across major social media platforms that has to be coordinated there's no way it's not and it is no way they're incentivized to not have people discuss certain things because we've said before you know that's one of the major points of um the social dilemma is that things that are controversial whether they're true or not are the things that are the most clicked on the most shared the most and that's where that's where the money is so there's got to be some sort of incentive for them to not do what they do with every other subject whether it's immigration or gun control or abortion or anything the algorithm is the sense of immigration or you're saying that as an this it's an example something goes viral yeah not the censorship right they
don't censor an immigration no i mean that the i mean the border crisis is a great example of that right like the government would probably like us to not see all those haitian immigrants storming across the border but my god those were shared like crazy totally you know so why was covet information shared well because there was a narrative they could say where this is dangerous misinformation we can protect people even though some of it turned out to actually be accurate right like the lab leak hypothesis you know at least at least that it's a hypothesis it's a hypothesis yeah the middle east is being considered by virologists right but the point is that who the [ __ ] are they to decide what can and can't be discussed and when they're doing something step in step with the government i get concerned so when someone comes along and this person who's a whistleblower says something needs to be done you know we're endangering young girls lives we're doing this we're doing that we need some sort of government for intervention i mean this is essentially calling for censorship and calling for government control of social media which freaks people out so she's pretty clear that she's not calling for censorship but it's the reason i asked you was curious what how it came across your radar because i happened to to know and hear a little bit about this from her we interviewed her on our podcast um and the story that goes viral about her saying that she's a psyop or that she's a plant that's an incendiary inflammatory controversial story so when that gets suggested is it going to go is it just going to fizzle out or is it going to go viral it's ironic it's going to go viral exactly and in fact the when you kind of realize like everything i mean there's there's some things that are real consideracy theories and there's some things that are real psyops and there's there's that's a real thing but notice how many things we think of as psyops conspiracies etc now and it's because anything that has that incendiary quality goes goes viral and i happen to know for example i think one of the things that claims in there is
that she's funded by this billionaire piero mittiar but i happen to know from talking to her that happened at the very very end of what she was doing and it was a tiny grant of like 150 000 for us in the non-profit world that's like a tiny amount of money basically just to support her flight costs and i happen to also sort of hear from her how like uh how much of the media was constructed the very last minute like she was working this one um newspaper the wall street journal to do this sort of procedural rollout of of specific stuff that she thought was concerning i guess what i'll just say is like what if she's just a good faith person who saw that virality was driving people crazy and that it was it was harmful to teenage girls and it's true that the um the government would see some of that and say hey we could use that for for something else we could use that she could be a tool for us to do something else but i guess what you know in the aim of complexity and nuance and not jumping to conclusions and this sort of thing um my perception from from talking to her now extensively she's a very good faith actor who was concerned that this was going to drive the world apart i should be really clear that this is not my position yeah she's this is just the conspiracy theory i literally don't have an opinion on her yeah i do have an opinion on algorithms and i do have an opinion on what it does do to young girls self-esteem and you have teenage daughters yes i i just think i mean and young girls are a point of focus for why their point of focus more than young boys i'm not entirely sure i guess it has to do with their emotional makeup and and uh there's higher risk of self-harm due to social media and jonathan hate talked about that in his book the coddling of the american mind um it's it's very clear that it's very damaging and i my kids uh you know my 13 year old does have like interactions with their friends and i do see how they bully each other and talk [ __ ] about each other and it's it's they get so angry and mad at each other um it is a factor but it's an it's an
algorithm issue right it's there's multiple things here so the first thing is um just to kind of set the stage a little bit uh i always use eo wilson the biologist who who sort of defined what what the problem statement for humanity is he said the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions and brains like easy brains that are hackable for magicians we have medieval institutions you know government that's not really good at seeing the latest tech whether it was railroads or now social media or ai or deep fakes or whatever's coming next and then we have god-like technology so we have paleolithic emotions medieval institutions god-like technology you combine that fact that's the fundamental problem statement how do we wield the power of god's without the love prudence and wisdom of god there's actually something that daniel taught me and um then you add to that the race to the bottom of the brain stem for attention what is their business model just to review the basics everybody knows this now but it's it's engagement it's like how do i get that attention at all costs yeah so algorithms is one piece of that meaning um when you're on a news feed like i don't want to just show you any news i want to show you the most viral engaging like longest argumentative comment threads news right so that's like pointing a trillion dollar market cap ai at your brain saying i'm going to show you the next perfect boogeyman for your nervous system the thing that's going to make you upset angry whether it's masks vaccines francis haugen whatever the thing is it will just drive that over and over again and then repeat that thing and that's one of the the tools in the arsenal to get attention is that the algorithms another one is technology making design decisions like how do we inflate people's sense of beautification filters in fact just recently since we talked last time um i think it's a mit tech review article showing that um they're all they're all competing first of all to like inflate your sense of beauty so they're doing the the i think the filters the filters people know this stuff it's very obvious but they're competing for who can give
you a nicer filter right and then now instead of waiting for you to actually add one tick tock was actually found to actually do like a two percent like just bare beautification filter on the no filter mode because the thing is once they do that the other guys have to do it too so i just want to name that all of this is taking place in this race to capture human attention because if i don't do it the other guy will and then it's happening with design decisions like the beautification filters and like the follow you and if you follow me i'll follow you back and the like button and check pulled refresh the dopamine stuff that's all design then there's the algorithms which is i'm pointing at a thing at your brain to figure out what how can i show you an infinite feed that just maximally enrages you and we should talk about that because that thing drives polarization which breaks democracy but that's a that's a we can get into that oh daniel let's bring you in here so how did you guys meet and how did this sort of dynamic duo come about yeah i was working on studying kind of catastrophic risks for at large you've had people on the show talking about risks associated with ai and with crispr and genetic engineering and with climate change and environmental issues pull up to the microphone there and there you go escalation pathways to war and all these kinds of things and basically how can [ __ ] hit the fan right and i think it's a pretty common question of like how long do we have on which of these and are we doing a good job of tending to them so that we get to solve the rest of them and then for me it was there were so many of them what was in common driving them are there any kind of like societal generator functions of all the catastrophic risks that we can address with to make a more resilient civilization writ large tristan was working on the social media issues and when you had eric on he talked about the twin nuclei problem of atomic energy and kind of genetic engineering and basically saying these are extremely powerful technologies that we don't have the wisdom to steward that power well
well in addition to that is all things computation does right there's a few other major categories and computation has the ability to as as you mentioned with facebook get to billions of people in a very very short period of time compared to how quickly the railroads expanded or any other type of tech get to a billion people a billion users which they did in like a few years versus before that it took software companies like microsoft even longer than that before that took railroads even longer than that so the power of this tech is you can compress the timeline so you're getting you know a scale of a billion people's you're impacting a billion people in deeper ways much faster which means that if you're blind to something if you don't know what you might be doing the consequences show up faster than you can actually remediate them when we say exponential tech we mean a number of things we mean tech that makes more powerful versions of itself so i can use computer chips to model how to make better computer chips and then those better computer chips can recursively do that we also mean exponential speed of impact exponential scale of impact exponentially more capital returns exponentially uh smaller numbers of people capable of achieving a scale of impact and so when he's mentioning god-like powers and kind of medieval institutions the speed at which our tech is having influences in the world and not just first order influences the obvious stuff but the second and third order ones facebook isn't trying to polarize the population it's an externality it's a side effect of the thing they're trying to do which is to optimize ad revenue but the speed at which new technologies are having effects on the world and the total amount of consequence is way faster than regulation can keep up with and regulation and just by that alone we should be skeptical of any government's ability to regulate something that's moving faster than it faster than it can appraise of what the hell is even happening in the first place so not only that you need someone who really understands the technology and you're not going to get that from elected
officials you're going to need someone who's working on it and has a comprehensive understanding of how the stuff works how it's engineered where it goes you're i mean i'm skeptical of the government being able to regulate almost everything right well and so there's maybe a few things to say about that so one is the complexity of all issues like climate change is really complex like the where the nuclear pathways of escalation or the way a satellite or gps could get knocked out triggers a nuke somewhere that's also really complex social media is really complex crispr you know bio stuff is complex so in general like one of the ways to summarize the kind of problem from our friend zach stein's kind of work is that the complexity of humanity's problems is going up like this but the capacity to meet them is like not really meeting it and then you add in social media and you polarize people and divide them into like they don't even know what's true because everyone's got their own personalized version of reality right and instead of even trying to try to meet that it goes down and in fact social media also rewards the most cynical take on anything so any time a government institution has ever said something dumb like when the guy asked zuckerberg uh how do you make money and he says uh senator we sell ads that thing goes viral and when that goes viral everybody saw that and they didn't see that you know the five senators who i talked to who actually do really get these things pretty decently and i'm not going to say like let's just like regulate it but just to notice right so the cynical take about every time an institution makes a mistake that thing goes viral which means we lose trust in so many things because no matter what what the issue is you notice that you were bringing up the conspiracy theory of might the government have a incentive to make a plant like francis and so it's plausible but plausible doesn't automatically mean is one of the challenges is when someone has a confirmation bias they hear something that's plausible and they just assume that it is without doing the due diligence of saying what i need to know you do a good job of checking that we
could also say would facebook have an incentive to say that she's a plant and try to hire a bunch of pr and they were and they were helping to spread that story i'm not saying they're responsible for it i understand i actually think that what happened is organically again the cynical take goes viral and then if you're rusher china or your facebook in this case you can be like that's a really helpful cynical take from my perspective in fact one of the things that facebook does try to do is turn the social media debate into a censorship or free speech debate because they know that divides the the political class because they know that the right doesn't want censorship obviously and so they say the more they can spin whatever francis is doing as she's claiming censorship the more they can divide um uh any any possibility for actual action in fact i'll tell you just a quick story really quick is during the three-hour testimony that francis gave if you watch the full three hours she had both people on the left and the right and i've been working on this for eight years i've never seen someone create a bipartisan consensus the way that she did she actually did if you watch the video and there was a senator there on the right who typically had been very skeptical of these issues and the next day i talked to her she was going to meet with that senator and he later said i can't meet with you why because the story went viral saying that she was a democratic operative and he said my base will hate me if i meet with you so the very thing we're talking about which is the ability to regulate anything wow is being broken and shattered because the incendiary controversial take on everything goes viral now again i'm not saying that we're this like easy world we should therefore regulate it's just like right but noticing the mind work like part of what i wanted to do today is like how do we reverse engineer this like bad trip we've been on for the last 10 years like it's like a psychedelic trip where we've all fractured into this different reality where the controversial psyop
interpretation of everything the conspiracy-minded interpretation of everything again some things are real some some of those things have desert there's in that way but just to understand how deep the mind work has been the last 10 years it's so funny you say the right doesn't want censorship isn't that a crazy statement like have we like shifted the polar you know the polar what do you mean it used to be the left didn't want censorship the aclu used to defend nazis i mean right what the [ __ ] has happened like our polls have shifted like north is south and south is north it's it's it just shows you that so much of what ideology is is tribal it's like you you find a group that agrees to a certain um certain pattern of behavior and thought and you subscribe to that now i am a right-wing conservative i am a left-wing progressive and then you just follow the playbook and it makes it so much easier than having your own individual nuanced thoughts on complex and difficult issues like this right but the fact that he couldn't talk to her because his base would somehow rather think that she actually is a democratic operative and she does work for the government it is trying some sort of an attempt at censorship and i'm sure not only is facebook amplifying that but all of the different russian troll pages on facebook are amplifying that which confuses the water totally well also if i'm russia or china facebook is like the best weapon i've ever had against the united states yes oh my god you've got an f-35 i don't need f-35 right i've got facebook i can destroy your entire coherence as a society and they have and you won't get anything done and all of your energy will be spent on waste infighting and heat we talked about this recently but there's i'm sure you saw the story there was 20 top 20 christian sites on facebook 19 of them were run by a russian troll farm i'm glad you actually mentioned that excuse me it was the eastern european troll farm yeah macedonia i think totally 104 this is an important stat actually i'm glad you brought it up um a hundred and this is as recent as october 2019 140 million americans per month were reached by essentially troll farms actively um there's three categories of
pages in which they're so for christian pages the top 15 out of 15 christian pages were all run by troll farms so all of the christians in the country have were receiving content and 85 this is this is a secondary point 85 of the christians who saw that stuff in their feed they didn't actually accept an invitation from the the group or the page to say yes i want to subscribe to you facebook because they're optimizing for growth they change the way the system works so if a page invites you that's enough for it to start putting the content in your feed so there's an example in francis's work where there was a q anon person who invited 300 000 people in one day 300 000 people and because facebook's optimizing for growth and engagement those people didn't have to say yes i want to join that group just by being invited it started testing like we want we want to optimize regulator puts in your feed and if you click on it it auto adds you to the group oh my god out of the top 15 pages for african americans two-thirds of those top 15 pages were run by troll farms of the top 15 pages for native americans one third of those pages were run by troll farms so we're now we're not living in an authentic reality reality quote-unquote it's getting more virtual if you read chinese military doctrine specifically look at the 36 stratagems don't ever attack a superior opponent directly turn the enemy against themselves based on their existing fault lines population-centric unconventional warfare right like that's kind of ancient doctrine it's just facebook makes that amazingly easy because it automatically already puts people into tribal groups that whatever the content is in that group is going to keep getting up regulated optimizes for inflammation and tribal identity and those types of things and so you don't have to kinetically attack a country to make the country so turned against itself that the polarized population supports a polarized representative class which means you get gridlock on everything which means you can't do effective governance which means another country that does autocratic governance just wins
geopolitically yeah it seems absolutely insane that they could through one page inviting people yeah instantaneously start to distribute all of their information on the on those people that they invited so why would facebook allow that like you would think so if i'm designing facebook you would probably say wait wait you just said the government should regulate social media it should be illegal as well it should be illegal yeah well this is i don't think the government should regulate but i do think there should be rules in terms of like if you're a regular person that say uh has a specific group of interests like same you only like um motor cars you like vehicles you like hot rods or whatever and that's what you're interested in you know you use facebook when you're off duty at work and you just want to just check some stuff out and all sudden you get queuing on [ __ ] because they invited you into this q anon group and you start getting all this information you start getting radicalized it's it seems like and again i don't know what we should do in terms of regulation i i but i don't think that social media groups should be able to just distribute information to people based on this concept of universal growth yeah well i mean think about it if we were just designing or unlimited growth yeah exactly i mean if if we were designing facebook with a feature called groups and groups had a feature called invitations and you could invite people yeah wouldn't you design it so that people have to accept the invitation for the group before it shows up in your feed why would facebook not do it that way right because what happened is starting in i think it's like 2018 people stopped posting as much on facebook so you and i and maybe we used to post a lot more in 2016 2017 if we stop posting as much oh [ __ ] we can't harvest all that attention from people we were doing all this labor what do you mean what caused it to slow down oh just like people i mean people being more skeptical maybe of facebook or just realizing they don't want to share as much or just usage burning out more
people moving to instagram or people are getting older as well right older older user base totally and so so now if i'm facebook i want to find new sources of free unpaid content creators where can i tap that pool of content oh i've got this thing called facebook groups where people are posting all the time so i'm going to start putting that stuff in people's feeds to just so now i'm fracking for attention i'm going lower into all these other places to backfill this attention harvesting we are the product manager and how do you know since there isn't rigorous identity if a user that says their user is really who they are or if they're a troll farm or if pretty soon they're an aigp three algorithm and you should explain what yeah please do gpt3 yes uh the ability to generate text-based deep fakes so so people know what a deep fake is well there's a whole reddit thread with people arguing with each other that are all fake do you know about that no i don't actually yeah let me send it to jamie it's uh duncan just sent this to me the other day and i was like what in the [ __ ] i could only look at it for a couple moments before i started freaking out but the idea that uh you know that's that's it's not far off like this this ability that deep fake ai has to recreate is especially in text yes exactly that's specifically what gpt3 is it's a text model that trains on trillions of parameters and basically the entire corpus of the internet so you're basically ingesting everything everyone has ever said online ever including stuff in your voice or in my voice and then you could say gpth3 write me an argument about why social media is great written by tristan harris using his words and phrases and it'll do that it'll actually be able to take my style of speech and it'll generate text there you could also say you wanted the vaccine the ability to say make arguments for vaccines or against vaccines and say only use real data and then be able to show the financial vested interest of anyone arguing on the other side and just have it be able to create more data than people can parse in any
reasonable amount of time like an academic looking paper that's 10 pages long saying why the vaccine is not safe with citing real charts real graphs real statistics and the real vested interests of people who are say positively pointing out that the vaccine is safe who maybe they have some connection to pfizer or something like that and it'll generate that full 10-page or 20-page document and it'll take a team of statisticians you know a while to decode that thing and you can flood the internet and it's ready we already have through open ai and the gpt-3 algorithm the ability to pass the turing test in many areas we need to explain what the turing test is meaning that if you're reading the text you can't tell that it wasn't produced by a human right turing test is the idea that if you that's how you find out if someone it's a very good robot so you've already got an asmr right so this is this is the um reddit thread so this is these are all why the human babies cry these are all robots this is all bots arguing with each other this is what happens when you give birth to a human baby oh my bad i thought you were just trying to answer the question no worries no i'm trying to answer the question of how babies cry yta i don't know what that means and you are disgusting i can't even fathom the level of toxicity in this post these are all bots i am disgusted that you are making fun of others don't you know that people in this sub are supposed to be empathetic with others feelings question mark i'm sorry but you're being a [ __ ] these are all robots yeah this is wild because if you've just read this you didn't know i don't really care if you disagree with my opinion as long as you don't call me a pedophile if you were a real man you would be with a young girl and take care of her and you would be a sex offender like this is wild [ __ ] yep it one of the things people don't know is actually was just developed over the summer they announced that open ai um just a track since we came and talked about some of these things last time in august 2020 openai released a video of using the same technology of machines generating stuff to actually write programming code so
you tell the gbg3 i want a asteroid video game and it's like and it writes all the code and then it puts a little graphic of a starship thing in the middle and then there's rocks that are flying when you say i want the rocks to move faster and then the rocks move faster through the asteroids only requiring natural language no programming so you're just saying you're typing a natural text i want an asteroid video game that when i move left it moves left i want this i want the asteroids to move faster actually make the the the starship bigger and then it just changes and it does it all for you now this is perfect because this is saying you're just typing in text that's right but also voice detects so you could just say it you combine these things together make me a pong game yeah exactly and lex uh code me the unreal engine i mean that's that one's gonna be hard yeah right but the point is that's where we're headed right so and part of this is again we have the power of god this is actually it right here it is this is the one make the person 100 pixels and it's doing it all itself yep wow and it writes the code in the right hand side so this is uh this video that jamie pulled up on youtube is open ai codex live demo and you can see this all happening while this person types in the data and they're actually explaining it now how this is going to work once you see it later yeah move set its position to 500 pixels down and 400 pixels yeah from the left and then it just does that oh my god look how quick it codes it wow now make it controllable with the left and right keys the right arrows right boom and then now you can move it so it does it progressively right it's adding the code in yeah wow yeah and this is going to be accessible to more and more people too go ahead this is an example of a kind of deep point to think about for the state of the world as a whole is one of the things that exponential tech means is exponentially more i'll tell
you this but get this thing right up in your face exponentially more powerful tech that's also exponentially cheaper which also means more distributed and so pretty soon this level of tech will not only be getting better but available to everybody so what happens when you have an internet where not only do you have an ai that is curating the facebook feed for the most sticky stuff which usually means the most toxic stuff that and that's an ai that is curating human-made content but now you have ai's that are creating content that also get to maximize for stickiness and then you have the relationship between the curation and the creation ais like how does anyone ever know what is true about anything again so ai can create fake stories and the the fake stories can be boosted up by these troll farms which themselves could be run by fake you know accounts and fake logic and wait it goes one step further is so that's just distributed ai right but we also have drones making continuously better drones with continuously better ability to swarm and weaponize them it also becomes easily accessible we also have crispr making biotech capability something that you don't have to be a state actor to have small actors can have so there's this question of how do we make it through having decentralized exponential tech which means decentralized catastrophic capability god-like powers decentralized decentralized god-like powers biology as well as in terms of technology that's right so it was social media just like gloss over the crispr thing for people who don't understand what crispr is crispr is a gene editing tool i think it's on the second iteration now or is it on the third something like that they're they're getting better and better at it the the idea is eventually is going to get to the point where it's like a home computer like where you are going to be able to edit genes yeah so how i mean how do you stop that or what do you do about that and who has who who if you
wanted to have any kind of regulation about something like that what is the regulation is the regulation that you have to have some specific level of clearance before you have access to it and but if that's the case then you put it in control of the government and then also bad actors and other governments are going to just distribute it wildly and how do you control that someone would uh have to have some kind of access to get it if one of the it's is something that you just need internet access for like open ai or the ability for cyber weapons right cyber weapons hitting infrastructure targets it's like now the only way to regulate that is universal surveillance on everyone's use of their home computer and we don't want that future so so in general like yeah um because this might sound like just uh disaster porn which i want to be really clear that i mean i think there is a way through this yeah our goal in coming on was to be able to talk about the the framing the problems so we know what we're trying to solve we're not trying to say hey we've just got this let's see let's frame it really clearly yeah okay you've got your coding problem and you have this biology problem with with crispr how do you how does a civilization navigate this without killing itself well daniel's gonna be able to speak to a lot more of this i just wanted to connect it first to social media so people see that the through line so i actually think that social media is its other kind of it doesn't seem as dangerous right it just feels like this this thing where people are sharing cat videos and their opinions and their right political ideas and sharing links but it's actually just like this and in the same way that that dangerous capacity we're now seeing what that dangerous god-like power was doing of steering three billion people's thoughts personalized to them the thing that would most outrage you know boogeyman their their lizard brain and their nervous system that's a god-like power when you have a god-like power there's sort of two choices that there's two attractors with
that power one is think of it like a bowling alley you've got one gutter on the left and one gutter on the right on the left you've got a dystopia a centralized control saying like here's how we're gonna control that god-like power that's like china controlling its internet that's like mark zuckerberg having a total monopoly on what people can and can't say like those are both dystopias that's centralized power the other uh gutter in the bowling alley is like take your hand off the steering wheel and let this thing go for everyone like anyone can make anything go viral let's add the devious licks which is by the way a tick tock challenge for anybody to basically trash their high school bathroom and it teaches you how to do it and these videos go viral and it's just like everyone's trashing what is a devious like i probably shouldn't have gone there it's so quickly it's a um high school teacher told me that there's there's all these horrible things that are going viral at the point virality is a god-like power and devious licks is a challenge that basically uh you you um you're challenging your fellow high school aged uh friends around the world to um trash their high school bathroom so you like flush a big mac with like [ __ ] and all this horrible stuff down the toilet at the same time they put like p this is awful they put like pee in the soap dispenser they do all this awful stuff and it just you're just spreading a disaster meme you're just teaching people how to create a decentralized catastrophe instead of a drone just for tick tock likes well they do it because it's getting attention and engagement there's another one that's a self-harm challenge for teenage girls they're saying basically um uh you know this is teaching who can who can do a cutting it's like a cutting challenge i think is what it's called so the point is that these these decentralized comes from are these things from troll farms i don't know but they could be some of them probably are right yeah there's a concept called stochastic terrorism there's a good article on edge which basically is the idea let's say there was a foreign state actor that wanted to
mess things up in the us population trying to control a specific person to do a specific thing is hard but trying to get an already kind of disenfranchised group more radicalized it makes it more likely that some of them do some harmful stuff is easy think about you know you last texted me joe on january 6th i think we had a quick text exchange because like i think that's an example of i don't i mean and i'm not going to claim that everyone is just that's an example i think i would say of i can basically go into a group of the boogaloo boys or you know stop the steel groups or something like that and i can just see stuff that's like hey let's get our guns out let's do this and i just just just hinting at that idea i'm not telling one person to go do something i'm not controlling anyone i'm just hinting and there's a wide enough group there that people can take action so that's one of the other decentralized power tools but i just wanted to close the thought of on the on the bowling alley we've got um the bowling alley one gutter is like let's lock it down with surveillance let's lock it down with mark zuckerberg controls everything let's lock it down with the government tells us what we can and can't do on computers and the other gutter which is the decentralized power for everyone which without people having the wisdom to wield that godlike power or like not at least not evidence that's in in people's own usage of it right now also we've incentivized people to do destructive things also right so in certain places there is an incentive to for those things to happen it's not just by accident it's like by design and incentivized but what you just said is super important it's a population that is getting continuously more radicalized on all sides that simultaneously has continuously more powerful tools available to them in a world that's increasingly fragile and so if you have an increasingly fragile world meaning more interconnected global supply chains that have where a collapse somewhere leads to collapse everywhere more sensitive infrastructure you know things like that if you have an increasingly fragile
world you have more and more radicalized people and you have those radicalized people having access to more and more powerful tech that's just fragility across lots of different dynamics and this is why the social media thing is so central is it's a major part of the radicalization process it's both a major part of the radicalization process and is itself an example of the centralized control censorship which we don't want and the decentralized viral memes for everyone which radicalize and enrage people and polarize democracies into not working the thing is in those two gutters the gutters are getting bigger every day like on each side you've got more potential for centralized control you've got china basically doing full control over the internet you know doing a bunch of stuff to to top down control and the other side you have more and more decentralized power in more hands and that gutter is growing so the the question is how do you basically we have to bowl a strike down the center of that alley but it's getting thinner and thinner every day and the goal is how do we actually sort of um it's almost like a test right we are we are given these godlike powers but we have to have the wisdom love and prudence of gods to match that set of capacities you were just mentioning what china is doing to kind of uh regulate its internet that's because you're worth speaking about yeah have you been following this yeah that's what terrifies me is that we have to become like china in order to deal with what they're doing um i i i just i feel like one step moving in that general direction is a social credit score system and i'm terrified of that and i think that that is where vaccine passports lead to i really do and i i think this idea that they're slowly working their way into our everyday lives and in this sort of inexorable way where you have to have some sort of paperwork or some sort of a cue code or something on your phone or qr code that scares the [ __ ] out of me because that that's you're never going to get that back right once the government has that kind of power and control they're going to be able to exercise it whenever they want with all sorts of
reasons to to institute it i'm worried about that too but i will say also just to also notice that um everywhere there's a way in which a small move in a direction can be shown to lead to another big boogeyman and that boogeyman makes us angry social media is upregulating the meaning of everything to be its worst possible conclusion so like a small move by the government to do x might be seen as this is the first step in this total thing i'm not saying that they're not going to go do that i'm worried about that too but to also just notice the way that social media amplifies that the degree to which we all get kind of effective and triggered by that the thing i think is worth mentioning is what china is doing regarding its internet because it's seeing real problems and we might not like their solution we might want to implement a solution that has more civil liberties than we should let's explain what they're doing yeah so i'll do it quickly so um it's almost it's quite literally as if xi jinping saw the social dilemma because they've in the last two months rolled out a bunch of sweeping reforms that include things like if you're under the age of 14 and you use doin which is their version of tick tock when you swipe the videos instead of getting like the influencer dancing videos and soft pornography you get science experiments you can do at home museum exhibits and patriotism videos wow so you're scrolling and you're getting stuff that's educating because they want their kids to grow up and want to be astronauts and scientists yeah they don't want them to grow up and be influencers uh and i'm not when i say this by the way i'm not just to be clear i'm not praising that model just noticing all the things that they're doing well i'll praise it another influence people that's a great way to do it they also limit it to um three hours sorry 40 minutes a day on tick tock for gaming um let me actually do the tick tock example so they do 40 minutes a day for tick tock they also when you scroll a few times they actually do a mandatory five-second delay saying hey do you want to get up
and do something else like because when people sit there infinitely scroll even tim cook recently said mindless scrolling which is actually invented by my co-founder of the center for humane technology azeraskan he invented he was in the social dilemmas the one who invented that infinite scroll thing um chyna said hey we don't want people mindlessly scrolling so after you scroll a few videos it does a mandatory five second like interlude they also have opening hours and closing hours so from 10 p.m until six in the morning if you're under 14 it's like it's closed meaning um one of the problems of social media for teenagers is if i'm not on at one in the morning but all my friends are on and they're still commenting on my stuff i feel the social pressure i'm going to be ostracized if i don't participate and if your notifications are on your phone keeps buzzing totally and even if they're not on it's like oh but i want to see if they said something about my thing and so um it's a it's a we call a multi-polar trap if i don't participate but the other guys are i'm going to lose out and facebook and these companies they know that by the way even netflix said their biggest competitor is sleep so one of the because they're all competing for attention so when you do this mandatory thing where you say we're going to close from 10 pm to 6 in the morning suddenly everyone if you're in the same time zone it's another important side effect uh can't use it at the same time so these are some examples for their military by the way when you if you're a member of the chinese pla army um you you get a lockdown smartphone it's like a light phone it's like hyper locked down you can't do anything by contrast we know that russia and china go into our um veterans groups on facebook and they actually try to sow disinformation try to radicalize veterans hey afghanistan happened aren't you really pissed let me show you 10 videos right and this is like dosing people with more mental health problems so in a bunch of different ways specifically if you want to drive civil war in a meaningful way in the u.s
take the people who have real tactical capability and radicalize them and so target those groups in particular and that's like that's it makes sense why their military wants to lock down the ability for external influence of course right yeah and so while we're you know spending all this money building physical borders building walls or you know spending 50 billion dollars a year on the passport controls and department of homeland security and the physical you know russia trying to try to fly a plane into the united states we've got patriot missiles to shoot it down but when they try to fly an information like precision guided information bomb we instead of responding with patriot missiles we respond with here's a white glove facebook algorithm that says which zip code or facebook group would you like to target right so it changes the asymmetries typically what made us power what made the us powerful was the geographic uh you know we had these huge oceans on both sides it gives us a unique you know place in the world when you move to the digital world it erases that geographic asymmetry of power so this is a imminent national security threat this is not just like hey social media is adding some subtle pollution in the form of mental health or hey it's adding a little bit of polarization but we can still get things done it's an imminent national security threat to our continuity of our model of governance which we want to keep spoken to people in power have you spoken to congress people about this yes but i'm hoping many more of them watch this because i think people need to see the full scope and i really do want to make sure we're not sounding like just full disaster porn because we want to don't worry about that go full disaster porn well it's just better that than not it's not meant to scare people just to get an appraisal of what is the situation it's going to scare the reality is going to scale it should scare people because we we're so far behind the eight ball there's a really important point tristan was just at that we actually need to double click on which is that democracies are more affected by
what's happening with social media than authoritarian of course nations are and for a number of reasons but do you wanna well and we sort of hinted at it earlier but when social media's business model is showing each tribe their boogeyman their extreme reality it forces a more polarized political base which means to get elected you have to say something that's going to appeal to a base that's more divided and in the facebook files that francis haugen put out they showed that when facebook changed the way its ranking system worked uh in 2018 to something called meaningful social interactions i won't go in the details they talked to political parties in europe so here we are 2018 they do an interview with political parties in poland and hungary in taiwan and india and these political parties say facebook we know you changed your ranking system and facebook like smugly responds yeah everyone has a conspiracy theory about how we change our ranking system because those stories go viral and they're like no no we know that you changed how your ranking system works because we used to be able to publish here's a white paper on our agriculture policy to deal with like soil degradation and now when we publish the white paper we get crickets we don't get any response and we test it and the only thing that we get traffic and attention on is when we say negative things about the other political parties so and they say we know that's bad we don't want to do that we don't want to like run our campaign it's about saying negative things about the other party but when you change the algorithm that's the only thing we can do to get attention it shows how central the algorithm is to everything else if i'm tucker carlson or rachel maddow or anybody who's a political personality are they really saying things just for their tv audience are they also appealing to the algorithm because most more and more of their attention is going to happen downstream in these little clips that get filtered around so they they also need to appeal to how the algorithm is rewarding saying negative things about the other party so what that does is it means you elect a more political like representative class that's based on disagreeing with the other side and being divided about the other side which means that it throws a
gear into the rent the wrench into the gears of democracy and means that democracy stops delivering results in a time where we have more crisis we have more supply chain stuff and inflation and all these other things to respond to and instead of responding effectively it's just division all the way down but it's been division from the jump even long before there was social media so all social media is doing it's putting gasoline on yeah it's they're taking advantage of a trend that already existed it's not like but my opponent is reasonable right but i feel like i'm just a better choice and you could disagree because he's a great guy but this is how i feel no one's doing that totally totally again but notice though in this 2018 example how specific the change was those political parties that before 2018 they could get elected in those countries because they hadn't gone that as partisan maybe as we were yet yes they could have gotten elected in getting attention by saying here's a white paper about our agriculture policy but after 2018 the algorithm has the master say everyone has to appeal the algorithm if i'm a small business i have to appeal to the algorithm if i'm a newspaper do i just like write the articles i want to write or the investigative stories the fourth estate that we need for democracy to work no i have to write the click bait title that's going to get attention so i have to exaggerate and say joe joe rogan just takes horse dewarmer because that's going to get more attention than saying he took ivermectin so particularly in this world where no one's buying paper anymore correct everyone's buying everything clicking online so you really and very few people are even subscribing so you have to give them these articles and then have these ads in the articles and those publishers and that's also driven by the business models of these these central tech companies so there's a facebook twitter and google there's two feedback loops that he just mentioned politically if you have facebook and other platforms like this polarizing the population then the population supports a more polarized representative class but the representatives to be elected are doing political ads and so the political ads then further polarize the
population and so now you have this feedback loop and then the same is also true with with media the media has to meaning newspapers television still has to do well on the facebook algorithm because more and more there's a monopoly of attention happening there and it's someone seeing a clip there that has them decide to subscribe to that paper or keep subscribing to it or whatever it is so you end up having the algorithm radicalizing what people want to pay attention to where then the sources of broadcast have to appeal to that which then in turn further radicalizes the population so these are runaway feedback loops and what's the solution um well actually you you asked me this last time and i dodged the question and part of it is because um it's it's connected to a set of broader issues that that i think is actually really deep in daniel's line which is actually the reason i wanted us to do this together this time there's obviously many steps to this right so once you've kind of let this cancer sort of spread if you take out the the thing that was causing the cancer we've now already pre-polarized everyone's beliefs like when you say what's the solution to all this like ever all of our minds are running malware like we're all running bad code we're all running confirmation bias except no one thinks that they are right everything's the other ones are but not not me but the point is that all of us like it doesn't matter like people on all sides of the political isles and all tribes we've all been shown our version of the boogeyman our version of the inflated thing that got our attention and then made us focus on that and then make us double down and go into those habits of those topics being the most important and so we have to realize that i almost think we need a shared moment for that i wish the social dilemma was a little bit more of a it was a shared moment but i think there's almost like a truth and reconciliation like uh moment that we need to unwind the you know our minds from the cult factory
because it's a cult factory that found each of the little tribes and then just sucked them into together and made them in a self-reinforcing let's say we take any issue that some people care about and think is central whether we take social justice or climate change or u.s china relations if half of the population thinks that whatever half of half the population has a solution they want to implement carbon taxes or whatever other half of the population is polarized to think that that is uh bad and terrible and going to mess everything up so that other half are still political actors and they're going to escalate how they counter that how do you get enough cooperation to get anything done especially where there are real issues and not just have all the energy become waste heat in in autocracy let's take china as an example where you don't have to where you don't have so much internal dissent you don't have that issue so you can actually do long-term planning so one of the things that we see is we have decreasing ability to make shared sense of the world and in any kind of democratic society if you can't make shared sense of the world you can't act effectively on issues but the tech the types of tech that are decreasing our ability to make shared sense of the world are also increasing the speed at which tech is changing the world and the total consequentiality of it and that's one way to start to think about like this bowling alley example is we're having faster and faster more and more profound consequential effects and less and less ability to make sense of it or do anything about it so underneath the ai issue the crispr issue the u.s china issue the how do we regulate markets issue the how do we fix the financial crisis issue can we make sense of anything collectively adequately to be able to make choices effectively in the in the environment we're in and that's underlying it tristan was laying out that you got these two gutters right you've got decentralized catastrophe weapons for
everyone if we don't try to regulate the tech in some ways and that world breaks or to say if we don't want decentralized catastrophe weapons for everyone maybe we do something like the china model but where you have ubiquitous surveillance and that's a dystopia of some kind and so either you centralize the power and you get dystopias or it's decentralized you get catastrophes and right now the future looks like one of those two attractor states most likely catastrophes are dystopias we want a third attractor how do you have a world that has exponential tech that doesn't go catastrophic or the control mechanisms to keep it from going catastrophic aren't dystopic and by the way we're not here saying like go buy our thing or we've got a new platform this is not about this is just about describing what is that that center of that bowling alley that's not the gutters that we can skate down the closest manifesting example of this so far um although when you do one more construction i think which is um but it is taiwan because taiwan actually i think i talked about it last time we were here is a um they've got this digital minister audrey tang who has been um saying how do you take a democracy and then use technology to make a stronger democracy so you can look right now the landscape he's okay we can notice that china and countries like china autocratic countries are employing the full suite of tech to make a stronger authoritarian autocratic society they're adding surveillance they're doing you know cameras everywhere they're doing sesame credit scores they're using tick tock to educate their people instead of turn them into influencers they're using the full suite of tech to create their kind of autocracy that they want to see by contrast open societies democracies western democracies are not consciously saying hey how do we take all of this tech and make a stronger democracy right how do we have tech plus democracy equal stronger democracy one of the other reasons i wanted to talk to you
is so far i think the tech reform conversation is like how do we make social media like 20 less toxic and then call it a day or like take a mallet and break it up and then call it a day that's not enough when you understand the full situation assessment that we're kind of laying out here of the skating down the middle of bowling alley the the thing that we need that competes with that thing because we can't just also allow that thing is going to outperform so the the china autocratic bottle is going to out-compete a you know democracy plus social media that like is 20 less toxic isn't going to out-compete that thing well ultimately in the long run it's going to but it's fascinating is they're willing to forgo any sort of profits that they would have from these children from 10 p.m to 6 a.m right in order to make a more potent society of more influential not influencer but influential more educated more positive people that are going to contribute to society this is something that i think you can only do if you have this inexorable connection between the government and business and that's something that they have with corporations and with the ccp over there right they have this ability because they're they're completely connected like what the government did the senator tell us about china's oh yeah this is a great point we were talking with a sitting senator who was saying they're at some national security conference um talking to a foreign minister of a major eu country and said who do you think the ccp the chinese communist party considers to be the greatest rival to its power you would say united states right right so it's not the united states they consider their own technology companies to be the greatest threat to their power oh so that's why when someone like jack ma steps out of the line they lock him up in the brig for a few months and shut his mouth notice that you know cryptocurrency oh that's a threat to our financial system oh a bitcoin specifically um oh tick-tock that's a threat to the mental health of our kids
oh facebook we don't want that in our country that would open up our military to foreign hacking so they see correctly that technology is the new source of power of basically what guides societies it is the pen that is writing human history and it doesn't have if you let just for-profit motives again coupled with like how do i get as much attention out of people as possible in the race to the bottom of the brainstem to suck it out of people that thing doesn't work with society that breaks it so they see that appropriately and then say let's do something about now the cynical view is obviously they're a communist country that's just you know just doing their thing that's a cynical perspective but a post-cynical perspective is they're also appropriately recognizing that there's a certain threat that comes with allowing unregulated technology so one way to think about this tristan was just saying that they recognize the power of new technologies and the need to be able to employ them if they want to be effective we can see how much the world responded how much the u.s responded to the possibility of a nuclear bomb with the manhattan project just even the possibility that the germans would get it and how that would change everything asymmetrically and so we make basically an indefinite black budget find all the smartest scientists in the world because that much asymmetry of tech will determine who runs the world it's important to also say there are some people who will have just like a knee-jerk reaction that says oh you guys are just being catastrophic yeah you guys are just trying to scare us disaster porn there have always been these risks we always come through them really until world war ii and the bomb there was no way for us to actually mess up the habitability of the world writ large we could mess up little local things and in fact that happened most previous civilizations did go like did go extinct for different reasons but world war ii was the first time we had truly globally catastrophic tech and we had to build an entire world system mutually assured destruction the bretton woods world the igo world to basically not use that tech
well now that was basically the first catastrophe weapon and then we had only two superpowers that had it so you could do mutual destruction and it's really hard to to enrich uranium and make nukes it's not hard to do these types of tech right that's the whole point and we have now dozens of catastrophe weapons many dozens of actors including non-state actors who have them and so we're like oh we're in a truly new phase this isn't the same as it's always been we're in a novel time of risk and the exponential technologies with kind of computation at the center ai and these other ones we're talking about are so much more powerful than all forms of legacy power that only the groups that are developing and deploying exponential tech will influence the future that's like the big story and then we would say well which groups are developing and deploying exponential tech well china is autocratic nations are facebook is google is like major corporations that are also top-down non-democratic systems are and they're becoming like facebook has three billion people the us has 300 million people right we're talking about something that has a global scale of influence but is really a top-down system a corporation though so you either have corporations that are wielding the power of all this technology for mass behavior modification surveillance of everyone perfect sort of understanding of their psychological traits and then moving them that scale but in the corp in the tech big tech corporation model they're doing it for a for-profit motive whereas in the ccp model they're doing it for their ideological goals but neither of them are democratic neither of them have some kind of participatory governance jurisprudence of foreign by the people and the open societies are not innovating and how do we develop and deploy exponential tech in an open society way and that's fundamentally what we're saying has to be like the central imperative of the world right now is you're not going to be able to compete with groups that are developing and
deploying exponential tech if you are not also but how do we do that in a way that preserves the civil liberties that we care about actually advances them and can advance participatory governance and collective intelligence and that's not a simple way is you don't right the simple ways you'll slide things down become an autocratic yeah so you either beat china by becoming china or you figure out a third way well that's like to see there be a third way i'd like to see a third way too but i don't see it so that's what's terrifying to me so like a little more about taiwan is actually worthwhile we're moving in the direction of china more than we're moving in the direction of some new utopia currently yes yes right so what about taiwan well so you can't even mention that see what happened with john cena no what happened you didn't say that yeah john cena was uh there was an opening weekend for fast and furious nine i believe and john cena accidentally or inadvertently said that taiwan is going to be the first country that sees the movie well china doesn't recognize taiwan as a country and if you want to do business with china you can't say that that was on full display when and it made people very skeptical of the world health organization when one of their spokespeople was having a conversation with a journalist and uh when she brought up taiwan's response and other countries have done it like this but taiwan's response and he disconnected his did see that did you see that yeah and then came back on and glossed over very quickly said china's doing a wonderful job let's move on and she was like but taiwan and he's like china is amazing and china this and china that well john cena by saying that taiwan was the first country that was going to see fast and furious pissed off china and then john cena made a video where he spoke mandarin and in it is like this weird video you should watch it because you haven't seen it let's show it to him show it to him because it's he's apologizing to china in the weirdest way saying i really really respect china and
i'm so sorry and i made a mistake i was very very tired so this is the perfect example of a kind of dystopia we don't want to go to a future where people are all accommodating or can't feel or think their actual thoughts because they have to appeal to some source of power exactly and the source of power is financial because 160 million dollars was the opening weekend for fast and force 9 and 134 million of it came from china senator had many many interviews nine information gave me lots of interview information uh i made a mistake i have to say right now it's so so so so so so important i love and respect china and chinese people i'm so so sorry for my mistake i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm very sorry you have to understand i i love and respect china and chinese people i'm sorry that's it he doesn't even say what he's sorry about right because this is wild [ __ ] when you see this guy who is you know one of our big major action movie stars right just on his knees apologizing to china right who hadn't said anything bad about china not at all right all he did was say taiwan as a country which you can't say and if someone talks about something that's not the mainstream narrative and the tech companies currently can't believe you never saw that i i think i i'd seen it in like a john oliver video or something briefly so i would add taste of it but yeah i mean that's a good example that's that's where you get your news i don't know but i was working out sometime um i so this is a good example of we don't want to live in dystopias where our thought and our ideas and our free expression and our ability to figure out what's true in an open-ended way because we don't know what's true right um we need to protect that but we also remember the last time i ended our conversation talking about orwellian dystopias and huxley and dystopias yeah that quote about amusing ourselves to
death or welfare feared a world where we would ban books and censor information huxley feared a world where we'd be drowned in irrelevance and distraction right so that's kind of another version of the two gutters like yeah right now we're kind of getting a little bit of both right we're getting a little bit of hey we don't like the way that the companies are doing this sort of censorship or platforming de-platforming of people we also don't want the unregulated like virality machines where the craziest stuff and the most controversial stuff that confirms our biases goes viral because both those things break break society right so let's get back to that again what's the solution well let me just make one narrow solution for that one because it's funny because francis in her own testimony says facebook wants you to believe in false choices between free speech and censorship there is a solution that facebook themselves knows about for this particular problem which is actually just to remove the reshare button the the basically the retweet button the reshare button um what they found in their own research facebook send something like multi like a billion dollars or something multi billion dollars on integrity modern content moderation all that stuff and they said in their own research it would be more effective to um than the billions of dollars they spent on on content moderation to just the remove the reshare button after you after people click it twice in other words this you can hit reshare on a thing and it goes to all your friends and then all those friends they still see a reshare button and they can click reshare and then it goes to all their friends right after that there's no reshare button if you just remove the instant frictionless like make my nervous system twitch and then boom i'm re-sharing it to everybody if you just remove that one thing you keep freedom of speech but you kill an irresponsible reach just like instant reach for everyone but you also killed the ability to retweet something or re share something that's interesting you could you could still copy and paste a thing and share it you can still do that yeah yeah okay but i think that we have to ask there's a story about steve jobs
that i've referenced several times someone um you'd appreciate this because it's about podcasts someone showed him um the latest version of the podcast app and someone wanted to make on the iphone this is on the iphone early days and they're like what if we made it so in the podcast app we had a reshare button and you could see a feed of all the stuff that your friends were looking at yeah i mean it sounds like kind of it's just like social media and it'd be really engaging and people would get sucked into podcasts but steve job's response was no if something is truly that important and truly that meaningful someone will copy and paste it as a link and be like you gotta check out this interview with joe rogan which i hope people do with this episode because it's crossing a threshold of significance of what is truly worth our undivided attention which is also the name of our podcast we call it that as opposed to just publicizing something spending a bunch of money or doing a bunch of or creating influencer culture or just rewarding again the controversy and the conspiracy theory and the thing and again i always i shouldn't use that phrase because it sounds like you're always one-sided on it but just the most kind of aggressive take on anything the most cynical take on everything being rewarded we don't have to have it's nowhere is it written that like a virality-based information ecosystem where you have the people are familiar now with the metaphor of like a lab that's doing gain of function research and the idea that something get leaked out a lab just like that as a metaphor well today we have the tiktok institute of virology we have the zuckerberg institute of virology and they're testing what makes the memes go as viral as possible right they're like hey if we make it have this photo if we present it this way and if we had these reshare buttons except their goal is to create these mimetic pandemics their goal is to have every idea that's especially the ones that most excite your nervous system and your lizard brain go as viral as possible and then what you can even say that the zuckerberg institute of virology released this this mimetic virus and it shut down the global democracy world because now we don't have shared sense
making on anything but we do if if everyone's intelligent and objective and they just you know they don't use the reshare button for nonsense the problem is that people are you know we were impulsive and we and we also don't spend a lot of time researching a lot of things that we read you know if someone says right i mean and they they know that and they pray on that right they prey on hey you're you're right you should you should totally reshare that thing well it's also you know things are if true spectacular and it takes oftentimes hours to find out something is true or not true right you know and we can't we don't even know right right it's very difficult to even trust talk about how social media kills science you want to do that construction well scientific bias right we talked about that if someone has a kind of an emotional bias towards what they already generally think is true even if they're following the scientific method well what experiment they decide to do what they go looking for will be influenced because there's a lot of things to look at right am i trying to do science on natural supplements versus on drugs versus on vaccines versus like uh i'll have an intuition that is the basis of a hypothesis or a conjecture that then i'll do the scientific method on intuition can be biased um so a point that tristan was saying earlier that i think is really important is that this model of facebook and it is not and it's not just facebook it's tick tock it's all all of uh the things that do this kind of attention harvesting which ends up it doesn't intend to polarize it's it's a byproduct right it's a second order effect and an intended consequence but in the way that like the unintended consequence of cigarettes was it had an externality which was lung cancer and oil companies had oil spills and so then government had to regulate it the these companies are fundamentally different because their their externality is a polarized population which in a democracy decreases the capacity of government
directly so the big oil companies and big pharma companies and whatever can do lobbying and campaign budget support whatever they can to affect government but their their mode of operation is not directly decreasing the effectiveness of government the mode of facebook's operation directly polarizes the population which polarizes the representative class which creates more gridlock which decreases the capacity of government both relative to other nations that don't have that issue and relative to their own internal tech issues right in their own internal demands i can't even regulate facebook in the example i gave at the beginning of the senator who was going to meet with francis but then he couldn't because these stories that polarized them went viral she should have shamed that senator that's what she should have done and that would have gone viral then he would have backed down because then his constituents would have been mad at him and go hey man um what's interesting is that instagram doesn't have a share feature yeah i just realized that which the share feature isn't actually the key tick tock is not really emphasizing shares but facebook is facebook is but the key is morality right so share is one way to get virality tick talk is just looking at engagement and up regulating the things that get most engagement this is actually a key point because let's say that we tried to make a piece of legislation based on thinking it was about shares then facebook would just move to the tick tock algorithm just by what you look at the most that thing gets reshared to other people and it's based on unconscious signals as opposed to explicit click signals so there's a deeper point here which is not is there a piece of regulation that we can put in even if we trust the government to do that it's let's even say we had a very trustworthy government it's can the government regulate at the speed that tech can outmaneuver it well and here's the other question if you didn't have any algorithms whatsoever wouldn't you be now open to be manipulated by troll farms just simply by volume you know if
they have a hundred thousand accounts at each individual location they have a hundred thousand locations and they're just pumping out different instagram pages and tick tock pay and we don't really even know how many they actually have because they discover them like facebook shuts down two billion fake accounts per quarter i'm sure they get all of them [ __ ] and this is before ai yeah for the gpt you're you're obviously being sarcastic by saying they get all of them they don't no exactly yeah um just to let people know totally paying attention that's insane two billion per quarter fake accounts yep and did they do is there a centralized area where these are coming from is it all russian troll farms are they some of them political ones that are used against opponents like well one of the problems is that we don't know because actually that's not true facebook has been um i really want to celebrate all the positive moves they make by the way this is not just so i'm clear and more clear like this is about finding what's an earnest solution to these problems right all the time they make great decisions that are moving the positive direction we need to celebrate that they do these um quarterly reports i think called like a information quality reports or they publish every quarter how many accounts they take down but it's just like a pdf like they're just putting out a post as opposed to allowing external researchers know for example in each country what are the top 10 stories that go viral how do they find out that someone's a troll post i don't know i mean there's classifiers that they build there's activity you can tell like usually have you ever had this happen use facebook and you click around a bunch and then it says like you look like you're clicking around too much have you ever gotten one of those messages um there's occasionally like a person can trigger a thing that makes it they're like are you real and it they're trying to figure out if you look around a lot you're not real there's because these bots a lot of what they're doing is they're going around harvesting information so they want to click around
various profiles and they like download the information and there's like ways more than a person could be able to do just by clicking yeah it's a hard problem right because essentially because the tech is getting better at simulating the behavior of a human and then simulating there are people who are proposing that social media and the internet as a whole needs rigorous identity layer i would say that's a requisite need for where we're going i was thinking that about twitter a long time ago that if and we don't kind of we kind of have that with facebook but it's not rigorous obviously right but twitter you know you can have jackmeof69 and that's your twitter handle and with some weird gmail account and then just post nonsense you know and so there's no ability to for justice in that system there's also no ability accountability there's also no ability for the user reading somebody else's thing to know who they are right for the veterans group or the whichever group to know is this a russian troll farm that is pretending to be a christian or whatever right and especially is this even a human or is this an ai in the very near future so the ability to be able to know this is a human and this is actually the human that they say they are is not an adequate solution but it's an example of a solution now this of course then creates other issues one of the things we've liked about the internet is anonymity because if there's rigorous identity who has access to that information and am i now centralizing data right so how do you become a whistleblower right which is huge or how do you how does something like arab spring happen right there's a whole decentralized community there's a great movement called radical exchange by glenn weil and they're trying to create part of this third attractor that's like what's the center of the bowling alley that's a digital version of democracy what are decentralized ways of proof of personhood there's a project called identa there's a bunch of things people can look up by radical exchanges work it's part of a whole movement of which taiwan is included uh which is that i
don't know if we really got to the taiwan example but we didn't think okay we showed uh john cena instead oh that's right that's right um what people need to get it because it's an example of what is working it's a solution it's a it's a direction of how we can go which is they've you know you can only fit so many people into a town hall to deliberate right um so there's sort of a limit to our idea of democracies kind of guided by ideas from 200 years ago they've created a system called polis which is a way of gathering opinions about various ideas and then sort of seeking who wants more funding for various things less funding for various things and whenever there's an unlikely agreement so they sample a bunch of people say you sit over here you sit over here they get these clusters like these people kind of like this these people kind of like these other things whenever there's an unlikely agreement between those clusters in other words consensus rough consensus that's what they sort of boost to the top of that system so everyone's seeing areas of common ground common ground common ground as opposed to fault line of society fault line of society be more angry join the common thread etc and then you're invited into a civic design process where you actually say hey i don't like the tax system and they're like great we're going to invite 30 of the people who were part of that rough consensus we're like let's improve the tax system let's talk about how we're going to do it they do a combination of in-person stuff this is a little bit before covid and zoom calls and then do like these mechanisms to kind of get an idea of where do people agree and then how would we make it better they've done this with air pollution they have a huge air pollution problem because of the lithography that they do with chips and things like this they do it with um with budgeting they also have a transparent budget for the entire taiwan government so people can see like imagine if the the u.s federal budget you don't know if you want to do this but lived on a blockchain where you had transparency into all the you know what was getting funding and that would that would create more trust in government because you could see essentially who's
getting the big contracts and for how much and that was more accessible and there was a civic participatory process where more people could could contribute and participate in identifying areas of inefficiency you could even imagine a place where citizens could get rewarded by saying hey this is inefficient we could do it better this way and if you identify places where it could get more efficient that gov you could make you could get money or resources by making the whole system work better for everyone if you ran a current audit of the us government through blockchain you'd have a goddamn revolt they would go holy [ __ ] this whole thing is corrupt this is infested down to the roots and that would be a real problem and i think the nancy pelosi's of the world would really have a hard time with that i heard some clip that you did where you were talking about your uh pot thoughts of people being in big buildings and the pipes everywhere um and just like how weird some aspects of civilization are so think about how weird democracy is like has an idea the idea that you can have some huge number of people who don't know each other who all believe different stuff and want different stuff figure out how to actually agree and work together as opposed to just tribalize against each other and do their own thing like it's actually a wild idea to think that that would be possible at any scale maybe a tiny scale where that's when it started it was a tiny scale right and we've always had a scale issue right in 1776 you could all go into the town hall and fit and so i i wasn't just hearing a proposition that a special interest group had created and i get a vote yes or no which will inherently polarize the population right very few propositions get 99 of the vote they get 51 percent of the vote because they benefit something and they harm some other things and the people who care about what gets harmed are fighting against it that polarizes the population against each other social media they're designed to do that just like crazy just like facebook saying hey this is a conversation about censorship or free
speech and boom you just split the population in half as opposed to hey we all agree we could do a little bit less virality we could stop the teenager use these in these ways and would be better for everyone the proposition creation isn't designed to polarize the population it just does because as soon as you get beyond the scale of we can all actually inform what a good proposition would be by being in the town conversation yeah just to find a problem i mean not everybody knows a proposition something you would vote on what's a good way to go forward before we make a choice on what a good way to go forward is we have to do some sense making of what is even going on here like what are the values what's going on here that was so the point was a conversation that happened at a smaller scale also if you had a representative the level of tech at the time was something that a very well-educated person could understand most of right they could understand a lot of the tech landscape obviously we're in a situation now where the scale issue of democracy has been completely broken so almost nobody we're supposed to have a government of formed by the people but nobody really understands the energy grid issues or first strike nuclear policy or monetary policy or anything like that and everyone's voice can't be heard right now what taiwan was working on is is the tech that is particularly in the west breaking democracy could that same tech be employed differently to actually make 21st century democracy more real so the same ai that can mess up the information landscape for everyone could we use that type of ai that understands language to be able to see what does everyone think and feel and actually be able to parse that into something we can understand so there's an online environment that says here's the distribution of people's values here's the various values people care about here's the emotions they have here are the kind of facts about it and then is there a place where we can actually craft propositions together so there's a way to make it to be able to utilize these same tools to make democracy more realized to make
collective intelligence more realized but right now as we were saying autocracies are working on employing these tools corporations are working on it both of which are top down democracies really aren't there outside of taiwan and estonia and a few small examples what would be the incentive like who would be incentivized to use that other than the people and it's pretty clear that the people don't have control over facebook don't have control over twitter certainly don't have real control over the government you know you have control over elected officials who it's almost universally agreed will lie to you to get into office and then not do what they said they were going to do which is the standard operational procedure so what's the incentive and how would how would these get implemented so again at a small scale 1776 your representative couldn't lie all that much because everybody they lived in the same town right and you could all go see what was going on right and so can we recreate things like as you were mentioning people would freak out if they could actually see how government spending worked can we create transparency at scale can we in a way that could create accountability at scale we could could we have places where there's direct democracy and people can actually engage in the formation of what a good proposition is not just voting yes or no on a proposition or yes or no on uh can we can i stop you there how would you say we could how would you do that how would you have that transparency and who would be incentivized to allow this transparency if the transparency has not existed up until now why would they ever allow some sort of blockchain type like deep understanding of where everything's going i don't think they are incentivized which is actually why this show is interesting because if the if we're really talking about a government of foreign by the people where the consent of the governed is where the power of government comes from like ultimately if and the founding fathers said a lot of things about that the government will decay at a certain point particularly
when people stop taking the responsibility to actively engage right and so if if tech can produce if tech has incentives to produce things that are catastrophically problematic for the world and we need to regulate that somehow and the issues are too complex for individuals to understand so you need institutions but how do you make sure the institutions are trustworthy you have to we have to create new 21st century institutions but they have to arise for and by the people which means there's a cultural enlightenment that has to happen right people actually taking responsibility to say we want we we want institutions we can trust and we want to engage in processes of recreating those and how do you get people to be enthusiastic about some sort of a radical change like that other than some sort of catastrophic event like a 911. well this is why we're talking about all the impending catastrophic events is to say we don't want to wait till after they have to do it before something happens it would be but it seems like that's the only way people really change the way they think about things is something some almost like cultural near-death experience has to take place well it's like the problem of humanity is paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and god-like tech one of the paleolithic emotions is it can't be real until oh [ __ ] it actually happened right and so like but the test is we are the one species who has the capacity to know this about ourselves to know our paleolithic emotions are limited in that way and say we're going to take the action the leap of faith that we know we need to do like we're the only species they can do that if a lion was in this situation or a gazelle they can't like understand their own mind and realize they have the one marshmallow mind or the you know short-term bias or recency bias they're trapped inside of their meat suit this is a beautiful idea idealistic notion however in real world application most people are just [ __ ] lazy and they're not going to look into this and they're not they're not going to follow through and this is why most people that really
study tech mediated catastrophic risk are not very optimistic and they think things like we have to chip human brains to be able to interface with the inevitable ais or we have to have an ai overlord that runs everything because we're too irrational and nasty and the question is like if there have always there's always been a distribution of how rational people are and how kind of benevolent they are and we have never with that distribution been very good stewards of our power right we've always used our power for war and for environmental destruction and for kind of class subjugation but with the amount of power we have now those issues become truly globally catastrophic and this is the thing is like and this is what almost every ancient prophecy kind of speaks to as you get as as you get so much power that you can't keep being bad stewards of it either the experiment self-terminates or you are forced to step up into being adequate stewards of it so the question is what would the wisdom to steward the power of exponential tech what would the minimum required level be and that's like the experiment right now that's the that's the opportunity for us the opportunity but you're talking about a radical shift in human nature well it's a possibility in human conditioning why don't you give some examples okay so we can look at some cultures that have certain traits quite different than other cultures as a result of the conditioning of those cultures more than as a result of the genetics we can see that if you look at jane's what are the genus the jains are a religion that is highly emphasizing non-violence even more than the buddhists they want where are they asia they won't kill plants they only eat fruits and things that come from plants so you can see a whole population that won't hurt bugs based on conditioning across the whole scope of human nature the genetics in it you go to a larger culture like the
buddhists and you can see that for the most part you've got like 10 million plus people over 3 000 years in lots of different environments that mostly don't hurt anybody including bugs as a result of the way they condition people you can decide conditioning culture you can see that jews have a have had historically a level of education that is higher than the embedding society that most everyone around them has as a result of investing in that and so we're like can cultures value certain things and invest in developing those in people it doesn't mean that everyone is suddenly has the wisdom of gods to match the power of god but can we create a gradient that's like this is where there used to be this concept building what's that i'm sorry i'm hearing what you're saying yeah but i don't see it yeah i'm hearing what you're saying idealistically yes but i don't see the motivation for the shift i i feel like this is you're it's a big ask it's a bit right and a big ask has to come with some sort of a master plan to get people to ship their shift their perspective well if you take a look at the like attractor of catastrophes and the attractor of dystopias those are the likely ones right but we don't see it like people don't give a [ __ ] until it's happening which is why one of those two will probably happen yeah well and with social media they do see it i think there's there's a unique moment and the reason i thought this would be an interesting conversation with the three of us is that social media has become the case like we can now all see it we can now i mean it took unfortunately for some people seeing the receipts which is what france has provided to things that we all predicted back you know eight years ago but now people understand that that is a consequence of unregulated exponential technologies that are steering people at scale making things go viral at scale and dangerous at scale so that's a case we can now see that thing can we leverage the understanding of that to realize
what bigger thing needs to happen that doesn't mean yeah before we get to the incentive just imagine as a thought experiment for a minute that facebook changed what it was optimizing for because facebook is this three billion person ai optimized behavior machine right like that's a huge it's not like normal companies right and it's important to understand that and it's optimizing for engagement which usually ends up looking like outrage desire addiction all those types of things but let's say that we could we assess for are people being exposed to different ideas and the ones they're used to are they actually up taking those ideas are people expressing ideas that have more nuance and complexity and you were actually up regulating for those things there's a lot of actually quite constructive content on the internet and imagine that you could actually personalize development and education this is why you started to say winterstone was saying what china is doing where the kids are seeing museum and science experiments and patriotism you're like yeah that that actually kind of makes sense and it makes sense but it only makes sense when you have an autocratic government that has complete control of the corporations and their motivations like if the corporation's motivations were specifically designed to rake in the most amount of profit like facebook says you'd never be able to trick them into doing that there's no way they'd be like [ __ ] you we're not going to do it that that infringes upon our rights as a business to maximize our profits we have a obligation to our stakeholders our shareholders they would never do it and we can see how the government took major corporations that had such an uh an effect on society and made them public utilities or regulated them in the past yes now could we have a situation where because of conversations like this there was enough bipartisan public demand that rather than being totally polarized as a representative class the representative class had to unify to say actually these platforms
are so powerful that they can't be harming our citizens and harming our democracy we actually have to put some regulation not on who gets to speak but what gets radically upregulated right but the problem is the way they would do it is the same way they do like the build back better bill where it's 40 000 pages and no one can read the whole thing and inside of it there's a bunch of [ __ ] about how they can spy on your bank account and and you know and it locked you down if you spend more than six hundred dollars then you have to go to a committee to decide whether or not you get your money back and make everybody scared and paranoid i mean this is the kind of behavior that our government engages in on a regular basis this is not just a big ask for us to get people to be motivated to make this radical change but it's a big ass to the government is like hey you [ __ ] have to start being honest now and that's not gonna happen yeah it's a tricky it's a tricky proposition because the question is it changes the way the government has been treating human beings through every single day of our lifetime so do you trust facebook to hold this power do you trust the government to hold it no do you trust individuals to be resilient against all of this power pointed at them that is so radically asymmetric more that more that more i trust people to wake up to the fact that you do have control over your news feed you don't have to look at it you do have control over what you share and retweet you should be more objective about the information that you consume you should try to find fact checkers that are independent and are unbiased and are not motivated by financial means like there's there's fact checkers that are clearly connected to parties you know we know this so i could similarly argue you're trying to um ask too much of human nature so it's way easier than that ask that of the government and ask that of corporations well at least human beings don't they they have a personal understanding of the consequences of what they're doing and they don't have this diffusion of responsibility that both government and corporations have the thing about the diffusion of
responsibility is one person in a corporation doesn't feel evil when the corporation dumps pollutants into some south american river but that is happening and it is a part of it but when an individual takes responsibility for their own actions and if we can somehow or another coach or explain or educate individuals about their consumption and what what kind of impact their consumption has on their psychology on their future on the way they view and interface with the world that could change the reason why these algorithms are effective is because they play to a part of human nature that we don't necessarily have control over what we like to argue over what we like to engage with you know i brought this up with your on your podcast before but i'll bring it up again i have a good friend ari shafir and he ran an experiment on youtube where he only looked up puppy videos and that's all he recommended to him the problem with the algorithm except for what you were talking about before with the q anon thing that's [ __ ] the problem with the algorithm on youtube is it accentuates the things that people are actually interested in but when facebook those [ __ ] when they do something like that where someone just invites people into a group and you can mass invite i'm assuming through some sort of a program right they're not doing it individually one by one so if some q anon group mass invites a million people and then it's all of a sudden distributing disinformation to that million people then you got a problem with the company there's a problem with the way that company distributes information because you're not allowing people to make the decisions that they could make to clean up their algorithm to clean up what they get influenced by to clean up what their news feed looks like that's a problem that's a problem because you're it's not as simple as you're you're giving people choices this is what they choose no you're allowing someone to radicalize like intentionally radicalize people with either willing or un unbeknownst to them disinformation yeah and we don't want the nestle coca-cola vending machine in the preschools because
do the kids actually have the ability to win the two marshmallow experiments in the presence of that much advertising the other thing getting it advertising do they understand marketing there's a we want to spot asymmetries of power and the challenge here is the asymmetry is i've got a a trillion dollar market cap company that has observed three billion people's behaviors and click patterns so i know more about people before they even know about themselves yuval harari gives this example his partner he said he's gay you his partner itzik makes two clicks on tiktok and he knows exactly what he wants right it when you have that degree of asymmetry and it's designed with that much power on one side of the table i mean what a system is inhumane if that symmetry of power is so asymmetric right so if i if it's influencing me more than i understand my own brain like a magician that's that's not gonna we're not gonna be able to get out of that because if it's playing to my confirmation bias and i don't know that i have confirmation bias i'm just run by confirmation bias that's a form in which i'm essentially a foot soldier in someone else's culture war if it's playing to my social validation i don't know that it's plain to my social value i don't even know i have a thing called social validation that that's an exploitable part of me that's an asymmetric interaction so i mean you're right by the way as a as a part of an ecosystem of solutions we do need a cultural i mean daniel calls it a cultural enlightenment but you can just simply say we need a mass education about how technology influences us that matches everyone uses social media deserves to know how it works and in the carnegie endowment they did sort of met analysis for the problem of misinformation if you look at like 100 organizations surveying how do we deal with this problem like i think like 98 of them said like the number two result was at least do digital literacy education for everyone right everyone should understand more about how this stuff works so to your point about we should be educating everyone to be better stewards of their own attention their own information consumption but when you have bad actors that are manipulating
this stuff at scales and at levels that people don't understand and we're about to have gpt3 and printing you know basically full research papers that justify everything you've ever believed um like that that's not that's not going to be an adequate solution so we have to change something at the systemic level the question's just how do we get that to happen yeah you know solutions right well if we're willing to i mean you know what i'm saying like we we have these ideas of what needs to happen but this is like what we need to do is get everybody to stop eating processed food and exercise regularly and only drink water well you can get like 10 people to do that you can get like highly motivated people to do that you can get really intelligent cons you know really conscientious people that are considering the impact their choices have on their future but that's not normal human nature and also you're dealing with the fact that most people are very unhappy with what they do for a living they're very unhappy with their lives their personal lives their there's like a good percentage of people that are not happy with most aspects of their existence well they seek distractions they seek distractions that might be the only comfort that they have is arguing about global warming with people online or or you know arguing about second amendment rights like we gotta take into consideration the motivation for people to engage in these acts in the first place and a lot of it is just they're very very unhappy with their existence so that's why they get trapped doing this when you talk to someone who is like hey i realize that i got to get off of social media i don't do anything anymore i wake up in the morning i have fresh squeezed vegetable juice and then i go on a nice long hike and those are rare [ __ ] humans they do exist but the idea that we're gonna change the course of the vast majority of our
civilization and have most people behave in that manner is very unrealistic so this is why now add increasing technological automation and the radical technological unemployment to that meaning automating more of our jobs etc right is that good or bad does that make people less happy or more happy well for the most part it makes a radically unemployable underclass a huge radically unemployable underclass where at least in feudalism you still needed the people to do labor now you don't need the people to do labor so then this is why there are a number of people in the upper wealth class who believe in universal basic income because it's at least the cheapest way to deal with those people now you add the metaverse to that and and this is the entry into the matrix world right right now this is this is where we we have to get to because that's what i'm really worried about what i'm really worried about is the solution will be to disengage with the actual material world and the solution would be to find yourself almost completely immersed and do whatever you can to just feed yourself and pay for the metaverse or whatever it is whether it's zuckerberg's version of it which by the way i saw a [ __ ] commercial which is so strange there's a bunch of like incredibly diverse multi-racial kids and they're sitting around bobbing their heads to a [ __ ] a lot or a tiger that's talking to them and dancing have you seen that please find that because it's like what are you selling the [ __ ] are you selling like it doesn't even show what you're selling it's like this weird uh change from facebook to meta right and so it's showing this ad it's very attractive it's interesting you see all these people they look cool and they're all bobbing their head and then like the tigers talking to them telling them anything is possible you're like oh cool anything's possible but you're watching like what are you saying like i don't even know what you're saying like what is this like watch this because it's it's so [ __ ] weird it's not moving of course not too many people are connected to the metaverse it's failing so the same thing but different messages
thought when the audio started that was good but see the same thing it's like cultivated multi-racial multi-ethnic groups this is the dimension of imagination [Music] so the two cans are dancing pelicans are dancing the tiger let's go to buffalo [Music] look everybody's bobbing their head no one's going what the [ __ ] is going on [Music] they're all bobbing their heads right but what is this this is going to be fun no it's not we're [ __ ] this is not going to be fun this is a trap yep this is a trap they're going to lure you into this and you're not going to give a [ __ ] about your regular life anymore because it's going to be so much more exciting and next thing you know they're going to say listen it'd be much more involving if you put a gasket in the back your head and they could just connect you straight to a pipe and next and then you're in the matrix so a few things to say um the competition for attention in the attention economy was always about the metaphors we've been living in the metaverse for a long time because it's about how do you capture and own and control people's personal reality that's what instagram facebook tiktok youtube the whole thing that's what these things are one of the things that this makes me think about that's subtle actually and from i know you've had jonathan height on the show talking about teenage mental health problems when you look at when self-harm and depression starts ticking up in the graph for the kids uh 13 to 17 year olds it's there's a subtle point in a specific year period where that ticks up and you know what happened what that year was it's like 2009 to 2011. what changed in that period the iphone the iphone and then social media we had social media before that right but what changed is when it went on mobile right now what changes when it's on mobile because it goes from you have it all the time you have it all the time it becomes your new 24 7
metaverse i would say that it's the when you virtualize people's experience so fully and that virtual world doesn't care about protecting and nurturing the real world when you virtualize people's relationships in a way that they don't protect they don't care about nurturing your offline relationships when they virtualize your online relationships in the same way that you know we have a technosphere that doesn't care about nurturing the regenerative capacity of the biosphere we have a virtual reality that's not trying to protect and and nurture the the real reality that's underneath that and it depends on that real reality so if the economy depends on the earth working in this fundamental way and it's not trying to protect to make sure those fundamental capacities keep going through deforestation and so on that's very similar to a virtual reality that's not protecting the social fabric that it depends on it depends on that thing for it being higher if you want to say anything to that yeah so why did facebook by instagram and by whatsapp and the various things they did is because a monopoly of attention is the play and a monopoly of attention is a really big deal to be able to get but as soon as new devices come out you're going to get attention in different ways so ar and vr as new platforms obviously you've got to lead the way in having the monopoly of attention there and increasingly hyper normal stimuli and the cell phone took us up to something like 50 screen time from say 25 screen time on the laptop the ar can take us up to like approaching 100 screen time or you know engagement time right and then persistent tracking of reality across all those domains so we can see why this is super problematic and and pernicious that was just speaking to how the metaverse is a natural extension of what they've already been doing right where's the middle lane we've got you know we've got the gutters on each side what's the middle lane there is oh i remember what what tristan was just saying about
if the daniel get on that microphone if i have virtual relationships online but they're actually debasing the integrity of my in-person relationship so when we're talking we're actually looking at our phones uh we would say from the center for humane technology kind of perspective what is humane tech one of the definitions would have to be and he was mentioning earlier that tech plus democracy makes a better democracy similarly if you want to think about what does humane tech mean tech plus any of the foundations of what it means to live in meaningful human life and a sustainable civilization tech has to make those things better so tech plus families has to actually increase the integrity of families otherwise it's fundamentally not humane it's misaligned with what is foundational to being human tech plus democracy has to make better democracy tech plus individual human mental well-being right but it's not right right tech plus democracy is debasing it fundamentally yeah currently but there are ways of actually um first of all aligning and choosing your business models to be in alignment with that thing so i mean not to give apple too much praise but when it um says hey you know we're gonna you know they just added the johnson johnson guy to their board and they're choosing to go into health because they could just say hey we're gonna build our own maximize you know engagement machine metaverse thing i'm sure they're working on one but the choosing business models their business model isn't maximizing attention that's why we use facetime it doesn't have like here's comments here's notifications here's the hearts and likes and thumbs up floating across the screen is using facetime because it's you're the customer not the product well apple's a fantastic example of what is possible when a company does have the most superior product in the market right like it's it's kind of widely acknowledged that when it comes to the phones when it comes to the operating system that exists in the phones and when it comes to the operating system that exists on the computers and then the fact that apple controls all of the hardware so the the
problem that windows has is you got lenovo and dell and there's all these different companies that are making razer they're all making the different hardware and then you have the operating system that engages with that hardware but there's all these different drivers because you got different video cards you have different there's so many different things that it's it's very difficult for them to make this one perfect experience whereas apple's like you know what we're going to do is we're going to control all the hardware so they make the best laptop they can possibly make they make the best phone they could possibly make and they've done such a good job with it they have this massive loyal fan base and then through that they decided you know what we're going to give you the option to not have advertisers track you and apps track you everywhere that is a wonderful solution and when tim cook announced that he said we cannot let a social dilemma become a social catastrophe they're going after the social media business model of surveillance advertising and that's one of the steps and that's a good example maybe they can do something with the social media like maybe apple can use this the same idea that they have and these same ethics yes and create a social media app and we can all jump jump on it something with no algorithms something that doesn't accentuate certain like i mean a stronger a stronger mode is if i mean they're never going to do this but imagine that they said hey we now know how to diagnose what the problem is it's these sort of engagement based business models that have infinite virality that treat us as the product and not the customer we know it's toxic for democracy you know we could just take it off the shelf we could say those things don't exist in our shelf here's a crazy thing it's a good time to do that now they could do that now here's the thing if they did that the um people would be cynical they would say wait hold on apple's doing that only so they can basically keep a bigger monopoly on their app store notice there's this whole lawsuit right now with epic games and facebook is trying
to dial up that because they don't want apple to be this big top-down take control with their social media apps are free apps yeah if they decided to say listen we think there's a real problem with these apps so we're not going to make them available they could simply do that they can simply do that and say we're going to have something that's available that we don't have any kind of control over what your feed is right and they um you know we were just talking about this last night you know in this one of the things we talk about is that there's there's always a cynical take when someone takes an action and there's there's an optimistic good faith take the cynical take on francis is a whistleblower who's a secret operative the cynical take on the government wanting to regulate social media is it's just because they want to take control or if the media is ever criticizing social media just because the media is upset that they don't have a monopoly on truth anymore there's a partial truth in each of these things if if apple takes a strong move against these social media companies and they do the privacy thing that you just mentioned they're now protecting people's privacy they prevent cross-app tracking there's an article that they make an extra billion per year out of that change they make a billion per year so the cynical person says oh they're just doing that so they can get more money for that how do they make an extra billion because somehow the extra advertising goes through their network or something like that because you're not using cross-app tracking through the other companies somehow people start spending more money on their system so now there's a cynical take there but here's the here's the move if they wanted to prove that they're actually a good faith actor this is your idea last night they could take the billion dollars or even just a large chunk of it that's not legal fees and say we're going to spend that billion dollars on solving the rest of the social dilemma we're going to fund non-profits that are doing digital literacy education we're going to we're going to put 500 million dollars into
nonprofits and that are doing digital literacy education we're gonna and another sort of humane tech we're also gonna put another 500 million dollars into r d to do more features that help address the social dilemma and actually move our whole product ecosystem further in the direction of protecting society and not manipulating society that might be the only solution if a company that's as massive as apple that has so much capital i mean they are literally one of the most wealthy corporations that's ever existed but we would need a if not the right yeah they're they're i think they're up there with saudi aramco they may be the most you know they keep going up and down but they would need a public will and support base of people and that's why your audience is really interesting also because like this is gonna take as daniel said this is a we the people type moment like we have to actually ask what is what is the best way out of this thing there isn't an easy answer right it's not like hey we're going to just tell you that's just do x and it's just all over we fix it all like we have to navigate through this thing so we have to find levers that are at least a little bit more attractive than other levers this is one of them taiwan is another one it's an example that works we could you know biden could invite audrey tang to come to the united states and actually say we're going to build a civic tech ecosystem the decentralized web community that's building these ethereum based like new web 3 things could actually say we're going to take this central design imperative we're going to do digital democracy that helps us do the bowling alley and get that that thin tightrope that we've got to walk these are the kinds of things that that could happen but we would need there to be a public zeitgeist that this this has to happen and i know it sounds dystopian if we don't do that it's not an easy problem it's not an easy problem but one thing we can show is if people are happier and more successful if they follow this path than the path of want and destruction because we we know that about alcoholics and gambling addicts right if you have an uncle that is an alcoholic and you see him you're like
wow i don't want to be like that guy you learn if you see someone just ruin their life with gambling you go wow that's scary i know a lot of people that are ruining their lives of social media i know people that it's it's radically exacerbated their mental health problems and um i personally have had a great increase in my peace of mind by never engaging with people online i know you told me that don't look at the youtube channel i don't know i don't look at any comments and i really don't and it's so much healthier for you oh my god i'm so much happier right it's incredible told that to friends and occasionally they dip their toes back in the water and then they go [ __ ] why did i do that and you know they'll they'll do an episode or maybe they don't like something that they said and then they go read and i'm like my god man get out of there and i i don't engage on twitter i don't engage in the comments of instagram or i don't even look at facebook and because of that what i take in is my choice like i look at things that i'm interested in and most of my uh social media it's not really social media consumption but most of it is youtube and most of it is like educational stuff or complete distractions and what was the thanksgiving study i was going to say i was just thinking the same thing um there's a thanksgiving study that after 2016 the more per they looked at zip codes that had the most like media advertising political advertising and the more of that media you had the shorter the thanksgiving dinners you were they did this mass study looking at like tracking people's locations and how long they were in their thanksgiving dinner location and basically the places that were most bombarded with like polarizing media thanksgiving dinner was was shorter so they argued and people yeah and people i think stood further apart or something like that it actually had the geo location on their phones too right the people who had right versus left views interacted less at dinner exactly that was what it was people with right versus left fuse interacted less at dinner and we're about to head into thanksgiving and i actually would say
that facebook and twitter their business model has been ruining thanksgiving dinner because their business model is personalizing confirmation bias for everyone so that when you show up so in the same way that that's an epitome of the problem that's your personal version of the social dilemma like we could also say like what would be the first step for each person listening to this that we can do during thanksgiving dinner that's like putting our phones at the door and actually trying to have a conversation about the mind warp that's taking place yeah it's hard because when people get together and they haven't seen each other for a while they want to argue about things that they feel the other person's wrong about right because they they've got so much of their time invested in these echo chambers but you just mentioned something that was so interesting which was if people started to understand that the echo chamber was affecting them and affecting the integrity of their family so rather than try to uh save everybody on the other side from trump or biden or whatever it was that they thought they did this other thing which is they actually tried to save people from excessive social media exposure yeah i want to save people from excessive exposure to everything that's harming harmful and damaging but it's very difficult and i think it's got to be an across-the-board decision that you make and it's got to be with your own health it's got to be with relationships it's got to be with honesty it's got there's got to be a lot of things that you do that you change if we can influence people in any way that's positive it's to understand where the pitfalls are where where's the traps there's a lot of them out there now when we think about the social media issue to a degree we can take the solution that you propose and just say maybe the individual can just remove themselves from it we would argue that this is actually impossible population-wide currently because there are companies that just can't succeed if they don't market on there compared to their company i'm not saying remove yourself from it that's not what i said what i said is don't
engage in anything personal like you can read people's thoughts on things you can go and watch a youtube video you can stare at people's butts on instagram but if you get involved in engagement that's when things get [ __ ] up the problem is that is the only form of self-expression that a lot of people have when you deal with um if you're talking about something that people think is a critical issue how do you express yourself how do you get your point of view if you think your point of view is significant how do you get it across well you have to engage that's a problem one thing i wanted to share we interviewed dan valone from an organization called morin common on our podcast and he does this work on what he calls the perception gap what they found in their work is the more time someone spends on social media the more likely they are to to actually misperceive what the other tribes believe so so like first of all there's we get hit by a double whammy because you're talking about participation on social media and you could sit there looking at stuff but not participating well it turns out the people who participate the most the extreme voices participate more often than the moderate voices that's what they find in their work and when they participate they share more extreme views so their stuff goes more viral so we're looking at this weird fun house mirror when we think like oh we're getting a sample that everybody believes we're not getting a sampler release we're getting a sample of what the most extreme people believe so if you actually ask in their research like how many people how many democrats believe that what would you ask for democrats what do you estimate that republicans what percentage of republicans believe racism is still a problem in the u.s i think they estimate like 40 or something like that and the answer is closer to like 65 or 70 percent so we are misperceiving because we're seeing through the stereotypes and the straw men and the bad faith examples of everyone so part of this mind warp is we have to actually again understand that we're seeing a very specific view and even if very few if we have a lot you know as a result of this podcast
if like 50 of people on facebook stopped participating per what you just said earlier the problem is that the small remaining group the most extreme voices there they would be identified by the algorithm and they would just maximally upregulate them so we just have to realize what game we're in what unfair fight we're in so that we can unplug ourselves from the matrix you called me morpheus last time i think i was here well there's a there's also a problem with tribal identity and it's uh it's [ __ ] silly that we only have two groups in this country and because the fact that we really have broken it down to two political groups we we are so polarized we don't have this broad spectrum of choices that we can you know well i i like a little bit of this i like a little bit of that and and to be in the center is to be a fence sitter and to to to inspire the ire of both there's many more people who are in the center the most people that's the thing that's why this show works exactly but most people don't think that because when they look on social media they just see people at the extremes and they're like am i going crazy is the world going crazy and the answer is like you're not wrong your mammalian instincts that things are upside down that's not wrong but it's not because of some master global conspiracies because social media is just showing us the craziest of the craziest voices on earth realize how much you look like terence mckenna look at that for real it's kind of creepy we both got the white and weird thing going on yeah for real it's a real problem you're like terence if he's a little more buff sorry go ahead so let's say that we could have a bunch of people get off social media yes that's one of the exponential tech risks that we've talked about but that doesn't actually do much about the fragility of decentralized drones it doesn't do much about the fragility of decentralized cyber weapons right oh you're a bummer man you had a little bit of a solution debbie downer over here well no the reason i'm bringing it up is because an individualistic only answer doesn't work
when other individuals and other small groups have the capacity to small and large groups to affect everything so significantly right but it does significantly impact the health of the overall population if we're more healthy mentally and physically we can make better choices the next step is not just that we make better individual choices but that those who can work to make new better systems yeah and so when you think about the founders of this country they didn't just remove themselves from believing in whatever the dominant british empire thought at the time was they removed themselves from that and then said we actually need to build a more perfect union and they invested themselves radically to do so and it wasn't a huge percentage of the population but that was working to build something that could apply to a much larger percentage of the population so we need some sort of a radical solution in terms of the way we interface with each other the way we do business the way we govern the way we do everything yes and so let's say you have people who start pulling themselves off social media and saying i actually want to engage with other people where i really seek to understand their ideas before i just jump and criticize i want to make sure i get their values and what it's like to be them and so they they first they remove themselves from the toxicity second they work to actually start making sense of the world better and being in better relationship with each other next they say i want to make a platform that facilitates this for other people and then i want to come on joe's podcast and talk about the platform and get a lot of people on there so we start to actually get the beginning of a new attractor a new possibility don't you put that out there don't you do it because then also a lot of people that think they have the solution what this sounds like is kind of a radical you know reboot of the u.s but there's the january 6 version of that which we we don't want right there is a different version i wanted us to tell you in the taiwan example the way that that happened is actually it was a bunch of activists stormed the parliament except they didn't try to break the glass and
the windows and break through everything they sat outside the parliament they created they brought in all these ethernet cables and they set up a wi-fi network and they had a bunch of hackers build this alternative um civic engagement platform where people could debate ideas right they're using technology so it's they did storm the parliament but they didn't storm it to to take it to to hurt people right they did it to create the better form of government but to debate ideas where you have things like where unlikely consensus is found that's what gets upregulated so they were designing that the better angels of our nature are appealed to rather than the lower angels of our nature and it's possible to do that that's a real working example i want you to really check that out it's a real thing we're not just you know pointing it at a at a random idea do people do say it's obviously a much smaller country it's not as homogeneous as people think they think taiwan they think everyone's the same there's 20 i think indigenous cultures or languages there so they actually have quite a lot of plurality they need democracy has plurality deliberation and compromise you have to have those three things work are you aware of the agent provocateur aspect of january 6th say more um i don't exactly know what the reality is but the what people are insinuating is that there was federal agents that were involved in instigating the violence instigating the entering into the capitol and then there's this one guy in specific that they've got him isolated on video they've shown him over and over again he's faced no legal consequences they know this guy's name they know exactly who he is all these other guys are in jail all those other guys who got into the capital i mean so many of them are facing like these massive federal charges and four years plus in jail this one guy is like we have to go in there we have to take back we have to get inside there and people start calling him a fed in in one one of these videos and i think he like takes off and runs away but this is what it seems like it seems like
and this is something that governments have done forever right you take a peaceful protest what's the best way to break up a peaceful protest you bring in agent provocateurs to turn it into a non-peaceful a violent protest smash windows light things on fire then you can send in the troops and you can clean up the mess and then you don't have any protest anymore this was the world trade organization in what was it in seattle in 99 or whatever it was that's what they did it's been documented that is what happened i mean like literal government agents went in wearing antifa outfits and starts this is pre antifa right smashing windows lighting things on fire and they were all eventually released conveniently well this guy do you know about this jamie you know see if you can find it because it's a curious case of this one particular individual who's like yelling in these various groups that we have to get in there and it like he did it pre january 6 they did it during the january 6th thing and this guy's face no legal charges whatsoever and people like well what the [ __ ] is going on here because when you see some kind of organized debacle like that and then you see people ins insisting that we have to take this further we have to go inside and then if you find out that those people are actually federal agents that are doing that you're like well what is happening here and how is that possible and how is this legal that's a problem yeah i haven't seen this one i remember the umbrella man who was uh breaking windows at the george floyd riots i think they found out that that guy was a cop and that i think that was like a rogue human but no i'm not sure if that's true but so this is where it's interesting with in this case i don't know the case at all but is it that somebody in government actually initiated him doing it as an agent provocateur to shut down the protest or was he someone who happened to be in government who was himself radicalized to acting on his own because of radicalization did the thing or is he an
agent provocateur but he's doing so independently just because he's a [ __ ] psycho you know some firemen start fires right but notice that whichever view you have you probably had a motivated interest to see it that way right yeah i didn't have any view on it right that's the thing i'm looking at it like this like what is it what is this video yeah i'm watching this guy like this one big beefy looking federal agent guy telling them they got to go inside and i think he was wearing a maga hat and uh you know it's like a guy in his 50s then and he's like i'll tell you what we got to do we got to get inside there we got to go inside the capitol and these people like inside like isn't that illegal like what the [ __ ] this guy's taking it to the next level but he's doing it like multiple times that's the the pro there's there is a real problem with intelligence agencies doing that kind of [ __ ] totally because they do do it and i think they do it thinking that this is like these group of [ __ ] psychos like we got to stop this from escalating so here's the way we get them to do something really stupid then we can put fences up and create a green zone and then we lock this down meet ray epps [ __ ] dad clicks meet ray epps the fed protected provocateur who appears to have led the very first um 1-6 attack january 6 attack on the us capital so let's watch some of this because it's [ __ ] crazy it's really weird this guy is doing this like over and over and over again there's a video of it but this is an article about oh so this is an article that's in revolver we'll find the video because the video is [ __ ] strange ray epps video here it is like this well that's 20 minutes long well just watch it we'll see some of it oh these are guys that are watching it what about that one that's uh it goes to a website these are all twitter arrest rave epps says so people are some people are hip to it but most people like including you guys have no idea
that this is a person right you've never heard of this before i don't know why it's not playing a video oh these [ __ ] with their clicks oh my god please log in log in i want you to log in we need to track you god one of the one of the things that was so cool about the c-span was the idea of being able to actually see what was happening inside of proceedings yes and we know that the idea of a modern liberal democracy is that we want to leave markets to do most of the innovation and provisioning of resources because they do a good job but we still want rule of law because there are places where markets will have a financial incentive for things that really harm everybody like complete destruction of environments or organ trades or whatever it is and so rule of law is intended to be a way that if you have a government that is of forum by the people that and it's given a monopoly of violence that it can check the predatory aspects of markets where the basis of the law because of voting is the collective values of the people but the state only has integrity and can check the markets if the people check the state and this is where again at a much smaller scale it was easier to have transparency and being able to see what was happening the larger scale messed that up and also having so many things that were issues of national security where it just can't be talked about then it becomes very hard to say well how do we have enough transparency that the people even if they wanted to could engage in being able to see what was going on so that we could have trustworthy institutions what terrifies me is the solution of this is an autocratic government that controls all aspects of society so none of this ever happens that scares the [ __ ] out of me because that seems to be where there's that [ __ ] let's play this tomorrow but do it from the beginning tomorrow we need to go into the capitol into the capitol tomorrow neither what i
don't even like to say it because i'll be arrested well let's not say we need we need to go i'll say it all right we need to go in shut the [ __ ] up boomer to the we are capitol to the capitol where our problems are it's that direction please spread the word all right no dave but one more thing yeah if we go up there no when we go in are we going to get arrested you don't need to get shot [Applause] [Music] okay i think we see enough there's a lot of instances it goes on for quite a while there's a lot of videos of this guy which is really fascinating because i think these methods that they've used forever are kind of subverted by social media because you have a hundred thousand different cameras pointed at this guy from all these when someone starts screaming loudly people start filming it and then you get a conglomeration they are a collection of these rather and you can go oh what is happening here like like i don't think they've realized that people would be so cynical that they would go over all these various videos and find this one guy who's not being prosecuted or arrested he's not being prosecuted or arrested ding congratulations no he's not look at that guy yeah i mean if you had a guess if you had like 50 bucks what are you gonna put your your chips on red or black i might put my chips on uh the result of stochastic terrorism like if i was china i would have wanted to infiltrate the facebook group that guys like him were in and just feel and just radicalize as much as possible so that some of them were motivated to do it earnestly and so it was like some patsy but i don't even know who it is for sure there's some of that going on there right there's a lot of stuff going on with january 6th right and it's it's a lot of sad humans who don't have a lot of going a lot going on in their life did you see the um what is the the into the storm that was the hbo documentary on q and on did you
see it no fascinating it's really good and uh it's a multi-part documentary series about q and on and the people that are involved and one thing you get out of it is that these people found meaning in this nonsense they found meaning and they they really thought they were part of something bigger than them and it gave them hope and happiness and what i got out of that is well these are this is exactly what we're talking about earlier the people that are getting sucked into this totally distraction life is that most people don't feel like they live a meaningful existence so when something like this comes up and you get radicalized whether it's by china or russia or that guy and he's saying you know that guy's just basically incendiary right he's just throwing gasoline on the fire but you're saying is is there something out there that you can connect to that's bigger than you and they're saying yes there is you can be a part of this group you can be a patriot are you a patriot do you want to storm the capital and then you got the [ __ ] president who's saying you know we have to make a big movement we had to do a big thing they stole this election like holy [ __ ] you know we have to go there and just show a force and then they pull them off of twitter and like oh my god it's a the conspiracy is even bigger than i thought twitter's involved and it becomes something that is all encompassing it it involves every aspect of their life they wake up in the middle of the night to check twitter they take a leak and they check it and make sure that you know we move to the right have has q released a new drop and these [ __ ] people get completely locked into it and at the end of this this documentary on hbo which is really excellent i can't recommend it enough you see a lot of them are like realizing like this is all [ __ ] and they're like what have i done with my life there's a reddit channel called cubanon casualties which is like people especially who have struggled with family members who have fallen down different rabbit holes and i guess that's that's one of them and as people come out of it just what happens i have a friend who just reached
out about that about his own wife he asked me like what can he do yeah well i mean i think what you're pointing to our friend jamie wheel uh who's here in austin we had him on our podcast to talk about this when we think about social media a lot of times people think about it as an information problem misinformation disinformation is actually about meaning and identity which is what you're pointing to people are getting meaning and purpose from a thing and it's therefore it's not a matter of like well let's just like tell people the true thing or the fact check thing there's a sense of meaning purpose narrative what i'm participating in that's that's bigger than myself that people are seeking and part of that which is exacerbated by social media because it's mass alienation and loneliness and those are exactly the kinds of people that can be you know pulled in various directions which includes also some of the decentralized ways that they can they can use those tools to cause havoc something i was thinking is in the founding of this country it was understood that both high quality education and a fourth estate right of kind of free and open press were considered prerequisite institutions for democracy to work you had the how they would afford the state is journalism right some kind of and but at that time so both both education and newspaper were the result of a printing press where you didn't just have a nobility class who had access to books when books were really hard to get but we could print a newspaper so everybody could know what was going on we could print textbooks so everyone could get educated if you could have a at least that was the idea right if we have a population where everyone can make sense of the world like they've learned how to make sense of the world they've got history and civics and science and like that and they know what's going on currently then they can all go to the town hall and participate in government so it was acknowledge that without something like a fourth estate a shared way to make sense of the world together
democracy doesn't work facebook in particular is not just a destruction of the fourth estate it's like an anti-fourth estate rather than share something where everybody gets the same information to then be able to go debate right now two different people will have facebook feeds that have almost nothing in common and polarized right and are identifying your fellow countrymen as your most significant enemy and that everything they think is wrong in a conspiracy and a lie or something like that right but how do you how do you rectify that and still have independent media right so one of the things doesn't say that's interesting is that as we started to scale more one of the things in newspaper and then with tv and broadcast became able to do was scale propaganda gave the same message to everybody and there was this whole big debate in world war one and then going into world war ii that democracy requires propaganda because people are too dumb to make sense of the world adequately so we have to propagandize them so they aren't fighting the war effort while we're in war and one of the things that is interesting and just from a potential and you'll say you have how do we get there because how do you incentivize the zuckerbergs or whatever and that's the the enactment is a real tricky thing but you could use the tools of social media which is the ability to personalize a huge amount of content to the individual to actually not to make real democracy possible where you don't need to give everyone propaganda because they're dumb you can actually help people understand the issue progressively better in a personalized way how are they already leaning expose them to the other ideas see that they're understanding it and you can imagine that like real democracy could actually be possible at scale if you could personalize the kinds of education and civic virtue that would be necessary for people to engage in a democracy let me add on to that because this example you just showed me right this guy i had never seen that video
imagine a thanksgiving dinner happening a few weeks from now where one set of people have been all exposed to this guy and this is like the central way that they see january 6 is through the lens of that guy if you're in one of the other filter bubbles all you see is just the violent crazy whatever the right you you're not even operating on a shared reality so when you talk about january 6 normally if we have a shared printing press or we have a shared fourth estate we've at least been exposed to some of the same things yeah but when you show up at thanksgiving dinner table when we argue about january 6th and you haven't seen something you haven't seen right but you you assume our brains are not built our part of our paleolithic emotions is that we were built to assume with my my brain construct reality from my eyeballs so like i have to assume i was built evolutionarily to assume that your brain is constructing reality from some of the shared stuff that i'm seeing with my eyeballs so all my biases are to assume other people are talking about the same reality and there's a little bit of a magic trick optical illusion because we both saw a quote unquote january 6 but we were exposed to completely different media sets so now when we get in a conversation it completely breaks down not because we're actually even talking about the same thing but because we don't even get to that level layer of detail and one of the things in a humane technology world the current i think i mentioned to you in the more uncommon research they found that the more you use social media the more likely it is that you um that you are not able to predict what someone else's views are in a topic you think all republicans are racist or something like that if you're on the democrat side or if you're on the republican side you believe that all democrats are lgbtq and only six percent of democrats are lgbtq so we are far off in terms of our estimations of other people's beliefs and in the current world the more you use social media the worse your estimations are in a humane future the more you use social media the better our our shared understanding and my understanding of your understanding would be and and so you can imagine
there's some sense maker out there who's showing both sides of these different filter bubbles and helping us bridge build so we're actually even able to have a shared conversation those are the kinds of people that daniel was just talking about would get kind of upregulated to be at the center of our shared undivided attention let's say i wanted to say how do i increase trust in our institutions that are processing things too complex for an individual to figure out on their own like the reality of climate change or covid well let's say that c-span like i had debates happen inside those institutions where people who had real expertise but had conflicting views had a long form facilitated debate but not the type of debate that is just oriented towards rhetoric and gotchas to try to win but that is earnestly trying to seek better understanding and there's a facilitated process and the people agreed to it one of the things they agreed to is what would i need to change my mind about this if the answer is nothing then you don't even engage in the debate if we can't even say what would change our mind we're not really responsible participants of a democracy and each of the debaters has to read each other's content first and agree to a facilitation process that's long form and we start with what do we all agree on say we're looking at climate change what do we all agree on that means now both around the values that are relevant and the facts of the matter that where we go to what we disagree on we know what our shared basis to derive a solution looks like then we try to formalize our disagreement i believe x i believe not x and we say what would it take to solve this do we need to do a new piece of science do we disagree because of an intuitive hunch or a different value we could do as much defines a private brain or you know that there's these common cynical narratives also that get in the way right because we're all just like oh well it's just this one thing or you know bench viewers oh the media doesn't like social media because it's losing its monopoly on truth partial truths but not complete go on but we could have people who had
different views but were earnest and wanted to know what was true more than hold their own view be able to engage in a process that could bring us to what is shared knowledge where are their disagreements what is the basis of the disagreement what would it take to solve that and actually have that be what is informing the institutions and all of that be transparently oversighted that would be a huge step in the right direction there are groups like braver angel search for common ground in fact so my organization we actually are standing up this thing called the social cohesion and technology council i think i got the name right taking these groups like braver angels search for common ground that this is what they do they actually run these civic processes with people who come from very different perspectives and it takes like multiple hours they bring them together for facilitated conversations but what we're doing with this council we're putting together is actually matching them with technology designers so they can actually take the lessons like how do you do conflict mediation how do you get shared reality from like very different identity held different realities and then also apply that to how you design technology because you can imagine a world where facebook's like oh do you want to see more bridge building between january 6 do you want to see more bridge building stuff on climate change and you could imagine sorting for that thing right they could design it very differently right but you would have to change people's intuitions and change human nature because human nature is conflict does most people seek conflict this is a fundamental question about how we view human nature it is true that the worser vices and worser devils or whatever you call them worse angels of human nature are are there within us right but if that's what we assume is true that that is the full story of who we are when we look in the mirror then this story is over and we should just go do something no no no no i don't drink margaritas no no no i just think for most people live these sort of unrealized lives it's a you have a giant percentage of the population that is
disenfranchised and totally they're angry yeah and they look for things that make them angry yes so well i think we have to address it at the root level before we address it even at a social media well you had johan haryan saying the opposite of addiction is not sobriety it's connection yeah like people need meaning purpose connection and you can imagine a world where social media is like hey here's some drum circles or dance events or obviously post covet or whatever but just social media could be steering us we're making life choices every day right now when you look at a screen it's just like it's basically allocating decisions of where time blocks are going to land on your calendar right most of those time blocks are like spend another five seconds doing this with your phone right but imagine social media becomes a gps router for life choices where it's actually directing you to the kinds of things that create more meaning now of course the the deeper thing is work inequality meaning not existing in the lot of the work that people do agreed but relationships yeah absolutely right i mean who's the angriest people in cells right when people get really angry you accuse them of being in cells but we can imagine a world that facilitates ways for people to you know go to dance events together where they meet other people in a more like facilitated environment as opposed to you're going to sit there at home and like let's just get you swiping and tinder's profiting from the attention casino so you match and then you never message someone right like they profit from just like that machine working that way right and then we also have the emergence of the metaverse where people are just going to be more incentivized to go into that because it's going to be very exciting which is why a humane future is the online world has to care about actually like regenerating the connective tissues of the offline world if it doesn't do that it's not going to work apple could be in a position to do that you take it back to similar to people exercising and not eating too much sugar because those are the too much sugar is a hypernormal stimuli right remove the sugar fat and salt from evolutionary food which are the parts
that create the dopamine hit and just make fast food out of it um and in the same way of like what is fast food to real food is just the hyper normal stimuli that's what porn is to real intimacy that's what dating apps are to actually meeting people it's what social media is to real human relationships is kind of just the hyper normal stimuli right we know that gdp is not a good metric of the health of a society because gdp goes up when war goes up it goes up when addiction goes up the question of what is a good measure of the health of a society one metric that i like it no one's applying the metric just as a thought experiment is the inverse of the addiction in the society as a whole is a good measure of the health a healthy society produces less addiction meaning more sovereign individuals because addiction creates a spike in pleasure and then an erosion of their baseline of pleasure and baseline of health fulfillment in general one of the reasons we're so susceptible to hypernormal stimuli is what you're saying is because we live in environments that are hyponormal like not enough of the type of stimuli that we really need which is mostly human connection creativity and meaning right and so at the basis of it is like how do we actually increase those is the only way that we become unsusceptible to the supply side marketing that appeals to yes and it's interesting to think about if apple were to take the you know small percentage of people who opt into tracking their usage statistics and they could actually measure for a given country hey this is the percentage of people that are addicted based on usage patterns again it's privacy respecting and everything and reporting that back to society so there's a better feedback loop between how healthy the society was and its use of technology and then actually have ways of saying how do we make i mean again apple's in this really unique position where their business model is not addicting people polarizing people you know they could actually make their their whole system about how do we have deeper choices in the real world well there is a movement in society
currently to try to get people to recognize through uh radically induced introspective thought brought on by psychedelics what the problems of our society and not necessarily the problems of these choices but the problems and you're talking about like indulging primarily in these choices whether it's porn or fast food or gambling or alcohol or whatever these problems are that people have is that there are certain psychedelic compounds that allow you to see yourself in an incredibly ruthlessly introspective way that'll allow you to make radical changes and those are all illegal right now and there's a lot of great work being done right now with maps where rick doblin's organization has worked to try to introduce these compounds to help specifically help soldiers deal with ptsd it's a big one and i think through that and through their advocacy and the understanding that this stuff is very effective whether it's through mdma or whether it's through psilocybin through some of the research they're doing with that that there's a way to get um a view outside of the pattern this this like deeply cut groove that you're stuck in the default mode yes and i think if we're dealing with anything that is a possible potential real solution for radically re-engaging thought for changing the way we interface with each other and with with society in general i think that's it and i think that the fact that that is illegal currently is one of the big it's one of the big problems one of the big barriers between us changing the way uh our our culture operates and what we find to be important yeah i mean you remember so many of the like founding writings of the country said we need freedom of religion but we actually need a religious people and what they were saying is like we don't care if it's confucianism or whatever but you need people that have some transcendent values and morals that bind them to more than just their own self-interest and they give them something like
love thy neighbor and give the benefit of the doubt and things like that so it was acknowledged that this democracy only worked with a comprehensively educated people where they meant both a kind of moral education and development of people as well as being able to understand the issues right both they need to understand science and economics and like that they also need to understand the importance of compromise over culture wars of seeking to understand each other's perspectives so the psychedelic renaissance kind of religion has has decreased in its overall influence on society a lot and the psychedelic renaissance is the beginning of like a new way that people are starting to access transcendent experiences and then reflection i would say that by itself um i have seen narcissists and sociopaths get more severely that way using psychedelics because it just creates reinforcement yeah and gurus so it has to be like psychedelics in a community of practice where there is uh checks and balances on each other ethics yeah exactly and i i think also it can move us away from this concept to use uh terence mckenna's words dominator culture you know and that you can have advancement without having a dominator culture and you can have advancement where you seek to engage in the greater good of the whole and you know and the choices can be made that way and i think in many ways it's one of the things that apple does when when apple is talking about this this world where they're creating less impact of advertisement by not having you track amongst all apps and and allowing you to choose whether or not apps track you that's a bold move in this world where everybody is trying to accentuate the influence that apps have and the the amount of engagement they have and that these uh to be able to use advertiser money and to to be able to generate more of it through that is so attractive to people i mean that's what look android is just a big
data scooping machine right i mean they're they're tracking everything and anything and it's one of the things they said about tick tock when they first when software engineers first looked at it they're like jesus crisis is like tracking everything and it's you know one of the most invasive of the applications why tick tock is not considered a major immediate national security threat i still don't understand i mean if russia in the night in the cold war was running the media programming for the united states for all of its youth like that's insane there's actually a specific strategy china uses called the ccp uses called the borrowing mouth to speak so you can imagine when anyone says that any western voice in the u.s speaks positively of the ccp you just add a little inflation they just get a little bit more boost than someone because you're more trusting of someone who's a western voice than of a you know someone who's from you know say ccp or china and so there's that's one of the invisible ways you can steer a culture but going on back to the the apple point it we all sound like we're promoting apple in this podcast and i just wanted to well we're kind of promoting good faith companies yeah we're moving in the right direction yeah and you had john mackie on whole foods we went to whole foods last night and talked about how that that's creating an environment for health and trying to at least couple better yeah perfect just coupling better towards we can make money by helping things be healthier right apple could say we're going to couple our business model put on the johnson and junk whatever you think johnson and johnson you can say we're going to orient our business towards long-term health of people we're going to do apple fitness we're going to do things like that we're going to change the app stores to you know put down in the shelf space all the toxic social media stuff if not take it off completely and put back on like what are the things that help people connect with each other yeah and kind of each other in person i mean part of that is it's actually kind of hard to host there's certain people in a community who are kind of the event hosters they're the people that bring people
together and right now i mean they're good at it but imagine that was just like a hundred times easier i'm not trying to sell anything i don't have any product or anything like here and thinking about this but there are people who who are work on how do we make it easier to bring people together in the physical world and if we made that a lot easier than it is today so that was happening more often so that when you thought about what you wanted to do instead of i could open up this app or that app i felt in my own community in my physical community more opportunities a more populated menu of life choices where i can you know do dancing connect with people drums whatever the things sewing clubs book clubs just the things that bring people together and you can even have you know all the public spaces libraries and town halls and squares and things like that have better instrumentation so that that was easier to book for communities right again this is part of a longer term trend and transition of how you get out of this but i do think that we have to make the choices that are fulfilling as easy to make as the choices that are not fulfilling but have the hyper normal stimuli instant hit i was thinking about something joe and you're asking like what are the solutions and jumping quickly to why some proposed solutions don't work which is true it's like you think about what are the nutrients the body needs you can die just from a vitamin c deficiency even if you have all the b vitamins vitamin d etc and so it's like the body doesn't need a nutrient it needs minimum levels of lots of nutrients the same is like how do you get buff which muscle do you work well you have to work all the muscles and you have to work them in lots of different ways how do you make a functional civilization do you do that through culture do you do it through kind of collective efforts or individual efforts do you do it through technology do you do it through changing markets or states we'd propose that there's some stuff in all those areas that has to happen simultaneously that drives virtuous cycles and otherwise it's kind of like
answering the question of like which nutrient do you need or which muscle do you need to work out like the problems are complex they have many different causes and all of the kind of single solutions might do something but end up failing and so we have to also and this is again something that's very hard to do when attention spans are getting shorter and shorter is how do we actually look at a whole ecosystem of solutions that collectively can start to address it even though any of them individually can't yeah so we're going to hit the brakes and go backwards or go in a completely different direction than the culture seems to be going in so we you know what i mean we have to not just stop our forward or not it's not even forward momentum the general direction that we're going in well i think with things like the social dilemma which was seen by 150 million people and and francis's stuff coming out and people having a negative reaction to the metaverse i don't know that many people who saw it was like yeah that's totally do that obviously they have asymmetric marketing power they're gonna put billions of dollars into funding this thing they're hiring ten thousand let's talk about that what are they doing because that commercial where the little the tiger's talking to the buffalo and then all the kids are dancing i don't know what the [ __ ] happening i mean i don't know what's happening in that example but the it's it's a race to control the whole experience i mean the reason that facebook is doing the metaverse zuckerberg doesn't like the fact that apple has controlled his destiny by controlling the operating system inside of which facebook has to sit and then all the various ways that whether they make advertising like they did recently the privacy tracking stuff it makes him not have control over his destiny and so if you own the whole platform bottom to top it's a classic vertical integration if i own the entire stack i can control the entire thing and then i own my own destiny that's what this is really about and it's going to become a land grab between these companies for who can sort of own the next metaverse platform it's a fascinating
sorry to interrupt but it's a fascinating observation too or a fascinating thing to observe when you're watching someone who has ungodly amounts of wealth clearly ambitiously pursuing more in in a very transparent way what's interesting to psychoanalyze him a bit is that he has 55 percent of the ownership and voting structure shares of facebook he's a very unique position there's never been i don't think a company as massively powerful as his in the sort of close to trillion dollar market cap range where it's all basically controlled by his psychology i mean i talk to facebook insiders you know occasionally and they'll tell me that it at the end of the day with a lot of these decisions it really does come down to mark in a way a young guy yeah how old is he he is he's actually the same age so he must be 37. so he and and then i think what he cares the most about is being seen as an innovator like if i had to name it it's not like you said it's not the money i think people always say oh it's just he's greedy he just wants the money it's no i think it's he wants to be seen as an innovator and if the world said the way you can be an innovator is not by uh building more stuff that that basically hollows out the physical world so we can make this unsustainable virtual world that collapses society you can be an innovator by actually fixing and helping to support the planet that we're on the actual world that we're living in the social fabric that needs to be strengthened but obviously he's been trapped by a set of incentives i mean one of the most interesting things is if he came out and said post all these facebook files and said like i'm actually trapped by the shareholder model and of the corporate form like i i am trapped by the fact that i have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders but he doesn't say that so in a way he has a fiduciary duty to lie to himself about that the gap between what his incentives are and what the world needs for basically sustaining also imagine if you've created something that says whether or not he created is a different
debate but you're the controller of something that's so massively influential on a global scale and maybe he thinks that at least he's not evil like he may be trying to make money and he might maybe trying to come off as an innovator but it's not an evil person i don't get an evil sense off of mark zuckerberg i get a it's kind of robotic he's he's odd he's odd in the way he communicates but maybe that's like a social awkwardness in dealing with his own public image being broadcast to the world and comes off clunky you know people come off clunky when they're concerned with how people view them right maybe that's it but imagine just giving that up i'm gonna back out now like you know jeff bezos is leaving amazon and he's going to like hand it over to another ceo what imagine him handing over facebook to some other person and watching them [ __ ] it up or watching them take this insanely powerful thing and actually make it more evil or make it more destructive but more profitable that's that's a total possibility right i mean if they just went full capitalist and some really ruthless ceo got a hold of facebook and they said listen our bottom line is like we're trying to increase the amount of money that our shareholders get off of this and what we're going to do is we're going to make these choices and these choices might not be that popular with analysts and with people that are you know sort of trying to examine culture and the impact that social media has on it but for us it's going to be a windfall we were speaking with a friend who is in a senior position at google working on ai and has come to the conclusion that a lot of people in senior positions in ai have come to that something like artificial general intelligence is inevitable and inevitable near term and near-term like how many years it depends upon who you're talking to but this was forms that are inevitable in the like five-year time period jesus
well how come that's debatable because some really intelligent people think it's off by like 50 years partly it has to do with how you define artificial general intelligence are you defining it as something that is truly sentient and self-aware or simply that can beat us at all games oh okay and this at all games is already here isn't it well pretty much and so then let's say you start applying that to beating us at the games of how to remove how to concentrate all the capital right because ultimately uh market is a game and most of the market is high frequency trading run by ai now already if you do the super one then you concentrate all capital into one thing yeah it's actually worth noting if it's a chess game and you could if you can out compete if you can see more moves ahead in the chess board against the other ais you win the other ais and then you just move faster i know but i mean that's what's terrifying is that it moves completely into the realm of ai and it's outside of human comprehension it's not we we're not even in the game anymore so specifically his thinking was it's inevitable that that will happen it will be dystopic there's no way for it to not be dystopic we at least think that google dystopia is less bad than the china dystopia oh my god so we're in a full-blown race right to get there and there are many people actually who understand and other people are like well actually the only answer is to jack jack our brains in so that the uh meat suit is somewhat useful to the agi so now we're in a race to do that when people understand the catastrophic risks and they don't see any good possibility out then oftentimes they will actually accelerate some version of a catastrophe as the only reasonable solution and this is why it's so important to actually define the design criteria right and have people committed to find solutions even though they're really hard and it's why i think something like this is interesting is truly a belief that a lot more people focused on what we need to be trying to solve is
actually useful we think there's a lot of super smart people at a lot of universities and in institutions and in their garage who care care about these things who could be working on solutions the entire blockchain ethereum community and these are some of these very smart people very very smart they're not necessarily working so let's start with the right design criteria right the design criteria of if you're adding tech that affects society it has to actually be increasing the quality of democracy it has to be increasing the integrity of markets has to be increasing the quality of families and mental health you look at what are the foundational things if it's not doing that it failed the design criteria similarly the idea that we have these dystopias and these catastrophes we need and the dystopia the catastrophes come from not being able to create order in the presence of the successive tech the dystopias come from top down order that so what that means is rather than have imposed order or no order we need emergent order which is what democracies and markets are supposed to do but they haven't they have to be up regulated a new more perfect union that's up regulated to the level of tech we have because the tech has advanced so far we need new versions of it so how do we bring about emergent order of for by the people that can direct the tech to not be catastrophic but isn't just topic i just want a lot more people thinking about that i want a lot more smart people at mit and stanford and the state department and wherever and in ethereum working on those issues proposing things finding out what's wrong with them so that the collective intelligence of the world is centrally focused on how do we make it through the meta crisis how do we how do we make it through the fact that we are emerging into the power of gods without the ability to steward that well what would it take to steward it well what will it take well a lot of people working on what it will take and coming up with partial answers is part of the answer right that's what we're kind of we started the manhattan
project we didn't know all the ways that it was going to come together right so there there is a leap of faith we have to be comfortable with the uncertainty it's one of the developmental qualities that's needed it's like we don't know how to make it through this like got it step into that reality take a breath into that yeah and we have to figure out how we're gonna do this we have to refresh um the way people felt after they saw the social dilemma yeah because the problem is they waited about two weeks and then they got right back to their normal consumption maybe not even two weeks 100 and i think that we have a very short memory when it comes to things that are impactful and really sort of jog your view of reality you know it's so easy to slide right back into it and i think there has to be an effort where we remind people we remind each other we remind ourselves whether it's a hashtag whether it's a some some sort of an ethic a movement an understanding like we're moving in the wrong direction and we need to like establish that as a as a a a real clear parameter like we've got a problem here yeah and i think people do get that a lot of responsible they do the social dilemma people got it a lot of the transit the facebook file stuff people's negative reaction to the metaverse yes you know yes there's a lot of power on the other side of the table right we've got trillions of dollars of market power the question is are we the people the culture going to be able to identify what we don't want and then steer ourselves in the direction of what we do but are we operating in an echo chamber where we're talking to a lot of people that are aware of it so when you say people are aware of it like what percentage are we talking about is it even 20. most people who watch the social dilemma walked away with something like tech is a problem it's kind of generally scary and it seems to be bad for teenagers and i use families they didn't get is fundamentally incompatible with democracy because it polarizes the population polarizes the representative class creates gridlock
and makes it less effective relative to other forms of government this is also like here we are we're at the like the three hour mark here so we've been having this conversation and even though we're doing our best to try to pin down solutions and it's like this is a very ethereal thing it's a very uh it's just like it almost seems um ungraspable you know it just seems like you you can nail down all these problem issues but then when it comes to real world application like what the [ __ ] do you do well this show is going to air by bouncing off of satellites that are in outer space to be able to go to people's phones and computers using the most unbelievably like advanced technology like that's pretty ethereal it's actually very hard for people to grasp the whole scope of the technological complexity when you have that much technological complexity and that much technological power we also have to be able to work on complex social systems that can make us able to wield it and we just haven't had the incentive and motive to do that but hopefully recognizing where it goes if we don't is incentive for enough people to start working on innovation but this technology this fascinating and super complex technology is disconnected from human nature from these thousands and thousands of years of human reward systems that are baked into our dna that's part of the problems that all these well only because we have a whole system trillion dollar market cap system dependent on hacking and mining from those human vulnerabilities because they've already done that if we subtract that thing yeah and we've instead reflect back in the mirror not the worst angels of our nature but the better angels of our nature we see examples of people doing the hard thing over the easy thing we see examples of people hosting events for each other and being better to each other rather than being nasty to each other we're just not reflecting the right things back in the mirror we do we do reward when people do those things right occasionally but the
social algorithms don't reward them by and large right they take a couple examples where the positive thing happens but mostly we see the most engaging outrages controversial thing and so that we have to reflect back something else in the mirror i think it's like if you remember the 1984 i had to bring it back to apple and if you remember the ad for the macintosh the famous thing where there was a woman like running down the uh the like there's the booming big brother on the screen and the woman's running down and she takes this hammer and she's wearing a macintosh t-shirt she takes this hammer and she throws the hammer at the screen and it blows up and it says on january 24th 1984 apple will introduce macintosh and you will see why 1984 won't be like 1984. was it 1984 that apple came up with that computer yeah it was actually and the reference was we have to defeat orwell we have to defeat that fiction that can't come true and we i mean it was a specifically against ibm oh you have it it's worth seeing for people that so check it out this is pre-internet this is it on earth [Music] we shall prevail [Music] on january 24th apple computer will introduce macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. wow it was powerful that is powerful you know we ended our last conversation with school yeah i was i was actually born that year which is crazy that's nuts um and you know you can imagine that was there during the super bowl by the way so that was seen by like it was actually the it was rated the most successful television advertisement in tv history steve jobs had a direct role in it and um you can imagine like we have to not let the orwell huxley two gutters thing happen we have to throw a hammer down the middle down the middle and and create a future where technology is actually humane and cares about protecting the things that matter to us one thing that gives me hope is that
these kind of conversations are very popular right you know like uh the social dilemma was very popular that's when we did got like 99 million views yeah this one will probably be similar it's like people are interested in this conversation because they know it's real issue at least the kind of people that are tuned into this podcast and i i think it's gonna be like little baby steps into the the correct direction and you know what i said about psychedelics is it's it's one of those seemingly frivolous discussions people that don't have any psychedelic experiences they don't realize the dramatic transformative impact that those things can have on cultures but we don't have much time no one has much time not a [ __ ] human that's ever lived has a 100 years ain't [ __ ] and in during this time of this lifespan that we've experienced we've seen so much change and so much almost unstoppable momentum in the general direction and it doesn't seem good but recognizing it discussing it and having documentaries like the social dilemma having folks like you guys come on and just discuss like what is really going on and we didn't even really get into a lot of the real technological dilemmas that we have you know when we basically glossed over the idea of drones and the idea of crispr and many of these other problems that are this just watching that with text to code thing going oh my god the barrier of entry has been eliminated but it's just can you type now you know and you can code it's wild but hopefully through conversations like this and you putting attention on it i mean you are part of the sense-making world you are helping people make sense of the world and when you put your attention on it i mean i'm grateful for you creating this opportunity to talk about these things because you know they're heavy conversations and they're hard to to look at it well and it's it's actually important that you have these long form podcasts right that
are two plus hours as opposed to it five second clips or tweets is uh when we talk about tech has to enhance the fundamentally important things so we saw how tech kind of uh specifically social media tech with the polarization algorithms messed up the fourth estate also messing up education it doesn't matter what you learn if you can't remember anything and you have no control of your attention and so one of the things is the tech has to actually be increasing people's attention right their attention span their control over their own attention and their memory if we were to be able to measure those things and say let's up regulate that if you want a democracy to work the tech should upregulate people's perspective seeking how much are they actually seeking other people's perspective and if i have a short attention span i can't hold multiple perspectives simultaneously because you just can't fit that into the same perspective and i'm right and that's the only thing i'm going to think and so imagine that like instead of the short click bait thing because otherwise i'll bounce if i actually read the longer thing and if my post had more nuance that actually got up regulated so it created an incentive to take in other perspectives to try to parse them and synthesize them that would be really different we've got to incentivize kindness too yes you know this uh willingness to engage in nonsensical arguments it's just so common twitter is the best example that it's like it's a mental institution where people just throwing [ __ ] at each other it's it's so wild to watch when you you don't see examples like this in real life it's like accentuating the worst examples of the way people can communicate but doing so in this weird public square itself is a virtual reality if you think about just what it does it's it's ranked by what's most engaging so it's like every dramatic event that happened with anyone anywhere like little drive-by like oh you just you just you just like cut me off on the freeway and i'm upset for a second anywhere that happens anywhere it just collects it all into this one efficient feed and then people are
responding as if it's all like happening at the same time it's already this weird chronologically distorted reality because it's pulling from all these different moments yes and making it seem as if it's all one moment so all right people need to just see i mean it's just twitter is just bad and it affects people's minds it's where they think that this is the world that they live in where is this concentrated form of it it's like um you know i my friend peter t was on the other day and he was talking about how bad juice is for you like people think the juice is good for like orange juice he's like sugar it is such a sugar rush to your liver that your your liver is like what the [ __ ] is all this like you're drinking like 11 oranges worth of juice and it's just going straight to your liver and your liver has a really hard time processing this is almost like that the social media version of that like your brain gets all these impactful moments without all the like regular life space in between them if you live a normal existence instead it concentrates it from billions of people all around the world and shoves it right through your [ __ ] brain and we're not designed for that i had a period where i intentionally went and curated my facebook algorithm where i followed all of the groups that uh look at police violence cop block and those ones and so my feed just became filled with um cops killing black eyes and killing uh you know escalating violence in ways that didn't look useful now of course those videos also didn't show what happened beforehand to possibly justify it or not so like they were selected for a reason but even where they were egregiously wrong they might be a very small statistical percentage of all police interactions but if even though i knew i was curating my feet for this purpose it emotionally affected me intensively just watching that many in a row but by the time i've watched 12 it feels like this is everything that's happening right right that's the whole world and then i i got rid of those and i curated ones
that were like um pro police thin blue line kind of ones and you saw people aggressing against cops and you saw what they have to deal with and i was like man these guys are heroes and again it only took like 12 videos and even though i was knowingly doing it to myself it was that emotionally compelling because we are used to evolutionarily seeing a world that is representative of the world but when there's so much data that .01 of it is uh more information than i can possibly take in and it can be totally statistically unrepresentative but it still affects what i feel the world is you can see how earnest people can get completely polarized that's such a good point it is earnest people and the fact that you are consciously curating and still having this effect on you but you at least can objectively express it to other people yeah and you know hopefully that gets into some people's brains and they they see how dangerous this stuff is and this is also why these troll farms exist because they they can really influence the way our culture moves and behaves and the way it thinks about itself gentlemen thank you very much for being here this was uh terrifying and uh daunting i i mean i i feel good but i also don't you know it's hard i get it yeah i feel like we should another time come back and talk about more concrete pathways yeah let's do it let's do it let's give it a couple of months and hope things don't turn to nuclear war i'll tell you why it feels inspiring to me and thank you for having us here is there's a lot of people who are focused on systemic injustice or climate change or uh economics or ai issues but how do all these issues fit together and how do we actually deal with the fact that we've created so much technological power and we've had such a huge impact on our environment through the whole industrial use of technology that the world's increasingly fragile these aren't just separate issues they are related there is a kind of global meta crisis and there is a need for real
innovative solutions in how we think about it and i think because of this more people just at least be thinking about that and then be talking about it and that means more of the collective intelligence of the world hopefully being able to start to work on solutions and i am hopeful about that i'm hopeful about that too let's end in a positive note gentlemen thank you very much i really really appreciate you thank you thank you bye everybody [Music] you