TRIGGERnometry - Jaron Lanier - The Truth About Social Media

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

Better Help - online counselling and therapy - 10% off first month https://BetterHelp.com/TRIGGER Jaron Lanier is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. He is considered a founder of the field of virtual reality.  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It puts everybody into this behavior modification regime that even if it doesn't do what it's supposed to, it has all these side effects. It makes everybody a bit more vain and crazy and stupid and contentious and paranoid. That does happen. It's really good at that. And because of that, it becomes this giant invitation to the worst actors in the world to try to go in and sabotage other people's societies. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is somebody we've been trying to get onto the show literally since the day we started. He's an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist and composer of contemporary classical music as well. He's considered one of the founders of the field of virtual reality. Jaron Lanier, welcome to Trigonometry.

Hey, how's it going? It's going great. Listen, man, before we get into what we hope is going to be a brilliant and fascinating conversation, tell everybody a little bit about your story. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Oh, gosh, you know, I find that to be a confusing question.

Well, let's see. I'm known for a few different things. And to different communities of people, some people only know me one way or the other. I approximately started virtual reality. I came up with the term, and I had the first startup and pioneered a lot of the apps and devices and whatnot a long time ago in the 80s when I was a kid in my wasted youth. And then I write books that are critical about technology. I'm very concerned that we have a responsibility as computer scientists to think about what we're doing to the world. And when it's not working, we have to be honest about it.

And so I've written a bunch of books. The best known one might be the 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts now, right now. But another one is called You're Not a Gadget. And I'm very skeptical of the idea of artificial intelligence. I'm very skeptical of the business models for social media and other things that involve. I'm very concerned about them. And then yet another thing is as an actual computer scientist, I do all kinds of things. We don't have to get into that because it'll put you to sleep.

but it's actually extremely important and profound. And then I do other stuff too, but I think that's enough to get going. Sure. Well, you've covered three things there that Francis and I are really keen to talk to you about, which is AI, virtual reality, and of course social media. I think we best start with social media because I feel like, of all the different stories we've covered on the show, the different guests, we've talked to the polarization,

the tone of our public discourse, the behavior of children in terms of their self-image and their body image. I mean, any issue that is affecting modern society, really, there is a role that social media has played. And by the way, you know, Francis and I are both quote unquote content creators. I love using Twitter, for example, to talk to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis. I think it's an incredible piece of technology. But we're also paying a heavy, heavy price for some of these benefits. Talk to us about your broad take on social media. You talk about the business model and the problems with that. What are some of the impacts that we're

seeing in the world, in your opinion, and where they're coming from? Well, okay, the first thing I want to say is that in the biggest picture, something similar to social media as we know it would be great. Like, I work really hard to help get the internet to happen, which is a story we can talk about if you want. role was, but I still believe in the idea of a more connected world. I still believe in the idea of people being able to have reach in new ways. All that's great. The problem that came up is the business model, which had a perverse effect of promoting the worst sides of human nature. Okay. So it's a business model problem more than a technology problem. And I really want people to

remember that because a lot of times somebody will come up to me and say, well, there's this or that about whatever social media platforms they like that I love and how can you say that I should quit it and that it's all horrible. And I'll say, you know, I never told you to quit. I gave you arguments. I want you to think. I want you to be responsible for your choices. But the good stuff is authentic. Like it would be absurd to argue that the authentic, that the good stuff is inauthentic because that's ridiculous. I mean, it's plain in front of our faces that they're good things. My personal favorite one remains an oldie but goodie. which is people with unusual diseases can find each other and share notes.

And that used to be impossible. That, to me, is a great concrete example of something that the technology is brought into the world that otherwise would not be in the world that has kept people alive. I love that. All right. So, I mean, it should be obvious. However, what happened was for a lot of really stupid reasons, the early Internet companies ended up with this bizarre business model.

And the business model is you pretend to be socialist in the user's experience, but the way you're capitalist is fake capitalists too. You end up with the worst of both worlds instead of the best of both worlds. So you're fake socialist in the sense that you say, oh, sharing is great, just share your information, and we'll give you free stuff. But the problem is there has to be a customer somewhere because it's still a world driven by business. And so the customers who come in think that what they're buying is, mind control. They think that what they're buying is so much access to user data and so much

access to giant algorithms that can predict user behavior that they can just pour money into alphabet or meta, Google or Facebook, and out will come massive behavior modification that will throw elections or get people to buy products or whatever it is or commit to a religion, and all kinds of crazy stuff. Or just cynically bring up. about a quicker end to civilization or something, whatever the person's into. The thing is, a lot of that stuff doesn't even work. I've been around the meetings where the big companies sell the biggest clients to pour money into this.

And honestly, I don't think you get a lot of mind control. I do think you get two things though. I think you get just a few big companies holding the ability. to blackmail everybody by controlling access of everybody to everybody. So in other words, it's just the opposite. What the internet was supposed to be is connecting everyone. And instead, we have universal blackmail of forcing people to behave in certain ways to get connected, which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

So that's stupid. But then the other thing is that even if the mind control to get somebody to buy a particular soap is pretty sketchy, and I think a lot of times the data that supported is sketchy, what it does do is it puts everybody into this behavior modification regime that even if it doesn't do what it's supposed to, it has all these side effects. It makes everybody a bit more vain and crazy and stupid and contentious and paranoid. That does happen. It's really good at that. And because of that, it becomes this giant invitation to the worst actors in the world to try to go in and sabotage other people's societies. So you have the lovely Mr. Putin having these basements in St. Petersburg create fake black activists to try to make the black political movements in the U.S. more radical in order to destabilize American society and make it kind of nutty.

That's documented. I'm just using that example because it's well documented. There's many, many others that are as well. And so you overall have this thing that darkens. human prospects. It makes everybody, like I say, just a little, like a lesser version of themselves, a little more vain, a little more mature, a little more paranoid, a little more onery and irritable. And all of that is in service of a business model that doesn't really deliver a lot of real value, but just creates artificial impediments to what would otherwise happen, in my opinion.

So I think it's a massive, massive screw up. And it happened, you know, I was around who when it was very, very small. Before Facebook existed, I sold them a company. I used to know Sergei and Larry. They were so cute, so full of energy, so optimistic. And the thing is that the surrounding social circumstance was incredibly adamant about two different needs that were totally in contradiction with one another. On the one hand, there was this leftist feeling because it's the Bay Area in California,

and everybody's supposed to share. The internet is finally a chance to get rid of the evils of capitalism. But on the other hand, we love our business hacker heroes. We love our entrepreneurs. We love our Steve Jobs, you know. And so you're supposed to be this great business person, but you're supposed to hate business. You know, like how do you get those things to work?

And the way to do it is by being fake, where you create fake socialism as an experience and fake capitalism on the back end. You don't get, like, whatever you believe about either of them, you know, this is the worst of both of them. It's like the worst possible solution, but in a way, it's the only one the social pressures of the time would allow to happen. Jaron, can you dig in for us into that particular thing a little bit more? What is the, I understand that me as a Twitter user, I'm not the customer, it's the advertiser that's the customer. But beyond that, how is the business model? making us different.

And when you talk about fake socialism and fake capitalism, dig into that a little bit more for us. Yeah, sure. So we have to go a little bit into the science behind behavior modification. So this backwards, it goes to the 19th century with Ivan Pavlov, yet another Russian. I see you have a mock Russian poster behind you. Well, I'm from Russia originally, so that's my heritage.

Oh, okay. And I'm from Venezuela. So I've seen socialism done properly. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. So we're all extremely well informed here. Yeah.

Pavlov. Talk to us about Pavlov and his beautiful dogs. One of the early behaviorists. And so these are people who said, we're going to do a methodical, mathematical, scientific approach to understanding how training works. So, of course,

people have been training animals, and for that matter, other people since ancient times. There's nothing new about that. But this was saying, okay, we're in the scientific age. We're going to do it methodically. And so Pavlov started to experiment with like, you're going to put a creature in a cage and control exactly what stimuli are available and exactly what outcomes are available. So you can really get focused information about what works and what doesn't work to understand behaviorism.

In the 20th century, probably the most famous heir to Pavlov was B.F. Skinner. He was doing the same thing. In Skinner's case, mostly with pigeons and rats, you put them in a cage. There are a few very interesting things that came out of this methodical approach to training. One thing is that it can get out of control. So if you put an animal in a cage and you say, if you hit this button, you'll get a treat. If you hit this other button, you'll get an electric shock, let's say. They'll just sit there hitting the treat button. What happens is it changes the nature of an organism or a creature

from one that has multi-level behaviors that can respond to different circumstances and can learn to one that's very simple, just stuck on a little loop. That's a very important thing to observe. All right, that's one thing. Another thing that's extremely interesting is that if you want to deeply embed a behavioral pattern in the creature, instead of just having perfect feedback where when you hit the button, you immediately get the candy every time, you add a bit of randomness, it might take a while longer. And this bit of randomness, what it does is it absorbs the brain's ability to adapt,

and focus it entirely on this because the brain is like, what's going on, what's going on? And so it actually strengthens the conditioning. Okay. So this is sometimes called operant conditioning. There are many variations, and I could flip into technical talk to create many shades of distinction, but I think I'm giving you a fair summary of how the stuff works.

The people who studied this had different opinions about how it should be applied to human beings. Okay. Now, at the dawn of computers, one of the founding computer scientists wrote a book called The Human Use of Human Beings. And this was a book pointing out that with the advent of computers, you could automate this whole thing instead of having white-coded lab researchers doing it. And there's a danger that people could make machines that would just make each other trained in a way that they'd become. crazy and very narrow and it could really be extremely dangerous for civilization. That was a book in the 50s, sadly forgotten human use of human beings. But then we hit the 60s and something really interesting happens.

It's famously known that a little into the late 60s, the beginning of the technology of the internet happened, funded in the United States by military research. I was trying to come up with the communications networks that could survive a nuclear attack by being very adaptable, right? But before that, there was a cruder technology for networking that was the first time computers were actually networked at distances for people to use. And this was an experimental network that ran only between universities in the American Midwest. And guess who got the job of designing the user experience in it? none other than RBS Skinner. So the very first network experiment with real people was by a behaviorist.

And his attitude, I think, was quite wrong, really wrongheaded. What he thought is that if you could get everybody onto computers that are networked, and you could put everybody under the influence of these algorithms, you could engineer a society that would become stable and productive and happy and perfect. That's the right reaction. It's funny, right? It strikes us as a laugh line. It seems ridiculous.

But there are a couple of amazing things about it, which is that B.F. Skinner was on the Western capitalist side of the Cold War. And yet what he was saying was not unlike what was happening on the other side. This is exactly what people in places like East Germany and North Korea and many other places have tried to do using other means to sort of put people under enough behavioral control and sensory control that you can engineer this perfect coherent society to your liking. And jumping ahead a little bit, Jaron, it's exactly like what China is doing now to its own citizens as we know, right?

Right. And unfortunately, I think China learned some tricks from our tech companies in this case, something that I find shameful. Yeah. But anyway, sorry for interrupting you. Carry on. No, it's right. So look, anyway, so Skater did this experiment.

It didn't work particularly well. It was a tiny crude experiment, mostly forgotten, actually. So then the internet happens initially between military sites and universities, but this is the radical 60s. So there's this kind of hippie thing, which, hey, listen, I'm part of it. I'm a hippie. I'm not going to hippie, proud of it. But at any rate, there was this hippie. be sensibility that was anti-capitalism, not exactly pro-soviet or pro the other side, but

definitely in this other space and somewhat naively utopian on many levels. I say that as somebody who's tried to live in a 60s commune and whatnot. It's hard. People are hard. You can't just pretend people are easy when people are hard. I mean, this is a fundamental issue that the left never gets, right? But anyway, the, so then when companies like Google show up, the rhetoric around computer culture, which is, and computer culture is incredibly powerful. I mean, it's not, this has never been an entirely top-down thing. This is a community cultural effort. And computer culture is anti-capitalist on the surface, but as I say, also pro-capitalist, as long as you're a hacker, hacker, hero, entrepreneur,

you know. So it doesn't make sense. And it doesn't, we were absolutely unwilling to take three seconds to step back and notice our own contradictions. Right. It's ridiculous, you know, very human, I think. So Google was born

with this ridiculous hippie illusion in front even though it's actually a company. And I have to say, I'm putting it this way, because I'm pretty sure that the original people who made Google would have been just as happy to do it differently, but the community pressure was so intense

that they weren't really given a practical choice. It was like this very intense dogma. Like as an example, I'll say some things here that might upset some people who are listening, but in the early days, 20 years ago, or whatever, but more than that, actually, like the seeming good guys who had nothing but very high self-regard, like the pirate parties in Europe,

were feeding Google business while pretending to be anarchists and anti-capitalist. And that was plainly true, obviously true to everybody. They were even funded by Google in many cases. And yet somehow everybody just ignored this. And I think it's an incredible testament to how people will be happily ready to lie to themselves if it's comfortable. And I think that's universal. That's not just a problem of this particular community.

It's a universal human quality. And I think it sneaks up on us all the time. Hey, Constantine, do you want better mental health? I'm from Russia. We don't have mental health. So how do you deal with mental health? You drink vodka, then go out and wrestle bear. If you live, you feel better.

If you die, you're not real man. What about the bear's feelings? It's Russian bear, it has no feelings. People don't always realize that physical symptoms like headaches, teeth grinding, and even digestive issues can be indicators of stress. And let's not forget about doom scrolling, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, under-eating and overeating. Sleeping too much, under-eating, this is Western disease. Therapy has really helped me in my life to concentrate and focus.

It's really important to have someone impartial who you're just to have someone impartial who you're not. you can talk to about the tricky issues that you're struggling to deal with. Therapy has played a really important role in helping me to deal with my ADHD and become better in all areas of my life. Why is he telling them how weak he is? Drink vodka feel better. Better help is customise online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist.

So you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to. Trigonometry funds get 10% of their first month at BetterHelp.com forward slash trigger, especially if they're not real men. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash trigger. We're talking about the worst of capitalism, but these companies in many ways are the worst of capitalism. They're monopolies. They're incredibly powerful. They now have the ability to influence elections like what we, like we, like, we saw with Hunter Biden and Twitter suppressing the story. I mean, it's terrifying, isn't it?

Well, a couple things to say there. One thing is I get calls from all kinds of people who are upset about what happened to elections. I have more firsthand knowledge than most people about what happened in the platforms. And there was more suppression of the left than the right. both things happened. But just to be clear about that, there was more stuff that happened that was anti-guiden than pro-Biden. Like what? Tell us.

Because I've never heard this argument. I'm very open to it. Like what? Can you give us some examples? The documented for real and high-volume foreign interventions that favored a candidate favored Trump, mostly driven by Russia. To say that that's all that happened would be ridiculous, because all kinds of things were happening.

But the weight of it went in that direction. Does that mean anything? No, actually, it doesn't. I know that it's frequently, you kind of want to believe, like if you're more sympathetic to one side than the other side, you kind of want to believe the other side got more advantage or whatever. Honestly, this whole thing is a big, giant bundle of bullshit anyway.

Like, I think to worry about whether the other side got more bullshit than your side is really irrelevant. The point is there should be no bullshit. No argument there at all. But, John, can I just challenge you briefly on this point? We're not challenged. Look, I know I've been through this argument a lot. I really want to emphasize, I do believe I have a clear picture of it. On the other hand, I just really don't think it matters or it's that important.

If it strikes you as being important, I really want you. I want you to reconsider whether it is. Well, that's why I want to ask you the question, because I am totally open for you to persuade me. It's unimportant. The difference that I saw, and look, neither Francis or I are Trump fans, neither of us is on the right. None of that, right?

We're just as a principle, to me, watching a set of coordinated efforts by different tech platforms to prevent a story about the son of a presidential candidate at being published on the eve of the election, that was unprecedented and very, very different to the tech platform messing around with Russian bot farms or whatever. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah.

Oh, look. And you know what? I, if you're going to, so if the question before us was, were there parties who work together to try to support Biden in ways that make us uncomfortable about the future, of a decent honest society and democracy, the answer is yes, there were. And so I would validate what you're saying.

I think that happened in a few different levels. I think part of it was the fact that most people of influence in the tech world are educated, and most educated people are more sympathetic to the Democrats in the U.S. and to liberal positions in general. and they naturally tend to support each other when they start to move in that direction. And even without an explicit conspiracy, there can be an effective one. All right. I don't want to deny that there's truth about that.

I also want to point out that some of what they were resisting, like if the question is, well, they're different questions. You could say, was there less reporting than there might have otherwise been about Hunter Biden? And probably, on the other hand, a lot of the promotion of the Hunter Biden story was also equally questionable and for the same reasons. And with even more central coordination and more questionable issues and more money behind it to the best of my ability to read it, which is neither here nor there. In my view, in the balance, if you compare all the different kinds of bias that were injected

into the social media systems, there was more pro-Trump stuff going on than pro-Biden stuff. once again, neither here nor there. And it makes no sense for any of us to adjudicate that. If I'm wrong, it really wouldn't have any effect on any of the positions I'm taking a consequence here. True. Okay, Jared, that being the case, what do we do with these hugely powerful companies? They can pretty much do what they want.

Yeah. They can control what they want. They disseminate information as they want. they're too powerful, surely. Yeah, so this is very problematic. So going back to the book I mentioned, The Human Use of Human Beings, and I didn't mention the author, Norbert Weiner, I should mention it.

And I have to say, this book is really hard to read because this guy's an ultra nerd and there's mathematical equations in the middle of it. And it's a great shame. If he'd written it in an accessible style, I think it would have changed the world, but he just wasn't that person, you know, at the time. This is going way, way back.

This is to the Manhattan Project Generation. of scientists, you know. So anyway, the problem is that if you have computer networks running the world, whoever runs the networks runs the world, it's like a much more powerful thing than money. It's a much more powerful thing than votes. It's like the most powerful thing because you're directly in control of the channels of action that exist in the civilization. And this was a danger that was well articulated in advance by a variety of people. I tried to say what I could about it at the time, as did a few. few others. Honestly, most of us in computer science, we're just so enthralled by the prospect

of power that we allowed our kind of, I don't know, our egos to get the best of us. Oh, this must be for the good. We're the best people. We'll save the world if we get powerful. I mean, and of course, that's fallacious. Nobody's perfect, you know, and no concentration of power is trouble-free, you know. And so that, that's what happened. And so now we do have this kind of curious situation. Now, that said, there's a weird kind of neutered quality to the new kind of power that makes it a little less horrible than it might be. And if you want to look at the comparison, compare what companies like meta and alphabet can do to what the Chinese are doing. Right. Or if it's the Russians or the Iranians

or these all kinds of other people. Like, there's a weird thing about Silicon Valley culture, if I can call that, or tech culture. And that it's so nerdy. It's so, we're not supposed to use the term on the spectrum anymore, but I don't really know what language to use for this. There's this kind of dryness to it that in a way, it's not exactly traditional power seeking, and it doesn't have traditional power goals.

It's more just this kind of nerd supremacy without a particular direction or sensibility. It's truly different, I think, than previous constitutional. concentrations of power. I mean, like, you go to Silicon Valley, and every other center of power in history has made itself beautiful and impressive, and Silicon Valley has not. It's just kind of another shitty suburb, you know, and that's strange, but it reflects this kind of incredible nerdiness. And so, if you talk to Zuckerberg, it's just this kind of very formulaic first-order approximation of what an idea would be. Like, the word.

world should be more connected. So we'll make it more connected and that's to the good. But there's nothing more. There's no, there's nothing there. I mean, of course, the individuals like getting rich, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with that, you know. Same thing at Google. It's kind of an odd thing. It's like we will organize the world's information, which I think, by the way, is a misnomer. But that we don't need to go into the philosophy of that. But the thing is, it's a weirdly neutered thing. And so the main problem with it is different from the problem. of, oh, I don't know, a Putin-like figure who wants to conquer a neighbor or a she-like figure in China who wants to create this sort of Chinese-centric model of the world that gives no room for even the identity of Tibetans or Uighurs or Taiwanese or anything. It's not like either of those things. It's more, it's a weird thing. It's like the nerd kid in high school who doesn't even really have an. an agenda, but just is sick of being the one dumped on. You know, it's a strange, inert kind of power to a degree.

But because it has the side effect of destroying the personnel, harming the personalities of everybody else, it still is, the effects are still too negative. And of course, the other thing to say is, whenever you create a center of power, it'll eventually be seized by the worst people. You start off with Bolsheviks, then you get Stalinists. And when you get rid of the Stalinists,

You don't suddenly get Democrats. You get some kind, you get Putin's, you know. Like centers of power are seductively horrible for history. So there's a lot of reasons not to do it. But it's also important to understand that when we talk about power of tech companies, it's a different kind of power than we're used to historically. And, Jeremy, it seems to me that like all revolutions, it started off with utopians, people wanting to build a,

better future, people having an idealized view of the world and how they were going to change things, some of the better, and they were going to make everyone more connected and society was going to get richer and just better as a result without realizing, A, the consequences of their actions, but B, as well, you've got to monetize this thing. And if you're going to monetize it, you want people to stay on the platforms and how you're going to do that. You're going to do it through algorithms and playing with people's emotions. Yeah, just over the last weekend, I keynoteed, or I co-keynoted with Neil Stevenson who wrote Snow Crash and many other science fiction novels. The big crypto conference, which is called Consensus put on by Coin desk in Austin, which is kind of like, we call it a dumpster fire in our current lingo.

But at any rate, whatever. The thing is, I thought, wow, I'm going to come in here. This is a hostile audience. You're not going to want to hear me say, how scound. I mean, this whole thing is and how whatever. But I put it in a positive light. And what I said is, look, instead of trying to make money from finding the next person to come along who'll buy some token for more than you paid for it, why don't we get these things to form

value chains where if you have a token for some piece of art and some person uses that art and animation and then somebody else adds music to the animation and somebody else adds a story and somebody else does this and that. And then it eventually makes money because people are willing to pay for it. Then if royalties go back to everybody, then in the, instead of selling the token, you could earn royalties and dividends on it and fund a society. Because one of the fundamental problems with tech culture and money in general is that it has forgotten what money is for. If you go back to Adam Smith or anybody who's been concerned with how money works,

the idea is that when you have money, that money goes to work for society. That's how you earn interest on it and the money goes up in value. The worst thing is to stuff your money in a mattress and pull it out of circulation. Right. And yet the tech industry has sort of been like putting money in a mattress. And that's even more so with the Web 3 and crypto stuff. And so what's funny is when I said this, I thought they were going to be angry, but I had this whole hall of people who started applauding and then they stood up. And it's like, I think everybody knows in their gut that the way we've been doing things is silly. And we need to be more focused on real productivity, real investment, real accomplishment, real achievement, real building, real innovation. and just moving bits around and screwing around with other people's behaviors doesn't actually do anything for the future. And everybody really is in it for the future at the end of the day. That's why people get into tech.

So it might just evaporate. Maybe I'm kidding myself. But I have this feeling like there's this, and this is a very young audience. So these are new people and not the same old people I've been talking to for decades. And I just have this kind of optimistic feeling that they're open to it and that there's room for tech culture to improve. I really believe that. Yeah, well, I know what you mean, Jaron, because I think, as I said to you right at the beginning when we started,

I think while many of us are grateful for the tremendous opportunities that being connected with 8 billion other people have given us, at the same time, we cannot ignore some of the terrible downsides, whether they are for society or for our children or for our own well-being or any of those things. And I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to that. And the other thing that I resonated with me so strongly is when you were talking about, you know, these are nerds who've got their own sort of not quite as evil agenda as it might be. But I was thinking the whole time you were talking, yeah. But that's because they owned the thing that they created.

What happens when they all get forced out or they die or whatever? Who's going to come in and replace them? Yeah, yeah. I think about that all the time. Like who exactly is going to inherit? Facebook or meta. Right. It's not set up to allow anything.

I mean, now, Cheryl just left, and instead of a new Cheryl, it's just even more concentrated. And that is not the way to create an institution for the benefit of humankind. You have to see beyond yourself, and it just hasn't happened yet. So let me ask you about that, Jaron, because you talked about how this could all have been done differently, and you spoke about it at the time, and the Biddle's business model is wrong. How do we fix social media? do we make it better? How do we make it slightly less worse, at least? Yeah, slightly less worse. I'll live with that. I think it's a really huge problem to say,

oh, I'm going to fix it. I'm going to make everything better and everything's to be perfect because whenever somebody says that, you know, this is going to be really crappy. If it's like, I can make this slightly less horrible, you know, that's the person you want to listen to. So I think there's a few things that can be done differently. One of them, if anybody wants to, the current issue of the Atlantic magazine in the U.S. has a piece of mind on how to fix Twitter that I wrote for Mr. Elon, and perhaps to no effect whatsoever, we shall see. But what it proposes is an idea that I think is the least invasive and least impinging on free speech way of just improving the conversation. and that is to demand that people form small associations, like form little zines or bands or clubs or brands,

small enough that they can all know each other and only publish through those and rise or fall in terms of reputation and monetary income together in that band, like you two are doing with your production here, right? Now, here's the reason why I'm saying that. If you look at all the people who've studied societies that you'd want to live in,

they've all come to the conclusion that that mechanism, which is often called a societal institution, is at the core of maintaining quality. All right. Some of the people who talk about that are the Tochville, Hanna Arendt, but you know the one that really got me going on it some time ago was a friend of mine named Mohamed Yunus, who went a Nobel for starting microlending.

And there's a lot of ways that microlending has perhaps not achieved all that some hope that would achieve. But let's leave that aside. There's one part of it that's worked really well, which is he had a bank in Bangladesh trying to serve a super poor community where nobody had a credit rating. If they gave somebody a loan, chances are the person would not pay it back because like, why would they? It was just free money. They weren't even used to the whole thing. And they said, okay, we're not going to do loans to individuals anymore. You guys have to form a group. You have to vouch for each other. If one if he doesn't repay, you all are going to pay the price for it. And this is a way.

that we can distribute the process of credit, creating credit, or if you like creating quality. And it worked. They suddenly got better repayment rates than traditional banks are used to. Incredible. So when people have a bit of a shared stake, they start to watch out for each other. And if somebody runs into legitimate trouble, other people help them. If somebody wants to screw around, they get rejected, they get ejected from the group. And suddenly you have quality going up.

Magic, right? And so I would like to see that in social media. And it would be strictly by free association. If you don't like your group, you can always quit. You can get into another one. A group can decide who to accept, who to reject. But the point is that the groups are small enough that the people really know each other. And then what you get out of that is a few things.

One, if somebody starts turning into a jerk and everybody turns into a jerk online from time to time. Because we turn into a jerk from time to time offline. I mean, let's, you know, be honest about ourselves. The other people say, hey, you know what? cool it. This is like a bit much. But another great thing is the group can post often enough to keep the brand going and to keep subscribers, whereas individuals have to post too often to do so and to stay sane. So that's a good thing. Another really good thing is that since the group is diving up benefits, and I want them to get subscriptions, donations, micropayments, I'm really into money for this.

I think there should be more money online. I really do because we live in a market world and to say, well, the online world won't be a market world, just makes people become gradually more and more obsolete as technology gets better. It's like, it's ridiculous. Like, if we're going to be socialist, we have to do it everywhere. We can't just do it online. So I'm like really pro-capitalism online because I think it's the most viable way to make things workable. But anyway, if there's a bot, if there's a fake person in your group and that bot is getting some of the money,

you have suddenly a motivation to get rid of the bot. And now, you know, when Elon Musk, is saying, oh, there's too many bots on Twitter. He's absolutely right. A friend of mine at Facebook tells me that 99% of the new account applications are from bots by their estimate. And the reason is that people who want to mess up a society put in bots in order to sway opinion. Right. So there's every economic incentive to make bots.

Well, now there'll be an economic incentive to get rid of bots. And otherwise, it's the platform's job to do it from on top, which is a losing game. but if it's distributed, just like creating credit and microlending, all of a sudden it becomes doable. We can get rid of the bots, which are terrible. They're poisonous. There are many other benefits. You can read the piece in the Atlantic if you want. So another thing I'll point out is that I've tried to do a ranking of the relative degree of terribleness in different online platforms. How often are people jerks?

And nothing's perfect. But the thing is, it's human being, so nothing's ever going to be perfect. Right. But there are differences. Okay. So some of the places are really assessed pool. Facebook is junk, horrible. YouTube is really pretty bad.

You can manage your experience on it to make it better, but it's really pretty awful. There's an experiment. Now, some people challenge. me and say, no, this isn't true, but I've done this many times. And in my experience, having done dozens of times, which is not a huge sample, so not up to scientific standards, but if I get a room full of kids and I say, okay, just either start with your account or start with a fresh identity where Google doesn't know who you are and just like YouTube recommend follow-up videos, how many tops does it take until you end up in some really weird, creepy, paranoid, ugly thing?

And I usually found it to be in the teens, like in the late teens of times, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But that's horrible. That's horrible. So YouTube's garbage. YouTube's accessible, despite many, many wonderful, valuable things on it. What's something that's better? I might be biased because I work with Microsoft, but GitHub, this place for sharing projects is pretty good. There's an occasional jerk on GitHub, but mostly people have a stake and they have a share. shared stake with people in their teams. So it's a little bit like the thing I'm talking about for social media. Where, you know, if you're working with a bunch of people on a coding project, the last thing you're going to go and do is mess up the value for everybody by melding off at

somebody for no reason. Like, all of a sudden, you feel a bit of a sense of responsibility to your mates, your compatriot, right? That's a good thing. So, and I believe in monetization, because I believe when people have a stake, when they have something to lose, they'll think through their actions more. If the only thing you, the only thing you have to gain is attention and you have nothing to lose, then you'll be a jerk because you, you, it's the incentive, right? It's really simple. So I want to monetize the stuff.

And then people say, oh, but I don't want to have to pay. But the thing is, if you're earning, paying won't feel so bad. Like, if somebody is gainfully employed, it doesn't bother them to pay for stuff that keeps other people gainfully employed so they can afford to buy whatever they do. Like, if people are part of the cycle of the economy and are part of a social contract that makes sense, they're more ready to pay for stuff. And we already know online that people pay for stuff sometimes it's possible. It doesn't have to be all the time, doesn't have to be like this religious thing that you never have an exception to, but we just need a lot more of it.

And Jaron, you're talking about, you know, social media platforms. And you mentioned Facebook, and I agree with you and YouTube. well. To me, the worst one is Instagram. It's the worst one. And there's somebody who used to, I used to teach for many years. Go for it. Go for it. Tell me. The ideal platform for me to do my bikini modeling. Not what you're telling me, but yeah. No, no, I hear you. I hear you. I get it. But just, but the effect that it has, particularly on children and young girls in particular, is awful.

It's awful. And, you know, and then I was reading, they didn't do it, thank the Lord, but then they were talking about Instagram for kids. I know. And like you can just imagine the meeting where that came up and somebody saying, how can we expand? How can we expand? Well, there's this population of kids, you know.

You know, it's just like it's incredible that that conversation could even have happened. Yeah, I know. John, let me, were you going to? No, no, because I, no. No, no, I was going to follow up because to me, the thing that is awful about Instagram, it's the obsession with the physical self and the constantly looking at other people's lives and other people's bodies and what that breeds in young people, particularly in women. And, you know, I walk around London now and there's so many people having plastic surgery.

And look, I haven't, there's no studies in this, but I go, this must be something to do with what people are seeing constantly on. line constantly on Instagram. Right. Well, look, a couple things to say there. One thing I've learned through heart experience is that if a causation connection seems right, it doesn't necessarily mean it is right. So to say that the plastic surgery thing tracks Instagram, it sounds right to me, but I'm trying to keep us to somewhat high standards of scientific study, even though that's hard with this because it happens so fast

and the only people with the data are the creepy people doing it. So it's difficult, but I would just put that in the category of kind of makes sense but not confirmed. It's my advice to you. Like we should do our best to try to, because we can make all the arguments we need to

and try to feature path without convicting every little possible wrong along the way because it won't even happen. nothing will happen anyway. So that's one thing I'll say. The next thing I'll say is the pumping up vanity has been happening for as long as women can spend money on anything or men, for the matter, just people.

Like, there's a sense in which it's ancient. And yet there's a sense in which it's more immediate, more programmed, and more kind of nasty now than I think it was before. And so it's easy in the stuff to get caught up with this argument. Well, it's always been that way, which is kind of true to a degree. But then the question of the amount and kind is also important. Then there is a difference now. Sometimes it can be hard to be articulate about what the difference is,

but it's definitely there. And I think it has to do with operant conditioning, with this use of behavior modification as a technique. Well, right. I was going to say human beings are the way they've always been, but the tools are much more powerful. And I think that's where we are. Which is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about because you talked somewhat almost romantically and wistfully about the early days of the internet.

And I remember that time, freedom, connection, anything is possible. What are you talking about? Say again? You weren't born yet. What are you talking about? Well, maybe not in those days. But I certainly remember, like, first encountering the mass phase of the internet, right? When the ordinary user was using it, right?

And I used to play a lot of computer games in the time. and I'd have friends all over the world that I would speak with. We'd build connections. We'd play games together. And we'd make the most outrageous jokes to each other. And it was free. And it was kind of edgy. And it was like the wild, wild west.

And that was fun. And that was cool. And now we are in a very different place where, rather than talking about how much freedom we all have, it's much more about how do we prevent, quote, unquote, harm. And we've talked about some of the harms that come with social media on the internet. but also there's a lot of this like you can't say this, you can't say that, amplifying this message causes this and that.

Do you think the internet will ever be free again, even in the way that it was? This is why I'm proposing this group structure I just talked about, because on the one hand, if we just say, well, we have to lay off because all of this telling people what to say is leading in no good direction, well, then the whole world turns to pot because we let manipulative, creepy people have the most power. But then on the other hand, if we let things just, if we get control to the point where we control those people, we also control too much. And if you want to see what that looks like, look at China. We actually think that looks like, and it's not good. And I think China has

become a little crazy, for instance, in its management of COVID, because of the inability for people to just communicate in a straightforward way. I think they've really hurt themselves. And so neither of those paths you're good. This group thing I'm talking about, I don't know if it'll work, because it hasn't been tested enough. So maybe it also is hopeless. But at least right now, it's, it's an idea that's still standing that gives us an alternative to shutting people down or just letting society fall away to the worst people. It gives us a path through that dilemma, at least it appears to, you know, so far, or maybe some variation of it will, but I mean, it's at least a direction because I really don't like either of the alternatives right now. Right now, if we don't go into

the direction of the groups I was talking about, we either have more and more sensorious behavior online, or we have more and more power for the most creepy people, or we have to just shut down the net. All three of those are horrible. So this is another option. It's another direction. Maybe, maybe. Do you have a website, or do you plan to have a website?

Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancelled culture, de-platform attacks or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that. So will you in a second? EasyDNS have rock solid network infrastructure and fantastic customer support. They're in your corner no matter what the world throws at you, unless it's your ex-girlfriend,

in which case you're on your own. You know about that. Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now, All you've got to do is go to easyDNS.com forward slash triggered. That's easydns.com forward slash triggered. Use our promo code, which is also triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. It's interesting you mentioned that, Jaron, because we use a platform called Locals, which is a bit like Patreon, but there's a community element.

to it. So it's not just money for access to extra content. It's a community of people who love our show. And, you know, there's about 15,000 members in total. There's about a thousand superactive users who contribute or maybe 1,200, something like that. And we, at this level, at least, we don't have to do any moderation. People aren't generally speaking, having a bitch fights with each other every three minutes. People are generally respectful. There's a sense of like everybody's pulling in the same direction. And one or two times when people have got out of line, me or Francis have gone, guys,

remember, this is like a cool space in which we all hang out and have a good time. And everyone's gone, oh, yeah, that's cool, right? And people come and go. But I think your idea sort of works. But I suppose the question for me is, in an internet that connects everyone to everyone, how do you do that?

Right. Well, all the platforms were cute when they were small. Yeah. Yeah. earliest days of TikTok weren't toxic. TikTok is currently toxic. The very earliest days of Instagram were actually cute, as hard as it is to remember now. So smallness works. The question is, how can you make a network of small things that maintain the good qualities of smallness while still scaling to the world?

So that's the idea I have presented to you as an attempt to do. And it's going to be a project. it's a civilizational level project. I can't tell you that I know exactly how to do it. I just believe that through process of elimination, it's the last idea standing I know about. And I don't see anything that kills it offhand unless you just want to be cynical and say,

ah, it's all going to be shit, which is, you know, it might be. It might be. But maybe this is a path forward. I think there has to be a small enough immediate community that it's possible for people to really talk to each other and for not to become lost in this giant ocean of bots and unknowability.

That's absolutely essential. But there has to be... There's another side of it I haven't talked about. Right now, the way people perceive the world is social. This is something we often don't realize about each other. There's an experiment I sometimes do with my students where if you go out on a crowded sidewalk, you just start pointing in something,

everybody will start looking there, even if there's nothing there. And the reason why is that we evolved to rely on each other for cues about danger and where to focus attention. This is something that's deep in us. Okay, so if you have this giant unknowable crowd, whatever that thing, the giant crowd indicates,

you will start to feel. So if there's enough bots in it to try to indicate that your society is shit or that the other society is shit or whatever it is, you'll start to feel that. Now, if you can turn it into a collection of groups, as I've been talking about, maybe you can cut back the total number of players by a hundred times or something like that, maybe even a thousand times.

Now, your interface to that world, instead of looking like this feed from a zillion people, will look like a new stand with covers that you've started to like. And you can add or remove from your new stand and start to dive into it, each of which representing a group. And in that circumstance, the way you receive information is given context and packaged. So there were horrible Nazis and whatever, whatever kind of creepy person, jihadists, whatever. These people have existed before.

But the thing is, they always sort of labeled themselves, like, we're in this magazine or we're in this, whatever. When they're just part of the feed, it just makes the whole world feel horrible. part of what leads to this rising paranoia for everyone. If everything is once again compartmentalized where there's at least some context, context hasn't been destroyed, then if you see some horrible message, oh yeah, those are the Nazis, whatever, fuck those people. So it gives you that ability to not have it be part of your social queuing. It's an extremely important issue I haven't talked about before. So we have to think about realistically how people work cognitively and how to just build a technology that works with us as,

we are instead of as how we imagine ourselves. Sharon, your idea is brilliant. The one area of pushback that I would say is, aren't we therefore just creating more echo chambers by doing this? Yeah, I mean, look, what will happen, this is why I wanted to be monetized. If you have a bunch of people just saying, oh, yeah, you're great and those other people are shit,

and then you have a whole bunch of those, how many people are going to subscribe to that? Well, a certain amount. It might even be a fairly large amount, but it won't be most people. Like what will happen at a certain point, when you get to the point where you have bands and brands and stuff, there's a bit of a filter that happens

where if it's just self-indulgent, echo chambery stuff, it'll start to fall. You know, there's an amazing thing that happens. Like, for instance, if you look at the history of music, you might say, well, the music business is filled with producers doing calculated artificial stuff and crappy artists who got in through nepotism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that is true.

And yet if you look at the things that were hits and the things that persist and the things that lasted over the years, at least in my opinion, there was kind of a sieve in which quality stuff rose, you know, overall, with some exceptions, and we can disagree about individual cases. But overall, it happens. And I think it would start to happen online, too. That makes a lot of sense. One of the reasons I think the people that like our show, like our show is they know when not right or left. We're just trying to find the answers in a complicated world. And we've got

our own biases, which we're up front about, but we're not pushing an agenda, because I do think that gets very boring, and we've seen other people go through a process where they just end up in one thing, and they're not curious anymore, and I think that's very off-putting. I know what you mean. Look, we've done a lot on social media, and we could talk for hours more, of course. Talk to us about AI. You mentioned you were extremely skeptical, and about VR as well. Just give us your, you know, a Cliff Notes version of your thoughts on. Oh, yeah, sure. Well, look, on AI, just to be clear, the actual algorithms, I'm a total enthusiast of, and I've worked on and contributed to to my knowledge, my little group, a little startup was the first to do deep fakes, as we know them,

and also the first to do snap filter kinds of things, because I think these types of algorithms have their uses and can, you know, and they're scientifically interesting. The thing that, bothers me, though, and I think that tends to create a cover for the worst uses of these things that can make them feel anti-human and indeed be anti-human, is this ideology that we're building a life form in the box. Now, within, and even the term artificial intelligence suggests an intelligence, you know, it suggests that there's some entity, some creature, some, you know, something alive in there. And I really don't like that way of thinking. I want to think of them as tools, not as creatures.

Now, as it happens, the single person who did the most to promote the creature way of thinking about computers was named Marvin Minsky. And he was probably my most important mentor when I was young. And then he started to argue with him about this. We're going back to like late 70s, early 80s, something like that. And I'd say, you know, this is bullshit, Marvin. Like, these things aren't alive. Like, look at the thing.

And I know, God, I hate to say this. Marvin wouldn't want me to say this, but he would say, look. this lab is funded because the military believes that if we don't build these creatures that are enemies well, so just play along and then you get a salary. You know, it's like a marketing thing. And so I say, okay, okay, you know, and I did it. And I think it still is sort of a marketing thing, but it's become sort of a religious thing. It's like, we, the nerdy guys get to create life.

Screw those women. Like, or don't screw them or whatever. We're going to make these life. And the thing is, everything gets clear. Totally. There's no absolute truth on this because nobody can really know what else is conscious or what else. We don't really have, is evolution itself as a process conscious? Is it intelligent?

You can debate that. I think you can see it either way. The terms have a lot of potential wiggle room in definition and whatever. I mean, it's interesting. You can't ever come to a conclusion because there's no way to define your terms. And we don't have, if I can get slightly sophisticated in my language use, we have no empirical channel together evidence to help the argument along one way or the other anyway. So it's not resolvable.

But we can ask pragmatically which way of thinking makes us more competent. I think that's a reasonable question. And thinking of them as tools instead of creatures makes us more competent because then we can evaluate them as tools. If we think they're a creature, then we're giving them too much deference. We never make them better in the ways we need to. So, like, if you, that's why I really don't like it when people say, oh, I'm going to have this program that'll make music art for you, and it'll be better than a person. And the reason why is that then you'll change to make it seem better. The way I used to, the way I used to put it is, you'll make your, do you know what the Turing

test is? It was this idea from Alan Turing, who started computer science. And it's ironic. because if you know anything about the story, he wrote this just before he committed suicide because of it up. And it's a long, amazing story. But at any rate, if you take it at face value, what it says is if you can tell whether a program is a person or not,

you might as well call it a person, otherwise you're prejudiced. Now, of course, he was being essentially tortured for being gay and treated as a non-person. So there's a whole level to this thing that we could talk about. up. Let's leave that aside for a second. The thing is, if it's true that somebody cannot tell if the machine is acting like a person or not, maybe they're behind them, you know, they're just

texting with you, then one possibility is the machine elevated itself and became a person. The other possibilities that the human lowered themselves and became an idiot to believe the machine is a person. The test doesn't allow us to distinguish between the two. This happened just last week where an engineer was fired from Google to sort of believe their program had become alive. But it's also possible that that guy became an idiot. There's no empirical or scientific distinction between these two things. We can't tell which is which. Anyway, people demonstrably are willing to make themselves idiots to socialize.

We do it all the time. We all become morons, aren't going to try to impress a date. We all become morons to try to impress a potential employer. We all become morons all the time with each other in the hopes that it'll do some good. And every once in a while, maybe it does. It usually doesn't. But we do exactly the same with machines that we think are people. So let's not think they're people.

Let's call them tools. If whatever it is isn't working, let's say that tool needs to be better designed. Let's not say, oh, I guess that's just the way it is. It's a creature. No, no, no, no, no. And I think this, so this issue of treating them as tools instead of people is actually one of the core problems that got us into the trouble we're in. Because Google always conceived of itself as an AI company. And then I thought, well, if it's not doing what we want, the thing is it's

an emerging AI and we have to give it the space. It's like a child. You let it grow and go through its tantrums or whatever. And that attitude is absolutely wrongheaded. They're tools. If they're not doing what we want, we change them. And, Jaron, on that, speaking of pragmatic questions to ask in this sort of conversation, you know these tools from the inside out. We don't. Is it not the case that the algorithms that say determine our ability to search for things on Google? They're so complex now that actually it's not within the realms of possibility for a single human being to assess that algorithm in its entirety. Right. So this is a large topic to talk about. And I'm not here representing them at all, but I'm the so-called prime scientist at Microsoft and our office is,

funding and helping guide the open AI algorithms like TPT and Dolly and Kodak that some of your viewers might be familiar with. And so this question of, can we understand what these things even do? In my opinion, part of the issue is that the culture, tech culture wants them to be creatures instead of tools and kind of set them up to be hard to understand more than was really needed. Now, that's going to be a controversial statement, and I'll get a lot of pushback from people in the field. And yet, I think it's true. Like, for instance, one of the problems we have, do you know what Dolly is? No. Oh, you should look it up. It's D-A-L-L-E. It's the latest

image generation stuff. So you just give it some text, and you say, hey, I would like, I would like to have an image of a robotic pumpkin swimming the English channel in the style of Turner. And you know what? It'll synthesize that. It'll come out. And the way it does it is through this process of sort of randomly starting to create images and comparing them with images that have matching keywords nearby and going back and forth until it gets something that it reads as a match.

And typically what comes out actually looks like the thing you asked for. It's just astonishing, actually. Now, what's wrong with that? Well, there's a few interesting things about it. One thing is if you just give it nothing but the one word Asian, and nothing will come out with porn, because all it does is it reflects the primary keywords that were online. And I don't think most the billions of people from Asia really want that result. I don't think that's great.

So there's something wrong with the way we're doing it. And so then what we end up doing is it's a little bit like the problem of trying to censor online speech, to fix online speech. It's like this game that you can never win. So now what you do is you create this whole organization, that's trying to go through the output of these giant models and try to have them not give terrible results. But, you know, it's a never-ending struggle. And it's not clear that you ever even get to the point where it's okay.

You know, it's just rough. And at what point is this kind of safe for the world, you know? So that's a tough one. Darren, can I tell you what troubles me about your answer very quickly, right? I asked you whether these algorithms are too complicated for a single human being. to understand, and you're a very smart guy, and you gave me an answer that's too complicated for me to understand. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, but what I'm saying is what troubles me about that is if it was the case that a single being could understand, I imagine you would have said yes, but you didn't.

Let me give me a chance to finish. Okay. What I was saying is right now they can't be understood, but I think we could do things differently so that they could be understood and actually better. That's the big picture I'm trying to get across. Okay. Let's suppose, instead of saying, we'll just randomly take whatever people upload into the internet and then use that as the basis for these types of algorithms. What if instead, we said, you know what? We're going to put out a bounty.

We need better input data that reflects what Asia is. And then some of these clubs I was talking about, we sometimes call the Mids, but whatever. There's like these data trusts, these clubs of people, like the ones who would publish, they would start saying, okay, we've just assembled 100,000 images of Asia. And then the people running the algorithm would say, wow, we just tested that. That improves our performance. We're not just getting poor in anymore. You know what?

We'll pay you this much. And then they say, well, you know, we're going to collectively bargain with you. We think we deserve that much. And then they go back and forth. And what they get is a fair market price. So what you're doing is you're using the market to fix it. And now people understand what's going on. And the reason you know they understood it is they got paid, right?

If they didn't understand it, they wouldn't get paid. And so basically, you end up in the same situation that you have in capitalism where understanding is reflected in payment because if you're not, you only get paid if you're generating enough value for the person to be able to pay it or being willing to pay it. So the successful negotiation is your validation of understanding, whereas otherwise what the hell would it be. So what you do is instead of saying,

oh, no, how can we fix this horrible thing? made, you say, how do we motivate people to make a wonderful thing? That's the answer. To say, oh, I'm going to have these eggheads, people like me who are going to understand it, is ridiculous because you shouldn't even trust us. Like, suppose we could understand it. Do you want to trust me to under? No, of course not. That's not how civilization should work. Do I want to trust a marketplace? They made of groups of people who are earning their way to improving the performance of these things? Yes, I like that. And then what I like also is that then every time there's some new algorithm or some new robot,

instead of the people saying, oh, no, this thing's going to put me out of work. I thought I was going to make a living as an artist, but now this thing's going to make the art. What will I do? I'll just be living in the street. Instead, they say, oh, this is a great opportunity. I'm going to join one of these groups, and we're going to improve that thing, because right now it's garbage, and we're going to make it better. We're going to get paid for it.

So it converts the whole thing and turns what we call AI into this endless, infinite set of new opportunities instead of this thing that makes people feel, absolutely. And that's what I call understanding. Well, that is a beautiful message to end on how realistic that is we are going to find out. Jaron Lanier, it's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters for our supporters. But before we do, in that local group that I told you about, right, small group people working together. But before we do, we've got one final question for you, which is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

Oh, that's interesting. Does AI fulfill the same emotional needs as your ridiculous royal family for people? You're going to have to expand on that a little bit. Well, as an American, I was looking at like, what is this royal family? Why is it there? What is all this fascination? It's all class system, Darren. Well, no, but the thing is, it's this, see, I think AI sort of is too.

It's like, it's this set of principles that come from very powerful people that are supposed to run society. you know, I'm starting to feel like this whole gamut is falling flat. Never mind. My answer is. Forget it. All right. It's been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find your work online, where's the best place to do that?

Where is the best place to engage in this wonderful mind? The last book I wrote was, wait, which one? I'm not sure if I remember the order. The last two were called Don of the New Everything, which is a memoir of the early days of virtual reality in the 80s. And the social media book I wrote was called Ten Arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. In the UK and UK adjacent countries around the world, it's published by Bodley Head, which is a fun publisher you have. and I think on the VR memoir, the head is wearing a headset.

It's natural. It's a head. Anyway, and then there's two more books coming out, but I'll leave you. I'll leave you. What? Leave us in suspense about those. Well, look, if you did give us your time once again

when the books come out to chat about what you're talking about and then we'd be very grateful. Don't go anyway, because we're going to ask you a couple of questions for our locals. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, Oral Show, all of which go out at 7pm UK time.

And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Do you see a connection between the emergent use of social media and virtual reality? And on the other hand, the growth of the feeling that we sort of all get to choose our own identity? Thank you.