The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program | Guests: Dave Rubin & Tristan Harris | 9/2/20

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

A listener sent in a fifth-grade assignment about the NBA’s boycott over police brutality. BlazeTV host Dave Rubin returns after a month off the grid to find that nothing got better, except in the Middle East. Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris previews the new Netflix special “The Social Dilemma” and warns about “the largest psychology experiment ever run on humanity.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI was supposed to take over the parts of the job you hate. Turns out, it made your job even harder. Instead of doing the work, it gave you homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists get work done from start to finish. Cases get resolved. Loops get closed. With ServiceNow, you can do the parts of your job you're best at and delegate the rest. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

Hello, America, and welcome to the program. Wow, what a great show today. Wouldn't you say, Stu? Great show, Glenn. You're not even listening. No, you're supposed to be doing this. You're on your own today. Holy cow.

Great show. We're going to talk to you about what is headed towards the next election. Talk a little bit about some of the things that are going in, you know, our schools and our churches. Not disturbing at all. No, not at all. And we have a guy who actually was one of the ethicists that worked at Google until it scared him. His eyes almost melted. He got out big Netflix special on Google and YouTube and Facebook next week.

And tonight is our special on Big Tech. The president, for the first time, retweeted something that I did or said, and it was on the special tonight. He knows what a big deal this is and how Big Tech can influence and steal the election. You don't want to miss it. On the Blaze on Demand, after 9 p.m. tonight, you'll be able to find it. live 9 p.m. either on Blaze TV or on YouTube while it lasts there. But make sure you check it out. If you want to join us at BlazeTV, just go to blaztv.com. BlazTV.com slash Glenn and use the

promo code Big Tech and you'll save 20 bucks. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. You saw this, but a new, a new council got together, called together in Washington, D.C. to do a study on which monuments should be removed, deemphasized, destroyed, or just reframed. And the top two, I like, are, you know, the Washington monument. Destroyed or removed or relocated. Relocated. All right. And the Jefferson Memorial.

And you have a problem with that? Yeah, something along the lines of over my dead body. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is something, honestly, I don't like the way that the country has become, where Washington, D.C. has just become this corporate state. You know what I mean? I lived in Washington, D.C. in the 80s when it, you know, when it was just still recovering from FDR, but it wasn't like it is now.

Now it's just all the big businesses. Everybody has their headquarters there because they need to do business in one. Washington, which is sickening. But I will tell you, if you take down, if you try to take down the Washington Memorial, you take down and this is saying something, I hate Andrew Jackson.

I hate him. I think he is the guy. If you go back in history, I think he's the guy that actually ended the Republic as our founders understood it. He's the first one to put the nails in the coffin and turn us

away from who we were at the founding. Would you agree with that? Mm-hmm. I hate that guy. Hate him. But you try to take his statue down in Washington, D.C. I'm thinking about getting on a plane and going and standing around it. Probably would do it.

You start to mess with Benjamin Franklin. The two statues of Benjamin Franklin, they want to take down. Benjamin Franklin. Based on... He was a racist. He was a racist. He was a racist. He was an abolitionist.

No, no. An outspoken abolitionist against his own business interests. He was humiliated at the end of his life by the Southern Democrats because they were saying, oh, look, and now he's for abolition. I mean, he's just, he's gone crazy. It's sad to see him decline so fast. They made him into a guy who was a bubbling idiot when he wasn't. Which party was that again?

The Democrats. Oh, okay. Yeah. The Democrats. Yeah. The Defenders of Truth and Justice. Yes, yes. The bringers of light.

Yeah. The bringers of light. I don't know about you, but that is, that's a fight. That's a fight. You touched the Washington Memorial. That's a fight. Do you see that Antifa went in and took down, and I know this isn't the same thing, but it shows how deeply they're going into culture.

They defaced Graceland. and spray-painted Antifa and BLM messages on Graceland. If you think any of our culture is going to survive this, you're mistaken. They will burn down everything. They will erase everything. Now you've got too far, man. You're talking about the King of Nanner sandwiches.

Well, the King of Nanna sandwiches. He's going to all. He's going away. I mean, they, if that doesn't show. It's amazing what they, what they're trying to, because all of it has to go, right? It's not, it's not just the Confederate soldier statues. No, it's America. It's America.

And that's why they were running. The Confederate soldiers are not even as important as the founders. Yeah. They don't care about the Confederate soldiers, half as much as they do, about the founders. And they don't care that the one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement, as our founders was Ben Franklin. They're not holding him up as a hero. Because they have to erase all of it.

All of it. Your culture is being not, not kind of going away slowly. America as we know it will be gone in four years, gone in four years. Which is their goal. And if you don't believe it, listen to the protesters, the rioters in Oakland the other night. Oh, yeah. Death to a chanting death. to America. Who needs Iran when you've got these people trying to destroy our country from

within? And by the way, did you see that Wheeler finally, he's getting, he's getting, they love him. They love him. The mayor of Portland, Oregon, love, love, love, love, love, love him. They have, they have disrupted his, I guess he lives in a condo. They've disrupted his condo. He's now moving out of it. Trying to set it on fire. Yeah, trying to set it on fire. It is, it's really, really, really bad. He's still backing them. He's still backing them. He's saying they can't, you know, protest around his house.

It's kind of like Nancy Pelosi, you can't get your hair done, but I can. Yeah. And Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago doing the same thing. I will not apologize for protecting my house and my wife and children. Well, okay, but what about everybody else's house and wives and husbands and children? She doesn't give a rat's anise about any of them. She just protects her own. There's reports that up to 147 cops are guarding her home every night.

I mean, in a time where you've got kind of a crunch for police, the hypocrisy is crazy. Can you imagine being a cop? And guarding that? He'd be like, I mean, this is why our cops are known as heroes. Yeah. Because they guard people they vehemently disagree with. Yeah, you're thinking this one. too. They're not allowing the police to actually do the job they want to do, right? So they're pulling them out of the danger areas and then, you know, assigning them to the mayor's house in all of these cities. It's incredible. It's incredible that people don't get more pissed off about it. And it's incredible that the media is just going along with it. Yeah, this is okay. That's understandable. She needs protection. She's the mayor. Oh, okay. Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it's going to be like? Because remember, how.

the media was under Barack Obama. They just, they just, they didn't care. The media already is trying to make, if it wasn't for Donald Trump, I wonder if we would even know the truth about the story. No, I shouldn't say this. If it wasn't for the blaze, but the blaze is protected, quite honestly, your freedom of speech to say something that the media doesn't like is being protected by this administration.

That's how close we are to the end of the First Amendment. If it's not for him standing in the way, blocking, I'm telling you, we lose our voice. You wouldn't know the truth of the Reichstag fire that happened with the shooting in Portland. You wouldn't know it. You wouldn't know what was true in Kenosha because we wouldn't have been there. And they would have spun it as right-wing, far-right white supremacist coming in. and if you don't think that will close down every single group that you might be in, you might have ever been associated with,

you're on a watch list, dude. You're on a watch list. It's terrifying. Because they've kind of captured the hearts and minds of the youth, too, which is really troubling to me. When I see all of these collegiate football teams, including BYU's football team, talking about how they support these groups like BLM,

Shameful what is going on. Shameful. The church needs to get rid of BYU. If BYU can't hold to the standards of the church, then the church should defund it and get rid of it. Well, I don't think they understand. I don't think they've looked into it. I don't think they're paying attention to, you know, they hear one side on Facebook or CNN or wherever. And they don't get the full story.

And so they buy into the fact that Black Lives Matter is about Black Lives Matter. Deseret News is doing the same thing. Same thing. Deseret News. I mean, it's paint Deserate News owned by the church. I'm sorry to get all really specific here, but people in Salt Lake, you need to know this. Wake up. Deserate News is now painting Mike Lee as an extremist.

Mike Lee is the furthest from extreme that I've ever seen. They are making excuses for BLM. They're making excuses. They are marching through the same tune. And I don't know what's happening, but the church needs to divest and get away. Get away from it. Yeah.

Because the infection is there in BYU, in the universities, and it's in the press. Get away from it. Here's how deep it goes. I got this sent to us by a listener in Kentucky, I think. Fayette County. Public Schools, virtual learning academy.

This is a fifth grade assignment where they had to study what the NBA is doing. Okay, here's the audio of this. Hey, ladies, if you look here, this is his assignment. This is the Fayette County Public Schools. You go over here and you see the Newsella NBA boycott. Let's click on it. Read this attached article. Wow.

What is the relationship? This article up? And Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor. Yeah, and they don't give the context of that. Here's the article. NBA protests over Black Lives Matter. Now. And then you get the one-sided viewpoint of Black Lives Matter.

Scroll down. And here's the questions. So please. And what are the questions? If anybody tells you this is fake, this is not fake. What is the real? Go ahead. Fayette County Public Schools.

Okay, go ahead, stop. In small town. Fifth grade assignment. So just to show, it's not just universities. What's a relationship between Jacob Blake and Brianna Taylor? A, both were victims of police violence, sparking protests against racial injustice. Or B, one supports the NBA player's decision to boycott the other dozen. Both were involved in the decision to boycott the NBA, blah, blah, blah.

So obviously, you know, they were both victims of police violence. Unbelievable. Without explaining what exactly happened. happened in the in the in the i'm telling you this is working this is working this is just what social media is doing is working the conversation in my home we talk about this stuff all the time in my home i mean i'm dad imagine i'm talking about it in my home and because of social media my kids will go but dad that's not what happened you're going to believe some friend of yours that sent a story on Facebook over something that I do and you've grown

and to love and trust me really scary it's terrifying it's terrifying you parents you do not have a chance if you aren't at your school watch last week's Wednesday special just go to Glenn TV at Blaze TV watch last week's Wednesday night special if you see that it is all about the schools. When I'm going on a couple of day vacation to celebrate my wife's birthday. I'm coming back next Monday. On Wednesday of next week, we have part two of what they're putting into our schools. And this is horrifying. And if you are not at your school, if you are not looking over every single thing that is coming from the school, you are going to lose your kids. That is not hyperbole. I truly believe there is a chance.

that we are on the edge of the times that have been foretold since the beginning of time. I believe we're on the precipice of that. If that's true, you're going to lose your children. Your children will turn against you. You will lose them to darkness. You must read what is happening. trust yourself pray like you've never prayed before and trust the spirit to tell you what to do everyone has a right to their own personal revelation no one else can have revelation for you

but you you and your family you get revelation for you can't tell me that you get revelation for me and my family, but I know you get revelation for you and your family. And now is more important than ever. You and your children are all children of God. And he does not want to lose you. If you sincerely come to him and say, help me, understand, help me. If you do your own homework and then bring it back to him and say, is this true? Is this not true?

It's the only light that you can trust. Don't trust me. Don't trust anyone. Do your own homework and trust only in him. These are the times where you must be so one with the spirit if it says stop. Turn around. Pull your kids out. Do this.

You have to be so in step that you do it immediately or the consequences will be severe. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. Well, it is good to be with you. Apparently the world is still spinning. Earth is still here. But yes, I did go into a self-imposed coma. And I'm just getting back, man. So take it slow.

Take it easy on me, would you? So, Dave, tell me this. Are you, were you more surprised last year because the world wasn't on fire as much as it is right now? And so when things happened, you were like, wait, what? But when you went into your self-imposed coma, you knew the world was crazy as hell. So what were the things that you, did you still have the, no way that can't be possible. Did you have any of those?

You know, it's funny because you were the one who brought me back last year when I did the month off. And then you sat down with me for two hours and enlightened me on all the things that I missed. And one of the really funny things that you did was you made up some stuff and then, you know, contrasted it with true things that happened and I had to guess which was true. And you got it wrong several times. You were like, that can't be true. So I'm going to pick this one. Nope, Dave, that one's true.

Yeah. Well, this year, look, it looks like we got peace in the Middle East. I did not expect that to happen in August. You know, there's some strange things out there. I mean, look, this is the fourth year that I've done the August off the grid thing. And I do no news and I try to stay away from devices. all of that stuff. And I do it more than anything else to just get a little extra perspective on all of the issues that, you know, guys like us spend our lives talking about and that are the

things that everyone is consumed with right now. I mean, what is political has now become everything everywhere in society. And one of the problems, and we've talked about this many times, is that because of the nature of the news cycle and really Twitter more than anything else, how it's just driving this endless sort of craziness, all we're all doing all day long is reacting to everything. And by taking a little time off, I think I'm able to give myself a fresher perspective on some of this stuff. But to directly answer your question, I mean, I knew that this year was going to be particularly

crazy because, of course, we had the conventions, you know, Biden was going to pick his VP, the riots, racism, all of these things. And sadly, as far as I can tell so far as I can tell. none of it got better. No, none of it got better. What was the thing you were most surprised or you had the biggest, give me some perspective on something big that happened that you've been thinking about now in the last 24 hours?

Well, without question, I mean, this deal that was signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is beyond historic. And if I'm reading the stories correctly this morning, you know, I'm just trying to catch up on everything. It sounds like there could be about four more Arab countries. four to five maybe more Arab countries that are about to sign peace deals. And if we lived in a sane society, everyone, regardless of your political affiliation, your religion, your belief system would be saying this is the most monumental,

absolutely staggering, incredible event that has happened in terms of Middle East politics in the last three decades. And yet from what I can tell, well, Trump had something to do with it. So this is somehow negative. Yeah, no, they didn't. They barely, they said, I actually heard people say, this happened in spite of Trump. You know, this was something really that was in the works for a long time. Really?

Was it? But anyway, they say, I was just reading today, that they think the BDS movement, the boycott, divestment and what's the other one? Yeah, sanctions. They say that's over now. They say that that movement has been destroyed by this. that in and of itself is huge. Absolutely incredible. And, you know, again, because I'm just catching up on all the news stories when I googled it this morning, you're right.

The framing of this is somehow this is despite Trump or in spite of Trump or has nothing to do with Trump. And without making everything about Trump, because again, I'm just getting back on the grid here and I got to ease my way into this whole thing. It's like this is, I thought Middle East peace is what everybody wanted. I thought it doesn't matter if you're on the right or on the left, you're a Republican. Republican, you're a Democrat, liberal, conservative. It doesn't matter. We all want peace. Don't we all want peace in the middle? Yet somehow, no, no, this is a big trick. And that just goes to why everything is so screwy. Man, you have to be for something, not just against people. And that's one of the reasons why I'm

going to do a new show at The Blaze, because that's what I want to get to. So, well, might as well announce it now. Go ahead. Yeah, well, starting today in about three hours or so. I've been up since about 3 a.m. today. I am going to be doing a new show on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that we are going to simulcast on my YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com slash Rubin Report, as well as stream on the Blaze. And it's going to be a 24 minute, in effect, a half hour show with the Blaze. You guys, just like everything we've done together for the last year and a half or so, I make all the decisions. You're not my boss. I'm not your boss. We're just working together on it. Do we really have

to say this anymore? Do people even, do people still say? that. I mean, it's so crazy. So crazy. I'm sorry, Glenn, you don't control me. God, that's so crazy. I mean, I mean, you know me, Dave. Do I seem like a controlling guy that I want to control everybody's show? Have I ever struck you that way? Went Beck controls you, Dave, Rubin. It's so stupid. But what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to have my cup of coffee and I'm going to talk to my producer. We're going to put together. I'm only going to try to hit probably two to three stories a day. You know, one of the problems is we are obsessed with every little small thing that happens in the world of politics. And that, it's sort of

what we were talking about before. That's what's keeping everybody crazy. And I actually think, and one of the reasons I wanted to work with the blaze is you guys have, or I should say we now, have a bunch of hosts that I think give a really nice perspective about this stuff without making everyone hysterical. But that really is going to be the thrust that I'm going to go for. I'm going to wake up, I'm going to go, what's going on in the world, and how can we, how do we pilfer a little bit of sanity out of it? Because I want people to care about the news, care about current events, care about what's happening, but not be obsessed or even more disturbingly, not be depressed by it. And I think if we can, if we can do a little more of that, then we can start setting some of

this stuff, right? So give me the thing to not be depressed about. Oh, man. Go ahead. Off the top of your head. What? I told you to ease me in. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. So maybe you'll just be a little depressed on today's show, but not fully depressed. To what the thing to not be depressed by, I think is hard to see, but I really do believe it's happening. And as you know, I'm here in California. I'm in L.A. So it's really tough when you're in California. You got to get to Texas. But I think underneath the headlines, underneath the riots, underneath racism, underneath the pandemic and all of that, I truly. believe that there is an awakening happening across the country. I think people are waking up to the nonsense of the media. I think people are waking up to the nonsense of just factory settings that somehow

left is good and right is bad. And you don't see that in the polls. You don't see that on CNN. But I think, I actually think you will see it when it comes to the election. And I think just look, walking around LA here when when people can recognize me which is a little tougher these days because of the mask but usually now when people come up to me they say hey Dave you know i saw you on fox or I saw you on back and they're happy that they saw me and they don't want people to know it because it's still LA and you can't have people know and you watch scary Glenn Beck or scary Dave Rubin but if it's starting to bubble up here that means it's really happening elsewhere and that's not the type of stuff that the mainstream media can cover because it's it's antithetical to everything else

that they're pushing. But I think a wake-up is happening, and I'm going to do the best I can to be as big a part of it as possible. So I would really like to hear from you, Dave, at some point when you get your feet really back into the waters of stuff, that I'd like to hear, what do you think people on the left know?

You know, what, we are so separate in our news streams now that there's two versions of America. and Donald Trump and the protests and everything else. And for the life of me, I cannot understand how people, and I don't think they do, I think the regular American that's not playing a political game, not involved in politics or in media or anything else. I think those people are looking at it. Those Democrats that, you know, are just not the game players. They're looking at the riots and they're like, you know, this has been going on for a while.

my own party seems to be okay with it and I'm not okay with it and I just can't vote for people who are okay with this. The media in the last week and a half has been turning this now around on Trump and blaming all these riots on Trump and saying that they're now against these riots. It's the most incredible Reichstag kind of lie I've ever seen. And I'd like to know if regular people who don't pay attention that much, if they buy into that. Yeah. It's a great question, man, because it's hard to tell, right? It's really hard to tell because everything now, whether it's the NBA sports world or anything else. Going to a salon is now political.

so it's hard to tell what regular folks are thinking about things. And again, that's why when I debut this show just in a couple hours, I am not going to try to bludgeon people over the head with just the day-to-day political stuff because I think there's a much bigger philosophical and moral and cultural battle that we're fighting. But I would say this, you know, the average person who's not political, which is, by the way, most people, the average person who just, you know, wants to hopefully have a job and have a family and have a family and have. have a house and a car and a dog, if their choice in November is, okay, we can either burn down

the entire system, and I mean that literally, we're going to burn down buildings and we're going to tear down monuments and everything else, or they can potentially vote for a guy that maybe they were uncomfortable with or they don't like the way he tweets or something like that, I guarantee you all of those people, which is a huge chunk of independent sort of middle middle of the road people, they're all going to break towards law and order and towards civilization and towards some semblance of an America that we all love. I mean, to try to imagine it the other way. It's pretty hard to imagine a sort of middle of the road person going, all right, I'm going to I've been thinking about it and I'm not really political. I don't really think about all the issues,

but I'm just going to throw everything in. I'm going to just end the whole thing. I'm going to go down with the people that are burning everything. I just don't sense people will break that way. I think they're all going to break the other way. Okay, we're back with Dave Rubin here in just a second. Returns to the grid after 31 days. Blaze TV announces a new show with Dave Rubin, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays beginning today. Make sure that you are a subscriber of blazTV.com. You can do that now going to blazTV.com slash Glenn. Use the promo code, Big Tech, for the special we're doing tonight, and you'll save 20%. This is the best of the Glenn Beck.

program. Thanks for having me, Glenn. It's good to be back. I think the last time we spoke with three years ago. I can't believe it's been that long. It shouldn't be. I want to talk a little bit about the special that is coming out on Netflix, but I don't know what it's going to take to convince people that they are, we're going

to lose the idea of free choice. very soon because you won't know what your free will really is. Have you been manipulated to think that? Can you explain that to people? Yeah. Well, so for people just understand also the lens that I'm using to talk about these topics. As a kid, I was a magician, and so I've had a lifelong experience of asymmetric information. Like how does one party and, you know, magician, know more about your mind than you know about yourself?

if they didn't know more, then the trick wouldn't work. So the whole premise is there's asymmetric influence from technology to us. But it's not quite the kind that people think. I mean, think about the time. Last time you said, I'm going to watch this one YouTube video that looks really interesting. And then I'm going to go back to work after the video. And next thing you know, you wake up two hours later and you say, what just happened to me? And you think, man, I should have had more self-control.

But what that hides is behind that piece of glass, that screen, is like basically the largest supercomputer in the world that has almost like an avatar voodoo doll model of you. And it can basically simulate, if I were to prick you with this video versus with this video, how long could I get you to stay? And YouTube is running these simulations on each of our avatars to figure out what's the perfect next video to show. And if you think about the fact that our brain, you know, is running pretty old hardware there compared to the biggest supercomputer in the world at Google, that we're going to lose

that battle. And that's the problem is that technology, we have the largest AI systems in the world predicting what's the perfect thing to keep you here. And the problem is that that reinforces affirmation, not information, because the things that tend to work that keep you there are things that confirm your views about reality that are even a more extreme view of your existing view of reality. So if you look around the world and you say, why does the whole world feel like it's gone crazy everywhere all at once? You're seeing levels of polarization, divisiveness, anger. You're seeing, you know, extremist militias on all sides, showing. Showing

up around the world, you're seeing people in the street. You know, what do these countries have in common? And the answer is social media has become the information infrastructure for, you know, humanity. And it's not having our best interests at heart. So the film, the social dilemma, is really the first film. You can think of it almost like the insider with big tobacco because the film takes the insiders who built the Facebook like button, the father of virtual reality journalier,

the YouTube Recommendations engineer who built some of the recommendation system, early employees from Twitter, from Pinterest, from Instagram, who are all talking on camera about these are the unintended consequences of these systems that have kind of, you know, gone out of control like a Frankenstein. And that's why the film is so important, because, you know, as long as these companies profit from outrage, from confusion, from distraction, from addiction, from depression, let alone we haven't talked about the issues of teenage girls, because teenage girls aged 10 to 14 years old.

Suicides have gone up by about 150% since 2009 or 10. And that's, we think, very related to social media really arriving on mobile at that time and putting teenage girls, especially in this kind of constant bullying social pressure type situation, which is something of universal concern. So, you know, this film, we're really hoping that this becomes kind of a shared artifact, a shared truth about the breakdown of shared truth and about the breakdown of society that's occurred from these social media platforms. And then figure out how do we fight back from there, right? How do we take back control?

But how do you? I mean, you know, I was seeing today the head of YouTube, she was talking about how, you know, they're going to start looking for, and they already have authoritarian news and then, you know, pushing down anything that they don't feel is, you know, from an authoritative source. And she said, we're teaching the super, I can't remember what she called it, not the algorithm. Yeah. She said, we are teaching through machine learning, you know, what truth is. And I thought, they don't even know what truth. I can't tell you what truth is. They think they know what truth is.

How do you ever, when this machine, as we approach the singularity, how? do you ever retrain it to think truth is something else? Yeah, they really can't, I mean, I think you and I both know this. There's, what is, what is truth, right? I mean, I don't mean that truth doesn't exist, but let's say

that we're looking on Twitter as an example for just a second. So truth is, well, the best quote unquote truth, I mean, the basis of what truth could be defined as is what people are tweeting. But people are tweeting about things that happened 30 seconds ago or five minutes ago, and people don't know what's true. And they can put, they can simply spin it. And the way to think about it, I think, is that Twitter has turned each of us into yellow journalists, where each of us are incentivized

to say something with absolute certainty without knowing that it's true. And this is happening on all sides of the political spectrum. And it means that we're, we're just lobbying things. It's almost like we're littering into the epistemic comments. We're littering into the information environment. And we're polluting it, but we don't actually see that that's what we're doing. And Twitter incentivizes us, because it gives us that dopamine rush of, look, you get more likes and more followers, the more anger you are and the more certain you are, and the bigger mob you build off of the caricature of what someone else on the other side set. And this is happening, again, on all sides, is driving all of us into this very warlike.

You know, I think we're all feeling this almost like pre-Civil War type thing that we don't have to go this way. We're really hoping that this film can become kind of a wake-up call for that. And the same thing, if you want to go to the YouTube example, you know, they don't know, what truth is. They can do things like, okay, we're going to prioritize longer standing brands of media, because that might be helpful. And, you know, it's been a kind of massively democratized force,

which, you know, has had many benefits. But the problem is that there's many, many people gaming that system. I think there's an article in the Neiman journalism lab that something like 400 local news sites are just masquerading, you know, fake news sites, basically, because

it's very easy to start up these local fake news sites that are fake. And one reason for that, by the way, in the death of the fourth estate and local journalism is because technology companies have hollowed out the profitability of all these local newspapers, as we know. And as you know, Thomas Jefferson, if I had to choose between, you know, having government versus having perfect news, I would choose perfect news because the people need to be informed. And one of the other side consequences of technology companies is hollowing out the profitability of local journalism, which we need to keep our institutions in check.

Yeah, I find many times it's the local news reporters are the only ones you can trust. They're closest to it. They have the video, and they're not part of this system, although they are part of the clicks and the likes and everything else. But generally speaking, the closer you get to it, the more accurate it is. They have more of these incentives and the, you know, theoretically, I mean, it used to be the training to figure out, okay, we don't just report on it because it happened. We say there's a developing story here. We're going to figure it out.

And that's what local journalism to do. But again, when local journalism has to cater to that same race to the bottom of the brainstem to get clicks out of people because Facebook is the, you know, they're beholden to Facebook, right? Local journalism gets most of its traffic from Facebook, which means that they have to participate in this. kind of race to the bottom of outrage and clickbait headlines and things like that. And so it's actually made journalism writ large even worse across the board, everywhere in the world. And that's what's so subtle about this. It's so invisible because we're 10 years into this grand psychology experiment that this is

the largest psychology experiment we've ever run on humanity where you have literally, you know, three or four major technology companies with, you know, 100 people making these design decisions and algorithm decisions that are then shaping what. 3 billion people are thinking and believing about what's real. And each of us have been in it. We treat it as normal that, of course, that's what's real and that's what the news is. But we don't see that we're being fed a completely different diet than the person right next to us, including our own family member.

And that's what's so pernicious about it is the invisibility of this breakdown of truth, of shared truth, a shared reality.