The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Tristan Harris: "Social Media: Bringing the Ring to Mordor"

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

On this episode, we meet with Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-host of Your Undivided Attention Podcast, Tristan Harris. Harris explores the intersection of society and social media technology. How does modern social media pose an existential risk for society? How can we create a healthier, sustainable relationship between our social technology and culture? Harris explains how privacy, liability, and antitrust could contribute to a healthier tech ecosystem. Why is it not enough to reduce the harm of technology, and how can we use technology to strengthen democracy? About Tristan Harris: Tristan Harris has spent his career studying how today's major technology platforms have increasingly become the social fabric by which we live and think, wielding dangerous power over our ability to make sense of the world. Along with Aza Raksin, he is the Co-Host of "Your Undivided Attention," consistently among the top ten technology podcasts on Apple Podcasts, which explores how social media's race for attention is destabilizing society and the vital insights we need to envision solutions. Tristan was also the primary subject of the acclaimed Netflix documentary, "The Social Dilemma," which unveiled the hidden machinations behind social media. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/16-tristan-harris

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today's guest probably needs no introduction to those paying attention to the social media space and to issues around democracy and polarization. Tristan Harris is the co-founder of the nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology, whose work was highlighted in the film The Social Dilemma, which was viewed over a hundred

million times. Tristan and I have become friends in the past year. I've introduced him to people in D.C. and elsewhere. Because I've concluded that without people understanding what's real, what is science, what is algorithm driven, if we can't have that conversation and discourse nationally, we will never be able to solve the longer term issues of climate change, resource depletion, financial overshoot, etc. As you'll see from our discussion, Tristan knows the intersection of society with our social media technology cold. It is my hope his organization and efforts can help pave away to some healthier, more sustainable relationship between our social technology and our culture. I hope you find our conversation educational and helpful.

Since I first met you last year, I think I need to call out your team's influence on our social media conversation. Obviously, my listeners probably know. You made the movie The Social Dilemma and with the Center of Humane Technology and Francis Howgan and presentations, I'm sure you've given all over the world for the first time last quarter, Facebook's daily user interactions declined. So that is kind of a David and Goliath story of sorts that your education and evangelizing the risks of social media actually made a difference. So congratulations on that.

Well, Nate, I'm glad you mentioned that because obviously there are wins for the whole of humanity to educate the world about why these systems are so toxic. But I just wanted to say it's actually worth mentioning because I think some people might hear the problems we're going to talk about today and feel like it's just the most uphill climb in the world. I mean, how can you ever change a trillion dollar market cap set of companies, each of them with a trillion dollar market cap business models that are entrenched. No longer a trillion dollar market cap. Now it's 500 billion. That's right. And that's the point. If you had asked me, you know, back in 2013 when we started working on the topics of the arms raised for attention and, you know, trying to raise awareness inside

of Google and trying to get engineers and product managers to come forward and getting people to say we do have a fundamental misalignment of incentives, I would have never believed you in 2013 that we would be sitting in a place where Facebook stock price would be cut in half by, you know, since the releases by Francis Hogan, the brave whistleblower that came forward, who I know and who is a friend, you know, that we would see people who say, I don't want to work at these toxic companies. I want to work at something else, right? I would have never believed you that, you know, e-regulator Marguerite Tvesterger would be using our language and the language of the social dilemma and crafting policy that we would have a film that would

reach 100 million people in 190. countries and 30 languages. So I know we're going to get into some probably some dark topics today through the nature of the topic. But more has been changing than has ever changed in the space. And I think that's an important note to Mark. No, absolutely. So I hope you don't mind me sharing this. But when we met, we talked for a couple hours, if you recall, when we first met at a Starbucks. And then we talked another month later and you said, Nate,

um, since I met you, I haven't been sleeping that well because of the things we discussed. Energy depletion, finance, climate change, the interconnected nature of everything. Um,

but something I've not shared with you is after we met, I also started sleeping more poorly because I realized that the things that you and your colleagues are working on, the information ecosystem, polarization, social media, what people believe versus what is reality. If we don't solve that, we can't solve the other things. And so we need to solve everything. But if people don't share a common understanding of what is going on in the real world, then I don't know what hope we have.

So can you maybe for the people that didn't watch the few people that didn't watch your documentary, can you just give us an umbrella overview of what's happening with our social media infrastructure, why it's getting worse and why this is a critical risk, just a few minute overview. Sure. And also just to say, meeting you has been one of the most transformational experiences of the last year, I would say. I think I've sent your talks to so many people because it. It's so impacted how I'm thinking about the bigger risks that we face.

And I just anywhere I can go to recommend people watch your talks and read your work, I do because I think it's just so fundamental. So right back, right back at you. Well, thank you for that. We'll pin that because I have a response to that. But keep going. Okay. So let me give a little overview of the social dilemma for those who might not have seen it.

So this film came out in September 2020. and it's a documentary made by the previous climate change films, film team chasing ice, chasing coral about the glaciers melting and then coral reefs bleaching. So these are environmentalists who've been studying global impact problems for a long time. And it was an old friend of mine in college, Jeff Orlowski, who is the director of the film. The film is basically about tech insiders, like myself. I used to be a design ethicist at Google. It has the guy who invented Facebook's been.

business model, brought Facebook's business model of advertising to the company. Roger McNamee, who actually, like, advised Zuckerberg in the early days. René DiResta, who was one of the few researchers who got the full Russia data set from 2016 and how they were influencing the U.S. political sphere, tech insiders who were inside of the companies, people from Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, et cetera. And they were coming forward to basically say, we have a problem. There is a fundamental misalignment of incentives between the business model. of these companies, which is not just advertising, but it's the incentive to capture human attention.

And we famously call this the race to the bottom of the brainstem to capture human attention. Because you can be better at capturing human attention, the deeper into our vices and into our fears, into our emotions, into our paleolithic brain, the deeper you go, the more attention you'll get. And so what started off as just honestly offering products on a marketplace where I can choose this social network or that social network,

turns into this arms race for, can I stimulate your ego and narcissism and get you more reach and followers than the other guy can't? And literally right now, Instagram and TikTok, are kind of in an arms race for who can get you more viewers to that video,

more likes, more followers, because that's how I inflate your ego and then get you coming back. And the more followers you have on my platform, the more likely you are to post your next video on my thing and not the other guy's thing. And so if I don't copy what you're doing, if you, for example, beautify photos.

Right? So there's these filters. on these photo sharing apps. Snapchat has it. Instagram has it. TikTok has it. And when you take a photo or a selfie, the one that plumps your cheeks,

that plumps your eyes, that plumps your lips the most and does the best, it's like mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? And if you make me look best, then I'm probably going to post using your app. So just to give you an example of this arms race, it started off where each of them were competing

to offer these different filters, right? Instagram has some filters, Snapchat has some filters. TikTok has some filters. But now it was found. found out that TikTok actually, without asking you, does the beautification by, I think it's like two to three percent or something like that. Because in that arms race, I'm going to do better if I automatically do it than if I wait for you to do it. And it's the same thing as with video sites where I'm going to do better if I automatically auto play the next video, then if I don't

automatically auto play the next video. And if the other guy does it, then I have to too. If Netflix starts auto playing the next episode and YouTube has to start doing it to. And this is the arms race of a different kind of superorganism in your language that continues to grow, but it's feeding off the substrate of what makes our society work because it preys on isolating us in that race for attention. So just in the macro sense, the superorganism is a collective action problem because we want to use dollars that are spent on energy because that contributes to economic growth and salary and money and other people are doing it.

So to use less, we lose out versus other people unless we're really mature and have self-discipline. But you're saying that this same collective action problem happens in social media where the best thing for me would be to not use filters and be authentic and honest. But if I make that choice, I'm out-competed on whatever I'm trying to share by other people that do use these filters, et cetera. Yeah, so there's two different arms races. There's an arms race on individuals. So, you know, if some population of teen girls are not using the photo filters and some populations of team girls are using the beautification filters and the ones that are using beautification filters get access to more likes, more followers, more re-shares,

then suddenly it's going to be harder for the other ones not to, right? But that's on the user side. On the platform side, what I was talking about is the design. And that's really what our work at the Center for Humane Technology focuses on, is the design of Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, Facebook, etc. Because these are design choices made by people in Menlo Park, in Mountain View, in California. And their choices... So the superorganism part is the design is optimized for clicks which result in dollars.

And the corollary is our economic system doesn't care about externalities. It doesn't care about the fact that we're mispricing this finite one-time bolus of fossil magic, it just cares about profits. So there's the, there's the analogy. Exactly. Exactly. And just like there's a runaway growth imperative on an economy or a GDP of a country or an oil company that was directly tied to, you know, the financial system and that causes climate change, you know, much of our stock market is propped up by the big five tech companies whose business models are, well, not all of them, by the way, some of them. We should talk about the distinction. But for those who optimize for maximizing attention and engagement, they call it engagement, their business

model is making sure they get more time spent, more usage, and more engagement every year. And if it starts to go down, if they have to do and make choices that are about getting it to go back up. And that's the essence of our work and what we've been saying is a massive problem and breaks the way that society works. Because to your original point, the deepest harm here, I think, is if you break shared reality, if you break the notion of our ability to see a same reality and have shared facts and shared understanding so we can coordinate what solutions we want.

But in a business model of doing what's best for keeping you swiping, you Nate Hagen's sitting there by yourself with your phone and your finger, I want you swiping the most. And so I'm going to show just not what makes everyone keep scrolling together to make that whole society work. I'm going to show what keeps Nate Hagan scrolling. And if that's doom scrolling on climate stuff and videos, you know, on oil and debt, then I'm going to show him that. But if it's for your, if it's for your

daughter who, you know, might be swiping through anorexia videos because that tends to work best. And by the way, this is not deliberately done. What usually happens as someone starts swiping on dieting videos and food tips and healthy food. And then the algorithms are figuring out, well, what tends to work well for that cluster of users? And it turns out that the anorexia videos work really, really well. And the algorithms don't know what the word anorexia means. It doesn't know that those photos are good or bad. All it knows is that it works. And that's the same thing. So that's important because we do kind of apply agency to these algorithms thinking that they're evil and trying to show us things. They're just following mathematical algorithms that optimize

for clicks. So there is not a hidden brain there choosing to lead us down the dark path. That's right. It's just optimizing what our own behaviors default click to, yes? That's right. A lot of people want to vilify the tech companies and the founders of those companies and the people that work there. But I promise you, they're not all growing mustaches and twirling them as the world burns. They're instead caught in this arms race. Now, there are decisions that they can make and they have been denying the fundamental reality that their products are causing these effects. And for that, we should be holding them accountable. And I want to make sure I'm clear about that. There's definitely responsibility in the equation. But even if it weren't these at founders, right? People have been very critical of Facebook and because of our and collective efforts, you know, people are using some of their products a lot less. But now people are moving to TikTok. And TikTok is doing just as much of the race to the bottom of the brain stem that just crossed, I believe, YouTube and maybe Facebook and time spent on Android. So it's actually grown even more so. And that's because it's just a supercomputer pointed at your brain saying,

what's the next video that's going to keep you swiping instead of saying maybe I should do something else. And that supercomputer is trained on, you know, two billion users' behavior. It figures out exactly what's kept users just like you swiping. And so it knows way more than you know yourself, what will work. What we're saying then is that climate change and biodiversity loss and other natural resource sync effects are the externalities downstream of the macro superorganism profit-seeking market-dominated exponential growth system and behaviors in especially teen women, polarization, addiction, lack of attention span to do gardening because you're addicted to online games or playing Overwatch or watching TikTok videos. Those are the externalities of the digital

infrastructure that our culture has developed. Yeah, that's right. I think that that is the digital fallout or what we used to call the climate change of culture. Because much like we have an extractive energy economy whose externality is climate change and it occurs through what you've talked about, planetary overshoot, you know, the over extraction, over pollution, overdepletion, you know, past the kind of metabolizing capacities of the Earth in different ecosystems. We have to be specific about that. But in the same way, you know, you can have certain amounts of personalization of content in society. But if you over extract, if you do overestract, if you do overshoot on personalization, you break the shared, what Daniel Schmachemannberg calls,

the epistemic commons or the information ecology. These are fancy terms. We should just call it as our shared reality, our ability to make sense of the world together. When was the last time we had a shared reality? Well, that's a great point because it's, we shouldn't do the classic Garden of Eden naturalistic fallacy thing where we say, hey, there was this pristine state of affairs where everybody viewed the world the same way. But we can talk about certain periods of history, where in media there was a smaller number of channels. And there was a cost to that. You know, when we had Walter Cronkite, we had, we didn't have an arms race on who could keep people's attention.

And we didn't have a thousand Walter Cronkites who started realizing that the best way to keep their attention was to be, you know, Mr. Croncite, Q&ONN extreme. And to pull people down into the Cronkite echo chamber that would keep people going. We have tens of millions of Cronkites now. They all have their AM radio shows. Yeah, but they're not Cronkites because they're in. have been to figure out how do I inflame your emotions to keep you coming back? And if I tell you that you're right, that's going to work a lot better than saying, well, actually that view you have, it's not that you're wrong. It's just that here's a more complex picture. The guy who's saying, well,

here's nuance and complexity. They're going to get massively outcompeted by saying, here's a simple story and here's why you're right. But what does that say about our genome, homo sapiens if we're more likely to click something that inflames us than informs us. Well, I think as is key to, I think just about most of the guests you've had on your podcast and to be consistent to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, who kind of framed this as, I think this is how you, when you and I met, we both talked about all these concepts that the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions and brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And, you know, our brains and our emotions, it's not that they're bad or they're wrong.

They're just evolved for a different environment. And they were not, just like salt sugar and fat were not available on the savannah in the abundant quantities that they are today and also not combined in this perfect, you know, optimized way. Well, now we have the perfect optimized combinations of fear, amusement, you know, ego, narcissism. And we're sort of combining those as the new salt sugar fat, but for society delivered through digital tech products. Right. So gossip and inflaming arguments about some hated outgroup or some super great praise about my in-group or sex or controversy, all those things shout louder to our brains than an

objective accounting of the fact that fish are migrating northward because they need more oxygen because of warmer waters in the ocean. So this is a real example of why fitness matters more than truth. These things, at least we perceive in our brains, that they matter more to our lives, even though they don't relative to the ecological circumstances that are unfolding. What does I say? We get caught in the drama treadmill, right? And so think about it. If I'm Twitter, right, so people use Twitter and Twitter is like a drama internet. Every piece of drama is hyperlinked to every other piece of drama. So it's never been easier to see which drama inflamed at every other drama and then go click down the rabbit hole and then see everyone's response to that drama. Drama is really

good for Twitter because drama is engagement. And so they're trying to hyperlake all those things together because that makes them more successful as the sort of internet sinkhole of competing for attention. And all that's just to say that, again, their business models of capturing attention are fundamentally misaligned with a, you know, civic society that really works. So here's another analog to the energy story. Our culture is energy blind in that we tend to be naive or ignore the massive benefits that we're getting from fossil hydrocarbons added to our system. We know that there are some bad things that happen with fossil fuels, pollution, climate change,

etc. And yet we're not strong enough to stop using them. In the same way we know or we feel that six hours of screen time a day or I don't know what the average is per day. Mine was six hours on last Sunday. That's what my apple said. We know that that's not good for us yet we can't, we're not strong enough. Our stone age medieval minds aren't strong enough to go cold turkey on that. Now, part of that is maybe in the realm of addiction, and part of it is the collective action problems. If you or I, given our roles in trying to change the cultural conversation, we're to totally give up social media, we would then be at a disadvantage of, you know, promoting the message

that we want to promote. But just speaking as a human, I'm pretty tired of Facebook, to be honest. I have a lot of my friends and family on there, and I like to post videos of my chickens. And by the way, the rooster Tristan got eaten by a coyote earlier this week. I named him after you when he was a chick. Yeah, so I'm the first time in nine years I'm roosterless. As an aside, I need a replacement rooster. We're down to 15 hens.

But anyways, I'm not strong enough to completely unsubscribe from all that. And it is useful to me because I need to pay attention to the information. But Facebook, I have almost completely given up on. I do post pictures of my dogs and my chickens. But beyond that, I don't use it much. But is that a reasonable analogy? We know we should give it up, but we can't. I'm going to push back a little bit, actually, because oftentimes this gets classed as an addiction problem.

And in fact, in Francis Hogan, when she came forward, she's the Facebook whistleblower. People remember. And she said that in Facebook's own research, they know that parents give their kids bad advice. Like, just put the phone down. Just don't use it. Just use it for less. Just don't use it after 10 p.m. What this misses in the picture is that Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or, you know, whatever

have colonized the basis of social participation in society. It's not an individual choice for me to not use it. If I'm a small, medium-sized business, do I have another place I can go to micro-target my ads to get the COVID economy rebooted after COVID? Right. I don't have another place to go. You don't have a choice. If I'm a kid and I, and all 12 of my closest friends are on Instagram, they're not on, you know, some other thing. They're on Instagram.

So it's not about whether I'm scrolling. I have no choice. If I'm a politician and all of my competitors are advertising on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, do I have a choice about whether I try to match them in the arms race? And so just like to your point about the climate change thing and the oil companies, I'd say the analogy is closer to. Not just that it's just closest in the sense that to participate in society for me to get on that plane to speak at the South by Southwest Conference last week, I had to use the fossil hydrocarbon economy to get myself there. They're exactly linked. We have downward causation caused by the financial markets that we are outsourcing our decisions to the market, to the financial system. And we're part of this culture.

We can't live outside of it yet until there are. options or a change. And it seems like that is another parallel with the social media infrastructure. Yeah. Well, so we, just like we have been on one phase of the energy infrastructure that, you know, you can say that hydrocarbons were a great way of bootloading our society, hopefully into a different energy paradigm that would be more friendly to the environment. The attention economy based on advertising generated a bunch of wealth based on extracting human attention. treating us as the product, not the customer, and it got us to an area of prosperity, but now we need to switch to a new paradigm, just like we have to do with energy. And so I think they're very

similar. In fact, of possible ways to talk about this issue, I've purposely tried to talk about it this way, because I think it does double work at seeing the connection between economics, climate, and technology, and the social climate. And just to say one last thing about the paleolithic emotions, and you know that I'm a magician by trade as a back. background. And as a kid, I do know you're a magician. Yeah. I figured that out last week. Yeah. Well, so, you know, in seeing how these products are working, one of the things you have to realize is that they're designed with an asymmetry of knowledge, just like a magician knows something about your mind and how you're going to make meaning of a situation. And they know they can manipulate that

meaning making that you're doing. Um, technologists also have an asymmetry of information. They know something about what tends to be sticky for people, but they don't know about themselves. So like, If I walk into Las Vegas in a casino, one of the things they figured out is if I remove the clock from the casino, people stay a lot longer. Because I'm essentially removing the reasons that as your mind is scanning around using its perceptual apparatus, it doesn't see clocks anywhere. You kind of forget, you know, time just passes more in flow. And it turned out, someone actually pointed this out to me. I didn't realize it until a week ago. TikTok, if you open the app on a, on an iPhone or an Android that doesn't have the notch with the uneven top, TikTok actually removes the

clock as you're watching videos because they don't want you thinking about what time it is. And so these are the magician-like tricks on the human mind. And you know my co-founder Azaraskin from the Center for Humane Technology. He actually invented the infinite scroll, which is that instead of hitting next for a video or clicking a button, that what if you just scroll and it just kept loading them at the bottom over and over and over again. And he invented that feature and he deeply regrets it. He estimates that it weighs several million lives per day in human time.

And it's because there remains. moving the stopping queue, which is that cue that your mind needs in a conversation. Like, if I stop talking right now and there's a space, we'll know that we can kind of switch turns. But if I keep talking and you're trying to jump in, then you won't be able to, right? So I'm doing the infinite scroll right now as I'm not letting you speak. Well, in this particular case, I would probably eventually just butt in and speak. Which is sometimes what our brains do when they catch up to realizing that we've been spending too long. Right, right. Well, exactly. So a little bit on the magic, just to let you know, you and I were together a couple weeks ago.

I can't remember exactly when it was two weeks ago. And you did this magic trick on me where you had this quarter in my hand and you said a story and my hand was closed and then the quarter was bent in half. And it wasn't before and it was a real quarter and I still have it. It's in the other room on my shelf. And I purposely don't believe that that was actually magic. I purposely did not look on the internet to see an explanation for that because it's In the doing of that, I would have lost some of the specialness of you cracking up at watching

my reaction and me wondering, how the hell did he do that? There's a key thing there, right? What's that? The magician, when they use the asymmetry of knowledge, that they know something about your mind, that you don't know about themselves, they're not using that to take all your money or to manipulate your psychology and make you anorexic or to make you vote for a different candidate or to ruin a democracy that you're a part of. of they use the asymmetry of information to create a magical experience, to create entertainment.

In a way, they have a fiduciary obligation to you to be entertaining you. They're operating with that asymmetry of information to help or to entertain. But contrast to that, technology companies have way more knowledge about the vulnerabilities of your mind, way more privileged information. They also know a lot more how the technology works, but they're not using it to the best benefit of your children or to the democracy to function better. So to use an obscure Dungeons and Dragons metaphor, the tech companies are lawful, evil, and magicians are chaotic good.

I actually haven't played that much Dungeons and Dragons, so you'd be educating me. But no, but my point is you can use magic in the broader sense to change people's perception of their reality. You do it all the time with your public talks and you use word combinations for our prehistoric brain that change how people think and perhaps behave. But you're not doing that to generate clicks or money. You're doing that to change people's hearts and minds. So magic in the sense of changing people's perception of reality can be a real thing and a good thing. Yes? Yeah. Well, I think there's this other trend that, you know, if you think about a timeline of any intelligence species, if it gets to a

sufficient level of intelligence, it starts to use its intelligence to understand itself. A lion doesn't have a capacity to point its own intelligence capacities to figure out how to lion brains work and then become self-aware of, man, why do I like gazelles? And why do I like gazelles that and not this? They can't interrogate their own mind. What's unique about humans in our intelligence is that we can actually build tools and build instruments and then actually become self-aware. Well, first, we don't need tools. We can actually just do like what the Buddhists did, where we just sit with our minds and we can study how we really work. We can notice that we have something called loss aversion, that it, you know, gaining a hundred

bucks doesn't hurt, doesn't feel as good as not losing a hundred bucks feels bad. And, you know, that's for an evolutionary reason. But we can discover facts like that about the human mind. And that's what magicians have done, right? They've discovered these ancient facts about how minds make meaning and biases that we have. And you can think of a timeline that, you know, from, at every moment, you know, from, Edward Bernays and Sigmund Freud discovering some basic things about human minds to developing marketing and focus groups to then the magicians coming along and figuring out how magic works

and then figuring out Frank Luntz and Drew Weston and people like this who know how language can shape thoughts and minds. Then you can figure out the pickup artist community and then cults. And then you can think about this increasing trajectory of self-knowledge about the predictability of human, social, animals' behavior if you control the environment and the situation. And that is like this sort of body of knowledge, which is how to turn the creativity and free will of human beings into predictable dead slabs of human behavior because there is an asymmetry where you can cause things to happen. This is why I lost sleep after I met you because I realized that me just college professor reality 101 trying to do a wide boundary comprehensive library treatment of the human. predicament on energy, human behavior, climate, biodiversity, money, economic growth, the future isn't what you just described.

It's relevant, but it's boring and dry and not going to be able to capture people with language, et cetera. So I really struggle with, should I just discard all the science other than what it informs in my head and use PR and tricks to change people's behavior? And that's not who I am. So I'm doing these educational videos and using some art and music and such. But it's really depressing to me that unless we change how people get information and have a discourse together in society that these larger issues aren't going to be solved. I think that we can make some distinctions that, you know, this knowledge about how human minds work doesn't mean we can inform.

the people who are communicating the most important things to the world and then wrap around it, this efficacy program to communicate even more powerfully, things that people need to know. But of course, this ability to persuade minds, if you think about that sort of it is, is this ability to persuade minds. That's what's going up on a curve. And you can use that for good and for bad. You know, Frank Luntz, the climate, the Republican pollster, you know, famously use these focus groups to come up with phrases like death panels in the salesmanship of Obamacare.

Right. So instead of the Affordable Care Act is helping people, they're going to have death panels, panels that are going to decide whether you're going to live or die, right? That was a powerful phrase. Yeah. And I disagree with him. And I don't know a lot about that issue, but just you framing it that way, I feel an aversion to whatever he was describing. Right. But, you know, he was he was finding. And that's what the point is that these are values neutral. There's a value's neutral capacity here that can be used for for many different purposes. And he also discovered that the phrase climate change was less alarming than the phrase global warming because the climate's always changing. And so it's a neutral statement. And it's this grand irony of history that the left in the United States ended up adopting the environmental movement ended up adopting the phrase climate change, which is one of the least effective phrases you could use. Yeah, it's a euphemism. Where did that name come from? I don't even know. Well, I don't believe that he invented it. And by the way, he regrets all this.

and has been trying to work to improve climate communication and someone that I know, and he's actually been trying to do as much as you can to kind of help use the tools that he's had to help reverse polarization and reverse climate change and things like this. But, you know, I think he didn't invent the phrase. I think he just discovered that it was the phrase that polled in the way that it did. But, you know, across the board, I've studied this, and there's people like Lara Borditski, who we actually had on our podcast. We have a podcast called Urine Divided Attention.

And we interviewed her about the past. power of language. And people don't know that, you know, if you talk about a pre-owned car, people like the idea of buying a pre-owned car. But if you talk about a used car, no one wants a used car, right? And there's just all these games. George Lakoff at Berkeley will talk about this ad nauseum. He wrote a famous book called Metaphors We Live By, where if you frame the nation, for example, as a family, mother Russia, we don't want those missiles in our backyard. We don't send our sons and daughters to war. In each of these phrases that I'm mentioning, We're invoking the nation as not just a nation.

We're talking about the nation as a family member, as a parent, right? The backyard of our country, the mother Russia, the father Russia. These are all ways that we manipulate culture into believing in ideas like a nation, which are abstract. They're totally fictions. Do all these language tricks or leanings that you just said have their core roots in evolutionary psychology that they're honing? in on an impulse that was conserved over evolutionary time that was important to us? Well, I mean, take that one nation as a family, right? So the family is going to be pretty core in terms of the human experience. Over time, people are going to have mothers and fathers,

and they tend to use the same basic ma-ma for mother and da-da for father, vaguely that direction, right? And then I think the clever political usage here is to link concepts that you want to be associated according to that childhood-like experience, that childhood like loyalty and warmth that you get from a mother to say mother Russia. And when you link these things together, you can start constructing realities. People call it ontological design. But this is just giving people a taste. I mean, I think we can get more into the tech topics. The important thing to establish here is that the mind can be persuaded. Everyone is persuadable. It's not just that because you and I are here and our listeners are listening to this, that only us, you know, three of us,

that you, the listener and the two of us, Nate and I are the smart ones. And it's only those dumb people way over there that are manipulated by propaganda. You have to see that you're not ever not using language. You're always using language. And when you use language, you're casting spells that create a framework for seeing reality. And we just have to be aware of this because increasingly there are actors that are better and better at knowing which language to use to get us to feel or believe one way or the other. And then you link this with the tech equation and technology is getting better and better at reinforcing certain language patterns over and over again.

I just hired a coach to help me with various efforts with my organization. And one thing she said off the bat was that the language I used to describe our situation is too negative. And I say the problem. And instead I should say the challenge or the opportunity. And the facts are all the same, but the language that I use tends to to be too negative because I'm freaking terrified about what's coming. So naturally I have negative sounding words, but I think another issue that I learned recently

is that if you're a certain personality type or if you're a certain temperament or if you're a certain Myers-Briggs type, the fact that other people think differently isn't the issue. The issue is that we naturally assume that other people think like we, we think like we do and that we're the same personality types. There's a name for that in psychology. I forgot the name right now. We overestimate the number of people who share our beliefs. And if you think about it, evolutionarily speaking, you would expect that people who you meet

in your tribe are likely to vaguely have the same notion and construction of reality as us. And so we wouldn't evolutionary be like evolved to think about how different every reality would be for everyone else around us. Right. because mostly 20 or 40 people around us, we pretty much kind of knew what was going on. And now there's so many different demographics that we come in contact with and different personality types. And so when you meet people and you say, oh, my God, how they're showing up at January 6th, they must be insurrectionist or something like that.

It's like, well, what if you've been fed a narrative for the last 10 years that showed that there was manipulation of the media that people are not saying things that are true? And by the way, there's a legitimate examples. Like I'm talking not just a conspiracy theory, but legitimate ways that the media has not. not been very honest about a whole bunch of things. And then someone says to you, the election, you know, was rigged. And in so many ways, you can say that it kind of was rigged and not actually rigged, but I mean the media environment, you know, the questions that were asked to Trump or whatever. And then you say, hey, the election was stolen. If you genuinely believe that, and then you show up at the January 6th event, the other side now has been fed this whole newsfeed

of the last four years that said that we're living in this authoritarian state for Trump or whatever. and these are the kind of fascist Trump followers who are, you know, showing up at a rally. And so each of our perceptions of each other, I'm not trying to say this in a way that's as sympathetic to at least the media environments that each have been living in. It causes us to be upset at each other, but from not even a shared ground, right? We don't have a shared understanding of even what history is or what narratives we're living in. And so we're constantly misinterpreting each other's behavior, which drives up itself more conflict.

Well, I want to get into that in a second because I think, polarization is one of our biggest risks that we face in the near term. But coming across your work, I had an interesting reaction. First was depression, that this was actually happening. The second was when I hear someone that's a January 6th conspiracy person, my initial reaction is frustration and anger. But after being exposed to yours and others' work in this space, I have developed more tolerance and empathy because I understand that.

that someone in my direct blood relative family who will remain unmentioned believes in that narrative. And now I can understand that it's their news feed. They only have one news feed. And they just don't get exposed to the things that you and I are talking about. So I have an understanding of why they come to that. So at least that's a mature direction for me to think about it. It's still a giant, giant problem. And notice, by the way, so I know this is a polarizing example.

So I excuse myself, hopefully, with your listener, just for a moment, let's just cool off any emotions that might occur here. But, you know, there were armed insurrectionists and people with zip tides who were going to take hostages and kill and harm, I think, people in our capital. So I just want to be very clear that I see that too. But if you were on the Trump supporter side, you saw infinite videos of, um, very regular old Trump supporters who were just showing up at election day, believing that their election was stolen, and they're just showing up excited about Trump. They saw those videos. They didn't see the videos of the zip ties and the other stuff. Whereas on the left media ecosystem, you saw videos on a loop of all these guys with guns and slamming police officers and violence. And so again, when we're talking about this event, we've been seeing very different examples on the Black Lives Matter side.

You know, if you're on one side of that, you clicked on a video of, you know, an innocent African American person. getting beaten by the police in a way that would make you just so outraged, right? And then you clicked on one of those and Twitter sees a pattern. It says, oh, I know what videos to serve people like you. And it shows you infinite videos of innocent African Americans getting beaten by black people. But if you're on the other side of that, you might click on a video of a police officer getting really unfairly treated. And then you see infinite videos of police officers getting really unfairly treated.

And you start to realize that we've again been in this reinforcement loops of confirmation bias and it's really fragmented at a very deep and subtle way our ability to ever even empathize with each other or where we're coming from. And again, there's no one, there's no billionaire behind that saying, hey, let's foment this, send those people these videos. This is just that algorithm uprating for drama and clicks like you said earlier. That's right. Although bad actors and foreign adversaries have been and will continue to.

amplify the narratives that they want. And so if I'm Russia, it's the best news in the world for me that this fault line emerged in your society around Black Lives Matter. So I'm going to dial up both sides, right? If you actually look at the behavior of the Russian bots, they're not pushing for one side. They're just pushing for what makes both sides angry. And they say things that people who are in each side would even agree with, right? They're not saying, it's not propaganda. That's what my colleague Rene de Resta calls amplification, because they're just selecting what your own domestic voices in your country are saying, the most polarizing and divisive voices. And they're just piling onto those things. And so you can think of the news feed algorithm behind Facebook and Twitter and so on as a fault

line finder. You know, you've got a trillion dollars of compute power that says, okay, whenever there's a fault line, because the fault lines emerge, people post an inflammatory content. And then it just puts an amplification loop on that fault line. And so it's like turning up the contrast in a photograph where all the lines suddenly get really visible, right? Suddenly all at once. That's what it's doing to our society. And we have to really see that at a fundamental level because we have to see that it's incompatible with democracy. So I take a stronger view that when we talk about solutions to this problem, which I know you probably want to get into, that if, you know, when we think about solutions, our lawmakers typically go to the legible ones. Like we have privacy reform and we have

content liability, something called Section 230 reform. We have antitrust. These companies have gotten too big. It's too much concentrated power. But you take those three levers, privacy, content liability and antitrust or concentrated power. And you don't get to a world where technology is strengthening democracy. You might get to a world where technologies maybe 10% less toxic for society than it is now. And I want to claim that our goal here in this conversation shouldn't be how do we reduce the harm of social media. We have to ask, what is technology plus democracy equals stronger democracy?

Is there anything on the horizon right now, technology-wise or regulation-wise or anything that would dramatically improve or deteriorate the existing situation that you've outlined. Well, there's all sorts of things that we can do and can be done. I just wanted to focus on, you know, back to the E.O. Wilson quote, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and then accelerating godlike technology. The medieval institutions part is just that our law, the letter of the law, always lags the spirit of the law and the way that the spirit of law has to get reinterpreted in an increasingly complex world where technology is redefining our concepts. So we have a concept called

protect freedom of speech, but that didn't anticipate a world where computers could generate speech and flood the internet with synthetic media of videos of things that didn't happen, of photos of fake bombings in Kharkiv and Ukraine, which it can do. And so what I was just trying to point out was that oftentimes our institutions reached for that which was legible in the concepts that it had articulated in the past, like consent or privacy or free speech. But what do those terms mean in a world where technologies is changing the definition of what would privacy even mean when, for example, without you filling out a form and telling me your name and address and personality traits for Cambridge Analytica, there's a new paper out with AI that

in 2018 with 70% accuracy, I can get your same big five personality traits, your openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, acceptance, I think I got the right, and neuroticism. And I can get those traits by looking at your mouse patterns, just by looking about how you move on a screen and click and the speed at which you click, you can read things. So think about it as like the end of the poker face, right? A regular person, they use their eyeballs and their reading, it's like cold reading, it's another magician type thing. I can look at you and I can read certain things about you.

A lot of that's kind of fake and they're manipulating how much they think they know. but increasingly technology is able to read our micro expressions and predict there's another paper about that in 2018. I think that AI can predict our micro expressions better than we know ourselves. And so I'm just, I'm plotting this out because they challenge some of these things, these sacred cows that we've had that we've enshrined like privacy, where the definition of privacy isn't whether a service collected, you know, your name in a registration form. It's the ability for technology to know more things about us without even us filling in

any explicit information. Well, that was where I was going with the question is, are the developments that are coming with AI and GPT3 machine language and that in the coming years going to accelerate the trends that you're already describing on polarization and clicks and reading our minds and then directing political voting and market capture type of events? take action and we realize what it'll take to lock some of this down. Right? So even while I'm trying to be very clear also. I don't want to just scare people or cause a moral panic around the boogeyman of technology reading our face and Michael expressions.

It's not like every company is doing that. And Apple has control over face ID and what people can and can't use face ID for. Right. And so on your iPhone, you know, whether it reads those expressions or not, it has to be a, you have to give access for a phone to get access to your camera. So I just want to make sure I'm really clear that while these are capacities that are getting rolled out and they do challenge the situation, the key is that there are certain actors that we need to operate in our best interest. And if you think about it, Nate, like I often really like to think about this from the perspective of a doctor or a lawyer or a financial professional. Because in all three of those fields, you know, if I'm a doctor, I know way more about the complexity

of medicine that you, the patient, don't know. And you're giving me privileged information, private information about you so that I can hopefully make you make the best decision in that complexity. Right. So I have to be operating in your best interest because if I use the fact that I know about medicine and you don't, I could just charge you for the, you know, pharmaceuticals that make me the most money. And similarly, if I'm a financial professional, I know about finance more than you know about

finance. And so you've got to trust that they're solving the principal agent problem of being a fiduciary to our best interests. And the same thing is true for a lawyer. They know about the law. And so in that divorce case, they need to be navigating for. for your best interest. So when you compare those fields and the amount of complexity that's on the other side,

technology needs to act as a fiduciary to us in that complexity. Because the complexity in technology is racing ahead faster and faster. Like you said, we have synthetic media. We have news feeds. We have different forms of privacy that we're going to need. We need to make sure, if you look at the first and second derivative of how fast those curves are going, the way to solve it isn't by regulating yesterday's misinformation. problem from the 2016 election, which is what the regulation conversation is, the best way would

be to pass something like the Tech fiduciaries Act, which says that if you're above a certain size, you have to act with that complexity in the best interests of people. And we need better ways, I mean, democratic ways of defining what the best interests of people means, but we need to make sure that more and more of their decisions are not extractive. Because in that complexity, right now you have Facebook operating for its best interests, which is whatever personalizes and outrage is and flames the most. And that's the same for Twitter and, you know, similar for China and TikTok. And so that's what we need to change. And do you have any existing examples of what that might look like or conceptually, how might technology for the betterment of society as a regulatory

thing look like? It looks like technology being a sidekick for our values for the two marshmallow version of us, not the one marshmallow version of us, right? And so that's the marshmallow test of, you know, show you one marshmallow and can the kid resist it and can they have an executive control ability of their neocortex? They can go for the two marshmallows 10 minutes from now instead of the one marshmallow now. And there's an ability to develop that capacity. But right now, technology wants to develop the one marshmallow society, as Daniel will often say. But what if we're 80 to 90 percent of us are already the one marshmallow societies and we're asking for more marshmallows? Do we need to train and educate and help meditate and mindful living as a precursor to these new technology laws?

Do they need to happen hand in hand? Or is it only a superorganism, top-down downward causation sort of situation that the technology has to change. Otherwise, we're screwed. you know, you and I have talked about my executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, Randy Fernando, used to run. So we work on these problems of social media together. And he used to run nonprofit called mindful schools that trained mindfulness to kids. And they would teach kids mindfulness for 10 minutes every day or something like that. They'd give the materials to train kids to teachers.

And then they got this program into schools. And so you get kids meditating. And it's great. And they can show the metrics showing it's making things better, whatever. The problem is when those same kids spend five. five hours more later that day on TikTok, it just completely undermines all of the work that you did on the meditation. And that's actually why Randy, you know, joined us and working to do this as we see the asymmetry of power. Let me give you a couple more examples of that. I don't mean to depress people,

but there are philanthropists that spend a billion dollars on depolarization efforts in the United States where you put people into rooms with each other. And I think that's great. But the problem is if those same Americans who spend, you know, let's say 10 hours in a room with other Americans and they get a taste of the fact that, hey, people don't have nearly the same extreme views as I saw in social media. That's great. But then again, once I'm dosed with five hours a day of Twitter showing me the outrage machine and the other side being acting in bad faith over and over and over again because the bad faith examples of their behavior go more viral than the good faith examples of their behavior, then I'm going to believe the bad faith thing. So what's going to matter more? The billion dollars

spent on depolarization or five hours a day on the tech platforms, which is to say the tech platforms are going to matter more. What's going to matter more? Teaching kids better mental health habits, meditation, mindfulness, feeling self-secure and confident about your body, all these things, or the five hours a day you spend on Instagram where I make you feel bad about your body. So the tech does have primacy. And that's the thing that people should have to get, is that this is the problem beneath other problems because tech is gradually taking over the way that we see ourselves, our identity in the case of children, and the case that we see how we see ourselves in our democracy. And right now, just one last thing, Nate, I think it's really,

really important for your listeners to know. There's this super important research by this group called More In Common. And what they studied was how we believe a stereotype of the other side, because social media rewards the most extreme views from the other side and presents those way more disproportionately than the moderate views. Because we get hit by a double whammy. The extreme voices participate more often than moderate voices. And the extreme voices, when they say stuff, it goes more viral than a moderate person saying stuff. And so we get hit by a double whammy of overrepresentation of those extreme views. And just to make this concrete, Democrats believe that a third of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year, meaning are rich.

Only 2% of Republicans make more than $2,000 a year. Republicans believe that more than a third of Democrats are LGBTQ. And only 6% of Democrats are LGBTQ. And if you ask both sides before the 2020 election, what? percentage of the other side do you believe would justify violence before the election if they lost? And they believe that 50% of the other side would justify violence. But when you ask their own side, when they ask themselves, what was the actual number of that would justify violence? It was only 5%. So again, we're in a hall of mirrors of seeing the most extreme stuff.

And even though I can tell you this, notice that your mind is still running the malware of the emotions of the last 10 years that reinforced a false view of who the other side is. The natural landing spot for that, and we're almost there already, is the positive feedback on the extreme demographic and the extreme message within that demographic is going to end up with a half of, well, a third of our society super far on the left with radical views. A third of society, super far on the right with radical views. in a third of society, which is probably where I would be, which is just fed up and don't want to look at any more information ever again because they don't know what to trust. And in that world, how can we have a discourse about a collective future? Exactly.

We can't, which is why I say that, you know, I think between you and Daniel and I, we've been just reiterating that our biggest problems in the world are all collective action problems or coordination problems. We're in a game theory matrix and we need to figure out how to cooperate to achieve solutions and believe that the other side's not going to defect, which means we need to have a shared reality, whether we're talking about inequality or deforestation or poaching or, you know, any of these problems, nuclear risk, we need to have a shared view of reality and then be able to coordinate around that reality. And that's why we need a social media infotech environment

that's rewarding synthesis and creating those who are creating shared reality. So imagine instead of division entrepreneurs that are paid in more likes and followers, the more clever they are at finding devulsive fault lines, we get synthesis entrepreneurs. We reward synthesis entrepreneurs. I don't mean we, the people like we pay them where we like and follow their stuff more, but just like we subsidize corn or we subsidize the forms of energy we want to transition to, we could subsidize synthesis entrepreneurs, those who are doing that job and that work. And then other people say, well, who's successful on TikTok? Who's getting the most likes followers and rewards? And we'd say, oh, look, it's those synthesizers, not those dividers. And we want that.

society and we need that society and the tech platforms need to get off the business model of profiting from the wrong thing so that we can do the right thing. Is there any hope of that happening or is that happening anywhere in the world right now? There's a bunch of groups that are working on that. I think the best hope we have of this and the best living example of this is what's happening with Audrey Tang, because the digital minister of Taiwan. I'd say that Taiwan is a unique example, not for what people know in terms of China being interested in taking over Taiwan, But Taiwan has actually pioneered a form of digital democracy where they actually sort in their online environment for what they call unlikely consensus. So they have this online polling system.

We do our democracy using physical poll ballots and physical places that we gather and things like that. They're trying to ask the question, if we did democracy, not just trying to copy the old 18th century form of democracy online, but what if we did a new kind of democracy online where we have even more people than we could fit in the town hall. but we're searching for agreement. We're searching for where there's an unlikely consensus about what the problems are and what we want to do about them. And they built lots of technologies to help instrument that process. And their system called V-Taiwan and Polis and GovZero, people can check out. We did an interview with Audrey Tang on our podcast called Your Undivided Attention that I really highly recommend. Because it's the most inspiring example.

I think the podcast is called Digital Democracy is within reach. Because instead of a complaint about the tax system or climate, change turning into a shit post on Facebook that generates an outrage feed that then generates resignation and apathy like you're saying in their system when I'm upset about something I go to this online place and I talk about something I want to change and instead of it turning into an outrage feed it they basically sort for who are the unlikely agreement uh participants in that process and then invite them into a zoom call or a physical meeting where they are actually in a civic design process to talk about what you know to get an expert uh input and then to actually

talk about what they want to do about it. And it's basically, it's a machine. It could be someone from the far left and the far right or Taiwan's version of the same, but that they show some elements of facilitation or diplomacy or empathy or whatever. And those get uprated as opposed to the more flamboyant extreme divisive comments. Think of it like a, it's like an incentive, it's a landscape, it's an evolutionary search algorithm that's searching for legitimacy. across party boundaries, across different points of view. And it finds these areas. And once it finds them, it sort of inflates them. Just like instead of doing narcissism inflation, they're doing synthesis inflation and finding who can, how can we inflate the areas where people actually

agree on something and want to do something. So when they get something like an 80% approval that, hey, this is what we want to do. The way that this, the way she became digital minister is that the government in Taiwan saw that 80% of the public agreed that we should do X. And what are democracy is looking for more than simply that there's just an overwhelming majority of people who want X. And right now, that's the thing that we really need. And that's the best example of it working in real time. And, you know, why the Biden administration doesn't invite Audrey Tang immediately to the U.S. to help bootstrap a Manhattan project for a U.S. digital democracy right now is staggering to me. Well, I think they're kind of busy with other problems. But to me,

that seems like a real central problem. So I want to be sensitive to the time constraints here. I'm sure you and I could talk for five hours on this stuff. But I want to get back to when we first met. You also told me something else. You said that you had lost sleep after hearing about all the metacrisis and how things fit together. But you also said that you shared my video with some of your colleagues at

your organization and your friends. And then in addition to feeling scared and depressed, you also simultaneously felt alive and this feeling of purpose and like community that you were like seeing the map and it made sense and it energized you. And that really fired me up because that's what I'm trying to do with all this work is to get some fraction of society to roll up their sleeves and see what we face and work together. And it's the working together. I mean, you and I, every, we don't talk that often, but when we do, it's like a little shot of adrenaline because you are a pro-social, you know, adventurer and a catalyst for better futures for humanity. And when I interact with you, I sense that and I feel like there's a lot more people on the team. That's what we need to

do is grow that team somehow, but with the down-regulating of reality in social media, it seems difficult to do that. But building that community seems really important. Maybe you could talk about that just a bit. Look, these are challenging topics. And what you said is true and real. I think we both faced it and felt it in our physical health. And I think, though, that there's nothing more powerful than seeing those problems together. I mean, ironically, it's what we're talking about with social media, like the ideal outcome is that we're able to synthesize and find common ground about what we actually are all seeing together, as opposed to some people are upset about a cabal of pedophile elite, and some people are upset about Fauci, and some people are upset about

Biden, and some people are upset about Trump, and everyone's just in this different reality, upset about different things. It's really hard to feel purpose when that division exists. And what I love about your work is it's about, you know, you can't have a society be energy, if it depends on energy. If, just like, you can't have an economy be blind to the biosphere if it depends on the biosphere. And so I think that what's fun, what's so important about your work is it's foundational to the life support systems that give rise to our ability to do everything else.

And similarly, I think our work at the Center for Human Technology is foundational to the social fabric that we need, the sort of social trust, social contract that we need to be able to do all the other problems. Now, that's daunting when you realize that both are in such a dire predicament, but when you find the others, as Jamie Wheel likes to say, of people who are seeing the same system that you are. And I think one of the challenges, I mean, I listen to your podcast, Nate, and it's excellent. It's wonderful. And it's such important work that you're doing here. And I know that if I'm another listener that I'm speaking to right now, it can often feel like you're alone when you're a listener, listening to these things. And I think the strongest thing you can do is find community who see this problem with you.

Because when you know that other people are working on different aspects, it gives you some hope. I think Daniel and you and I meeting together this year has been some of the most inspiring jolts of, you know, inspiration and energy to keep working on this stuff. Because we know that there's an invisible team of allies that are kind of doing the best that we can, at least to navigate, right? We're not going to be able to quote unquote solve or dicks all of this. It's just how do we mitigate and navigate and, you know, make wise choices no matter what happens. I agree with you. And I think there I'm trying to come up with a list of interventions at the global, national community level. At the individual level, you know, there's no easy answers here.

And I think telling people or suggesting people how to be instead of what to do is probably what I'm going to do for this year. Earth Day talk because we just need a lot more people speaking the same language, knowing that they're not alone. And the key, I think, is there are so many people who know that something is wrong with our trajectory. I call them the walking worried. And if you, we need to get those people connected and talking to each other in Topeka, Kansas and Albuquerque, New Mexico and Mendocino, California.

etc. And even if it's a small group, you form the social bonds now when things are relatively stable and peaceful and relatively. And those social networks are going to be really important no matter what happens in the future. But, and this coming back to your work again, with the social media, A, the distraction of it, because people spend so much time in their little assholes, ordering stuff from Amazon and getting their dopamine and entertainment on various social media and other things. That's part of it. The other part is the forming of the little viral memetic tribes that we've splintered away from

the natural physical tribes in our communities where we live. And I think that needs to be reversed. It's going to be reversed because we're going to need those people again. in our lives. I just want to, I want to accelerate it, if possible. It's like your friend Nora Bateson, who, when your podcast said that her friend was starting laundromats or something like that in small cities, I think I heard her say, because laundromats are little micro community gathering points, right? And we have hollowed out the social fabric because as the Amazonification and DoorDashification and seamlessification of the world, one click

and you're at my door and I get to live more and more in my own physical isolated reality comes true, it undermines those shared places and hollows out those shared places of physical gathering. And we are paleolithic social animal beings. And we need that. And, you know, one of the things that Jamie Wheel does with his recapture the rapture, you know, gatherings is how do we just bring people together to do the human things, the dancing, the music, you know, just being with each other. And, you know, by the way, this doesn't have to be this way. Like if Facebook's business model was bringing people together, they could be just dialing up the events sort of coordination system so that it's all about, it's never been easier to have a rich community life.

You can imagine a version of social media that's actually all about making social coordination of being in the physical world together easier. But of course, so long as the business model. Why doesn't that spontaneously evolve somewhere as an alternative? And then there's PR to advertise to send people there. And that's what's operated. Why isn't that happening? There's got to be some barrier that keeps that from happening.

The current incumbent platforms is that their business models are based on attention. So the hiking trips and the shared ecstatic dance experiences and the book clubs in person, those don't make them money. And the isolated screen time watching stuff, laughing stuff by yourself does make the money. So that's why we need to have another platform. I mean, Apple is one of the best position companies to address these problems, by the way, because their business model is the hardware. and you know they already have a feature called find my friends or find my and you can add your friends on there and maybe we should do that so I know more when you're in town and you know it could be much they could they could well we did that two weeks ago oh that I think that's right on that

high control but imagine that kind of feature set was built out by Apple again his business model is totally friendly to the things that we've talked about and they could say hey instead of just a static map that you can just see where your friends are in real time what if they had ways of signaling where we're going to be what which friends were open open to seeing, ways of making scheduling and calendaring a little bit smoother. Like, there are ways of strengthening that possibility. And by the way, there should be smaller actors and startups and things like that. But there are technical and psychological reasons for why it's hard for small startups to do it.

So Apple's just one of the viable actors that can kind of move the whole thing in this direction. Well, that gives me hope. And I do think that going out there and alerting people to the risks from social media, or from climate change or resource depletion, et cetera, is necessary as well so that they kind of know we need to do it a different way. So keep doing what you're doing and good luck with all your successes and Center for Human technology. So I just on due to the time, I have some closing questions that I ask all my guests a little bit more on the personal side. So I hope you're okay answering them. But given everything that you just outlined, what kind of advice would you give to people,

especially young people who today understand your story and maybe my story, that they're alive during this time of a fractured information system and this giant panoply of risks, the metacrisis, the human predicament, what sort of advice would you give to a young person? First, I just, I empathize with when you see things like this, it can be really hard. And taking it in on your own is not advised. I think the key thing we've already talked about is having community. You know, but like you've already said, Nate, like the best things in life are free. I find that in this period of COVID and knowing the things I know, the things I get the most pleasure from is having dinner with a small group of friends.

You know, it's just like the film don't look up, right? It's like the asteroids coming to hit Earth. And what do people do? What do they do the last night before the asteroid, you know, is hitting Earth? They're bringing some food and whine over and they're hanging out. And I think that our ability to be resilient no matter what, you know, more volatility in chaos is coming our way. And there's going to be more volatility. I think that it's about going through it together.

There was actually a powerful thing. A friend said to me recently over the summer. and kind of reckoning with these topics is like, yep, it's going to get a little bit bumpy. And the key thing is that we're going to go through that bumpiness together. And there's just something about not just those words, but actually feeling it. Like if you feel like you have that community, it doesn't mean hide in your whole. It means just build resilience with the people around you that you want to navigate this, this whole thing with.

And find the people, find the others who see it in similar ways so that we can all make wise their choices together. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that. I try to, and when I bike where I bike, and finally it's spring, so I'm biking again, every bike ride I go in this county, this rural county I live, and I try and stop and say hello to someone that I've never met before who's out working in their yard. Because these are the people that live in my county, and I know very few of them. So I agree with you on the community.

So next question, Tristan, personal question. And I don't know how you're going to answer this. What do you care most about in the world? These are deep questions. I don't know if I care most about one thing. I think, you know, having a good future, as best a future as we can have is, I think, Every day I wake up and I just ask every moment of my life, what am I doing? That's what's the most leveraged thing that I can do to enable us to have a better future than the one that we're currently on the trajectory on?

And, you know, there are things that are moving in that direction. Like it's actually interesting. If we can survive this Ukraine, Russia situation and it's been awful, obviously, for everyone in Ukraine. And I just want to completely honor that. the social media issues have made, have really weakened democracies everywhere. They've weakened shared reality. They've made it hard to come together. But this Ukraine situation has actually kind of activated democracies more than ever

into more coherence to drop a lot of their local inside differences and fault lines and to instead focus on a more shared threat, which is really, I think, viewing the monster that is the, you know, the authoritarian thing that happens when you have a, small, you know, one person at the top of a massive thing that has a lot of power, a lot of economic resources, nuclear weapons, and is acting in a unilateral way and can be inside of the bubble and echo chamber of their own mind. And that's true of Jijing Ping. That's true of Putin. And we're seeing how that form of governance can act in a way that it doesn't have checks and balances against it. And I think that that, if, again, if we can make it through

this, is an interesting development at reversing a lot of the trends that we've talked about. Because on the one hand, I'd love to see social media platforms that, you know, reward the synthesis entrepreneurs and those who are better at bringing us together. And I want to see that. I think that these external events could, you know, be used to flip things the other way. And I go back to the, I think it's a Taoist story of the Zen maybe. It's a maybe. Sorry, let me say it again.

I go back to this Taoist story of the farmer. I think it's called the maybe story. Are you familiar with this one, mate? It's like a, it's sort of a series of stories where the farmer's son breaks his leg. And the person comes over to the farmer and says, well, I'm so sorry that this tragedy, you know, befell, fell upon your son. And he says, you know, don't you feel bad about that? And the farmer says, maybe the next moment a week later, there's a war breaks out. And all of the sons have to go into the war.

But then his son who broke his leg doesn't have to go. and then the person comes up to him and says, aren't you glad your son didn't have to go to the war? And he says, maybe. And it keeps flipping back and forth, the meaning of each event. Oh, it's the worst thing that ever happened. That's the best thing that ever happened. And I just think that story provides a lot of calm to the situation because you realize uncertainty is the place from which not a kind of, hey, it's all going to work out okay. but that's, if hope lives anywhere, it's in the things that we don't know. Because in the places of certainty, it's not, it's not going to be there.

We like certainty, and that's one of the pieces of advice I give my students, is to embrace uncertainty. It doesn't feel good, but we're going to have to get more familiar with it. So given that maybe Zen story, two other questions for you that are bookends, what are you most worried about in the coming decade and what are you most whole? hopeful about in the coming decade. Most worried about is all of the things we've discussed. I mean, maybe I'm too close to the problem that I'm focused on.

But, you know, what I worry about is how hard it is to reverse people out of very deep entrenched belief systems on any side, right? It's much easier to pull someone into a cult than to get them out. Ask anybody who's been in a cult. Yeah. And it's really hard once we've bound our identities up.

with something to let go of that because it is controlled and taken over our identities and our relationships. And one of the ways that cults prey on people, I actually studied cults in my work on persuasive technology. And one of the ways that cult to prey on people is that they increase the price tag of leaving because they tell everybody who your relationships in the cult that they're going to disconnect from you completely if you leave. And they suck in your family. So if you leave the cult, you're going to leave your family and then also the family that is in the cult. And they're design manipulative design imperative is to increase that price tax. So it's much, much harder to leave. And that's invisibly and implicitly happening with the way that social media

kind of isolates us more and more into these bubbles, where it's really hard, no matter what extreme perspective we've been pulled into, to sort of say, well, I'm willing to let go of some of that a little bit. So what worries me is, is that it's much harder to hit the reverse than it is to hit the gas. And that's also why, you know, for so long we were really trying to scream as not as we could upstream from these problems so that we could get ahead of it. Unfortunately, we've gone pretty deep into the cult factory. But the thing that gives me hope maybe to turn to your second question is just that I would never have seen as much change that has in fact happened as over the last even six months.

If you had told me that the president of the United States would be during a state of the union address, asking someone who was whistleblowing about this fundamental problem, you know, stand up at the state of the union, is what Biden did just recently and inviting Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, giving this national attention and saying this is a shared problem for our democracy, you know, to go from something that a handful of people inside of tech companies know is a problem that are clamoring about to something that has, you know, the most esteemed to lead attention in the world. I think we've totally traversed that. And the stock prices of these companies

have dropped tremendously. We're seeing attorney generals file big tobacco style, you know, lawsuits and litigation that's increasing the risks of future investors don't want to fund more products like this that are in the race to the bottom of the brainstem. You know, Apple is making small changes in this direction. There's a lot to be proud of in the amount that is changing in the other way. We're not there yet, but I think it's important to, if you had a Geiger counter that's sort of like a clicker for each click on the timeline of things moving in a better direction, it would sound like, you know, click, click, and then, and it's getting faster and faster. So that's where I at least, you know, get hope from.

And hopefully people waking up and listening more to your podcast and, you know, seeing these problems. Thank you. I think my podcast is just trying to outline how all the different issues interconnect. and most people in climate, energy, finance space don't get your perspective. I think they've probably seen your documentary and are a little aware of this, but this issue affects everything. So I really wish you luck and continued success on this. And we'll have to have you back in six months or so and get an update because there's so

much more that I want to talk to you about. Do you have any other closing words of wisdom advice or thoughts for our listeners? No, I don't think that it's, I can barely say something wise about the things that you asked me before. So I just appreciate being on with you, Nate. It's really great to do this with you. Final honest question. Should I unsubscribe from social media?

I would say that if you don't need these things, then get off. the problem is that we justify to ourselves, oh, but what if I were to miss? And there it is again, the loss ofversion. There's that paleolithic emotion. But what if I were to miss that video, that one video of, you know, that would change my view on this topic? And we would miss things, but we're missing things all the time. And I'll tell you maybe one last story. Steve Jobs was once asked when someone who's building the podcast app for the iPhone,

probably the one that you're listening to this podcast on right now. The guy who was building this podcast app was in a meeting with Steve Jobs at Apple and said, I have an idea. Why don't we make a news feed that shows you what all the podcast your friends are listening to? So I would see when Nate's listening to his podcast and he'd see what things I'm listening to. And we'd be able to see each other stuff. And then we can create a different kind of social network around it. And Steve Jobs sort of like slammed his fist on the table and said, no. He said, if something is actually that important, then your friend will copy and paste it, the link to it. And they'll send it to you. And we've gotten sort of normalized to this view that everything has to be shared. with us and go viral and put it in a feed and all of this stuff, I would prefer to live in a society of what's time well spent or sort of worthy of our lives and our finite time and attention,

given the challenges that we face. And I think that if we develop a social norm and a culture, where when things are really important, we take the time to send it to those handful of people that need to know about it. Because if we knew that that was the decentralized operating system running inside of everybody else, then we could have a lot more faith not worrying that we're going to miss something important from these feeds. Well, on that note, I am going to bid you a good afternoon. I'm going to change my clothes. I'm going to get on my bike.

It's 48 degrees out. And because of the pro-social shot of camaraderie, I'm going to leave my phone here on my hour bike ride. I'm going to check how many likes I got for this podcast to see if people are still giving me. Thanks. Okay. All right, my friend.

To be continued, be well. I'll talk to you soon. And thanks for your time. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.